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The plight of the artist in the face of such historical nightmares as the Holocaust has inspired films ranging from István Szabó’s Mephisto (1981) to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. Someday perhaps Szabó or Polanski or a filmmaker of equal stature will take on the bizarre and tragic tale of Kurt Gerron. Until then, this plodding documentary by Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender will have to do. Gerron enjoyed tremendous success and popularity as a character actor, film director, and cabaret performer (his version of Der Dreigroschenoper’s "Mackie Messer" is a classic) during the Weimar period, so much so that he overlooked the establishment and the implications of the Third Reich until it was much too late. He ended up in Theresienstadt (Terezin), a "model" concentration camp into which the Nazis siphoned the most distinguished Jewish artists, intellectuals, and athletes as a kind of Potemkin village to deceive the world about the Final Solution. Late in the war, the Nazis decided to make a propaganda film about the camp, and Gerron was coerced into directing it. Clarke and Sender use archival footage (including excerpts from the film), talking heads (including Gerron’s surviving colleagues and fellow camp inmates, whose testimony is harrowing), and a cliché’d commentary narrated by Ian Holm. However clumsy, Prisoner can’t help but be moving in its depiction of an artist confronting the ultimate existential absurdity and of evildoers committing the ultimate act of inhumanity. (96 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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