Wszystko Na Sprzedoz (Everything for Sale)
The director of Everything for Sale (1966) told this anecdote when he was an old man. In an interview around 2015, Andrysz Wajda said that around the time that his friend, Zbigniew Cybulski died, the director was at the Warsaw train station. There was a homeless man familiar to many commuters who frequented the station. The old man, apparently, died on the concourse a few minutes before Wajda arrived. He saw the corpse partly covered by a sheet. Near the dead body, there were bits of clothing, some cans of food, a cane and a walking stick, a dog leash, and some tennis shoes and scarves. A sign had been posted among these items, handwritten with the words WszystokoNa Sprzedoz – that is, “Everything For Sale.”
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Wajda had flown to London in the first week of January 1966. He had spoken to the Polish movie star, Zbigniew (Zybyszek) Cybulski about making a film together. In London, Wajda was meeting with the British dramatist David Mercer. Mercer wrote teleplays primarily for the BBC. Two of his filmscripts are celebrated – the script for Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment (directed by Karel Reisz and which won a BAFTA in 1967) as well as Providence (with John Gielgud and directed by the French filmmaker Alain Resnais in 1970 – that film won a Cesar Award for Best Picture that year.) Mercer was an up and coming screenwriter and Wajda wanted to commission a script for Cybulski, then, acclaimed as “the Polish James Dean.” Shortly after reaching his hotel in London, Wajda received a call from Roman Polanski, another Polish director. Polanski told Wajda that Cybulski had been killed in an accident – while running to catch a train, Cybulski fell between the cars and was mangled to death. That was the end of the commission projected with Mercer. Wajda immediately flew back to Poland to attend the actor’s funeral.
Cybulski embodied the energies of the Polish cinema in the late fifties and sixties. Although he had a starring role in only one of Wajda’s movies, 1958's Ashes and Diamonds, he had played supporting roles in another three films made by the director. (Wajda had directed him twice in appearances on stage.) Furthermore, Cybulski was a close personal friend to Wajda. Cybulski died on January 8, 1966 at the Glowny station in Wroclaw. He was 39.
After Cybulski’s funeral, and a few weeks later, Wajda began working on a film about Cybulski, the picture that came to known as Everything for Sale. At first, Wajda had no script and told his friends that the entire film would be improvised, supplemented as well by screen tests and other “odds and ends” that the director had lying around. Wajda was acclaimed as Poland’s most important filmmaker at that time. The studio Kamera produced the picture. Because of his prestige, Wajda had a virtually unlimited budget and could afford a long shooting schedule. It took several months to accumulate the footage that was later edited into the final cut – the editing took an unprecedented six months because of the difficulties of piecing together the disparate materials that Wajda had collected. The movie was said to be about Cybulski but constructed so that the actor would never appear in the film. “It was like making a film about the ghost of Hamlet’s father,” Wajda said, “except that the ghost would never appear on-screen.”
In the picture, someone says that the movie will be about the presence of an absence. Another character sardonically says that such a film “will do great in Paris.” “But how are we supposed to sell it in Poland?” the other person asks.
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Everything for Sale is film about making a film. The picture is a Moebius loop in which the two strands of the narrative – the film and the film within the film – turn out to be one and the same.
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Everything for Sale begins with ominous imagery in a train station. We hear amplified footsteps like gun shots on the paving – the soundtrack is like the scene of Lee Marvin pacing through the airport in Point Blank, another important movie from the sixties. In the darkness, a man is running. He is running as if for his life. The camera can scarcely keep up with him and the shots don’t display the features of the running man. He races alongside a train that is pulling out of the station and, then, drops out of sight between the platform and the train’s wheels.
From dialogue following this scene, which is revealed to be part of a movie under production, we learn that director and the film crew have a problem: the leading man has simply vanished. He was supposed to be the figure chasing the train. Instead, the director was his stand-in, racing along the train to catch it, but filmed so that his identity is not discerned. The cast and crew speculate as to the whereabouts of the fickle leading man. We learn that Ela, the divorced wife of the dead actor whom the picture celebrates, is playing herself in the film.
Ela goes to her ex-husband’s home. After their divorce, the dead actor (who is played by the actor who has vanished) remarried. The buxom new wife has a child. Ela and the woman talk. They wonder where the actor has gone. Why has he vanished? He didn’t come home the preceding night and didn’t show up at the station where the shot involving the train was made. Ela becomes increasingly distraught. There is tension between the two women and Ela goes into the bathroom where she finds one of the missing man’s razors that she uses to slash her wrists. She staggers out of the toilet into living room where we see cameras set up with a sound man to record the dialogue. The scene between the two women is part of the film within a film as we now interpret this part of the movie.
Ela, then, goes to a party where the cast and crew involved in the movie, as well as fashion models, are dancing and drinking. Ela dances frenetically. A scriptwriter is hiding in a closet eavesdropping on the partygoers to that he can glean some good lines of dialogue from the drunken people talking to one another. He tells the director that Ela has been proclaiming that no one loves her and think that this line can be used in the movie.
The partygoers stagger out along the river (the broad Vistula lined with monumental buildings). They happen on an amusement park and the drunk people climb onto a carousel that spins them in a wide arc around a central pillar. Ela turns on the carousel and it begins to rotate. The people on the carousel suffer from motion sickness and seem ill. But Ela refuses to shut down the carousel or even reduce its speed. The cast, director, and crew have thrown the party, it seems, in the hope that the missing leading man would appear – but he remains absent, nowhere to be seen.
There is a question about replacing the missing actor with Daniel. Daniel is handsome with a red-blonde beard. But he says that he’s not well-suited to playing the role of an actor in the film within the film. He says that he’s an athlete and does better with physical roles, like playing the part of a boxer. Ela and the director are flirting in a car near the river. Somehow, the director has cut his forehead. Ela goes down to the river to wet a handkerchief to wash his wounds. (The river is mostly frozen and the water in its shallows seems none-too-clean.) The director takes a picture of the blood spilling out of the wound on his forehead. This is supposed to be real blood but the image rhymes with the blood dripping out of Ela’s slashed wrists in the suicide scene. The director uses a Kodak Land Camera to take polaroids of the cut on his head. This references the fact that the movie was the first to be shot on Kodak Kodachrome, a film stock that allowed for better color saturation than the somewhat dowdy Soviet stock used for most Polish films at the time.
The wives of the missing actor (who is playing the dead actor in the film under production), both the ex (Ela) and the present wife embark on a hunt for the missing man. It’s grey and snowy. They go to a performance hall where poetry recitations take place. There they encounter a taxi cab driver who says he brought the missing actor to the poetry performance hall. He was apparently with a young woman (Mala or “the Little”), a member of a poetry recitation club. The cab driver is bitter because the actor didn’t pay the fare. Ela quotes her missing ex-husband to the effect that actors take on the sins of others or show us how to live. The bearded guy who is athletic and plays boxers shows up on his motorcycle. He buys one of the women a ice cream cone, a pretty cold thing to eat in this dreary icy weather. The ex-wife is driving the present wife on their search for the missing man. A scene of a herd of (apparently) wild horses is intercut with some of the material.
In a snowy woods, the two wives (ex- and current) come to “Y” in the road. (This “Y” signifies a pivot in the movie.) There they meet a young woman with a big beehive or bouffant hairdo. This is Mala, the girl from the poetry recitation club. She says that the missing man left the club late at night to catch the last train. The girl was left behind at the edge of the woods where she stayed with a forester because it was too late to catch the last train into Warsaw. The two wives are disgusted by the girl and abandon her – she’ll have to walk back to town. But Ela thinks better of this and they back up to pick up the poetry-reciting girl. Suddenly, they hear on the radio that Poland’s most famous actor was killed late the night before when he fell between the cars of a train that he was trying to catch.
This is the pivot or hinge of the movie. The two wives (ex- and current) seems briefly grief-stricken. But life goes on.
From the film’s first ten minutes, the viewers are intentionally confused by the movie as to what images are contained within the film-within-the-film (the death scene simulated by the director in the train station and Ela slashing her wrists) and what parts of the movie are part of the frame story of the production of the film within the film. For instance, the scene of Ela powering the carrousel seems part of the frame story as does the scene at the party, but none of this is very clear and the two strata in the film (frame and film-within-film) seems to be melting into one another in strange and unpredictable ways.
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There’s another shot of 20 or more running horses that seems unmotivated – neither part of the frame or film-within-the-film. Then, the women go to the scene of the accident, along a snowy railroad track. Some cops are taking measurements and the women look aghast at the spatter of blood where the actor has just died. All three women are present: Mala, the ex-wife, and the current wife. It is now apparent that the film about the actor who perished running for a train can not be completed; the death of the leading man, himself killed by a train, has made it impossible to proceed. Someone says that film’s director will persevere in the effort to finish the movie because he habitually converts everything around him to a movie. “We are hyenas” – and the plan emerges to continue with the movie but make it about the “absence of the leading man.” Someone protests that you can’t make a movie about an “absence”. The response is that they will love the picture in Paris. But first, it is noted, the movie will have to sell tickets in Poland.
We see people dressed in black. They seem to following a casket into the cemetery, but, instead, we see they are walking alongside a cart carrying reels of the defunct picture. (This is in black and white.) Grainy black and white newsreel footage of the dead actor’s funeral ensues. The cast and crew are present and there is discussion abut the logistics of making a movie in which the leading man never appears. The idea is floated that the film should be a movie about making a film. This idea is discussed with Andrzej (the director who shares a surname with Wajda). Daniel goes to a club with a dress code. The doorman gives him a nice leather coat (similar to the coat worn by Cybulski in Ashes and Diamonds). Apparently, wearing the leather coat, he is allowed into the bar. There, as in Ashes and Diamonds, he lights a shot glass of vodka so that it flames in memory of the dead actor. We learn that the leather jacket was kept in the coatroom so that the deceased actor, a celebrity, could always be admitted to the Club. The leather coat is said to have been the “skin” of the deceased. On the jackets, there is a little pin at the lapel saying: “I am a genius.” Daniel has the legendary cup that appeared in Ashes and Diamonds – this is the cup that Cybulski keeps in his pocket and orders the barmaid to fill with vodka in that movie. The battered cup is a souvenir of the Warsaw Uprising and, supposedly, was taken from the corpse of a German Cybulski (or his character in the 1958 film) killed. At this point, the idea is discussed that the part of the dead actor will be played by Daniel. Daniel is outraged at the notion that actors are fungible – that is, that one performer can be simply substituted for another who has died. He punches the film’s producer. (I recall this as happening in a toilet, again a reference to the rather noisome-looking lavatory in Ashes and Diamonds.) At this point in the movie, there is mention of a film script that the decedent wrote, possibly in Paris. Someone who may know about that script is involved in the production of an epic film out on the frozen steppe. After a brief shot of Daniel at the decedent’s graveside, the Everything for Sale cuts to the steppe where a huge crowd of mounted men wearing on their backs odd-looking wings are preparing to mount a cavalry charge. The film that we see being produced is Jerzy Hoffman’s Pan Wolodyjowski based on the 1889 novel of that name written by Henryk Sienkiewiczka. (The film was released in 1969 and was top-grossing picture in Poland. “Pan” means something like “sir” or “colonel”. The movie is about an invasion of Poland by janissaries of the Ottoman empire. It is melodramatic stuff with attacks by wolves, huge pitched battles, and the heroines sold into the Turk’s harem.) The man on the field of (filmed) battle tells a story about the decedent. The story is about how the actor was in Paris and met a girl in a cabaret. It is implied that this story became part of the script that the decedent wrote. The cavalry charges and an assistant wearing wings himself, runs in circles around the camera simulating the winged appendages passing before the camera during the mounted attack. We cut to woods where Daniel is being timed as to his ability to run. The leading man in the film within the film (acting the part of Cybulski) will have to run swiftly, for instance, in the scene in which he tries to catch up with the train pulling out of the station. The camera tracks Daniel running in snowy forest while another man times him. Perhaps, we are seeing a rehearsal for a scene in the movie. Daniel is told that his time isn’t that good, at least on this iteration of the run.
Andrzej, the director is with Beata (the dead actor’s ex-wife). They go to an art exhibit that apparently commemorates the Warsaw Uprising. Beata doesn’t want to go into the exhibition – she thinks it is too brutal. Andrzej looks at the art. The paintings seem to depict the presence of the dead from the War still haunting Warsaw. The dead are portrayed as eerie blue figures. (This is part of the film’s theme that the dead haunt the living – both in the form of Cybulski but, also, as memories of the millions killed in the War.) There is a monument to 40 Poles shot outside the art museum by the Nazis.
Andrzej and Beata (the dead actor’s ex-wife) are driving on a road through a snowy forest. They run over a corpse lying in the middle of the road. At Beata’s urging, Andrysz puts the car in reverse and goes back to the body (it seems that he would be content to just drive away). The body is a dummy and it turns out that local cops (and possibly traffic engineers) are conducting some kind of study to determine to what extent citizens will stop for a body lying in the road. As Beata and Andrzej drive off, another car drives by and ignores the dummy. In post-war Poland, people tend to ignore the corpses with which the past has strewn the present
The film crew and actors discuss to what extent the legends that surround the decedent (now indistinguishable from Zybeszky Cybulski) are true. Someone tells the story of Cybulski walking to Berlin in the middle of the war to get a bouquet of roses for his girlfriend – no roses were to be had anywhere in Poland. The story is claimed to be true by the sister of the woman who received the roses. The sister loved Cybulski but he didn’t pay any attention to her.
Andrzej talks about how he and Cybulski were representatives of a generation of Poles whose lives were destroyed by the War. This is a sort of Polish “greatest generation” – the indomitable people who endured the war and prevailed. Andrzej tells his wife that he is with the dead. She asks him “Come be with me.” Andrzej says that he is with her, but she understands that this is merely a statement of physical location – spiritually, he is remote from her. Daniel is now playing the part of the decedent actor. Andrzej lounges on his director’s chair in the middle of the railroad tracks with the train puffing in the background. The train approaches and Daniel flings himself out of the moving car at the exact location where the actor’s body was found. Andryzej says that the camera should focus on the cup, fallen next to the railroad tracks. This is the battered cup that Cybulski carried, the talisman of the generation of Poles whose lives were uprooted by the War. Technicians pour blood on the snow where the actor’s body was found.
A herd of riderless horses is nearby. The train hoots and the horses stampede. Daniel runs among the horses as the camera tracks him. Some horses pass between Daniel and the camera; this is similar to the effect with the wings in the cavalry charge sequence. It now becomes apparent that the rehearsal in the wintry woods was, perhaps, testing Daniel for this scene in which he runs indefatigably with the stampeding horses. The riderless horses symbolize Poland, the generation of dead Poles killed in the war, and Wajda’s own father who was a cavalry officer shot in the Katyn forest. The only freedom for this generation of Poles is run wildly among the spirits of the dead, here materialized as riderless horses. The lost cause of Polish freedom is also correlated to the doomed cavalry charges during World War Two, a subject of Wajda’s film Lotna made immediately after Ashes and Diamonds. The cavalry charge against tanks and artillery correspond to the “lost cause” of the film that can not be successfully completed due to the death of its leading man.
Much of what I write above is hypothesis and conjecture. The film is difficult because of the subject matter, the way that it is made, and the horrific problems of pronouncing Polish words and understanding their spelling. The Germans and most other enlightened people have regularized their spelling and eliminated unsounded consonants – for instance, in German words like Thor (gate) and Thur (door) are now spelled Tor and Tur since the “h’s”, formerly (in medieval times and before) were aspirants that now are not sounded. The Poles haven’t attempted this reform. Studies show that most Polish children can’t spell their names correctly until they are in their teens. Some never learn how to spell their names. Even Poles are baffled by their orthography leading to wide-scale chaos and the perception that these people are dimwitted, stupid, typical “Polacks” – the term that they use for themselves and sanctified in English by Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Horatio says that ambitious Norway “smote the sledded polacks on the ice.” (Some argue that the word is intended to be “pole-ax” meaning that someone hit the ice with a “sledded poleax” – but why “sledded”?) If one were to eliminate unsounded consonants from Polish names, many of those names would simply vanish, evaporate like the morning dew.
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Films about the making of films are surprisingly common. The film within a film even has a picturesque technical term in French mise-en-abym. “Abym”, I think, is a word similar to “abyss” in English. The concept, so far as I understand it (which is questionable), is a film within a film presents a hall of mirrors – the frame film reflects the film embedded in it and vice-versa: interpretation, therefore, is abysmal, that is, without a bottom. (A famous example of mise-en-abym is the play put on by the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom has dreamed that he was transformed into ass – in the context of waiting for his cue in the play-within-a-play “Pyramus and Thisby”, he says: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I shall get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’ because it hath no bottom. I shall sing it at the latter end of a play before the duke. Pereadventure, I shall sing it to make it more gracious at her death.” This peculiar speech, one of the greatest in Shakespeare, with its weird synesthesias – hands that taste, eyes that hear, ears that see – and its odd intimations of death at the end of soliloquy is a perfect example of the unsettling aspects of mise-en-abym. There is something dreamlike, something endless and unfathomable about the effect of films-within-films or films about making films.
Great examples from cinema include Close your Eyes (2024) recent masterpiece by the Spanish auteur Victor Erice about making a movie called “The Farewell Gaze”; as in Everything for Sale the subject of the movie is an uncompleted picture that was stalled 30 years earlier by the mysterious disappearance of its leading man. Sullivan’s Travels (1941) by Preston Sturges concerns the making of a fictional film called “O Brother Where Art Thou” – an escape from chain-gang picture later actually made by the Coen Brothers. In Godard’s La Mepris (1962, released in English as Contempt), characters are making a film version of Homer’s Odyssey – the picture is produced by Jack Palance and directed by Fritz Lang who plays himself in the film. “The Dueling Caballero” is a film within the film Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Truffaut’s movie picture, Day for Night (“The American Night” in French) is a 1973 film about making a movie with Jacqueline Bisset called “Meeting Pamela”. John Travolta is enmeshed in a political conspiracy while trying to record a scream for a cheap slasher movie in Brian de Palma’s Blow Out – the film within the film is called “Coed Frenzy.” Orson Welles’ last picture, The Other Side of the Wind (shot 1970 - 1976, edited 1980 to 1985, completed by Netflix in 2018) concerns a director played by John Huston making a movie in the style of Michelangelo Antonioni – the film shows a “wrap” party at which sequences from the film within the film are screened. This is just a sample of many different films within films.
Probably the most famous and highly regarded picture of this kind is Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963). This movie seems to be the model on which Everything for Sale is based. A director, played by Marcello Mastrioanni (Fellini’s surrogate) is making a science fiction film at a massive Cinecitta Studios set on which towering rocket ship has been erected. The director has lost his way, seems creatively blocked, and, at every juncture, is pursued by predatory women who distract him from his project. The strata of frame film and film-within-a-film become increasingly jumbled and confused and, at the end of the picture, we discover that the film being made turns out to be 8 ½ , the very picture that we have been watching – named because the movie was Fellini’s eighth feature film (with ½ referring to a short picture “Toby Dammit or Never bet the Devil Your Head” part of an omnibus Italian picture called Spirits of the Dead based on Poe short stories.)
In broad terms, Everything for Sale follows the same narrative scaffolding. The Polish film makers flounder when their (unnamed) leading man goes missing. They have been working on a movie about Zbigniew Cybulski and his tragic death on January 9, 1967. The layers of film and film-within-film get scrambled and the picture turns out to be Moebius strip in which the production of the movie and embedded movie are so intertwined as to be inextricable – it turns out that Everything for Sale is the picture that is being produced and this is the movie we see.
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The layers of artifice and reality are entangled even on the level of the film’s production. The actors all use their own first names and are playing variants on themselves. (All of them were friends or lovers of Cybulski.) The performers improvise their lines for the most part. Wajda encouraged them to use their own recollections of Cybulski in scenes in which we learn about the unnamed man’s adventures. Cybulski was renowned in Poland as a fabulist and great liar. The source of Cybulski’s battered cup, a talisman for the actor, was much contested – many didn’t believe that Cybulski took it from a German that he had killed. In one scene, someone tells a story of Cybulski courting a woman by walking all the way to Berlin to get roses for her that were unavailable in Poland in 1945. That tale seems highly unlikely. (Cybulski would have been 13 when WWII began and seventeen when VE day arrived.)
Both of the leading ladies were rumored to have engaged in sexual affairs with Cybulski. (The movie exhibits considerable anxiety about these rumors; in the opening title, both of the leading ladies expressly deny that there is any connection to reality between their personal lives and Cybulski or the romances shown in the movie.) In fact, Beata Tyskiewicz was Wajda’s wife at the time that the movie was produced. But she had also been involved in a love affair with Cybulski.
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Everything for Sale engages directly with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. In the film, as in Welles’ picture, a movie crew is investigating an event – in Wajda’s case, the death of a celebrity actor whose demise has put their production in jeopardy. In Kane, a documentary crew is engaged in interviews and detective work to understand the meaning of Kane’s enigmatic last utterance, “Rosebud.” Borges famously characterized Citizen Kane as a “labyrinth without a center.” And, although the audience is privileged to grasp the meaning of “Rosebud” in some sense, the documentary crew concludes no one will ever know what the word meant – it may have been a nickname for a girl that Kane once knew, or something that he prized, or something that he lost, or really anything at all.
Everything for Sale likewise seems to be a labyrinth without a center. Cybulski is absent from the movie and we don’t know what his demise signifies nor is there any agreement about the dead man’s character or probity. The viewer is left with puzzling images that don’t necessarily cohere.
In an important way, Everything for Sale, however, is a rehearsal for Wajda’s most significant later film and, probably, his masterpiece, Man of Marble (1977). This picture is the most politically significant film in Polish history and has been viewed as a document of resistance leading proximately to the Solidarity Movement and the strikes at the Gdansk shipyard.
Like Everything for Sale, Man of Marble is a movie about the making of a movie. A young woman about to graduate from the Krakow Film School begins to assemble a documentary about the “man of marble” – that is, Mateusz Birkut. Birkut, a brick layer, was celebrated in Polish propaganda as the mason who once laid 30,000 bricks in one shift. He was a hero of the Communist party and worker’s movement. But the man has vanished. The young woman, Agniezska, tracks down the director of a propaganda film about Birkut and, then, follows leads to interview people who knew the bricklayer. She discovers footage in old film libraries showing Birkut and finds out that he was denounced as a traitor and, possibly, sent to prison. Near the end of the film, she discovers an archive of footage showing Birkut but is denied access to the images by the Polish State. She speculates that there is something in the censored footage that will explain the mystery. But she isn’t allowed to see the archived film. She tracks down Birkut’s son who is laboring in the Gdansk shipyards. The son tells her that his father died a few years earlier and that he doesn’t know why the film has been suppressed. Like Citizen Kane, and like Everything for Sale, the movie is about a mystery that the protagonists in the picture never solve. It is a labyrinth without a center.
Man of Marble is a collage film made from snippets of old propaganda reels, political documentaries, interviews, and recollections that are often colored by emotion or bias and unreliable. Everything for Sale can be similarly characterized and seems to be a dry run for the film technique and structure used in the much more famous and renowned Man of Marble.
Everything for Sale is also important in film history as the first picture made in Poland to adopt the techniques of the French Nouvelle Vague. The film’s chronology is scrambled, the film stock is a mix of black and white and color, and the camera is handheld roving through the locations with a freedom not observed in earlier Wajda movies. We noted the rather ponderous compositional integrity of Ashes and Diamonds, that is, the conception of the film largely in terms of striking tableaux. Everything for Sale is filmed much more differently, with rapid unsteady camera movements, and discordant editing. Wajda’s 1960 The Innocent Sorcerers, a jazz-inflected story about Polish beatniks and bohemians has a script that reads like a French New Wave picture, but was filmed with studio methods used in conventional Polish cinema. Everything for Sale is the first picture in Poland to marry an advanced film technique to a “new wave” sensibility in terms of the themes and events in the scenario.
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Imagery in Everything for Sale carries symbolic meaning.
There are two symbols for history: the train and the carrousel. History either proceeds according to Marxist dialectic along a straight track into the future or history repeats, cycles, moves in circles like the berserk carrousel near the Vistula that Ela sets into frantic motion.
The train as a symbol for unstoppable historic processes derives largely from American Westerns. John Ford’s first famous picture was The Iron Horse (1924), a silent movie in which American manifest destiny is embodied in the railroads taming the West. This sort of symbolism reaches a climax in the films by the Italian Communists Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. In Leone’s magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the Old West is mythologized in the concluding landscape shot showing Indians in retreat before pioneers who cross the deserts in wagon trains while in the middle distance, the iron horse, puffing black smoke up into the line of the horizon, advances westward. Bertolucci was assistant director on Once Upon a Time in the West. In his grandiose epic, 1900 (1976) a train festooned with red flags symbolizes the inexorable advance of Communism and its ultimate triumph in the May Day festival, choreographed like a Busby Berkeley musical, in the picture’s last reel. The movie is bookended by characters who lay lengthwise on the track, between the rails, so that trains can roar over them – an image of the individual pitted against history with an overtone of hope that the Communist utopia will also make room for dissidents and those for whom the dialectic of history does not seem inevitable.
The train as a metaphor for the inevitability of Communism features in Soviet silent films and movies of the thirties. In those pictures, we see armored trains advancing over the steppes. In the civil war, Dziga Vertov, the great Soviet propagandist, showed movies to the peasants on white sheets draped over trains armored against attack. The armored train also embodies the force and fatality of destiny in the Mexican Revolution. Go to 1910 restaurant in Austin and look at the armored trains photographed on trestles over deep, dry canyons. There is an armored train under attack in the Mexican Revolution in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). For Wajda, the train symbolizes the onward rush of history that mangles those who get into its way.
But in Poland, the more things change the more they stay the same. The history of Poland is a history of partition, conquest, brief efflorescence of Polish culture, and, then, more conquest and oppression. The Poles had the misfortune to be occupied by both the Germans and, then, Russians. This historical cycle is materialized in the image of the carrousel on which the Polish film crew and actors ride after their drunken party. The carrousel spins merrily, but nothing ever changes – the trajectory of history is a repeated oscillation between repression, liberty, and, then, more repression.
The herd of riderless horses is an image for Poland as a mob without a leader, running in one direction and, then, the other, The riderless horses, as I have earlier maintained, correlate to the imagery of Poland as a quixotic lost cause, beautifully mounted and caparisoned horses charging into artillery fire and falling before armored tanks. (Wajda’s father, murdered at Katyn, was a cavalry officer.) The horses are motivated by the film requiring large numbers of animals for a spectacular cavalry charge in the movie version of Pan Wolodyjowski. This is meaning of the scene in Everything for Sale on the frozen steppe where a movie about a battle with the invading Ottomans is being made. Poland is always invaded, always occupied. The cavalry doesn’t come to the rescue.
The film that Wajda made after Ashes and Diamonds is Lotna (1959). That film is named after a beautiful mare that is the center of a rivalry and controversy among cavalry officers. At the climax of the film, the mare Lotna, leads a charge of cavalry against German tanks – an event sacred in Polish mythology which, in fact, never happened. Pope Frances during a visit from Polish religious authorities said that Lotna was one of his favorite movies and that he particularly loved the scene in which a Polish priest wins an equine competition. Wajda, who was touched by this reference, said that he was glad that he had lived long enough to hear the Pope praise his picture.
To be a Pole is to be fixated on historical injustice and to celebrate the martyrs who opposed this injustice – the people shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising, the death of the entire Polish intelligentsia in the Katyn Forest, the courage of those who opposed the Soviet repression at the Gdansk shipyards. The Poles are always documenting their trauma. (Hence, the exhibition of paintings by Andrzej Wroblewski that the film director attends. Wroblewski was an important post-War artist in Poland. Born in 1927, he died at age 29 in a mountain climbing accident in the high Tatra Mountains in Poland. Wroblewski attended art school around the time Wajda studied in that institution. At art school, Wroblewski founded the so-called “Self-Teaching Club” for art students, a group in which Wajda was a member. Wroblewski is best known for his “Execution” series of paintings, shown in the exhibition that the director Andrzej attends – Beata refuses to go into the galleries. The “Execution” series shows Poles who were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1944 uprising when the Nazis executed hostages.) Polish history is one continuous trauma. What are cameras for? To photograph wounds. When Andrzej, the film director, suffers a gash to his forehead when his car jolts to a stop, his first impulse is to photograph the wound using a Kodak polaroid camera.
In Everything for Sale, history seems to be stalled. The carrousel spins in circles. The train exists only to kill the best and the brightest. The movie can’t be made. We are in an interregnum in history.
Gramsci, an Italian Marxist wrote in 1931, in his Prison Notebooks, “the crisis consist precisely in the fact that the old is dying and new can not be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
