{ "id": "epky3egkmm", "slug": "kapo-epky3egkmm", "title": "Kapò", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical", "label": "War and historical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure", "label": "War action and adventure", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure.war-action-films-released-through-1999", "label": "War action films released through 1999", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure.war-action-films-released-through-1999" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure.war-action-films-released-through-1999.yr-1934-1962", "label": "Released 1934 to 1962", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure.war-action-films-released-through-1999.yr-1934-1962" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical", "label": "Western Europe · 1946 to 2000: War and historical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical", "path": [ { "id": "geo.weu", "label": "Western Europe", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946", "label": "Western Europe · 1946 to 2000", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical", "label": "War and historical films (individual works)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.weu.t1946.culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical" } ] } ], "excerpt": "Kapò (1959) is Gillo Pontecorvo's Italian Holocaust drama, also called Kapo, starring Susan Strasberg as Edith, a Jewish girl who becomes a camp kapo; famous for Rivette's 1961 tracking-shot critique.", "snippet": "Kapò (1959) is Gillo Pontecorvo's Italian Holocaust drama, also called Kapo, starring Susan Strasberg as Edith, a Jewish girl who becomes a camp kapo; famous for Rivette's 1961 tracking-shot critique.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.war-historical.war-action-and-adventure.war-action-films-released-through-1999.yr-1934-1962", "markdown": "# Kapò\n\n**Kapò** is a 1959 Italian war drama directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, about a young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp who saves herself from death by assuming another prisoner's identity and becoming a kapo, a prisoner functionary who supervises other detainees. It was one of the first feature films to depict the horror of the Holocaust, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/22619)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Director and writers | Gillo Pontecorvo; story and screenplay by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/22619) |\n| Production | Italy, 1959; 112 minutes; black and white, 1.66:1; Italian language[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/22619) |\n| Co-production | French, Italian, and Yugoslavian; shot in Yugoslavia[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo) |\n| Lead cast | Susan Strasberg (Edith, alias Nicole Niepas), Emmanuelle Riva (Terese), Laurent Terzieff (Sascha), Didi Perego (Sofia), Gianni Garko (Karl)[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/22619) |\n| Literary source | Freely inspired by Primo Levi's *Se questo è un uomo* (1947)[3](https://www.raicultura.it/cinema/articoli/2019/01/Kapo-b7b2f892-37ba-4445-9602-93fc02eb1883.html) |\n| Historical standing | One of the first films to depict the horror of the Holocaust; Oscar-nominated[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/22619) |\n| Critical landmark | Jacques Rivette's 1961 review \"De l'Abjection\" made one tracking shot a lasting reference in debates on filming atrocity[4](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/so-nobody-can-lie-sam-fullers-falkenau-morality-tracking-shots) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Plot\n\nEdith, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl living in Paris under German occupation, is arrested with her family in the film's opening minutes and deported to a concentration camp, where she is separated from her parents.[5](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1437-kapo-into-darkness) A sympathetic prisoner working in the infirmary saves her life by giving her the identity of \"Nicole,\" a non-Jewish thief who has just died. She then witnesses her parents being led away for extermination.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo)\n\nDetermined to survive at any cost, she is transferred to a labor camp, sells herself to SS officers in exchange for food and improved standing, and is eventually promoted to kapo, or warden, as her soul hardens.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo) When Sascha, a Russian prisoner of war, arrives, the two fall in love and her sense of altruism reawakens; she agrees to join a risky escape plan.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo) She dies during the mass escape attempt.[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642529.2023.2181534)\n\n## Production\n\nPontecorvo came to fiction features from documentary work. After seeing [Roberto Rossellini](https://www.edgepedia.org/roberto-rossellini)'s *Paisan* (1947), he quit journalism, bought a camera, and made documentaries through the 1950s before directing his first fiction feature, *The Wide Blue Road* (1957), his first collaboration with screenwriter Franco Solinas. *Kapò* was their next film.[5](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1437-kapo-into-darkness) It was Pontecorvo's second feature.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo)\n\n[Susan Strasberg](https://www.edgepedia.org/susan-strasberg), daughter of [Actors Studio](https://www.edgepedia.org/actors-studio) teachers Lee and Paula Strasberg, played Edith; she had originated the title role of *The Diary of Anne Frank* on Broadway and lost the lead in [George Stevens](https://www.edgepedia.org/george-stevens)'s 1959 film version the same year she was cast.[5](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1437-kapo-into-darkness) The film's stark black-and-white photography, much of it in extreme high contrast, was noted for a newsreel-like illusion of authenticity.[5](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1437-kapo-into-darkness) Pontecorvo also mixed in documentary footage and used a duplicate negative to give the film a drab, contrasted appearance.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo)\n\nThe film belongs to a cluster of late-1950s and early-1960s features about the camps, alongside the East German *Stars* (1959), the American *The Diary of Anne Frank* (1959), and *Judgment at Nuremberg* (1961); apart from [Eastern Bloc](https://www.edgepedia.org/eastern-bloc) productions such as Wanda Jakubowska's *The Last Stop* (Poland, 1948), it was one of the earliest feature films to focus on life inside the concentration camps.[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642529.2023.2181534) • [2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo)\n\nRelease dates differ across reference sources: the Rai Cultura account places its Italian theatrical release in 1959,[3](https://www.raicultura.it/cinema/articoli/2019/01/Kapo-b7b2f892-37ba-4445-9602-93fc02eb1883.html) while Larousse and the BFI list 1960[7](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/Kapo/5790) • [8](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/ceacd108-27cd-5c0a-8572-aadad4182878/kapo) and a French release date of 26 April 1961 is recorded by L'Officiel des spectacles.[9](https://www.offi.fr/cinema/evenement/kapo-15122.html)\n\n## The Rivette controversy\n\nThe film's place in film criticism rests largely on a single shot. In June 1961 the French critic and filmmaker Jacques Rivette published \"De l'Abjection\" (On [Abjection](https://www.edgepedia.org/abjection)) in *Cahiers du cinéma*, denouncing the moment when the character played by Emmanuelle Riva commits suicide by throwing herself onto an electrified barbed-wire fence. Rivette wrote that the man who decided, at that moment, to use a forward tracking shot to reframe the woman's corpse at a low angle, positioning her raised hand in the composition, deserved \"nothing but our most profound contempt.\"[4](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/so-nobody-can-lie-sam-fullers-falkenau-morality-tracking-shots) The review echoed [Jean-Luc Godard](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-luc-godard)'s dictum that \"tracking shots are a question of morality\" and Luc Moullet's inversion that \"morality is a question of tracking shots.\"[4](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/so-nobody-can-lie-sam-fullers-falkenau-morality-tracking-shots)\n\nThe shot became what film scholar Libby Saxton called \"a critical topos and shorthand for the ethical risks at stake in reconstructing the Nazis' crimes or other historical atrocities.\"[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642529.2023.2181534) In 1992 the critic Serge Daney built his essay \"The Tracking Shot in Kapo\" on Rivette's description, while acknowledging he had never seen the film.[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642529.2023.2181534) Saxton pointed out that Rivette slightly misremembered the framing, and shot-by-shot analysis showed the sequence is marked by disruptive montage and ends in a medium shot of Terese's dead body, not the close-up later critics described.[6](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642529.2023.2181534) The debate sits within a larger argument, framed by [George Steiner](https://www.edgepedia.org/george-steiner)'s 1963 claim that \"the world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason,\" about whether cinema can represent the Holocaust at all.[4](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/so-nobody-can-lie-sam-fullers-falkenau-morality-tracking-shots)\n\n## Reception and legacy\n\nContemporary and later critical opinion has been divided. The Los Angeles Times described the film as \"neither a great nor a terrible movie,\" but one with a special place in the history of Holocaust films and film criticism, a flash point in debates about the responsibilities and limitations of cinema when depicting historical atrocity.[10](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-apr-11-la-ca-secondlook11-2010apr11-story.html) The Turner Classic Movies essay called it underappreciated and credited it as a philosophical examination of the choice between survival and dehumanization, while noting that even Pontecorvo admitted the weakness of the romantic subplot.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo) On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 57% critics' score against an 84% audience score.[11](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kapo)\n\n[The Italian](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-italian) encyclopedia Treccani credited the film with the merit of having begun a cinematic path toward understanding the Jewish genocide, before Pontecorvo's documentary vein revealed itself fully in *The Battle of Algiers* (1966).[12](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/italia_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/) The film also stands at the head of a broader body of work on the kapo figure, the prisoner functionaries whose position between victim and perpetrator has been treated in later documentaries such as *Kapo* (Tor Ben-Mayor and Dan Setton, 2000), the first film to include filmed testimonies of former Jewish female functionaries in Auschwitz-Birkenau.[13](https://www.liatsteirlivny.com/Articles/representations-of-jewish-functionaries-in-the-holocaust-in-israeli-documentary-cinema?lang=he)\n\n## References\n\n1. [Kapò (1959), The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/22619)\n2. [Kapo, by James Steffen, Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/articles/86543/kapo)\n3. [\"Kapò\" di Gillo Pontecorvo dal romanzo di Primo Levi, Rai Cultura](https://www.raicultura.it/cinema/articoli/2019/01/Kapo-b7b2f892-37ba-4445-9602-93fc02eb1883.html)\n4. [\"So nobody can lie\": Sam Fuller's Falkenau and the morality of tracking shots, Sight and Sound (BFI)](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/so-nobody-can-lie-sam-fullers-falkenau-morality-tracking-shots)\n5. [Kapò: Into Darkness, by Michael Koresky, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1437-kapo-into-darkness)\n6. [Digital visual history: historiographic curation using digital technologies, Rethinking History](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13642529.2023.2181534)\n7. [Kapo, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/Kapo/5790)\n8. [Kapò (1960), BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/ceacd108-27cd-5c0a-8572-aadad4182878/kapo)\n9. [Kapo, L'Officiel des spectacles](https://www.offi.fr/cinema/evenement/kapo-15122.html)\n10. ['Kapò': portraying the unthinkable in art, Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-apr-11-la-ca-secondlook11-2010apr11-story.html)\n11. [Kapò, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kapo)\n12. [Italia, Enciclopedia del Cinema, Treccani](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/italia_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/)\n13. [Liat Steir-Livny, Representations of Jewish Functionaries in the Holocaust in Israeli Documentary Cinema](https://www.liatsteirlivny.com/Articles/representations-of-jewish-functionaries-in-the-holocaust-in-israeli-documentary-cinema?lang=he)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1934 to 1962*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"Kapò\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[Kapò](https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm](https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"Kapò\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/kapo-epky3egkmm. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "Kapò is Gillo Pontecorvo's Italian Holocaust drama, also called Kapo, starring Susan Strasberg as Edith, a Jewish girl who becomes a camp kapo; famous for Rivette's 1961 tracking-shot critique." }