Kanal

“Kanal” is the Polish word for “sewer.” Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 film bearing that name documents the final desperate days of the Warsaw Uprising in World War II. The movie begins as a fairly conventional combat picture. We are introduced to a small battalion of ragged insurgents: the camera tracks along their company as a voice-over identifies some of the men. The soldiers are defending a Warsaw suburb against German attack and have been surrounded. They expect to die. The men are predictably handsome and gallant. Among their number are two attractive (and buxom) young women, each romantically attached to one of the troops. The insurgents are commanded by a tough-as-nails Lieutenant who looks like a character from a sixties’ era WW II comic book. The camera glides through horrific ruins (the film was shot in the actual debris of Warsaw in 1955-56) and there are some unconvincing battle scenes. All of this is competent stuff, but unimpressive. The men loiter in a ruined mansion and a musician tries to play the out-of-tune piano. The love affairs develop a little and there is lots of pessimistic talk and cigarette smoking. Some of the men get drunk on home-brew. Before the big German assault, the insurgents are ordered into a chaotic town-square that is under German bombardment. The square is packed with panicked civilians, hysterical women searching for lost children, and smoke drifts from burning buildings. The musician has called his home in downtown Warsaw and learns that the Germans are rounding people up and burning them alive with flamethrowers. “Where are you?” the man’s wife asks him on the telephone. “With the Resistance,” he says. The woman is incredulous: “there still is a Resistance?” she asks. The company of insurgents descends into the sewers via a small manhole and the rest of the movie takes place underground. This part of the film is extraordinarily gripping, a peculiar combination of expressionist chiaroscuro and nauseating realism that has the flavor of a Hammer horror film. The sewer tunnels are brilliantly lit but the imagery somehow suggests darkness -- this is accomplished by pouring chiaroscuro light at oblique angles onto black and glistening brick walls and vaults; the men carry flashlights which appear as bright spears of light in their hands and, when they light matches, these also flare convincingly, although as highlights against tunnels that have been flooded with movie light to make everything legible. The men and women, who strip to their chemises like the stars of a Hammer Dracula film, are smeared with filth and the water through which they crawl and trudge is turgid, syrupy with oatmeal-like feces. The effect is one of people trapped in Stygian darkness although, in point of fact, the sets are well-lit and the dirty, befouled water gleams like the streets of a film noir metropolis. The extended sequence in the sewer tunnels is convincingly nightmarish. The tunnels are a labyrinthine maze and the group of men gets split into small parties, all of them ultimately doomed. The musician goes mad and, after quoting Dante’s “Inferno” wanders the watery galleries, playing an ocarina like some perverse version of Orpheus. The lovers make it to the light but only to find their escape from the sewer blocked by bars through which they can not pass. People drown and are suffocated by methane fumes and the wounded bellow in the dark passageways like maimed bears or wolves. The lieutenant finally makes it to the surface. But he has lost his whole troop. (In a disturbing scene, we see most of the men squirming their way to the surface only to be captured by Germans who have been busily shooting civilians against a gore-stained wall, corpses heaped like garbage against the bloody masonry.) When the lieutenant finds that he is alone except for a subordinate who has lied to him about the troops following behind, he executes the sole survivor of his company and descends into the sewer again, his hand holding a revolver the last part of his body to disappear into the underground. The subject of the Warsaw Uprising was fraught with political complications when the film was made. Apparently, the Red Army stood by idly on the opposite side of the Vistula, allowing the Poles to be butchered so that they would be unable to resist the Soviet occupation of their country. For this reason, Wajda has to present the Uprising in a way that shows it to be wholly futile and degrading. The Polish patriots are like sewer rats, drowning in excrement, and their heroism is meaningless. Wajda could not depict the Uprising as courageous, nor could he provide any political context -- the result is a film that is mostly an expressionistic horror-show. But as a horror-film, some of the movie’s scenes are incomparably effective -- the tunnels gleam with malevolent eerie light and water foams with fog, misting the Gothic vaulted vistas so that the sewer looks like the moors in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”. Faces leer and corpses dangle grotesquely from the grates of the manhole covers. We aren’t far from a Roger Corman production from the early sixties and, indeed, some of the performances include grimaces and staring eyes, quotes from “The Inferno” like something that Vincent Price might intone in “The Pit and the Pendulum” or “The Conqueror Worm”. It’s horrible enough but also magnificently beautiful with, perhaps, just the slightest element of kitsch thrown in for a good measure.