Pawel Pawlikoswki’s “Cold War”

It is a love story. It is a story of true lovers unhappy about circumstances. Those circumstances may be called political. Set during some of the darkest years of Stalinism, the lovers are performing artists who are unhappy because oppressed in their native Poland, and unhappy because alienated in the France where they take refuge. They go back and forth. Each time they cross a border as a form of escape. Even their returns are escapes, for their escapes are returns. Call it the return of the oppressed. Not the repressed, which is internal, but the repetition of external ugliness and direct or indirect coercion. The lovers never find a place for themselves, where they can live and be happy.

Of course this world must be filmed in black and white. The alternatives are always stark and never really happy. Happiness can only be defined negatively, as a negation or attempted abolition of its opposite.

In this story of impossible love, the lovers are tragically matched, which is to say, mismatched.  Wiktor is a man with an air of detachment from what he experiences, looking awry or smiling wistfully, as he does when Zula visits him in the prison.  He is, not unlike Ida in the director’s eponymous previous film, also a study in Polish history, essentially a witness.  Though Wiktor’s internal exile and relative indifference do not save him, and the retreat at the end is into the quiet life of a convent but to a more complete off-screen space.  Zula is from the start a woman aflame, and she clearly enjoys provoking Wiktor, at one point loudly jumping in a river so that he will run to save her (while she floats).  From the fact that, as we learn early on, she may have killed her father to prevent, in her account, the latter’s sexual aggression, we understand that she may react quite strongly to problematic entanglements of desire and power.  This seems fitting, since so much of the film is an overdetermined series of escapes from and returns to situations where desire confronts impossibility.  This problematic can even be staged in such a way that dramatizes that desire and impossibility together, as some of the songs by the troupe do.  

We are also in the Cold War; and the film is appropriately titled, as defined by the East/West conflict as well a certain coldness. East and West were different, and the party line on both sides, based on a tacit agreement (wherein neither invaded the other; meaning, most notably that the West did not intervene in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, or Poland in 1981), was built around this opposition. As we all know, the East claimed to represent the ideal of socialism that Western radicals would dream of. (And it did not do a very good job of this). And as we also know, the West then and now was indeed freer, but also involved more poverty, indifference, and alienation. The film suggests that artistically, as well as politically or socially, West and East were to some extent false alternatives. The director makes the same point in the equally allegorical film “Ida,” made just before this, using the jazz band and its singer as figures for Western artistic freedom, just as in “Cold War” forms of art largely are the battleground for the alternatives to be played out. It is worth a footnote here that these two recent films of the Polish director are stylistically “retro” to the period being filmed, and that the art of cinema was one place where, arguably, East and West in Europe were not alternatives to, but variants of, each other. (A fact that must have implications for our reception today of Communist-era Eastern European dissident cinema.) Mr. Pawlikowski clearly is trying to settle scores the artistic way by rethinking them, to better grasp what really was at stake, partly to understand the traumatic recent history of his country. And maybe to do so in ways that both continue and call into question the schematic form of much of Polish cinema that we know from Andrzej Wajda, who at least in Polish cinema is clearly Pawlikowski’s major stylistic influence and conscious referent. That form I would describe thematically as a romantic nationalism that is typically Catholic and moralistic, that tends to involve Oedipal scenarios, and that is tragically melancholic, as both these films certainly are—perhaps an understatement, as “Ida” is provocatively meditative and this film simply devastating, with all the beauty of its high-contrast black and white images contributing to the visual poetry of this defeat. Poland defeated; ask a Pole when his or her country was last not defeated, and the sigh or laugh you get will be knowing; this is not a new story. 

I said Pawlikowski’s recent films may be questioning the romanticist paradigm. Perhaps in our modern self-reflexive age no despair is complete until one despairs of the despair. Which does not itself give you hope, whatever Hegelians might have said about the negation of the negation. Ask the Poles, too, like the late philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, about philosophical theories that have done duty as ideologies. 

At the tail end of the film’s crisp 90 minutes, which seem economically disposed but never rushed, the lovers, Wiktor and Zula, are sitting on a bathroom floor (I am tempted to read this whole film’s images as symbolic; is that a melancholy hermeneutics?). We have just seen him freed from a dank and ugly prison worthy of some West Slavic Siberia, where squalor translates barbarism’s coercion. They are in a nightclub where she was singing. Now they are on the floor. (Here comes my spoiler.) 

She says take me away from here. Of course. No, I mean, for good.

They have spent years fleeing misfortune. Repeatedly, they cross a border: to the West (France) and back again to Poland, via ‘neutral’ but Communist Yugoslavia. Just as in Cold War political rhetoric, intellectual and moral/political blackmail was always used to present “our” side as the lesser of evils, or to simply claim that “we” are the good guys just because they are bad. The Manichaean heresy meets the Freudian death drive via repetition: the good is only that better that is the escape from some greater evil (Hamlet in his famous soliloquy gave this as the reason for not passing to the act as do Zula and Wiktor).


The Cold War in the world of ideas was the kind of political stalemate where everyone loses because the good society is by definition out of reach. What is its psychical analogue or form? And what are the options available to these two artists? 

There is no way out, apparently, even through art, except to cross over “to the other side.” That was in effect the setup of the two-superpower system, a system based on an agreement dividing Europe (it took a slightly different form elsewhere in the world) between two ruling powers. The losers were the people, including the East German, Hungarian, and Czech people, as well as the legendarily long-suffering Poles. Each side had its alternative, which arguably it needed, not only as (at least ideological) enemy, but also to name it as, for better and (because undesirable) worse, the only possible alternative. This is of course why when the Wall fell, the question that immediately would be posed was that of desire: for a named and known alternative (the West with its plentiful consumer goods) or an unknown one to be discovered or built. As the liberal German philosopher Jürgen Habermas put it at the time, no one can reproach the people of Eastern Europe for not having the will and patience to try some other supposedly more democratic social experiment. In the subsequent years and now almost three decades since, many critics of the “socialism” that should be spoken of in scare quotes would find that in its wake there were other things worth criticizing that came with the West’s triumph. This view is well displayed in Kryzstof Kieslowski’s “White,” which also contrasts Poland and France, as well as the last episode of this late director’s “Decalogue.” Other films, particularly in some other countries like Bulgaria and of course Romania, not to mention the Hungarian director Bela Tarr, and the Russian Tzvyaginstev, have focused on the squalid and difficult lives many people in these countries have now. In “Cold War” we see this mainly associated with Poland in the period 1949-64 on which the film focuses. 

In any case, this and other aspects of the shift pose a set of questions, some of which are quite germane today to any “left” or liberal oppositional political project, in Europe and internationally. 

Let me return to and conclude with the personal quality of the ending, which I find very poignant even in the absence of the showing it vainly promises.

(Warning: Total spoilage ahead).

Zula and Wiktor get off a bus in Poland in the middle of an empty field that for some reason has a bench that appears to serve as bus stop. The Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” comes to my mind here, having just seen a film that could well be interestingly compared to this one, and that ends with that song in the credits. Christian Petzold’s “Transit” is a story marked with a sense of unreality about a German man in Marseilles hoping to escape Europe to avoid an advancing government of some fascist hue, and that is filmed in a deliberate combination of 1942 and today. Here, Wiktor and Zula get married, Romeo and Juliet style, in an empty church, exchanging the proper Christian vows with makeshift objects of consecration. Then they swallow all the pills, which they have divided between them. They go sit on the bench. After a moment, she says, “Let’s go to the other side. There’s a better view there.” We never see that view, or their crossing to assume and enjoy it, but we can see that there is just an empty field divided by a road and this stone bench. “The other side” is of course a romanticist and pagan-Christian figure of death. She is metaphorizing the transformation into nothingness, an ending that (like the film of course) is not a beginning (at least not in any shared mode of experience, which is how the endings of artworks may differ from those of lives). And the better view? Does she want a better view? Do we? The film has in many ways the visual beauty of striking ugliness. But surely we don’t want or need a better view of Wiktor and Zula and their world. We have seen enough, they have seen enough, and she certainly knows that, and is being ironic. Unless of course you could have an experience that is merely aesthetic and doesn’t prick you, as you don’t feel it physically. The dual sense of the term “feeling” (pleasurable and painful sensation or emotion) seems appropriate here. Since Aristotle’s “Poetics” and the theatrical genre at its outset that he was commenting on, we have known that art is vicarious experience through semblance of what Arthur Danto called “the ‘is’ of artistic identification.” Does Zula want to end their lives as people who suffer but continue it as those who see (and so perhaps understand)? This is not a film that entertains us with comforting illusions. Her remark is bitterly ironic, however much she herself grasps it as such. 

But she and Wiktor have spent 15 years of their lives and 90 unhurried minutes of ours passing to the other side of the border between the two Europes. Pawlikowski is unstinting in showing Poland then as miserably tyrannized with the sole redeeming feature of traditional peasant songs and dances staged as such a triumph of the popular will only cause the Stalinist authorities to hiccough slightly in recognition of their own ideology’s imperfect congruity with this idealized pre-industrial Volk world. Pawlikowksi has made a beautiful films about miserable lives. It clearly is oppression from without and not personal moral failure that makes them so. (This is in part the legacy of Wajda.) So they go to the West, and its European capital, Paris, to escape Warsaw, and back to Warsaw to escape the West. (Yugoslavia’s relative neutrality does not seem to much benefit them either.) Now what do you do when you are a permanent escapee now at the end of the road? You cross to its other side. Only now of course it is a pathetic gesture that only encapsulates an impossibility. There is no other side, or rather the other side is pure negation, revealing nothing. Nor is this an object of salutary recognition as it still is in Bergman. There is no other side, there is no better view. Perhaps the film should have closed with a citation, ironized by context, of Margaret Thatcher’s statement, “There is no alternative.” 



The story is filmed and set in a retro style, like the director’s previous film “Ida” (is he making a “Polish trilogy”? His earlier English film “My Summer of Love” seems very English and is just about relationships and love, while these historical films made in a black and white style suggest early 60s Wajda). The film works its way through a couple of paradigms that are clearly identified or nearly so. One, noticeable as soon as the Polish state troupe performs its songs about a girl’s impossible love for a man in another village, we might call the Oedipally doomed romance theme. The other consists essentially of Wiktor’s escape from Stalinist Poland, and the conditions that determine his choice to follow Zula in returning after a sojourn in France where he becomes a jazz artist and lover of the typically ambiguous and engimatic poetess played by Jeanne Balibar. Zula is a fireball from start to finish, while Wiktor is characteristically an observer (like the title character in “Ida,” where the observer as witness is morally privileged, though lacking any “worldly” course of action, so that she can only return to the convent). Wiktor has an ironical gaze and smile; it is as if he is standing whimsically outside the events that happen to him (but maybe freer to want to leave Poland for that reason). In a way, his conscience is the film’s center. The film is deliberate enough in making clear some of the unpleasant but of course well-known (certainly in Poland) truths about the Communist regime. It sends him at first on an ethnographic musical research project about folk songs. Then there is the state troupe singing peasant songs about thwarted love and, soon, a turn to blatant Stalin-worship and more ideological song themes. Zula is on stage (Wiktor suitably directing) and shown trying out and studying dance and song numbers during these episodes, which establish the film’s other main theme besides the political one. Simply put, her and Wiktor’s relationship must be impossible for narratival reasons that are themselves also political. Consider: Is there not here a political paradigm of inside and outside, transgressive desire allowed or prohibited, and so of borders crossed and the sense of the crossing doubted? We must also add that there is the unexplained story that Zula killed her father; her account is that he mistook her for her mother, and she reacted. She is reactive, and she gets reactions from Wiktor despite his voyeuristic passivity and half-absented relationship to the world around him, with the Romeo and Juliet finale finally rooting him somewhere, in a return, this scene occurring in a fresco-decorated abandoned church that had been glimpsed at the beginning. Zula is a drama queen who will throw herself into a river so that Wiktor will save her. But the Oedipally impossible romantic desire and transgression story is inscribed near the begging soon after Zula’s entrance. The Communist Party spectacle stages these loves songs, but apparently does not understand that transgression is not so easily contained. Film lovers who know the films of Andrzej Wajda, who is clearly Pawlikowski’s major stylistic influence or referent, know how much Polish films and Wajda’s, the greatest Polish filmmaker, in particular, work with and within Oedipal paradigms that are often political and can also be romantic. Something of Polish nationalism, involving the fate of a people who as a nation were defeated and occupied more than once in recent centuries, was certainly at work there. Romantic nationalism typically does involve Oedipal scenarios, which it may hope to work through by obtaining the true object of desire despite or through the defeat of the father/state obstacle. This schema can certainly generate stories that are of tragic defeats. The defeated may then take a certain kind of moralistic attitude, which when done with some historical and social basis, can produce very rich stories. Wajda’s masterpiece, “Ashes and Diamonds,” came the closest to critically rejecting this whole paradigm, which it does from within. When the dying Maciek writhes in the trash heap at the end, our sympathies are essentially with him. On the whole, I think it must be said that Italian cinema (Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci) of the time (Italy and Poland were similar in having intensely political as well as very strong national cinemas) often did criticize the Oedipal paradigms of politics in themselves, while Polish cinema more often worked with it, when it did not move largely into the fantastic (as in Wojtech Has, and some of Andrzej Zulawski). But what if you can work within a paradigm and criticize it, not in the external manner of early Godard but in a way that is immanent to content and form? Isn’t that what made the first Godfather film so great? It only criticizes what is celebrates, and vice-versa, the better to make us all the more totally guilty of affirming all these normal family and business values, and within the comforts of a “normal” cinematographic style. Should we criticize only what we can easily step out of, or what we cannot or prefer not to?

Two questions I find fascinating to ponder are: Is one or other of these two paradigms (impossible politics and impossible love) fundamental to the other? Do they not intersect in such a way that each furthers the other? Are they at root the same situation? Secondly, this film seems incredibly self-conscious, and again in a way that it shares with “Ida.” If it is repeating a paradigm, what does that mean or should it for our understanding of it? The question that these first two films of what I am hoping will be a trilogy about Polish history filmed in this retro manner, raise for me with regard to something like aesthetic paradigms, is what does it mean when they are self-consciously reiterated (this film looks like it was made to look like a film from 1965) in ways that are not comic parody or farce but seem more earnest? Marx may have been wrong to say that tragedy repeats itself as farce: maybe tragedy repeats itself as tragedy about tragedy. This film would seem to be doing that precisely because the sense of repetition is so obvious, even though it is not a particular story or film being repeated but something clearly more allegorically general, and which we recognize as revealing a paradigm, more than reiterating a cliché. A cliché is almost always half a joke, often a knowing one for connoisseurs. This film, like “Ida,” may be best understood as having its own story as subject, in a way that usually calls attention to its various devices. If Pawlikowski wants to not only make a good a film about Polish history but a good film about how the Poles (and others) view Polish history, which certainly is partly mediated cinematically, then he would want us to think about these structures and paradigms.

To return to the problem of the ending that opens on to the new perspective we do not get:
There may be a story, novel, or film about an alternative. Maybe several. God only knows Europe, including Poland, like America, and the world, need one. This film’s vocation lies elsewhere. If it’s any consolation, this film in all its poetry, whose director seems to be asking us to take fuller measure of a traumatic historical past, is indeed, like the experiences of its main couple, devastating.