Andrzej Wajda - Three War Films

Rating NR Formats DVD Genre drama Directed by Andrzej Wajda Publisher Criterion Collection External Links Criterion Collection

Americans had it relatively easy during World War II. Our relationship to that conflict was barricaded by two immense oceans and a certain arrogance that believed our homeland could never be touched. Yes, our soldiers were dying all over the globe, but they weren't dying in our back yards. Neither were we.

American war films reflected this. With no geographically immediate example of battlefields, the studios churned out fantasies, safe visions of a war that would easily be conquered with the right amount of good old American know-how, courage and pluck. And this vision extends to this day. The American films about World War II trade on this same float. For all its much-vaunted "realism," Saving Private Ryan is nothing more than the Best Picture of 1943 with faster editing, louder sound, more violence, and a self-important air of sanctimonious irony.

The war films from those countries which weathered the brunt of the storm are far different. In all cases, it would take until at least the mid-1950's before countries like France, Britain, Italy, and Japan would come to grips with their war experience (Germany wouldn't touch the subject until the late 1960's and then only allegorically). Once the floodgates were opened, though, the torrent could be vicious. In Japan, Kon Ichikawa used narrative film to address the Japanese atrocities against her own soldiers, atrocities which included spiritual destruction (Harp of Burma, 1957) and cannibalism (Fires on the Plains, 1959).

Among the most fascinating reminiscences comes from Poland. Between 1955 and 1958, director Andrzej Wajda created a trilogy of war films that both lauded and called into question the behavior of his fellow countrymen during the war. Although never intended as an "official" trilogy, the three films, A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) draw an arc that is far more complex than any one film can reveal.

Each film is set at an important moment in the war. A Generation tells the tale of the education of a young man to the realities of resistance. Built around but not set in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, this is the story of resistance fighters who work around the margins of conflict.

Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki) and his pals involve themselves in childlike games of resistance like stealing coal from passing German troop trains. When one young friend is shot, Stach finds himself jolted to the next level of militancy. Chance encounters with committed communist Sekula (Janusz Paluskiewicz) and the pretty political organizer Dorota (Urszula Modrzynska) set the seal on his political and emotional coming of age.

Wajda wisely parallels these two points. By maintaining a human dimension to young Stach, his transition from playful to lethal is kept well within the range of our sympathy. It also helps, of course, that the people within his gun sight are Nazis. Wajda further engages our sympathy by taking the time to follow the plights of other young fighters. Most effectively - and ironically - is the tale of Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar). In a clear allegory for most of the Polish people during the war, Jasio embraces the resistance movement but fights getting involved in it. When he is cornered at the top of a circular staircase and forced into the ultimate act of resistance, A Generation finds a gravity that makes everything that comes after that much more moving.

Taking advantage of an obvious low budget, Wajda shoots A Generation in a spare, direct style that comes across as a mixture of neo-realism and expressionism. In keeping with the dominant storytelling mode of Eastern Europe, the film is played for intense melodrama, a fact which causes it to occasionally overstate its moments and surround its leads with one-dimensional characters. One surprising exception is the immature fighter Mundek played by a then 22 year old Roman Polanski.

For Kanal, Wajda mixes the same neo-realism and expressionism but in a more mature way. A group of resistance fighters at the tragic end of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 are ordered to hold a neighborhood from the advancing Germans. When it becomes clear that they will be wiped out, the regional commander orders them to escape through the sewers. Above ground, Wajda gives us the stench of battle played with little concession to artifice. Below ground, the sewers become a graphic explication of Dante's view of Hell where all "roads" lead to the furnace.

Kanal is the most accessible and viscerally exciting of the three movies. Although Wajda is frequently praised as a proponent of a specific homegrown Polish cinema, Kanal shows all the earmarks of a man who has a healthy respect for foreign influences. Kanal opens with a sequence that is pure Hollywood in its structure, yet unmistakably and darkly Polish in its intent. A camera glides along a group of fighters as they march to battle. It only lingers for a second on each as a grim voiceover tells us who they are and something particular and sympathetic about that person. It ends, though, with a premonitory warning: "Watch them closely," the voice tells us, "for this is the last few hours of their lives." It is the fundamental equivalent of putting up a sign at the entrance to the sewer that reads, "Abandon all hope ye who enter." It suffuses Kanal with a tragic inevitability that no western film of the period would have dared.

Like A Generation, Kanal is thrust forward by its melodrama. Many of the characters have a faint air of tragic inevitability to them, partly because we've seen them in other earlier films and know the signifiers that mark their fate. There is the captain who is slowly cracking under the strain of command (Twelve O'Clock High, A Walk in the Sun), the sensitive artist who inevitably retreats into his own protective madness (Guadalcanal Diary) and the young woman trying to save the wounded object of her unrequited love (Odd Man Out). Here, though, familiarity does not breed contempt. Wajda uses this shorthand while also giving each of these characters enough time to establish themselves in our sympathy.

Wajda also shows a great deal more confidence in his ability to control the plastics of cinema than in A Generation. Kanal is filled with memorable images and moments that move the film away from the simple generic description of "escape picture." Even though his depiction of the sewers is extraordinarily effective, Wajda saves his best images for the end. Two in particular cling to the memory. Escaping into the daylight, one character realizes that he has entered into the middle of a Nazi trap. Staggering toward a pile of dead bodies, he kneels down of his own accord and awaits a bullet that he is sure will come his way. Even more powerful is the final moment: A gun held in the hand of an officer as it sinks out of the daylight and below the lid of the manhole as he goes back into the sewer on a mission that we know is futile.

If A Generation is about tragic heroism and Kanal is about tragic inevitability then Ashes and Diamonds is about tragic choices. Set on the last day of the war, Ashes and Diamonds presents that moment of transition when one can rejoice about the evil that has been overthrown but silenced by the question, "What comes next?".

The death of Hitler brought a whole new set of problems for Poland. The country's fate had already been determined at the Yalta Conference. Stalin, taking advantage of a dying Roosevelt, negotiated Poland as a province of the Soviet Union. The end of the war meant the trading of one foreign rule for another, a fact which did not sit well with many Poles. Poland had always been a politically factionalized country. During the war, these factions came together to defeat a common enemy. Each believed that the end of the war would bring about the rise of their own particular ideology. It was inevitable that these enemies who had become comrades must now once again go back to being enemies. But how do you do this when you've shared the experience of having fought side by side?

Ashes and Diamonds comes to grips with this question on a microcosmic level. On the morning of the German surrender, three resistance fighters are sent to kill the new communist provisional governor as he makes his way to the city. Their balance thrown off because they are no longer fighting Nazis, the men accidentally shoot up the wrong jeep. This killing of two innocents sets in motion a series of tragic events that reveal far deeper divisions in the Polish people than the war had ever allowed to surface.

At the center of this tale is Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), a committed freedom fighter/assassin who suddenly discovers that he no longer has the heart to do his job. After accidentally killing the two men, Maciek must go into town and complete the job. There he meets Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), a bar maid who is fighting her own resistance campaign. Wearied by years of total war, she refuses to allow herself any possibility of connection with another human being. His defenses suddenly down, Maciek falls in love with her and allows his feelings to further complicate the task he must perform.

Unlike the black and white, good versus evil morality of A Generation and Kanal, Wajda uses Ashes and Diamonds to explore the moral ambiguity that accompanies any war's end. Our hero is an assassin and his mission is to kill the rightful leader of the territory (Remember: This is a film from behind the Iron Curtain). In Cybulski's hands, Maciek is a likable, fun-loving young man, marked by a wicked sense of humor and willingness to be kind when kindness is needed. Once a Polish marauder against the Nazis, he is now expected to become a partisan Pole battling Poles of another partisan stripe. It is an impossible situation, particularly for a young man whose always seen his role as a defender of Polish honor.

Ashes and Diamonds is certainly the most technically polished of the three films as well as the most morally subtle and complex. But just as he would occasionally trip into melodramatic overstatement in the two earlier films, here Wajda intermittently falls face forward into a deep puddle of excessive symbolism. We don't need the constant talk of delicate violets to know that innocence is being crushed. And the ending is a particular mess. Deserting his Polish roots in favor of a bizarrely Fellini-esque crosscutting of Maciek's death with an expressionistic party sequence, Wajda undercuts the power of the ending just when it needs to be enhanced.

This, though, cannot kill the impact of what has come before. Throughout Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda skillfully moves through a series of moral arguments that ultimately call into question - at least from the Polish point of view - what exactly was gained from the war. It is the question that ultimately opens up this informal trilogy to a worthy discussion nearly fifty years after it was completed. From the heroism of A Generation to the "What price glory?" question of Kanal to the final moral confusion of Ashes and Diamonds, Wajda poses the eternal structure of our relationship to every war and asks us why we must continually put ourselves and the rest of the world through this inevitable and destructive spiral.

Criterion Collection has released an handsome box set of these works under the title Andrzej Wajda: Three War Films. A Generation and Kanal come with good 1:1.33 transfers although the source print for each contains a good number of scratches. The same cannot be said for the extraordinary 1.1:66 transfer of Ashes and Diamonds. All three come with interviews with the director and others. Also included are Wajda's 1951 student film, Ceramics from Ilza, and an interesting newsreel on the making of Ashes and Diamonds. Not to be missed, though, is Wajda's interview with Jan Nowak-Jezorianski, a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising.