I lived in Poland for about a year when I was six years old, and I have always made a point of catching whatever Polish films are on offer whenever the film festival comes around, starting with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy (1993-1994).
But I have never made much effort to look into the history of Polish cinema, apart from watching a handful of Kieslowski’s other films, such as Blind Chance (1987), which I saw while doing background research for an article on those multiple-timeline stories that were so common a few years ago, and of course the Dekalog (1988). But even that doesn’t take us back very far.
So when the Pacific Cinematheque announced that it was going to run a series of war movies directed by Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda back in the 1950s, I just had to check ’em out.
Wajda’s first three films are often grouped together as a “trilogy” of sorts, and while they are all pretty good, my impression is that they get better if you watch them in chronological order. A Generation (1955) reportedly marked a significant neo-realist break from the state-approved “socialist realism” that had dominated Polish screens up until then, but it seems to me there is still a bit of pandering to the Communist authorities in this story of Polish youth who join a Marxist group that takes up arms against the Nazis. One of the young resistance fighters is played by Roman Polanski, who would go on to win an Oscar nearly half-a-century later for directing his own version of the Nazi occupation, The Pianist (2002), and I was reminded of that film while watching Kanal (1957), which also features a bit of piano-playing during the Warsaw uprising; however, the second half of this film concerns a dark, miserable, nightmarish trip through the sewers, as the last members of a resistance platoon try to escape the Nazis, and end up getting lost, going mad, or getting caught; the musician even makes a point of quoting a line from Dante’s Inferno about people swimming in “a river of excrement”. Finally, Ashes and Diamonds (1958) takes place the day after the Nazi surrender; the front lines have long since moved past Poland and into Germany, but the struggle continues against the new Communist regime, and the story concerns one nationalist fighter who is ordered to kill a local Communist official but has second thoughts after he becomes romantically involved with a barmaid; of all the films in the “trilogy”, this one may make the most interesting use of religious imagery, plus there is a hilarious subplot concerning a banquet in honour of yet another newly-minted Communist official that goes deliriously wrong when his assistant gets seriously drunk.
Wajda followed these films with another war movie that is not usually grouped with the others — and is thus almost impossible to find on video — but arguably ought to be. Lotna (1959) concerns a white mare that is passed from one cavalry officer to another during the early days of World War II, when Polish cavalry officers went up against militarily superior German tanks. There are some nice character moments; I especially like the way a wedding takes place so close to one of the officer’s funerals, and how the bride’s veil gets caught on a nail in the officer’s coffin; I also like the two conversations between another officer and a teenaged girl, who takes exception to being treated like a “child”, and who then promises to “remember” the officer. There is of course some violence here, but most of the gore is relegated to those moments after the battles, as the camera pans over the bodies of fallen men and horses.
If Lotna is not usually grouped with the other war movies, it could be due to a number of factors: one, it is mostly in colour (the quality of which varies from shot to shot), whereas the other films are black-and-white; two, it takes place at the beginning of the war, whereas the other films move chronologically from before the Warsaw uprising to during the uprising to immediately after the war is over; and three, maybe we just like “trilogies”, period.
I’m definitely interested in learning more about these films and the context in which they were made and received. And I see from the IMDB that Wajda is still working, at least as of his most recent film in 2002 (which also starred Polanski!) — although, oddly enough, I don’t think I have seen any of his recent films, and for that matter I’m not sure that any of them have ever played here.
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