AAs the themes of the futility of heroism and the bitter aftermath of war have periodically returned to his work, Polish director Andrzej Wajda has for years come back to Jerzy Andrzejewski's short story, Wielki tydzien (Holy Week), about the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto during Easter Week in 1943.

For various reasons he was prevented from filming it, or simply decided against it. An early obstacle was Andrzejewski's difficult relationship with the Communist regime; later, he gave up because of the cold reaction to his 1990 feature, Korczak.

"But since these reservations are no longer valid, and I am living in a free country, I think I have the right to speak out about this painful subject - the relationship between the Poles and the Jews - in a voice which is true and sincere, not withholding the cruelty against either party," said Wajda. "We hear words spoken from the screen never heard before - Poles' opinions on Jews."

Andrzejewski, whose story Ashes and Diamonds was filmed by Wajda in 1958, lived next to the ghetto when the uprising took the Germans by surprise. Wielki tydzien, which he wrote in 1943, follows Irena, a young Jewish girl fleeing from the Nazis, after her parents have been killed. She is saved by her close friend, Jan, who she has not seen for a long time. He asks her to stay with his family at their suburban apartment house, but not all of the inmates are happy about having a Jew under their roof.

"The more death you see, the more you want to live," she says. But the conflict is closing in on all of them.

When shooting the film, Wajda included a minimum of location work - "I only wanted to show the burning ghetto, so that the audience would recall the picture, while concentratring on the inner struggle of these people." One location was closed to him though - even in 1995 the Polish Episcopate denied him authorisation to film in a church.

Jørn Rossing Jensen

V rámci periodického návratu k marnému heroismu a hoÞkùm následkÛm války pÞistupuje polskù reÏisér Andrzej Wajda i k povídce Jerzy Andrzejewského Wielki tydzien (Velkù tùden). PÞíbûh pojednává o povstání ve var avském ghettu v dobû velikonoãního tùdne roku 1943. V natoãení filmu mu bylo z rÛznùch dÛvodÛ zabránûno a také od nûho sám vícekrát upustil. Hned zpoãátku mu byl pÞekáÏkou komplikovanù vztah s komunistickùm reÏimem, pozdûji se filmováni vzdal kvÛli chladnùm reakcím na svÛj film Korczak z roku 1990.

"Vzhledem k tomu, Ïe tyto pÞekáÏky jiÏ netrvají a já Ïiji ve svobodné zemi, mám dojem, Ïe mám právo vypovídat o tomto bolestném tématu - o vztahu mezi Poláky a Îidy - pravdivû a upÞímnû, aniÏ bych zamlãoval krutost obou stran," Þekl Wajda. "Z filmového plátna sly íme to, co nikdy pÞedtím - názory PolákÛ na Îidy."

Andrzejewski, jehoÏ povídku Ashes and Diamonds (Popel a diamanty) Wajda zfilmoval v roce1958, Ïil v sousedství ghetta v dobû, kdy byli Nûmci zaskoãeni povstáním. Wielki Tydzien natoãenù roku 1943, vypráví o Irenû, mladé Ïidovské dívce na útûku pÞed Nacisty poté, co byli zabiti její rodiãe. Zachrání ji její blízkù pÞítel Jan, s kterùm se dlouho predtím nevidûla. Pozve ji, aby zÛstala s jeho rodinou v jejich bytû na pÞedmûstí. Ne v ichni v domû v ak souhlasí s tím, aby Ïili pod jednou stÞechou s Îidovkou .

"âím víc smrti vidí kolem sebe, tím víc chce Ïít," Þíká dívka. Konflikt mezi nimi v ak roste.

PÞi natáãení filmu pouÏil Wajda minimální poãet zábûrÛ v exteriérech. - "Chtûl jsem ukázat jen hoÞící ghetto, aby si mohl divák, soustÞedící se na vnitÞní zápas postav tuto scénu vybavit." Jeden z exteriérÛ v ak pÞed ním je te v roce 1995 zÛstal uzavÞen. Polská biskupská diecéze mu odepÞela povolení natáãet v kostele.

Jørn Rossing Jensen.

Prod co: Heritage Films

Prod: Lew Rywin

Dir: Andrzej Wajda, based on the novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski

Ph: Wit Dabal

Ed: Wanda Zeman

Prod des: Allan Starski

Sound: Krzysztof Grabowski

Cast: Beata Fundalej, Wojziech Malajkat, Magdalena Warzecha, Bozena Dykiel

Running time: 94 minutes

Int sales: Heritage Films

Screening: 21 June, 20.00, KCP-Kongressovy

Lifetime Achievement Award

© Andrzej Wajda

As the Prague International Film Festival pays tribute to Polish director Andrzej Wajda with a ten-film retrospective, Geoffrey Macnab looks over the career of one of the greats of post-war European cinema

A very Polish hero

There is an unforgettable moment in Andrzej Wajda's Ashes And Diamonds (1958) which seems, in hindsight, to encapsulate his preoccupations as a filmmaker. The fatalistic hero Maciek Chelmicki (played by Zbigniew Cybulksi) is drinking with a friend at a bar. Growing maudlin, he strikes a match and begins to light glass after glass of vodka with the flame. As he does so, he murmurs names of fallen comrades. A banal incident is suddenly invested with a strange, ritualistic pathos. Chelmicki is expressing his sorrow and patriotism, but, above all, he is bearing witness; acknowledging the part that his old colleagues played during a seismic moment in Polish history.

Recent Polish history has more than its fair share of such moments. From the Warsaw uprising to the Solidarity strikes, Wajda has recorded them all. Whether or not he sets out self-consciously to make political films, it is inevitable that reverberations from events around him continue to echo through his work.

When his debut feature, A Generation, was released in 1954, Wajda was quickly labelled a realist. Like Rossellini and De Sica in Italy, he eschewed the contrivance of studio filmmaking, preferring to work on location with young, untested actors. The story of two boys growing up in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, this was the first part of the famous trilogy. Its successor, Canal (1957), was likewise based in Warsaw during the occupation, but here Wajda was able to imbue his story with a tragic grandeur. Set largely in the sewers, where a group of Polish insurgents are hiding out from the Nazis, it works on a symbolic as well as a realist level. Wajda doesn't celebrate the uprising uncritically. Like so many others in his subsequent films, his protagonists here are attempting to resist the tide of history.

It's a forlorn, even suicidal, endeavour, but there is a very Polish heroism in their folly.

Maciek in Ashes And Diamonds (1958) is the archetypal Wajda hero, kicking against history. He's a reluctant assassin, assigned to murder a leading communist official. Cybulski's charismatic, grimly nonchalant performance (he wears dark glasses - supposedly a legacy from his time fighting in the sewers) earned comparisons with James Dean and made the actor a cult figure with western audiences.

In his 1970 film, Landscape After Battle, Wajda looked at the scars left on his country by the Nazi occupation. The protagonist, Tadeuz (Daniel Olbrychski) is an embittered young intellectual staying in a former SS Barracks in the American occupation zone. He's hesitant to return to a Poland now under a new and alien authority. While the end of the war brings respite to other countries, it presents Poles with yet more dilemmas.

During the early 1970s, Wajda made a series of films less directly concerned with political questions, but often with a wistful, lyrical tone which revealed his painterly eye. (As a young man, he'd trained as an artist.) Among these was The Birchwood (1970), the story of a forester living in the woods with his daughter and tubercular brother, and The Wedding (1973), his adaptation of Wyspianski's magical but baffling play about the wedding of a country girl and a Cracow poet.

However, it was Man Of Marble (1977), one of his most self-consciously political works, which re-established his reputation in the West as the most important Polish filmmaker of his era. Wajda intended the film as a history lesson: he wanted the younger generation to know the problems that had faced their parents. It tells of a young film student who tries to make her diploma movie about a former worker.

Her subject is a bricklayer, celebrated as a national hero of labour for his record breaking feats in the 1950s, but quickly denounced and forgotten by the regime when he begins to meddle in worker politics.

Given the subject matter, it was only to be expected that Man Of Marble should run into difficulty with the authorities. Nevertheless, it spawned a sequel of sorts a few years later. Man Of Iron (1981) is one of those rare films which works both as topical documentary (it was filmed in and around Gdansk during the shipyard strike of 1981 and even features a cameo from Lech Walesa) and as compelling drama. This time round, it's not an idealistic filmmaker but a sleazy, corrupt journalist around whom the narrative is organised.

He has been blackmailed by the authorities into gathering information about the strike leaders. But he too ends up converted to the workers' cause.

Wajda's obsession with Polish identity and politics is discernible even in his historical films. His Danton (1983) is a case in point. Its portrayal of two key leaders in post-revolutionary France - impulsive, free-living Danton (Gérard Depardieu) and implacable, cold-hearted Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak) - drew the inevitable comparisons with Walesa and General Jaruzelski. The Promised Land (1976) may have seemed like a nostalgic paean to 19th century Poland, but beneath the period flummery, it was also an ironic look at the birth of capitalism. Now, with Holy Week (1996), Wajda has come full circle. His new film is again set against the backcloth of the 1943 Warsaw uprising. Forty years on, it seems, he's still telling the same Polish stories with the same blazing intensity.

[Home ] [Content ] [The Sponsors ] [The Team ] [Comments ] [Help ]