On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz

Abstract

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz Michał Oleszczyk Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration. By Marek Haltof. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 198 pp., ISBN 978-0810136083. US $34.95. With his latest book, devoted entirely to a single film but drawing on years of studious research, Marek Haltof confirms his stance as the leading historian of Polish film working abroad. Based at Northern Michigan University, Haltof has significantly contributed to the field of Polish film studies (with his 2002 Polish National Cinema still serving as the basic single-volume history of Polish film, reissued in an expanded edition in 2018), and he has done much to remain in touch with the latest developments in Polish arts and politics, making him a uniquely equipped commentator on Polish film culture past and present. That Haltof should devote a nearly 200-page study to a film not currently available from any major distribution companies or streaming services is indicative of the film's richness and the dire need of reintroducing it to a wider public in a worthy edition that would highlight its aesthetic qualities and political significance. The work in question, Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), is no ordinary film. Shot and released within three years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (which has since become a metonymic symbol of the Holocaust), the film was made by a survivor and shot on the very location the horrific events took place. Co-written by Jakubowska and a fellow political prisoner Gerda Schneider, The Last Stage was not just a pioneering work of feature-length narrative cinema dealing with the still-recent [End Page 104] Nazi genocide but also a fierce act of faith in filmmaking's power to write history (and stop history from replaying itself). Haltof 's approach is multidimensional and methodical. He offers a detailed production history of the film (significantly indebted to Alina Madej's archive findings and featuring a number of freshly unearthed facts) and Jakubowska's meticulously rendered biography as a political prisoner in a number of camps. The film receives a close reading, leaving practically no scene uncommented on, after which Haltof draws attention to the film's reception (in communist Poland and abroad), its implications for the wider politics of preserving Auschwitz-Birkenau as a historical site, and its eerie afterlife through other films in which it has been quoted—often as supposed documentary footage (Alain Resnais's Night and Fog [1955] and George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] provide just two famous examples of such self-effacing appropriation). Perhaps the most interesting reading Haltof provides has to do with the film's ideological aspects, none of which could have been discussed freely in the director's homeland (and were largely ignored by international audiences) at the time of its original release. As Haltof reminds us, Jakubowska (who died in 1998 and thus saw the fall of communism) stayed a lifelong communist stalwart. She inscribed her vision of history into The Last Stage, in which the horror of the death camps is ultimately shown as an environment in which the power of the human spirit is forged and from which the new communist mindset emerges into its postwar dominance of Eastern Europe (here equated with salvation). In this respect, the key character of the film is Marta Weiss (played by Barbara Drapińska), a Jewish communist political prisoner whose multilingual skills save her from immediate death in the gas chambers and allow for her gradual gain of ideological awareness, culminating in a neophyte revolutionary confession: "It's only here in the camp that I understood how things are." Within the multibranched and rather unfocused narrative of The Last Stage, which doesn't follow any single conflict and doesn't focus on any particular character's arc, Marta serves as the closest thing to a stand-in for the audience. Through her eyes we learn about the inner workings of the camp. Her bravery and martyrdom is celebrated in the much-discussed final reel, in which the imminent Soviet intervention is seen not only as bringing about the dismantling...