Distant Journey (film)

Distant Journey (Daleká cesta) is a Czech Holocaust film directed by Alfred Radok and released in 1949, immediately after World War II. Radok uses experimental cinematography, blending historic footage of the Nazis with a fictional love story between a Jewish woman and her Gentile husband.

Soon after the film's release,Stalinist censorship was implemented in Czechoslovakia. Radock fled to Switzerland and Czech filmmakers began their long struggle against strict communist censors. Film production declined, and Distant Journey was banned from audiences only to reemerge nearly forty years later.

Summary

Distant Journey follows Hana, a Jewish eye doctor who falls in love and marries a Gentile named Toni. Their simple love story becomes a nightmare when the government begins the systematized extermination of the Jews. Hana's family is transported to Theresienstadt, and the romance becomes a struggle for survival.

Radock never shows blood or lets a gun fire in his fictional story, but the historic footage he integrates into his film achieves a sense of terror. Adolf Hitler, Streicher, and other Nazi leaders read speeches and a pile of dead nude bodies on the lawn of a concentration camp inforce the atmosphere of the Holocaust.

Radock creatively integrates his fictional narrative into the historic footage. While the historic war-time footage is shown, Radock shrinks the previous frame of the feature film down in the lower right hand corner of the screen. And a sometimes ironic, sometimes exhausted narrator explains the scene. This frame within a frame technique reinforces the idea that global political affairs affect private, personal matters.

The slow spread of antisemitism that led to deportation and murder of the Jews is played out in the film. In 1941 Jews were no longer allowed to go to the theater in Prague. Dressed in stunning attire, the happy couple, Hana and Toni, are just about to leave for the theater when they receive this foreboding news from Hana's dejected father. In this way, Radock feeds his audience the history of the war through a personal and easily digested narrative.

The film is full of symbolic cinematography. For example, when a minor character, Professor Reiter, commits suicide strange camera angles show the old man sitting in his apartment, his open window, the cobblestone street far below and the stopped hands on a clock. When shrill screams echo from the street and the apartment is empty, the audience is to assume the awful truth.

Cast

• Blanka Waleská ... Dr. Hanna Kaufmann
• Otomar Krejca ... Dr. Antonin Bures
• Viktor Ocásek ... Engineer Kaufmann
• Zdenka Baldová ... Mrs. Kaufmann
• Jirí Spirit ... John [Honzik] Kaufmann
• Eduard Kohout ... Prof. Reiter

Reception

After sitting neglected for over forty years, Distant Journey reemerged to be hailed by critics. The Village Voice called it a "masterpiece," comparing it stylistically to Citizen Kane. The film is applauded for both its expressionist cinematography and historical relevance, being one of the first films to confront the Holocaust, only three years after it occurred.

Trivia

Footage from Distant Journey appears in Stanley Kubrick's (1971) film A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick incorporated the shots of children playing amidst rubble into his film.

References

* *

See also

Similar Holocaust films:

• The Fifth Horseman is Fear
• Samson

External links

• Distant Journey's Yahoo page
• Distant Journey's IMDb page