. Alfred Radok is a seminal figure in the Czech theater, having directed the National Theater and founded the landmark Laterna Magika, which revolutionarily combined live performances with rear-projected films and other cinematic tropes (it also provided a launching pad for several filmmakers). In 1949 he ventured into film with Distant Journey, merging experimental theater into a cinematic narrative that addressed the Holocaust. Set in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp (where Radok's father had perished), the film depicts the horrors experienced there by a young nurse during the last days of the war. One of the first Holocaust-related films, it's still one of most stylistically daring, combining appropriated news footage, altered screen shapes, and polyscreen graftings for what critic J. Hoberman called “a stylized danse macabre. . . . Audacious and grotesque, the movie looks back to Caligari and forward to the unsettling puppet animation of Jan Svankmajer.” Distant Journey was sharply criticized for “formalism” by the reactionary government; disillusioned, Radok made only two more films.