Teresa Izewska as the doomed Daisy in Kanal

A Generation
Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written by Bohdan Czeszko; cinematography by Jerzy Lipman; starring Tadeusz Lomnicki, Urszula Modrzynska, Tadeusz Janczar and Roman Polanski. DVD, B&W, 87 mins, 1955.

Kanal
Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski; cinematography by Jerzy Lipman and Jerzy Wójcik; starring Teresa Izewska and Tadeusz Janczar. DVD, B&W, 96 mins, 1957; 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

Ashes & Diamonds
Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written by Jerzy Andrzejewski and Andrzej Wajda; cinematography by Jerzy Wójcik; starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa Krzyzewska, Waclaw Zastrzezynski, Adam Pawlikowski and Bogumil Kobiela. DVD, B&W, 103 mins, 1958. A Criterion Collection release, distributed by Image Entertainment,
www.image-entertainment.com.

Attentive viewers of Andrzej Wajda's remarkable first feature, A Generation, will be struck about midway through the film by a scene that pointedly recalls, even as it distinctively glosses, a historic moment of Poland's tortured wartime experience once evoked by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in his unforgettable “Campo dei Fiori” (1943).

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of the carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.

The deep irony of these compact lines expresses the poet's shock at the incongruous juxtaposition of thoughtless Poles having fun, while only blocks away the Wehrmacht was exterminating their Jewish compatriots during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of late April 1943. Wajda's handling of the scene, also set in the fairground at the foot of the Ghetto walls, is rooted in a similar irony. His ostensible hero Stach, a juvenile delinquent from a lumpenproletariat milieu turned communist resistance fighter, assembles a group of like-minded Polish youths to plan the rescue of their older comrade now fighting alongside the beleaguered Jews, even as their fellow citizens ride the carousels and swings, indifferent to the awful human tragedy so close at hand that they can smell as well as watch it.

Unlike Milosz, who focuses on a grim, contradictory present without political resolve, however, Wajda transports us into a postwar myth that the Communist rulers of Poland strenuously insisted upon to enhance their credentials as the principal Polish group to have resisted the German occupiers and to claim, not entirely incorrectly, the high ground in the struggle against anti-Semitism before, during and—despite the panicked flight of the majority of Polish Jewry between 1946 and 1950—after the war as well. Like every other Polish patriot, Wajda, knew the little scene's politics grossly exaggerated the communists' efforts. Yet their presence speaks volumes about the twenty-seven-year-old director's humanistic concerns as well as the compromises he, like so many postwar Polish and East European artists, were obliged to make with the powers that held his homeland in their thrall. Even here, however, at the beginning of his long and complex career in the Polish People's Republic, Wajda proved to be no mere political mouthpiece for the communists. He may have been obliged to adopt the party's take on the recent history of his long-suffering native land, but a canny sense of political tact as well as his use of the medium to blunt the script's impact helped him stay at the outer, though still acceptable, margins of political orthodoxy. What is so striking is that the young director is already able to use the only recently learned tools of his medium to blur the imposed ideological constraints. Wajda arrives in his debut feature as a filmmaker thinking outside the prevailing esthetic canons of Socialist Realism. And doing so enables him to reconfigure the image he shapes into a pregnant semantic field that vivifies the history undergirding the scene in a way Milosz might have endorsed as kindred in spirit to his own expressive effort.

How much this scene owes to Wajda's first great cinematographer, Jerzy Lipman, himself a Polish Jew and thus hardly indifferent to the symbolic weight of the moment, is unclear. In any case, the two evidently agreed to approach the scene indirectly. The carousel and another carnival ride on which couples swing dizzily in and out of the frame to the strains of a primitive organ, are initially shot obliquely from a low angle against a cloudless sky troubled only at the horizon by the acrid black smoke billowing from the ghetto's ruins a stone's throw away. Before any of the plot unfolds, that is, the powerfully ambiguous perspectives in the composition already tell us we are in the midst of a world gone awry. Only after he establishes an uncanny space, both familiar and yet somehow estranged from itself, does Wajda have the camera smoothly pan over to the little band as the conspiracy takes shape. The accent falls less on political myth-mongering than on the creation of a bravura exercise du style by an astonishingly confident young artist.

Not all the scenes in Wajda's first major directorial effort are as effective as this one, yet seeing A Generation again after many years confirms how much Wajda, trained as a painter, was esthetically alert and open to the examples of other film artists. First among these influences was Eisenstein, whose compositional style intrigued Wajda enough to publish an essay about it while still a student. Other eye-openers for Wajda were the first films of Orson Welles and the Italian neorealists who, as André Bazin noted at the time, were committed to staging in depth and the graphic, dramatic, and symbolic potential of foreground/background contrasts. Such effects, occasionally augmented by Wajda's carefully orchestrated camera movements, often transform the conventional patches of Bohdan Czeszko's script into something at least visually exciting to watch. From the very beginnings of his career, Wajda's films would reward viewers who scrutinized them as closely as they followed the plot.

A Generation 's conversion narrative is at least as old as Gorky's novel The Mother (later memorably filmed by Pudovkin) and stumbles to a sentimental halt during Stach's brief love affair with Dorota, the fearless youth leader of the communist resistance group he joins. Alternately serious and sunny, Dorota is a Socialist-Realist cliché, redeemed somewhat by actress Urszula Modrzynska's commitment to the role and Wajda's subtle use of off-screen sound and a musical leitmotif in his restrained handling of her capture by the Gestapo. Auteurists, moreover, will be pleased to see in this failed relationship anticipations of the doomed affairs in Kanal as well as the most famous breakup in all of Wajda's films, that of Maciek and Krystyna in Ashes and Diamonds. In any case, Wajda had the good sense to surround the stolid Stach with a number of more vivid characters, both major and minor, who time and again steal the show. The film's true emotional center is Jasio Krone, like Stach a young factory apprentice, who, though he claims he is a communist, at first vacillates about his commitment, rationalizing that he needs the security of a well-paying job working for a factory supplying the German Army to care for his father. Only after his fear and latent anti-Semitism lead him to turn away Abram, a former friend escaped from the burning ghetto, thereby forcing him out into the night and almost certain death, does Jasio feel sufficient shame to join Stach's resistance cell. (Wajda would later elaborate on their haunting exchange in the film, Samson (1961), based on a Kazimierz Brandys script.) Jasio eventually dies dramatically, throwing himself down a twisting stairwell when the Germans close in on him after the successful rescue of the senior communist leader Sekula from the burning ghetto. Played by Tadeusz Janczar in his first major screen role, Jasio—ambivalent about Jews, alternately cowardly and flamboyantly brave—is a far more honest and engaging portrait of a Polish Everyman during World War II than are the more unconvincingly noble Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki) and Sekula (Janusz Paluszkiewicz) .

For a Polish film, initially commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the communist takeover (and then rejected once it was complete), to feature, however briefly, anti-Semitic Polish workers in the factory or the mass of lumpenproletariat in the shanty town Stach lives in, required of Wajda equal degrees of candor and courage. Like the minor characters, these secondary plot lines not only help to flesh out the main narrative, they also convey the edgy, angst-ridden atmosphere of German-occupied Warsaw. Some of Wajda's most telling revelations are not narrativized at all, but conveyed through what might be thought of as visual asides. The fairground scene is certainly one example. Another has an exuberant Stach driving a horse-drawn wagon through the Warsaw streets only to be brought up short before a group of Jews at forced labor marching to work as they are being beaten by Jewish police. Or consider the telling moments when Jasio walks to the factory past a row of men hung from lampposts while a German officer takes souvenir photos. More than the plot itself, these small, gruesome details, so casually or briefly present in the background of shots that they might be overlooked, have the ring of historical truth. They are the mark of a young director in control of what he wants to say artistically as well as politically about Poland's recent history.

Wajda's next two films, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, confirmed his directorial promise and established his worldwide reputation a half century ago. The routinely excellent Criterion Collection has now handsomely coupled them with Pokolenie and the rarely seen student short, Ceramics from Ilza, in a fine new boxed set. All are presented in their original aspect ratios, and all, happily, are cleaner and finer grained than any that have appeared in video or DVD format before. The three features are often referred to as Wajda's ‘war trilogy,' and in this case the tag is not merely a marketing gimmick. Taken together, they represent the period of Poland's darkest hours in modern times with remarkable intensity. A Generation focuses on the months between September 1942, when the brutal occupation was firmly in place, until the collapse of the Ghetto revolt in early May 1943. The time span of Kanal narrows to the fifty-sixth and fifty-seventh day of the Polish national uprising that commenced on August 1, 1944. Finally, the celebrated Ashes and Diamonds concentrates on a single day, May 8, 1945, when the Germans surrendered in Berlin, as it turns into the morning after, the first day of a peace that brought, for Poles, anything but. Each film represents only an episode in the larger canvas of the Pole's riven history during and after their shattering war against the Germans. No obvious political theme or stance unites them all. Certainly Wajda does not overtly celebrate the communists' coming to power in Poland—although he, in a nod to the regime, does take some obligatory swipes at the communists' chief rivals, the right-wing nationalist Home Army forces, which figure in different, and hardly complimentary, ways in all three films.

The three films differ stylistically as well, although perhaps less than some critics have maintained. Though the time spans covered are progressively reduced, Wajda's unrestricted narrational style continues to explore multifaceted plots, jumping from one story line to the next as he develops character contrast and suspense. Consistent, too, is his intense mapping of movements through carefully organized frames. That is not to say there is no development from film to film. Even a casual viewer can observe Wajda's growing boldness as he progressively inserts charged symbolic objects into the mise-en-scène, culminating, in Ashes and Diamonds, in the unexpected appearance of the famous white horse, the inverted crucifix in a bombed-out church, and Zbigniew Cybulski's feral death throes on a vast heap of rubble. If over the later course of his work such symbols have at times seemed arbitrary and intrusive, in these early films they are still fresh, suggestive, and slightly mysterious.

It is hard for me to evaluate Kanal objectively for it was precisely Wajda's second feature, seen nearly forty years ago, that convinced me that films could be worthy of the kind of protracted attention I had devoted to other art forms. Even more than the knight playing chess on a beach with a white-faced, black-robed figure representing death, or the conflicted, aimless, uncommitted haute bourgeoisie at work and play in contemporary Italy, I prized Wajda's doomed resistance fighters who could find no exit from the sewers of Warsaw. For me, they were clearly more genuine existential heroes than those in the work of other vaunted contemporary directors; they were also more deeply embedded in the real world of recent history and politics that intrigued me then as now. When Kanal shared a prize at Cannes with Bergman's The Seventh Seal, Wajda was almost immediately propelled into the pantheon of art film directors like Bergman, Antonioni, and Fellini. This was fast company indeed for a representative of a cinema culture correctly regarded as provincial for the first fifty years of its existence. To Wajda's credit, he has consistently remained productive—though not always as artistically convincing—despite radical shifts in the party line and even since the communist party has been transformed beyond recognition after the demise of the U.S.S.R.

Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and barmaid Krytyna (Ewa Krzyzewska) spend the night in a seedy, small-town hotel in Ashes and Diamonds

Wajda once astutely remarked that many of his films have been “an extension of a lack in my biography.” Such is the case with Kanal, which is not about canals at all. The title simply means ‘sewer' in Polish. (Distributors worldwide were canny enough to leave it in linguistic limbo since translating it would hardly have helped sell the movie.) In fact, fully half the film takes place in the nebulous realms under the streets of war-ravaged Warsaw. That is because the story, based on the all too real experiences of scriptwriter Jerzy Stawinski—experiences that Wajda, although himself a member of the Home Army, did not share—revolves around the ignominious end of a band of partisans just before the utter collapse of the Polish 1944 uprising. The plot provides a guiding thread for a trenchant, at times bitter, suite of character studies. Janczar plays Jasio, a fastidious dandy (in one of his first scenes, we see him getting water for a shave during a lull in the fighting); he is aloof to the appeal of the earthy but very beautiful Daisy (Teresa Izewska) who trudges through the sewers each day bearing messages to the dispersed partisan units. (She smells, he says.) ‘Wise' (Emil Karewicz), the physically imposing second-in-command, has hooked up with a brave teenage partisan, Halinka (Teresa Berezowska), neglecting to tell her, however, that he is already married. The composer Michal (Wladyslaw Sheybal) is obviously unused to combat; shaken by the capture of his family, he feels unmoored and artistically unfertile. Only in the eery light of the sewers will he find inspiration...and then go mad. Leading them all is Zadra (Wienczyslaw Glinski), devoted to his men despite what he knows to be the Home Army's hopeless, foolhardy struggle against the Germans' overwhelming power. Already legends in Polish popular mythology, these kinds of flawed men earned Wajda's sympathy even as he has insisted that he disagreed with their misguided, romantic effort to liberate the country from the Nazi yoke.

We meet this band in Kanal 's impressive first shot, a long take with powerful graphic impact, as the partisans curl down from the horizon to be picked up by a protracted tracking camera that concentrates first on one, then another, of the characters. (The excellent extended interview with Wajda on the disc makes it clear that credit for this shot should be attributed primarily to Janusz Morgenstern, Wajda's assistant director, who first mapped it out. Throughout, Wajda is consistently generous to his many creative coworkers.) A voice-over, added to the script during production, introduces each and makes clear that they are not going to survive. For the rest of the film, we are thus led to focus on how, and not whether, the characters will die, and on their physical and mental anguish as they struggle under the extraordinary circumstances in which they perish. Soon trapped in a villa under siege and faced with the imminent threat of capture, the partisans' only hope is to escape through the subterranean realm of labyrinthine tunnels under the city.

Wajda's contemporary, Andrzej Munk, had turned down the directorial assignment, convinced that filming in such an environment was impossible. But Wajda had been mentored by Aleksander Ford, then one of the most powerful figures in the state-controlled Film Polski, whose Border Street (1948) and The Boys from Barski Street (1954) had demonstrated how sewers could be exploited for exceptional visual effects. Wajda, seconded by his able Director of Cinematography Lipman and cameraman Jerzy Wójcik accepted the challenge.

Once descended into what the composer, alluding to Dante, calls hell, the band splinters into three groups. We follow each in tandem as they grope forward in the near total darkness toward an exit that only Zadra eventually manages to find. Wajda demonstrates considerable compositional ingenuity in the sewers. He resorts to closer shots, primarily of faces and bodies, strikingly composed by varying the filming angles. Space becomes chokingly claustrophobic; the lighting, consistently low key, becomes increasingly phantasmagorical, as beams from the mens' flashlights and light pouring down widely spaced air shafts play across the sewer vapors and reflect off the running streams of sewage. Any sense of time and direction is suspended for the viewers as much as for the characters. The camera movements emphasize their exertions and signal the incipient madness that will overcome some of them. In the last shots, these movements underscore the characters' closed horizons with a fierce irony. As Daisy cradles the dying Jasio, no longer able even to open his eyes, in her arms, she comforts him with visions of light, air, and freedom to come while the camera tilts up and away to the other bank of the Vistula River, forever beyond their reach, through the bars sealing the sewer outlet.

Indeed, irony is Wajda's preferred trope throughout Kanal. The meticulous Jasio dies almost happily in the filth because he has finally allowed himself to be enfolded in Daisy's love. Wise and Halinka, however, apparently so much in love at the beginning, break down in the sewers, less from the strain of finding their way out than from Wise's dishonesty at not disclosing his marriage. As soon as she finds out, the girl kills herself and, profoundly shaken, Wise shortly thereafter surrenders and meekly submits himself to a German firing squad. The classically trained composer, earlier incapable of invention on a grand piano, goes mad, but finds inspiration in the eerie echo effects of the sewers, which he transforms into a tuneless tune on a humble ocarina. Squad leader Zadra alone finds his way to freedom, but cannot accept personal survival when he learns that his men have failed to follow him. He shoots the group's record keeper (‘Bullet') who has deceived him about the squad's whereabouts, and then descends into the darkness as Bullet's meticulously kept documents swirl in the dust amid the ruins of the Polish capital.

Only the cultural thaw that followed the return of the less hard-line communist Wladyslaw Gomulka to power permitted Wajda's at least partially positive image of Home Army veterans onto Polish movie screens. Wajda had deftly managed to avoid rehabilitating their strategic decisions even as he accorded to them a kind of dignity consonant with Polish public opinion about their valor. Ashes and Diamonds deepened this critique. Jerzy Andrzejewski adapted his famous novel of the same name by radically condensing its time span, and focusing the plot on the assassin Maciek Chelmicki, a character dazzlingly invented by Zbigniew Cybulski in unquestionably the greatest role of his movie career. The story begins as an appalling black comedy when two extreme right-wing killers (Cybulski and Andrzej Pawlikowski), ironically sleeping on the grass beside a roadside chapel, awake to an accomplice's (Bogumil Kobiela) excited cries as their intended victims approach. They have been assigned to kill Szczuka, the new regional communist party leader, and despite a certain maladroitness, they manage to murder two men. Unfortunately, neither is Szczuka. Their failure propels the rest of the main plot. Charged with murdering a man he does not know, Maciek must weigh his political loyalties against the possibilities raised by what he least expected to find in this treacherous, war-ravaged place: love. His failure to resolve the tension between these two alternative paths conspicuously stands as a microcosm for the failed hopes of political reconciliation and the rebirth of love in postwar Poland.

Maciek's one-night stand with the hotel barmaid Krystyna, offers hope that he may yet pull back from his mission, marry the girl and live happily ever after. Although the script significantly curtails this aspect of the novel, Szczuka is also on a personal mission: to reclaim his son whom he has not seen during his years of exile abroad and who, in his absence, has been swept up into the right-wing nationalist and markedly anti-Soviet cause. But Maciek's love affair is as doomed as Szczuka's efforts to redeem his son. None of the characters' hopes can be realized; each is fated to play to the end a role for which he or she had been destined. Maciek will have to pull the trigger that will end Szczuka's life, and this will, in turn, force him to abandon Krystyna, canceling her opportunity to find a way out of the diseased polity symbolized by the guests at a raucous banquet held in the hotel. The devastating picture of the messy, violent incongruities of postwar Poland is pointedly embodied in the highly stylized polonaise the local notables dance to music provided by some tipsy and out-of-key musicians cross cut with Maciek as he makes a fatal mistake when he attempts to flee from Russian soldiers. Thinking that he has a gun (he had thrown it away after murdering Szczuka), they shoot him. Maciek dies like a dog on a vast patch of rubble, while the hotel concierge unfurls a Polish flag and walks out into the new dawn. Then, as now, the historical judgment rendered by this image is a bit over the top, but remains surprisingly resonant all the same.

Maciek is the riveting center of the movie, and Wajda gave the notoriously independent Cybulski great latitude in interpreting the part. “When I was making Ashes and Diamonds,” Wajda writes in his surprisingly pallid memoir, Double Vision, “if I had spent my time teaching or telling Cybulski how he should act in front of the camera, instead of watching him with wonder and admiration, I would have spoiled one of the great opportunities of my life. For in the final analysis, if you want to create something more original, something that sets your film apart from all the others, you've got to let your colleagues— especially the actors—develop their own style in complete freedom.” Was Wajda, perhaps, too lackadaisical, too permissive? Are Cybulski's very 1950's tight jeans, army jacket, and dark shades too inexplicably anachronistic? Is the actor's hunching and grimacing too awkwardly incongruous? I think the answer to these questions is no. Maciek is a carefully constructed maudit figure, deliberately out of synch with those around him; thus, his clothes (help to) make the man. His posture and at times impulsive gestures throughout the movie, moreover, are a slow-motion rehearsal for his desperate run before dying at the end. Today, moreover, his physical dynamism seems to fit into a calibrated ensemble of extrovert shticks that define many of the other characters. (See in particular Cybulski's theatrical colleague Kobiela's antics as the mayor's opportunistic assistant Drewnowksi.) Wajda was right. Letting Cybulski loose created a charisma around his troubled, indecisive, ultimately tragic figure that the passage of the decades has not dimmed.

Paul Coates's searching short essay and Annette Insdorf's insightful running commentary reminds us how tightly structured Ashes and Diamonds is both dramatically and imagistically. The same, certainly should be said of Kanal if not entirely of A Generation. Indeed, these films are so carefully constructed, so obviously ‘well-made,' that they may seem to insist—too much, at least for contemporary tastes grown up on far less demanding, serious and issue-oriented fare—on their status as works of art with a capital A. But none of these most important of Wajda's works is a cinematic dinosaur, worthy only of museal status. Alert young filmmakers not addicted to the banal formulas of contemporary industrial cinema can still mine them for ideas, as Godard did early in his career when he abstracted the lovemaking scene between Maciek and Krystyna for Une femme mariée or borrowed the rubble-strewn landscape of Ashes and Diamonds as the setting for Les Carabiniers.

Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.1 (Winter 2006), 42-47.