Poland's melancholy historiographer of the Communist period: In memoriam Andrzej Wajda

RIP Andrzej Wajda, whose death at 90 comes amidst a retrospective in New York of the works of another great Polish filmmaker, Kryszstof Kieslowski.  The latter is now the best known cineaste of his country to American audiences, but Wajda is the one essential figure everyone who knows his nation's cinema well mentions. It should also be noted in this regard that Poland at least from 1956 to the end of the Communist era had the greatest national cinema in Europe at least after Italy and maybe France.  And that, while Polish filmmakers like those of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were mostly well engaged with the particular situation of their societies, there was no real Iron Curtain in cinema, but if anything, then as now, the division was between the two models of an artistic cinema of Europe and an American one of entertainment.  I was privileged to be all to see all of Wajda’s films to date but one of reputedly minor interest during the 2008 retrospective at Lincoln Center.  Few cinematic oeuvres have left me feeling more consistently and profoundly moved.

Wajda’s landmark early film “Ashes and Diamonds” is as central to the film culture of the 1950’s as Bergman’s “Summer with Monika,” Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy,” Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” or Godard’s “Breathless.”  All these films shared a postwar concern with what might be called “existential” questions, Wajda’s seeming to argue the futility of the nationalist politics (which had been Wajda’s own, that of the Polish Home Army resistance which he joined during the war) that is accorded a tragic pathos whose destiny is revealed in the famous final shot of Zbigniew Cybulski, the “Polish James Dean,” writhing and pouting like a child as he dies on a rubbish heap.  Wajda would go on to make the overtly political “Man of Iron” and “Man of Marble,” both of which (the latter is about Solidarity at the time of its success in obtaining recognition) criticize the official socialism from the standpoint of Polish workers.  (You want workers’ power, we’ll give you workers’ power!)  His 2007 film Katyn, about the Katyn Massacre and its official cover-up, combines a television drama focused on various fictional characters who are engaged in the affirmation by some and denial by the authorities of the event, and then concludes with the very brutal realism of staging the killings so that the question raised earlier in the name of various dissidents with the courage to negate the negation is now provided an unforgettable answer.  He also made incredible lyrical films like “The Maids of Wilko” and “The Wedding,” a gorgeous evocation of a peasant wedding celebrating the marriage of an intellectual and a peasant girl based on a play by Stanislaw Wyspianski.  Politically, all his films ended in defeat, except “Man of Marble” and his penultimate film on “Walesa,” an interesting set of mock interviews with the actor playing the politician, but surely a failure politically for its lack of irony or ambiguity when the director shows him appearing before Congress and so allowing the movement he had led to being in a way reduced to falling into a trap of Cold War politics, suggesting perhaps to American viewers at least that it was Reagan and not the Polish workers who, for what are clearly very different motives, ended the socialism of state bureaucracy.

Polish cinema is too great and diverse a subject for me to say much more about here, but Wajda will stand among the greatest, perhaps the greatest, filmmaker who took it upon himself to interrogate recent history.  Artists do not usually give history lessons (exceptions include Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" and some of the early films of Bertolucci with their didactic set pieces), and even if Lenin was right that because of its mass audience film is the most important art, it cannot tell us what is to be done, but only give us something to think about.  In a time of growing official authoritarianism throughout the world, including the surveillance that can make the United States now seem like a lesser East Germany with the benefits of free markets and an haute bourgeoisie, the cinemas of Eastern Europe during the Communist period are ripe for re-evaluation in terms of their often subtle treatments of history and politics, and of ethical and moral questions that are not so easily separated from them.  And this is nowhere more true than of the cinema of Poland, and within it true of no one more centrally than Andrzej Wajda.