The War Trilogy: Three Films by Andrzej Wajda (1955/1958) War is Hell (Review)

An impressive boxset from Second Run arrives just in time for Christmas – it’s the renowned War Trilogy from Polish director Andrzej Wajda consisting of three films – A Generation, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds – released between 1955 and 1958 which established Wajda as a founding father of the Polish Film School movement and ultimately kickstarted him his status as one of the finest voices in late twentieth century Polish cinema.

A Generation, or Pokolenie to give it its Polish title, is the first film in this loose series exploring Poland’s experiences of WWII. It was Wajda’s debut feature and drew heavily from his own personal experiences of fighting in the underground resistance movement as a youth in war-torn Poland. As the trilogy develops we naturally see a slide towards disillusionment that befits a defeated and broken nation, but A Generation stands apart because of its innate sense of optimism.

The film follows Tadeusz Lomnicki’s Stach, a disaffected young apprentice from the slums of Warsaw who is firstly turned on to communism by his colleague at the factory, Sekula (Janusz Paluszkiewicz) and then turned on to the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation by Dorita (Urszula Modrzynska) a beautiful freedom fighter with whom Stach inevitably falls in love with. In crafting his debut Wajda is clearly inspired by the neorealist movement of Italian cinema, but at the same time, he adheres to the traditional framework afforded by the coming-of-age drama. And in 1940s Poland, young people came of age fast.

One of the film’s strengths is the story strand involving Tadeusz Janczar’s Jasio, an ambiguous and richly fascinating character who loathes both Nazis and communists alike. He reluctantly joins the movement and, without authorisation, assassinates the local Nazi officer who uses particularly brutal, bullying methods upon the local workforce. This impulsive bloody action earns him a rebuke from Stach, who dismisses him as little more than ‘a cowboy’, but he is oblivious to Jasio’s own remorse for his actions. Weirdly, given how Wajda wants us to identify with his central protagonist, there’s actually significantly more depth to this secondary character than there is in Stach or indeed anyone else, and it’s clear to the audience that Jasio now feels disgusted by the realisation that he has taken a life and become a killer. His story concludes with Wajda’s most powerful and brilliant sequence in this, his debut film; chased into a tenement by the Nazis, Jasio clambers up a spiral staircase battling his pursuers at every turn. Cornered and with nowhere left to turn, he dives from the top flight to his death – a moment worthy of Hitchcock and Vertigo.

A Generation bears all the hallmarks of a director’s first film in that it is far from being an instant classic and is a good deal amateurish in many places, but it shows enough glimpses of the promise that Wajda would deliver time after time from this moment onwards.

The second instalment in his war trilogy is Kanal, which tells the story of the Warsaw Uprising. It begins on the 25th of September, 1944 and the 56th day of the fighting, which lasted from 1 August to 2 October 1944. The Polish Home Armies campaign featured some intense fighting, but was ultimately unsuccessful, with massacres carried out by the SS causing the deaths of some 10,000 armed insurgents and possibly as much as 200,000 Polish civilians. With such sobering historical fact in mind, it is only right that Wajda’s tale is a bleak, harrowing and horrifying saga of blind hope, courage, fatalism, tragedy and poor luck.

Wajda opens his tale with Jerzy Lipman’s beautiful tracking shot through the rubble-strewn streets that introduces us to the key players, the resistance fighters and Home Army soldiers, who are attempting to hold their Nazi adversaries back, whilst at the same time commencing a tactical retreat towards the supposed safety of the centre of Warsaw via the city’s underground sewers (the ‘canal’ or ‘Kanal’ of the title). But a shadow already looms large over our band of brothers, as the film’s narrator informs us: ‘watch them carefully in the last hours of their lives’ We know that a happy ending does not await anyone here, not our leader Lieutenant Zadra (Wienczyslaw Glinski) or his second in command, Lieutenant Madry (Emil Karewicz) nor the lovers Korab (Tadeusz Janczar) and Daisy (Teresa Izewska) or the artist and musician Michael (Vladek Sheybal – and how good it is to see him play something other than the weaselly KGB spy he was so often typecast as in English Language productions like From Russia With Love and Billion Dollar Brain) Their fates have been sealed from the off.

Kanal is a film of two halves – the first sets up the group’s relationships and dynamics and sees them fending off attacks from within derelict, battle scarred buildings, whilst the second tracks their perilous and ill-fated journey through the sewers. Naturally once we reach this second act all hope rapidly ebbs away and Wajda’s comparison with the sewers to Dante’s Inferno is obvious, even before the educated Michael alludes to it. Once the film goes underground, the atmosphere changes to a dark (literally) and claustrophobic psychological horror, with the sense of tension and foreboding being increasingly ratcheted up with every hopeless waded turn through the filth, as paranoia and insanity begins to creep in and members of the group become lost, taking separate paths to their doom. Wajda excels with these truly haunting sequences and Jan Krenz’s eerie score further serves to exacerbate the deeply unsettling mood.

This sense of desperation is both palpable and greatly affecting in this distinctive and powerful anti-war piece, making it a feature that is leaps and bounds ahead of Wajda’s previous instalment in the trilogy, the faltering A Generation. Here is a production from a filmmaker whose confidence is clearly growing, and at a rate of knots. He’s also helped immeasurably by a fine cast, with Glinksi’s pessimistically honest yet totally dedicated officer whose desire to protect and lead his company easily elicits our sympathy, and the mercurial coupling of Janczar and Izewska proving especially winning. And praise too for Izewska’s character Daisy; an assured, hardbitten yet feminine (she’s a blonde bombshell in appearance) soldier who is heavily relied upon by the others. This is a rare example of gender equality and forward thinking feminism in a genre often lacking in such opportunities. I especially liked how she tells a near-blind Korab that she wrote ‘kiss my arse’ on the walls of the sewers in defiance against the Nazi onslaught, even though we the audience know that what she actually wrote was the more revealing, tender ‘I love Korab’ – such a bittersweet moment.

Kanal uncompromisingly fatalistic tone doesn’t make for an easy watch, but it’s a vital one which helps educate a Western audience on the horrors and experiences a country such as Poland faced during the war.

If Kanal is my personal favourite in the trilogy, the final chapter is undoubtedly the most well-known. Ashes and Diamonds is a rightly regarded classic and, in capturing the nation on the cusp of defeating one totalitarian monster only to embrace another, it remains a superb example of post-war Polish cinema.

The action takes place over the course of just 24 hours on the day that Germany signs their surrender. Faced with the prospect of peace, Poland is effectively in open season and, having spent the war under the Nazi jackboot, the mood in the Resistance is one of an understandable refusal to welcome a post-war future under an equally harsh regime of Communism from Russia. A charming and roguish young resistance fighter called Maciek (Zybigniew Cybulski) and his senior, in both age and rank, Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) have been ordered to lie in wait for a newly arriving Communist Party Secretary Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski) and his aide and to assassinate them on sight. Unfortunately, the assassins get the wrong men and two innocent civilians have been killed instead. 

Undeterred, Maciek and Andrzej catch up with their quarry and the former books a room at the hotel where the official is staying. As he waits for the right moment to make amends and complete his orders, Maciek meets and falls in love with the barmaid Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska). It is this unexpected connection with the girl that leads him to reconsider his role in what has become an endless cycle of violence and potentially offer him a way out.

Wajda brilliantly mirrors Maciek’s increasing life crisis and inner turmoil in the political and social context of Poland, with its uncertain future under the approaching Soviet rule. But cleverly Wajda doesn’t just depict a black and white situation here, as the party official Szczuka appears to be, to all intents and purposes a good man, who wants the best for his country and wishes to be reunited with his 17-year-old son, who has been captured by the authorities after fighting with the resistance in the uprising. There’s also a good deal of satire and caustic commentary to be had about Poland’s political turmoil, with party officials drinking too much and squabbling over their splendid banquets about who did what and who should get what as the city beyond lies in rat-infested ruins and the aristocracy hatch their plans to leave and live in exile. It’s also deeply symbolic, with some great visual motifs of fireworks and flames lighting the way through the darkness.

What most people remember about Ashes and Diamonds is of course the extraordinarily charismatic star turn from Zybigniew Cybulski as Maciek. The film may be set in 1945, but Wajda et al made a conscious decision to depict their (anti) hero with the mood and fashions of the year it was made – 1958. Clad in army fatigues and wearing sunglasses almost constantly throughout (even at night – Cybulski would claim it a necessity after he too had spent time in the ‘kanals’ fighting with the Resistance) Maciek, and Cybulski’s performance, in turn, is a deliberate attempt to create a cultural film icon for Poland and was a style that was emulated by Polish teens for years to come. It is no surprise that Cybulski was known as ‘The Polish James Dean’ and, like his Hollywood counterpart, Cybulski too suffered a premature demise via a tragic accident; falling under the wheels of a train he had attempted to board in 1967. He was just 39 years old. Tragedy later struck Cybulski’s co-star here too – Ewa Krzyzewska, who delivers a soulful, subtle and honest portrayal of the barmaid and potential saviour Krystyna, died in a car crash in 2003 at the age of 64.

As ever Second Run have delivered an attractive package here, with brand new 2K restorations, audio commentaries and individual booklets featuring new writing on each film. The extras also include several of Wajda’s early short films, including 1951’s The Bad Boy and Ceramics from Ilza, and 1953’s While You’re Sleeping.

The War Trilogy: Three Films by Andrzej Wajda