The Labyrinth (Jason A. Schmidt, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Dorothy Littlejohn at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

As part of the series in the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Real-Markable Stories, The Labyrinth is a short documentry where memory, art and hell collide as an Auschwitz survivor finally confronts the horrors of his past after 50 years of silence. Marian Kolodziej was on one of the first transports to enter Auschwitz. He survived five years imprisonment and never spoke of his experience until after a serious stroke in 1993. He began rehabilitation by doing pen and ink drawings depicting his horrific experience. Marian’s drawings and art installations, which he called The Labyrinth, fill the large basement of a church near Auschwitz.

The drawings depict skeletal bodies doing work of different kinds, always with a many other skeletal bodies nearby. The bodies have faces of real people with real faces showing the suffering and pain. All the drawings are black ink on white paper, mostly very large pieces. Beautiful drawings break your heart seeing the horror of Auschwitz.

For a topic such as this with so many wonderful yet horrible images, my feeling is there needs to be more variety in its presentation. There is an incredible amount of material that I wanted to see in close ups and in themes grouped together. I found myself closing my eyes with the endless trucking shot at the same pace showing the same images again and again.

This incredible story could be edited shorter and it would be better or it could have better grouping of images. The music was beautiful, but like the cinematography and editing needed  more variety.  The film also would have benefitted from a sound effects track to go with the images. The music and voice was a little too thin for the length of the film.