Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal
At age 90, Andrzej Wajda represents Polish cinema and its history in a unique way: not only have his film’s explored the history of his native land, but they have also made history. Wajda’s voice is so influential in his homeland that his 1981 film Man of Iron, featuring Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement, is widely considered to have been instrumental in freeing Poland from the Soviet bloc. Wajda has made more than 40 feature-length films, directed for TV, and adapted many of his movies into theatrical works that he has also directed. He has been a one-man film industry and his long life and career have been decisive in Polish cinema. (In 2000, Wajda represented Poland literally: for several years, he was an elected representative to the national congress.)
Wajda’s career is so complex and involves projects so remarkably varied that commentary must be either brief and cursory or book-length. From a cursory perspective, Wajda grew up in cavalry garrison, the son of a Polish military officer. Wajda describes his childhood as idyllic, a matter of exciting mock cavalry charges and parades – he says that his boyhood was reminiscent of John Ford’s cavalry movies. (The idyll ended tragically in 1940 when Wajda’s much-beloved father was interned by the Soviets and, then, slaughtered in Katyn Wood massacre – Wajda didn’t learn the truth about his father’s death until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is, until the mid-nineties.)
At 16, in 1942, Wajda joined the underground Armie Krajowa and fought against the Germans. (He was captured and sent to a concentration camp, a bit of bad fortune that may have inadvertently saved his life.) At the end of the war, the Soviets required that the Armie Krajowa be disbanded – Wajda’s unit laid down its weapons. However, other elements of the Armie Krajowa continued an insurgency against the Communists. Fighting continued for several years, a period during which the Communists hunted down members of the former resistance "Home Army" and either massacred them outright or sent captured guerillas to concentration camps.
In light of these dire circumstances, Wajda notes that for Poles of his generation, there was really only one subject: World War Two and its aftermath. Wajda said that Polish actors, as late as the eighties, could be divided into those who had somehow survived the war and, therefore, felt that life was a gift and a miracle (his perspective) or those, of a slightly later generation, who suffered survivor’s guilt, remorse at having missed the most important event in modern Polish history, that is, the Second World War.
After attending film school in Lodz, Wajda apprenticed with Aleksander Ford. Ford had begun his film in silent pictures, but was a prestige director and darling of the regime in the mid-fifties. (Ford went on to make the historical epic, The Knights of the Teutonic Order, the most expensive film ever made in Poland and an enormous success at the box-office. Ford controlled the Polish film industry – people that he denounced were arrested by the secret police and tortured. However, he ran afoul of the government himself while making a co-production with Israeli and German film makers about Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician who was also a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ford defected, lived for a time in Denmark, and the United States, and, ultimately committed suicide in a motel in Florida in 1980.)
Wajda became famous with his first films, the so-called war trilogy comprised of A Generation (1954), Kanal (1956), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). In the early sixties, Wajda was heavily involved in directing theater – he was at the helm of famous productions of two American plays, A Hatful of Rain (about morphine addiction) and Two for the Seesaw, a dark Romantic comedy. Throughout this period of time, Wajda directed about one film a year – these included A Siberian Lady Macbeth, Ashes, a historical epic about the Napoleonic wars, and Landscape after a Battle (1970), another picture about Polish concentration camps. He made a partial version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, entitled Pilate and Others (1967), and, later, adapted Conrad’s The Shadow Line into a film.
In 1974, Wajda directed another historical epic, The Promised Land, about industrial development in Eastern Europe – a film that we screened a few years ago. The first of Wajda’s films about the Solidarity movement was Man of Marble (1977). This was followed by the immensely consequential Man of Iron in 1981, a film in which the leader of the movement, Lech Walesa, actually appeared. (Wajda’s last film, made in 2012, completes his Solidarity trilogy – it is called Lech Walesa: Man of Hope and is a biopic about the Solidarity leader.) Danton, a French-Polish co-production released in 1983, was also seen as an allegory about the Solidarity movement, Depardieu’s Danton represented Lech Walesa poised in conflict against Robespierre, a figure analogous to the politicians opposed to Solidarity.
In 1990, Wajda made his own film about Janusz Korczak. He adapted the last part of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot into a film called Nastasja (the movie features a Japanese Onnugata actor – that is, male to female transvestite trained in Kabuki theater.) He directed a large-scale adaptation of a Polish national epic, Pan Tadeusz released in 1999 and another enormous box-office success in Wajda’s native land. (Pan Tadeusz was the second film by Wajda drawing upon the Nationalist romantic literature of the 19th century – the first was The Wedding, released in 1973, based on an important theatrical work penned just before 1900 by Stanislaus Wispianski.) Wajda’s 2002 The Revenge is similarly based on a 19th century farce that is regarded as a classic theater work in Poland. In 2007, Wajda was accorded international acclaim for his film about the Katyn Woods massacre and its nightmarish aftermath. The name of the film, not surprisingly, is Katyn.
How many massacres, atrocities, executions, and battles has Wajda staged in his films? How many revolutions has he depicted? How many protests and violent confrontations with authorities? How many heaps of corpses has he filmed?
Wajda is seven years older than Roman Polanski – in Poland’s tumultuous history, this is the equivalent of a generation. Film makers like Polanski largely defected from Poland and preferred to work abroad – notable examples are Krzsystof Kielowski, whose last four films were made in France, Jerzy Skolimowski who has worked extensively in England, and Andrzej Zulawski, who has made films in England and Hollywood. Wajda remained in Poland at the cost of certain compromises – he has been accused, from time to time, with collaborating with the same regime that his films helped to bring down.
The Warsaw Uprising
In some ways, it is astounding that Wajda was able to make Kanal. To understand political obstacles to the production of the film, we must know some basic facts about the Warsaw Uprising, the event the film documents.
Poland was overrun by the German Wehrmacht in 1939. The legitimate Polish government formed an government in exile and organized a resistance movement, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa). This resistance movement harassed German occupation forces in Poland and participated in some large, if doomed, uprisings, most notably one at Lvov in 1942.
In 1943, the Germans lost the battle of Stalingrad and the Red Army began to push the Wehrmacht out of Russia. By 1944, German armies had retreated into Poland. The Polish Home Army, then, began a series of coordinated uprisings called Operation Tempest. The purpose of these uprisings was to force the Germans to fight on two fronts – against the Russians advancing from the East and against the Poles rising up to attack their garrisons and convoys at the rear. Most of the Polish uprisings were crushed by the Germans with great loss of life.
Before July 31, 1944, the Red Army had reached a point about 10 km from the center of Warsaw. The Soviet positions were to the east of the Praga district of Warsaw, the suburb on the eastern bank of the Vistula, the river that bisects Warsaw. The Polish Home Army planned a concerted uprising and attack on the German forces occupying Warsaw – the notion was that the Home Army would begin killing German soldiers, seize the bridges crossing the Vistula, and, therefore, open the path for the Red Army to cross the river and seize the center of Warsaw. The plan was sound and, although historians debate the issue, probably would have been successful if implemented as proposed.
The Uprising began at "W-hour" – that is, five a.m. on August 1, 1944. ("W" stands for wybuch – explosion, wolnosc - freedeom, and walka - fight.) About 40,000 Home Army partisans attacked the German forces and, after several days of intense fighting, captured the city center, large portions of the suburbs, and had a command position in the Prudential Tower, an 18 story building that was the second tallest skyscraper in Europe at that time. Home Army attacks in Praga had dislodged the German units from the bridges on the Vistula. Initially, the uprising seemed to be successful and had achieved its preliminary objectives.
But the Red Army did not advance. Not only did the Red Army not send its columns across the Vistula, some units withdrew from the outskirts of Warsaw and began an armored thrust toward Romania. The Polish government-in-exile pleaded with the Allies to come to the support of the beleagured Home Army. Both American and British air forces engaged in several hundred sorties dropping munitions and food to the Home Army forces, but Western allied armies were nowhere near this theater of operations and could not provide any assistance on the ground. Until declassification of Soviet documents, it was unclear why the Red Army didn’t advance into Warsaw to seize the city, particularly when the bridges were seized by Home Army forces. (Officially, the Soviet’s claimed that the Uprising began too early, before the Red Army was properly positioned to support the rebels, and that the Home Army was a proto-fascist group, possibly allied with the Nazis.) We now know definitively what was strongly believed at that time – Josef Stalin himself ordered the Red Army to stand fast and not assist the Polish resistance. Stalin understood that the Germans had lost the war at Stalingrad and that it was only a matter of time before the Reich would be defeated. Accordingly, Stalin’s objective was to clear Eastern Europe of anti-communist forces that might oppose the installation of pro-Soviet regimes in the countries formerly occupied by the Nazis – and it was known the Polish army was highly nationalistic, pro-Catholic, and anti-Communist. Stalin made the decision to allow the Germans to exterminate the Home Army in Warsaw so that the Poles would not have a force able to resist a Soviet communist regime to be installed post-war in Poland. (This mirrors the Red Army’s massacre of Polish cavalry officers, including Wajda’s father, in the Katyn Wood in 1940 – the Soviet objective was to destroy Poland’s political and military elites to assure that the Communists could seize power after the war.)
Of course, the failure of the Red Army to come to the rescue of the Polish resistance fighters was regarded as "an act of infamy" at the time. And the motives of Stalin and his Red Army were largely understood – although historical confirmation wasn’t available until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both Churchill and FDR pleaded with Stalin to support the Warsaw Uprising, but to no avail. Without the support of Red Army tanks and heavily mechanized units, the Home Army was doomed.
Beginning on August 4, Heinrich Himmler sent special brigades of SS troops into Warsaw to commenced massacres in the Ochotu and Wolu districts of the town. The SS soldiers went building to building, dragging civilians onto the streets, raping the women and girls, and, then, shooting everyone in sight. After clearing a building, it was set on fire. Somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 civilians died in these massacres. The surviving population of suburban Warsaw took to the sewers and fled underground to the Old City or to the western suburbs.
Over a million people lived in Warsaw at the time of the Uprising. Combat in a urban terrain, fought house-to-house is asymmetrical. Although the Germans had air-cover, could use Stukas to dive-bomb Polish positions, and had tanks with heavy artillery, they were largely unable to dislodge the Home Army forces from the parts of the city that they had seized. The much more lightly armed and outnumbered Home Army was able to stalemate German forces in intense fighting that lasted for weeks. Throughout the battle, the Poles expected that, at some point, the Red Army would come to their rescue.
Beginning in September, Polish commanders began to negotiate with their German counterparts for the Home Army’s surrender. Each time a negotiated settlement was in sight, rumors occurred that the Red Army was advancing and so talks were suspended. But the Red Army never actually advanced and on October 5, 1944, the Home Army surrendered. About 15,000 men were disarmed and sent to POW camps. Between five and six-thousand troops melted into the civilian population. The remaining Home Army partisans had been killed – probably about 19,000 fighters. About 150,000 civilians were dead. The Germans lost about 10,000 men killed in the fighting.
The remaining civilian population of Warsaw was deported to a large concentration camp and sorted into different groups – about 60,000 people were exterminated in death camps. The Germans were told to treat Warsaw like "another Carthage" – accordingly, the city was systematically destroyed, each building looted, and, then, either dynamited or set afire. When the Soviet Army entered Warsaw in January 1945, the city was almost entirely leveled. Less than 10% of the buildings were standing.
After the War, the Polish Home Army was denounced for "collaborating with the Fascists." The Polish Communist party announced that the Home Army was to be exterminated. Although most Home Army troops were disarmed in January 1945, some number retained their weapons and began a partisan war against the Communists. The new Polish communist regime proposed an amnesty and told the remaining belligerent elements of the Home Army that they would be pardoned for their attacks on Soviet forces and the Russian backed Polish First Army. On the basis of these promises, about 60,000 members of the Polish Army surrendered. The NKVD, Soviet secret police, in charge of these operation, promptly arrested 50,000 of these fighters, tortured and executed their leaders, and sent the captured men to Siberia where many of them died in the Gulag.
No monument was erected to the Warsaw Uprising until 1989. Indeed, the Warsaw Uprising was a subject that could not be publicly discussed for most of the Communist era in Poland – Wajda made his film in the brief interlude of political "thaw" following the death of Stalin in March 1953. By 1958, a film like Kanal could not have been made and, indeed, would have been suppressed. The only reason the film was not suppressed in Poland was that the picture won the Silver Palm at the Cannes film festival in 1957 and, therefore, was a point of national pride that could not be ignored.
On the 50th anniversary of the uprising, many international dignitaries, including the American vice-president Al Gore, traveled to Warsaw. No one from Russia or the former Soviet Union attended the remembrance ceremonies.
A poem
On his website, Wajda cites a poem about the Warsaw Uprising:
We are waiting...
We are waiting for you, red plague,
To deliver us from black death,
To be our land once torn and quartered
Salvation met with horror....
You can not harm us! The choice is yours,
You can help us, you can deliver us
Or still delay and leave us to die...
Death is not terrible; we know how to die.
But know this: from our tombstones
A victorious new Poland will be born
And you will not walk this land
You red ruler of bestial forces.
This poem was written by Jozef Szcapanksi, an officer cadet with nom de guerre "Ziutek", a soldier of the "Parasol" battalion. Wajda declares that the poem "speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
Notwithstanding the international fame of Kanal, official Polish critics derided the film as a whitewash of the Home Army. Wajda says that no one in Poland wanted to see the film. He writes on his website: "This film could not satisfy (the uprising participants and those who had lost their loved ones in Warsaw). They had licked their wounds, mourned their dead, and now they wanted to see their moral and spiritual victory and not death in the sewers."
A Criticism
There are obvious flaws in Kanal. First, the three zooms to close-up of the bugged-out eyes and haunted face of the composer are three too many. The composer’s madness in the sewers is a rare case of Wajda succumbing to over-explicit explanation of images that are sufficiently clear in themselves – we don’t need to be told that the sewers are a hellish inferno; that much is obvious from what we have seen. (Contrast with the heartbreaking scene of the 12 year old child soldier trying to clean out some boots as the Tiger tanks approach the barricade where he is hiding – it’s obvious, but never stated, that the boy will not live to wear these boots and that, indeed, he will surely be killed within the next five minutes.)
The romantic or love story aspects of the film seem a bit unnecessary and have a dark undertone. The blonde "good time" girl, apparently a prostitute, is an example of the kind of person who joined the resistance. In France, as shown in The Sorrow and the Pity, as well as in Poland as well, many members of the Resistance were small-time criminals, malcontents, crazies, marginal people who seized an opportunity to rebel because it was their nature to fight against all authority, no matter how constituted. The good citizens generally collaborate with occupying regimes because, of course, they have the most to lose. Wajda defines the blonde girl as sexually experienced and promiscuous. We initially are told that she smells bad – her shoes are covered with shit. And she is experienced in moving through the sewers. In fact, Wajda suggests that she is kind of sewer-dweller, the sewer is her natural habitat. This element of the film feels unduly judgmental and, even, half-crazed – because of woman is sexually promiscuous is it fair to also portray her as an experienced guide through a literal sewer?
(Some critics protest that the characters look too handsome and well-fed; the people in the movie are all obviously movie-stars – they have movie star good looks. This bothers some critics and not others.)
The principal criticism of the film is that it is profoundly depressing. Life is already tragic. Do we need further representations as to the absurdity of existence. At the outset, the narrator tells us that we seeing a "tragedy" – we are advised that none of the characters on-screen will survive the next 24 hours. Before the battle, someone says that they will fight to the last man and all be killed because "it is the Polish way." (Recall that the Poles are famous for supposedly mounting the last cavalry charge in military history, a futile and massive attack on German tanks at the beginning of World War Two, an episode that Wajda made into a film much later in his life, Lotna. Recent scholarship has shown that this cavalry charge did not occur – a group of Polish cavalry ran afoul of German infantry, many horses were killed, and, later, when German panzers moved into the area, the carcasses of the dead horses were misintepreted.) Within the first two minutes, we know how the film will play out – there is no suspense of any kind. Tragedy is supposed to inspire in us "pity and terror" – but what if we only feel "disgust and shame?" After all, the Warsaw Uprising was an abject defeat and, in some ways, the film drags the memory of the Home Army literally through excrement – in fact, as I argue below, the sewers represent the psychic landscape of defeat and humiliation. Is this, in a way, too much to ask an audience to bear?
Marcel Martin in March 1958 wrote in Cinema:
"...the illusory symbol of freedom...nonetheless involves the immediate presence of death. Having said this – and words do not suffice to express the full intensity of the drama – one must ask: can the viewer really participate in a film in which the horror reaches such unimaginable heights? And the horror and pity aroused by the misfortunes of the characters, are they ends in themselves, since no relief, no hope is offered in the conclusion?"
In other words, should a film induce despair in its viewers?
Character names
In Kanal, as in the actual Warsaw Uprising, Home Army members were not known to one another by their real names. This was to avoid family members being killed or tortured in reprisal for attacks committed by Home Army members who might be captured by the enemy. The following characters are among the 43 troops that we see fighting in Kanal:
Zadra – treason (or, more likely, something like "curmudgeon")
Kula – bullet
Mady – wise
Smukly – slim
Korab – caravel (a kind of boat)
Stokrotha – daisy
Production Notes
Jerzy Stawinski was a member of KADR, the Polish writer’s union. Stawinski wrote a novella called Kanal about the last gasps of the Warsaw Uprising. (Stawinski had been a commander of a Home Army unit in the Warsaw Uprising.) With the Polish novelist, Tadeusz Konwicki (the writer of A Minor Apocalypse, a book that we read in the group), Stawinski adapted the story into a screenplay. Andrezj Munk, a well-known director, expressed an interest in the screenplay. Munk was a documentary film maker, used to shooting with natural light on location. With a couple technicians, he crawled down into the Warsaw sewers, emerged in a few minutes, and said: "It’s pitch-dark down there and very cramped – there’s no way to shoot a movie in a sewer." He abandoned the project. At that time, Wajda was working as Munk’s assistant. He decided he would try his hand at making the movie. The film was his second, after A Generation, also a picture about the last days of World War II.
Wajda, who was often willing to pay lip-service to the party-line, pitched the film as a movie critical of the Home Army. He told the State film production censors that the movie would show the errors made by the Home Army. At the time, the official stance was that the Home Army’s uprising had resulted in nothing other than the destruction of Warsaw, the murder of its civilian population, and the slaughter of Poland’s intellectual elite – the Poles should have been patient and waited for Marxist-Leninist destiny, in the form of the Red Army, to roll in to liberate Poland. With this understanding of the production, the project was green-lighted. Wajda began shooting the exterior war scenes in ruins that remained in the suburbs of Warsaw. The rather baroque, bourgeois house that shelters the Home Army rebels in the film’s first half-hour was built from scratch on the site. The night scene in which tracers fill the dark sky was shot with live ammunition on a couple hectares of set roped off from the public – everyone recalls the sequence as being very frightening to film.
While the exteriors were being filmed, Wajda had an elaborate studio set built to simulate the sewers. The set was brilliantly lit. In his comments on the film, Wajda observes that there is nothing naturalistic about the lighting in the sewers – the wet brick and sludge scintillate with indirect light. Far from shooting in darkness, Wajda simply filmed wet black surfaces with bright light. The sewer set is, in fact, an expressionistic triumph of design and carefully placed lighting.
The final scene, in which Zadra, descends into the sewer again, he pistol defiantly (if hopelessly) pointed at the sky, was shot in Warsaw’s Old City. In 1955 and 1956, the Old City had not yet been rebuilt and remained in ruins.
Polish audiences were uninterested in revisiting the calamity of the Warsaw Uprising. The film’s nihilism was heavily criticized. At the Cannes Film Festival, the movie was highly regarded and awarded a prize. (The other important film shown at the 1957 Cannes film festival was Bergman’s The Seventh Seal). Kanal’s fame at Cannes won the film some grudging admiration and emboldened Wajda to make the politically controversial Ashes and Diamonds (1958) about the last day of the war and the conflict between the Communists and the Home Army. At Cannes, several Hollywood film executives approached Jerzy Stawinski, lavishly praising him for his imaginative concept – "we love the metaphor of the sewers," the Hollywood executives said. Stawinski was bemused. Of course, to him, the sewers had not been a metaphor at all.
PTSD
In the opening exterior scenes, the influence of Roberto Rossellini in films like Rome Open City and Paisan, is clear – indeed, several sequences in Kanal seem to be modeled on similar sequences in Paisan, particularly the uncompromising final narrative in that film showing the slaughter of the Po River partisans. The style of film making is fluid – one of the opening scenes features a four-minute track through rubble as the Home Army troops scuttle through ruins to the smashed mansion. Wajda shows us that the partisans are trapped by a simple device: we see the soldiers ducking behind walls thereby establishing the position of enemy snipers hidden in the wreckage somewhere beyond those walls; but when the first fusillade of fire occurs, the shots are fired from behind the camera – this surprises us and shows that the enemy surrounds the protagonists.
Poland has been a great showcase and theater for the baroque both in architecture and literature. The mansion is a baroque labyrinth, a kind of mini-cosmos that contains all remnants of the civilization destroyed in the war. Tracking or moving shots in the mansion tend to be subtended between half-shattered mirrors – the environment is tricky with spaces within spaces, odd niches, reflections, a coat of armor, and elaborate, ancient-looking furniture. The mansion suggests an intricate stage-set, a kind of bonfire of the vanities. Of course, there is an ill-tuned piano and a folio of reproductions from Botticelli. The grounds of the mansion, its destroyed garden, are covered with fallen and ravaged books. (Later, at the very end of the film, a ream of startling white paper, like the wings of a dove, will blow across the courtyard where Zadra guns down the sole survivor of his platoon.) War, of course, is the enemy of art and truth – war destroys books, burns records, and leaves archives strewn across shattered landscapes. With this motif, Wajda shows us that the Uprising is not only being crushed by the Germans, but, also, that its existence is being erased forever.
The battle around the house is shot entirely from the perspective of the Polish defenders. At no point in the film do we see anything from the perspective of the Germans. The attacking Germans, quite sensibly have no desire to be killed and so they keep their distance from Home Army position. They prefer to shell the place, dive-bomb at it, and, then, send in the Goliath tracked (self-propelled) mines. The Goliath is a kind of motorized bomb, sent into positions held by entrenched enemies to blow them up. (As we see, the bomb runs off an extension cord.) It is well to observe how Wajda denies the audience the conventional pleasures of a war movie. War movies usually involve large-scale scenes of armies moving into action – there is the panoply of battle spectacular with explosions, flags, and vast movements of men and equipment, the pleasure of seeing a cast of thousands deployed on the screen. Wajda provides us with nothing of this kind. Clearly, he is capable of, and has the resources to stage a huge and spectacular crowd scene – this is established by the very complex and densely choreographed sequence in the courtyard crowded with panicked civilians and soldiers under attack by advancing German "Tiger" tanks. But Wajda is not interested in providing us with any kind of spectacle that we can enjoy – the scenes of combat involve small units of men creeping like rats through wreckage. The only big and spectacular war scene in the film involves helpless civilians and retreating soldiers under fire by an implacable enemy.
Similarly, Wajda denies us the pleasure of seeing the brutal enemy suffer for his cruelty. We learn that the Germans are burning Polish families alive. One of the Polish soldiers says: "We’ll make them bleed" in anticipation of a frontal assault. But there is no frontal assault – instead of storming the barricades the Germans use mechanized equipment in the attack and, so far, as we can see no German soldier is killed or injured. In the last half of the film, there are very few Germans even on display. As far as I can determine, Wajda’s film does not show a single German casualty – the only people "bleeding" are Poles. (Compare this to Spielberg’s nasty Saving Private Ryan in which the last forty minutes of the film is devoted to a John Wayne-style slaughter of German troops – the Germans are like Apaches in old Westerns: they seem to want to die and are mowed down in the hundreds by our plucky American soldiers.)
Once the action descends into the inferno of the sewers, the film becomes highly stylized and, indeed, intensely baroque: in a perverse way, the Hollywood executives were right – what occurs in the last half of the film seems unavoidably metaphoric. The sewers are a literal labyrinth. They seem more a state of mind than a real place. In the sewers, everyone is obscurely panicked – people run back and forth shouting that the Germans have filled the sewers with gas. Clearly, this is untrue – and, although there may, in fact, be bad fumes in the sewers, it’s not clear that these have the capability to kill anyone. Sounds are weirdly amplified in the sewers and, when we encounter the first checkpoint barricade, the men surrounding it seem to be already dead – they stand motionlessly by the debris blocking the sewer, like specters. The dying lieutenant half-drowned in the sewage and howling like an animal is like something glimpsed in a nightmare. Immediately, the platoon collapses into three groups that never rejoin one another. Once you have entered the sewer, it seems that you are doomed to remain there forever. The motions and gestures of the troops caught in the sewer become increasingly expressionistic – people are shown groping in the darkness, crawling, dragging one another forward as if moving against hurricane-force winds, groups of soldiers appear as statuesque friezes of the damned in Hell.
This imagery can be understood in several ways. First, it is a truism that the experience and historical meaning of World War Two is very different in a place like Poland or Estonia than it is in America (or even England). In America, we imagine World War Two as a great crusade in which virtue triumphed over absolute evil. This has been the propaganda disseminated in our movies and, even, history books. Politicians still refer to the Second World War as the "good war." But, of course, no war is good on any level. And, if you are Pole or an Estonian, it is not at all certain that "the Good Guys" won the war. The defeat of the Germans in Poland was followed by 45 years of savage repression, concentration camps, arbitrary arrest and torture, and economic malaise. One vicious totalitarian regime was succeeded by another. In this light, it is very difficult to argue that the heroism and sacrifice of the soldiers and civilians who died in the Warsaw Uprising had any value at all – in fact, the slaughter was an exercise in futility.
On this basis, we can interpret the sewer as an image for post-war Poland. After the fighting in the sunlight, a damaged and terrified group of people, some of them wounded, descend into a nightmarish labyrinth. The atmosphere is literally choking. The darkness is all-encompassing and there is no way out. No one comes to your rescue. You die in the darkness, the "darkness at noon" of the police state. It is no accident that the most clearly visualized killing in the film is one Pole shooting another. We never see any Pole successfully kill a German, but the last act of violence in the movie, a murder that presages the savage darkness of Ashes and Diamonds is Zadra pointlessly killing the last survivor of his battalion. The image of one Pole killing another Pole in the ruins of a city is an apt metaphor for post-War communist Poland.
There is another interpretation that may be more relevant to us. We now recognize that, in the wake of war, there is enormous psychic disturbance. We may interpret the sewers as an objective correlative for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the sewers, the Germans aren’t killing the Poles. The rather the Polish fighters are trapped in a blackness that leads them literally to suicide – for instance, the Polish girl who shoots herself when the man with whom she was sleeping declares that he must survive the ordeal so he can return to his wife and child. The warrior who has returned from battle finds himself in an uncomprehending society, cut off, and cast into darkness – there seems to be no way out and depression gnaws relentlessly at the sense of self. Topographically, the sewer is an interior, an inside, in which the characters are entrapped – there is an eerie sense in Kanal that the last half of the movie is a dream, a nightmare occurring within someone’s disturbed sleep. Years later, Wajda made a film called Landscape after a Battle – in my view, we can productively view Kanal’s second half as a psychic "landscape after battle," the spiritual darkness, confusion, and alienation that descends upon soldiers after the killing and dying has ended.
And Yet
As if in recognition that the story of the Warsaw Uprising is too terrible to be esthetically enjoyed, Criterion includes on its disc a long interview conducted in 2004 between Wajda and another old man, Jan Nowak Jezioranski. The interview primarily involves historical issues and ends with a kind of defense of the Warsaw Uprising. Jezioranski was a courier during the Warsaw Uprising and later an official in the Polish delegation to the United States.
Jezioranski makes the point that the Warsaw Uprising was historically consequential in three ways. First, the Red Army paused for 63 days during its inexorable advance into Germany. This allowed the Allies to advance through Europe thrusting deep into Germany from the West. As a result, the Red Army was not able to claim all of Berlin. In fact, Berlin had to be divided between the allied occupying forces. In Jezioranski’s view, the Warsaw Uprising, paradoxically, saved Germany. If all of Germany had fallen to the Soviet army, West Germany would not have existed and the entire German nation would have been a satellite to Moscow.
Second, Jezioranski says that the horrific memories of the Warsaw Uprising prevented the Poles from joining the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union in 1956. If the Poles had risen with the Hungarians, they would have been similarly crushed and would have suffered another calamitous defeat.
Finally, Jezioranski says that the Poles learned from the Warsaw Uprising that violence only begets more violence and that revolution is best accomplished by civil disobedience and not armed force. This understanding led to the Poles adopting non-violent means during the Solidarity period and, ultimately, liberating themselves from Moscow without an enormous loss of life.
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