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MovieMail's Review
Made either side of his 30th birthday, Andrzej Wajda's great WWII trilogy not only put Polish cinema on the international map but preserved a fascinating journey from promising new talent to world-class master. The fact that his debut A Generation (1954) stands up so well is doubly remarkable, since his inexperience combined with forced labour under the cosh of Socialist Realism, the monolithic Stalinist doctrine that wrecked so much art in the USSR and its satellites. Accordingly, we're given appropriately heroic role models in Communist resistance activists Stas and Dorota and their comrades (one played by a young Roman Polanski), but Wajda is more interested in their doomed friend Jasio, who hates the Nazis but is reluctant to submit to another ideology to help defeat them.
The Cannes-garlanded Kanal (1957) was the first Polish film to grasp the nettle of the controversial 1944 Warsaw Uprising. With a bigger budget and much more creative freedom, Wajda recreates a virtually obliterated Warsaw before following his motley band of resistance fighters (this time the non-Communist Home Army) into the sewers to evade German tanks. The opening narration tells us that they won't make it, making this not so much a paean to Polish heroism as a fatalistic study of what happens when all options have been closed off.
The masterly Ashes and Diamonds (1958) begins as a thriller but a botched assassination attempt triggers a crisis of confidence in resistance fighter Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), striking at the very heart of what it means to be Polish at a time of national upheaval. Wajda’s art-school-trained eye ensures constant visual interest: burning vodka shots symbolise fallen friends, and an effigy of a crucified Christ dangles upside-down in the ruins of a church. Everything is ambiguous, including Maciek’s iconic dark glasses: they’re no fashion statement but a necessary remedy for the eye damage he suffered in the sewers. Although set at the end of the war, the film’s tone is hardly celebratory: Wajda knew what was coming next, and while he couldn’t spell too much out, he’d thoroughly mastered the art of writing between the lines.
Three groundbreaking films that are testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the struggle for personal and national freedom in Poland.
Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is set on the last day of WWII in a small town somewhere in Poland, where Polish exiles and the occupying Soviet forces face a new day and a new Poland. The fate of a nation is interwoven with that of soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to assassinate an incoming commissar. However, a mistake leads him to Krystyna, who gives him a glimpse of what his life could be. One of the most important of all Polish films.
A Generation (1955) is a strikingly unsentimental appraisal of heroism in a tale of a cocky Polish youth who decides to fight the Nazis after falling for pretty Resistance leader. Soon he is engaged in dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity, maturing as he assumes responsibility for others’ lives.
Kanal (1957) is set largely in the labyrinthine underground network of the Warsaw sewers, as a group of partisans attempt escape from the Nazis during the 1944 uprising. It's a grim, powerful and exciting tale in which there are unforgettable images of the young, doomed freedom fighters dying heroically for Poland against insurmountable odds.
