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‘Primo Levi’s Journey,’ different kind of road movie
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BY: LILA HANFT Staff Reporter
Despite its title, the documentary “Primo Levi’s Journey” really isn’t about Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, author and Holocaust survivor.
Its title comes from the film’s premise: to retrace, 6o years later, Levi’s 1945 journey from Auschwitz to Italy n travel and accommodations provided courtesy of Stalin and the Russian Army. Levi described the journey in his 1969 memoir The Truce (published in the U.S. as The Awakening), portions of which provide narrative voiceovers in the current film.
Levi’s surreal, frightening trip took 10 months and meandered through 1,000 miles of war-ravaged Eastern Europe n Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria n through cities and countryside transitioning from Nazi rule to the demands of Stalin’s Communism, often with little discernible effect on the level of human misery.
When Italian filmmaker Davide Ferrario and his crew retraced Levi’s journey, they traveled through the same cities and countryside, now transitioning from Soviet Communism to a distinctly American form of global capitalism, which also appears to do little to alleviate human misery.
According to the director, the parallel between Levi’s journey and his own is that “we’re (also) living at the end of a truce. For Levi, it was the truce between the end of WW II and the beginning of the Cold War; for us, it’s the one between the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001.”
Ferrario travels through nationalist furor in Ukraine; Soviet-style collective farms in Belarus (“We’re getting better all the time!”); and Chernobyl, a ghost town once called “the city of children.” In Budapest, the “Cemetery of Communist Statues” contains huge statues of Lenin and Stalin n and a sign saying “We accept credit cards.”
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, who leads Ferrario and his crew through an abandoned steel mill in Poland, calls the mill’s enormous neoclassical shell “a living corpse” and suggests it be made into “a museum of Communism.”
Ferrario’s intention was to travel “with our eyes and (Levi’s) words.” In the film’s best moments, serendipitous events in Ferrario’s film and lines from Levi’s prophetic prose come together beautifully. Levi’s description of Belarus’s farming communities is echoed by Ferrario’s experience, where he and the film crew end up dining amiably with formerly wary government officials, including the KGB agent who initially swooped in and hustled Ferrario off for questioning.
“After spending a few days with the village people … all of us completely agreed with what Levi had written about the same villagers. We were moved by their good nature,” Ferrario remarks in his director’s notes.
“I always had Levi’s book with me, and the experience of seeing and of reading were almost simultaneous and dialectic,” he says.
Throughout the film, however, Levi himself remains elusive. Old photos and footage from Levi’s return to Auschwitz in 1982, in which Levi’s dark eyes and taut face suggest a war intelligence, increase our curiosity about him. But he’s really only present in the excerpts from The Truce, read in English by Chris Cooper.
“It seems the world is headed for disaster,” Levi wrote, “and we limit ourselves to hoping its advance is slow.”
lhanft@cjn.org
Its title comes from the film’s premise: to retrace, 6o years later, Levi’s 1945 journey from Auschwitz to Italy n travel and accommodations provided courtesy of Stalin and the Russian Army. Levi described the journey in his 1969 memoir The Truce (published in the U.S. as The Awakening), portions of which provide narrative voiceovers in the current film.
Levi’s surreal, frightening trip took 10 months and meandered through 1,000 miles of war-ravaged Eastern Europe n Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria n through cities and countryside transitioning from Nazi rule to the demands of Stalin’s Communism, often with little discernible effect on the level of human misery.
When Italian filmmaker Davide Ferrario and his crew retraced Levi’s journey, they traveled through the same cities and countryside, now transitioning from Soviet Communism to a distinctly American form of global capitalism, which also appears to do little to alleviate human misery.
According to the director, the parallel between Levi’s journey and his own is that “we’re (also) living at the end of a truce. For Levi, it was the truce between the end of WW II and the beginning of the Cold War; for us, it’s the one between the fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11, 2001.”
Ferrario travels through nationalist furor in Ukraine; Soviet-style collective farms in Belarus (“We’re getting better all the time!”); and Chernobyl, a ghost town once called “the city of children.” In Budapest, the “Cemetery of Communist Statues” contains huge statues of Lenin and Stalin n and a sign saying “We accept credit cards.”
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, who leads Ferrario and his crew through an abandoned steel mill in Poland, calls the mill’s enormous neoclassical shell “a living corpse” and suggests it be made into “a museum of Communism.”
Ferrario’s intention was to travel “with our eyes and (Levi’s) words.” In the film’s best moments, serendipitous events in Ferrario’s film and lines from Levi’s prophetic prose come together beautifully. Levi’s description of Belarus’s farming communities is echoed by Ferrario’s experience, where he and the film crew end up dining amiably with formerly wary government officials, including the KGB agent who initially swooped in and hustled Ferrario off for questioning.
“After spending a few days with the village people … all of us completely agreed with what Levi had written about the same villagers. We were moved by their good nature,” Ferrario remarks in his director’s notes.
“I always had Levi’s book with me, and the experience of seeing and of reading were almost simultaneous and dialectic,” he says.
Throughout the film, however, Levi himself remains elusive. Old photos and footage from Levi’s return to Auschwitz in 1982, in which Levi’s dark eyes and taut face suggest a war intelligence, increase our curiosity about him. But he’s really only present in the excerpts from The Truce, read in English by Chris Cooper.
“It seems the world is headed for disaster,” Levi wrote, “and we limit ourselves to hoping its advance is slow.”
lhanft@cjn.org
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