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Passenger (Pasazerka)

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Passenger (Pasazerka)

Passenger is one of the great, overlooked films to deal with the Holocaust. Andrzej Munk's film stands alongside Night and Fog and Shoah as a seminal examination of this crater in 20th century life and thought. Unlike those films, however, this is not a documentary, and a kind of conditional incomplete work. Munk died during the making of Passenger, and a colleague cobbled together the footage, photographs and voice-over narration, thus giving the film both a rough-hewn quality of a film in the making; while at the same time suggesting that the best approach to such an event is subtly avoiding over-dramatisation. Resembling in some ways Chris Marker's La Jetée, made around the same time, this disc also contains 47 minutes of extras that include The Last Pictures - a rare documentary about Munk featuring Andrei Wajda and Roman Polanski. A masterpiece.

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