Rent Passenger (1963)

Incomplete - and Resonant - Passenger review by CH

Incomplete works, whether on the page, canvas or as sculpture, can have as much fascination as those deemed finished (if anything ever is).

At an hour long, Passenger is but a fragment of what it could have been, and the missing scenes are mainly, one infers, those to have been filmed upon a boat some time after a guard and prisoner - both women - had become embroiled in a Polish death camp. The shipboard sequences, for which stills are supplied, provide a counterpoint to a brilliantly and harrowingly re-creation of a camp (beds which are but holes in a wall, for example) at the evil heart of the Holcaust. The relationship, the taunts, the forced marches to the ovens: these have, of course, become familiar but Passenger - such an innocent-seeming, nautical title - also does service to describe those who made a one-way journey, their ticket marked Oblivion.

There is no film like this, and it should be better known.