The most dramatic cinematic spectacle of 2022 was the video that Volodymyr Zelensky recorded for the opening ceremony of August’s Venice Film Festival. The Ukrainian president described the war in his home country as “a tragedy not to the score of Morricone but, rather, to the tune of ugly chastushkas and sounds of explosions, shots and air-raid alert wails. A horror which is not 120 minutes but 189 days long.”
Zelensky is a former actor, a star of romantic comedies, the Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear. He addressed his speech to what he called “the family of cinema”. Listing its members, among them actors, directors, cameramen, set designers and critics, he declared: “We have to talk about this war with the most clear language possible, the language of cinema.”
Moving images, whether those of Hollywood blockbusters or of TikTok, play a vital role in opening people’s eyes to the horrors of war. A terrific new restoration of Andrzej Wajda’s War Trilogy (from Second Run DVD) is an opportunity to think about cinema, military invasion and self-determination in 20th-century eastern Europe. The films are set in Poland during the Second World War, a catastrophic time when over five million nationals, half of them Jewish, died as a result of German and Soviet occupation.
A Generation (1955) is a coming-of-age story that also charts the coming of political consciousness. Stach (Tadeusz omnicki) is a carefree youth until one of his closest friends is killed by a Wehrmacht soldier while trying to steal coal from a train. He is soon recruited into the People’s Army, before falling for Dorota (Urszula Modrzyska), whose capture by the Gestapo leaves him both despondent and determined about his future path.
Kanal (1957), pictured, takes place during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, as a unit of freedom fighters tries to escape the incoming Germans by using the city’s sewers. They trudge and they trudge; thirsty, oxygen-depleted, waist-high in effluent. It seems like a mad plan—and, in a way, we’re told as much. Early on, a narrator urges us to “look closely. These are their last hours.”
Darkness. These young Polish people risked their lives against the Nazis only for Stalin to seize control. Ashes and Diamonds (1958) follows Maciek (a hugely charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski) as, at the end of the war, he tries to assassinate the local secretary of the Moscow-supporting Polish Workers’ Party. In a damaged church, he comes across an inscription that quotes the 19th-century poet Norwid: “You burn, not knowing if you will be free, or if all that is yours will perish / If only ashes and chaos remain or will the ashes hide a sparkling diamond.”
The trilogy isn’t autobiographical, but it is personal. After Wajda’s father was executed in the 1940 Katyn massacre, his family was forced to seek shelter in various cities. He never forgot the bomber planes, the dust-clouds in the streets, the sight of Polish army officers being marched to German prisons. Though he studied at a clandestine school (like many of the characters in A Generation) and joined the Polish resistance at the age of 16, he was stalked by a feeling that he hadn’t done enough. “These films were an extension of a lack in my biography,” he once said.
If Wajda’s chief theme was national independence, his aesthetic was internationalist. Polish audiences had been weaned on Soviet cinema, with its wordiness, its moral certainties, and its theology of socialist realism. Wajda found it slow and portentous. “We wanted our films to adopt the rhythms of western films because we thought it would keep us alive,” he later recalled. The trilogy makes dynamic use of widescreen; of rubble-strewn landscapes that recall Italian neo-realist works such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and expressionistic lighting that bears comparison, in Kanal, with Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).
Though Wajda had many run-ins with censors, through luck and guile he managed to get his trilogy out into the world without too many compromises. The films are documents of endurance, idealism and incredible bravery. Still, their endings are hardly consoling. Sometimes they are ghastly. His characters fear that the war is unending; that, for all their nationalist credentials, they have lost their humanity.
This is probably not what Zelensky was calling for from “the family of cinema” in Venice. But in Wajda’s work there is something undeniably important, an illustration of something said by the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuciski (and later quoted by Wajda): “Man cannot live in an atmosphere of marginalisation, contempt, sense of inferiority but has the need for identity, identification…”
