Review of Danton (1983) by Mark K — 20 Jul 2007

When I was 10 my mother sent my older brother and I to Poland for two and a half months during the summer of 1990 to spend time on my uncle's farm in post-Communist Poland.

Oh what fun we had!

There wasn't even a ball on my uncle's farm for us to play with, and my brother and I spent most of the summer suffering from either bronchitis or newly discovered allergies.

At one high point during that summer, my uncles thought it would be a great idea to give us kids some "culture"...and took us to Majdanek concentration camp. I went there thinking I was going "camping." My brother called me a "fucking idiot" when I didn't understand why people would go to a camp to concentrate. I thought camps were ususally supposed to be fun...you know...like places where people played kickball, volleyball, and other games involving balls we didn't have, or hadn't descended yet, that summer. Balls aside...I found out just what a "concentration camp" was when we got there.

We spent the whole day checking out guard towers, electrified fences, barns full of stolen shoes, Dr. Mengele's operation table, gas chambers, ovens, and a giant memorial full of prisoners' ashes. By the end of the day my mind was mush...and very, very fragile. That night my aunt and uncle were watching a film on Polish television that made me finally snap into endless tears. The film ended with several, very graphic, guillotine executions. I didn't find out what the film was until 13 years later in 2003 when, on a whim, I picked up "Danton" in the video library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I sat down that night and watched this film, and at the very end, during the guillotine execution scene, a flood of terrible memories came back to me and I sat up and said, "Oooooh...so THIS was THAT movie! It's good!" If you see this movie, you'll agree it's good...and terrifying for what its implications are for any country going through an era of tyrrany. Also, the guillotine executions may just make you bawl like a 10 year old child staring into the abyss of non-existence.

Enjoy!