The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze)

This film takes place in a small Slovak town in 1942, just after the government has become a puppet regime for the Nazis, and centers on the relationship between an elderly Jewish shop owner (Ida Kaminska) and her Aryan overseer, Tono Brtko (Jozef Kroner). In certain respects this story is the very antithesis of Schindler’s List. Where the 1993 movie pitted a bureaucratic David against the bureaucratic Goliath that was monolithic Nazi fascism, Elmar Klos’ and Ján Kadár’s 1965 film searches out the tragic entanglement of the most pitiable of human destinies and still works towards the most unlikely of transformations. Beyond anger, disappointment, resignation or hope on any scale, this movie really offers an incredible experience, about which no reviewer can say much besides ‘See it.’ The Israeli novelist Aaron Appelfeld has asked whether art and literature are really possible after the Holocaust. While his own somber works are themselves an answer, I think this much too little known Czech movie offers something even more. Truly one of the greatest movies ever made.