Cinema
Passenger
Pasażerka
Andrzej Munk · 1963
Synopsis
On the transatlantic liner bringing her back to Europe with her American husband, Liza, a German woman, thinks she recognises among the passengers Marta, a prisoner she knew at Auschwitz. Shaken, she admits to her husband what he did not know: she was not a prisoner in the camp, as she had let him believe, but an SS guard. Memories come back; at first she arranges them to justify herself and claims to have done only her duty, but little by little another story emerges, that of the bond between the guard and her prisoner.
Context
The film comes from a radio play by Zofia Posmysz, a former Auschwitz prisoner, La Passagère de la cabine 45, broadcast in 1959, from which the director had made a television film in 1960; the two of them wrote the screenplay. Shot partly in the camp, it remained unfinished: only the Auschwitz scenes had been made. The Kamera group chose to edit the material as it stood. Witold Lesiewicz, assisted by Andrzej Brzozowski, made from it a film in which the liner exists only in still images, and Wiktor Woroszylski wrote the commentary, spoken by Tadeusz Łomnicki. Released on 20 September 1963, it returned to French cinemas in a restored version on 25 January 2023.
Who it is for
A film of about an hour, in Polish; the scenes on the liner, never shot in full, exist only as photographs commented on by a voice.
Prizes and reception
International Critics' Prize and special jury mention at Cannes in 1964; Godard exempted it from his condemnation of fictions about the camps.
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