The Andrzrej Wajda War Trilogy

The neo-realists in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 took their cameras on to the bombed and ruined streets of Italy in films like 'Rome-Open City' and 'Paisa' and,afterwards looked at life in the raw in films like 'Bicycle Thieves' . This was the cinema also of Wajda when he sought to put down his experiences in the Polish resistance in the trilogy beginning with 'A Generation', 'Kanal' and 'Ashes and Diamonds'. The tradition influenced British cinema too.

In the films, we are made aware that the hopes of the resistance fighters in the ruins of Warsaw are always going to end in despair and death; it is their commitment to the cause,be it Nationalism or Communism,that is their motivation to continue against stacked odds. In 'A Generation', boys try to be men fighting a war they cannot win and it gets them killed. They are brought into the Youth Resistance under the fiery Dorada/Ewa who organises the partisans. In this world, there are factories hiding rifles,police authorities working with the Germans and the young partisans themselves, friends, dying. The unfortunate thing about the film was that it seemed to be filmed in semi-darkness most of the time and it was hard to follow the characters and, sometimes, the storyline.

'Kanal' was much more focused and we went with a platoon of partisans trying to get from the suburbs of a completely-wrecked Warsaw to the centre to continue the fight at the same time of the uprising of the ghetto in 1944. The platoon,split up in the sewers,makes its weary way to the centre which,in the soldiers' minds,equates with paradise,green fields and the open air but only meant hell for most of them, like the description in Dante's 'Inferno'. It was interesting to note the motivation of Catholicism alongside Communism. The film could have been read several ways but it was gripping and demanding,especially as,with the pair near the end, paradise is viewed via a barred tunnel and the truth of the light shining down into the sewer turns out to be Death.

All the struggles end in 'Ashes and Diamonds' or, perhaps,are only just beginning. It is now 1945 and the Russians now run Warsaw and it should be a time of hope. However,Polish nationalists see this new dawn as the evening of democracy and they try not to let Communism make Poland a nightmare. The resistance fighters now fight communism,their one-time 'saviours', although their incompetence when trying to assassinate a Russian commissar via Maciek and killing an official at the local cement works does not augur well. Maciek cannot seem to keep to the job in hand when he falls for a beautiful barmaid,Krystyna, the third in a line of beautiful women seen in the trilogy. The fighting on the streets is now substituted by battles for power in the commissar-infested committees and there are some wonderfully-shot scenes,using tracking shots, of the Poles sucking up to the communist authorities as they grovel for preferment. So this is where the struggles have all ended.

The aesthetics of Maciek's eventual death are one of the greatest moments of cinema,dying amongst the white clothes-lines stained with his blood,almost a parallel with the Crucifixion. The struggle dies with him in agonizing paroxysms.

The unrelenting realism of the trilogy puts the war into the face of the audience. The camera is out there following the partisans in the ruins,in the sewers and,finally round board room tables. Were the stuggles depicted in 'Kanal' really worth it in the end? This trilogy is an antidote to the Hollywoodised version of the war but does sow the convention of some American war films of the fifties which looked at the empty gung-ho heroics and found them wanting,especially in films like 'Attack'.War affects everybody,soldiers and civilians,for good or ill and the fortitude of those who fought for what was the fleeting 'freedom' of their country can be admired tremendously.

This unimpeachable film portrays the Warsaw uprising as sheer hell. Its what it was like. I recently visitied the museum about the uprising in the Polish capital; you wouldnt have wanted to have been in the city during the war. The film is gloomily suspenseful and taut to the end. A marked improvement on the turgid and pro-communist first entry in this Polish triology.

The acting is dire - very sloppy and forced in places - and the film has not aged well. I ended up watching it in fast forward because there were so many unnecessary 'pregnant pauses'.

One to avoid I'd say.

This film - A Generation - from 1954 struck me at first as rather peculiar. Expectations that the story of a Polish youth living under Nazi occupation to be filled with soliloquy by the main character and dramatic events to move the plot along proved misplaced. After watching it a second time, I got it - this isn't a big dramatic film but a quiet story with real complexities underpinning it. The carpentry business where he goes to work as an apprentice is clearly making bunks for concentration camps whilst the owner stashes guns and money for the Polish resistance. These contrasts are presented quiety, in a matter of fact, daily life as it goes on kind of way yet the impact upon the character of our would-be hero is brilliantly understated. He meets and falls in love with a leader of the resistance who is eventually captured by the Nazis and taken away. As he comes to terms with unutterable loss of his love, a new bunch of recruits turns up looking now to him for leadership. Self-denial takes over as he stops his tears and looks towards his new responsibilities that have been forced on him by circumstance. The use of light in the film - or more exactly the absence of it - creates a real sense of claustrophobia. The settings are mostly in close quartered buildings or alleyways - only the last scene offers any expanse of space, but by this time any reassurance this may offer has gone. Very moving film making.

The debut feature by Andrzej Wajda is a coming of age tale about young Poles joining the resistance during nazi occupation, and was made by a cast and crew predominately just out of film school. That inexperience shows at times with some poor editing, clumsy lighting and a story line that could have been tightened considerably. The overt class war ideology espoused by the more sympathetically draw resistance characters who are communists can grate on a modern viewer, but in contrast the doubts and uncertainties expressed by individual fighters are much more of a bold step for a first time director working in 1950’s Poland. The two leads are experienced actors and give good performances, whilst the film has some nice touches, notably the famous shoot out on the spiral staircase, a scene that has been copied a number of times since.

Overall – inexperience shows behind the camera, but enough innovation is displayed to suggest a real talent might have been found.