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The art of memory: Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy.

Article Excerpt
Attentive viewers of Andrzej Wajda's remarkable first feature, A Generation, will be struck about midway through the film by a scene that pointedly recalls, even as it distinctively glosses, a historic moment of Poland's tortured wartime experience once evoked by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in his unforgettable "Campo dei Fiori" (1943).



I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of the carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky.

The deep irony of these compact lines expresses the poet's shock at the incongruous juxtaposition of thoughtless Poles having fun, while only blocks away the Wehrmacht was exterminating their Jewish compatriots during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of late April 1943. Wajda's handling of the scene, also set in the fairground at the foot of the Ghetto walls, is rooted in a similar irony. His ostensible hero Stach, a juvenile delinquent from a lumpenproletariat milieu turned communist resistance fighter, assembles a group of like-minded Polish youths to plan the rescue of their older comrade now fighting alongside the beleaguered Jews, even as their fellow citizens ride the carousels and swings, indifferent to the awful human tragedy so close at hand that they can smell as well as watch it.

Unlike Milosz, who focuses on a grim, contradictory present without political resolve, however, Wajda transports us into a postwar myth that the Communist rulers of Poland strenuously insisted upon to enhance their credentials as the principal Polish group to have resisted the German occupiers and to claim, not entirely incorrectly, the high ground in the struggle against anti-Semitism before, during and--despite the panicked flight of the majority of Polish Jewry between 1946 and 1950--after the war as well. Like every other Polish patriot, Wajda, knew the little scene's politics grossly exaggerated the communists' efforts. Yet their presence speaks volumes about the twenty-seven-year-old director's humanistic concerns as well as the compromises he, like so many postwar Polish and East European artists, were obliged to make with the powers that held his homeland in their thrall. Even here, however, at the beginning of his long and complex career in the Polish People's Republic, Wajda proved to be no mere political mouthpiece for the communists. He may have been obliged to adopt the party's take on the recent history of his long-suffering native land, but a canny sense of political tact as well as his use of the medium to blunt the script's impact helped him stay at the outer, though still acceptable, margins of political orthodoxy. What is so striking is that the young director is already able to use the only recently learned tools of his medium to blur the imposed ideological constraints. Wajda arrives in his debut feature as a filmmaker thinking outside the prevailing esthetic canons of Socialist Realism. And doing so enables him to reconfigure the image he shapes into a pregnant semantic field that vivifies the history undergirding the scene in a way Milosz might have endorsed as kindred in spirit to his own expressive effort.

How much this scene owes to Wajda's first great cinematographer, Jerzy Lipman, himself a Polish few and thus hardly indifferent to the symbolic weight of the moment, is unclear. In any case, the two evidently agreed to approach the scene indirectly. The carousel and another carnival ride on which couples swing dizzily in and out of the frame to the strains of a primitive organ, are initially shot obliquely from a low angle against a cloudless sky troubled only at the horizon by the acrid black smoke billowing from the ghetto's ruins a stone's throw away. Before any of the plot...