This film, co-directed by the Norwegian Titus Vibe-Muller and the Frenchman Jean Dréville (as a supervisor), should be remembered in the light of other great resistance films, tangible and still in flames – films made immediately after the Second World War. Like the contemporary masterpieces Paisà and La bataille du rail, Kampen is anti-heroic in conception, and with many real-life participants in front of camera. The distance of similar work especially American, is obvious: The Heroes of Telemark (Anthony Mann, 1964) depicts the same events, but on a more general level. Kampen is also about a group, about a network of complicated human relationships caught in the circumstances of war and violence, with resistance and individual achievement always present, but it is devoid of emotional tricks or heroic close-ups, depicted always from the midst of the anonymity of a hard task done together – a polyphonic approach. Some of its method is shared by the more famous The Longest Day (1962), but Zanuck’s star-studded film is impersonal and pedestrian in comparison. With Kampen, the polyphonic approach works. It creates a fascinating parties in action and the drama of many different nationalities at war. It is a painstaking achievement of factual historical reconstruction – “cette page de l’histoire”, as stated at the film ’s end. It also has an almost Hawksian harshness, and its own special poetry: in the images of icy landscapes, snowstorms, clouds passing the glacier and rocky drops, and in the reflection of objects needed for the hard challenge. There is a balance of nature and man usually captured only in documentaries with this degree of force.

Peter von Bagh