La Frontière. 1961. France. Written and directed by Jean Cayrol, Claude Durand. With Laurent Terzieff. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 18 min.
Dedicated “to the exiled, proscribed, expelled, banned,” this montage of documentary images codirected and written by Jean Cayrol—a former deportee who wrote the commentary for Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog —makes the Spanish Civil War a synecdoche for all forms of brutal exclusion. Courtesy Les Film Du Jeudi
L’Enclos (Enclosure). 1961. France/Yugoslavia. Directed by Armand Gatti. Screenplay by Gatti, Pierre Lary. With Hans Christian Blech, Jean Négroni, Herbert Wochinz. In French, German, Spanish; English subtitles. 105 min.
Jean Douchet, in Cahiers du cinéma, wrote that “for the first time, the concentration camp is taken as an object of reflection on the world. The allegorical aspect prevails over the realistic aspect, and, paradoxically, this film is more realistic about the details of life in the camps than any other previous ones, which only showed the apocalyptic side.” The director and cowriter Armand Gatti, who was himself a deportee, brings his experience in theater to the style of the film. Courtesy Clavis Films