Kapo, Gilles Pontecorvo

Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to a Nazi extermination camp, agrees to become a kapò (responsible for supervising other prisoners) to escape death. The tracking shot in Kapo became one of the most controversial shots in cinema history, following an essay by Jacques Rivette that was later corroborated by Serge Daney. Today, that shot serves as an essential reference point for reflecting on the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and cinema.

The screening will be followed by a conversation via Zoom with French critic Jean Narboni regarding the moral question in the cinematic image, prompted by Jacques Rivette’s famous article “De l’abjection,” published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1961.