Looking at Polish films through Wajda, Kieslowski

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): To look at the cinema of Poland, one must examine the works of Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski. These two internationally acclaimed directors have brought Poland to a distinguished place in world cinema. To many film lovers around the globe, Polish cinema is Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The two men, separated in age and their first films by one and a half decades, shared the same fatalistic vision, the same attitude toward life and death. Although they used different techniques and modes of expression, their movies are pitiless but honest observations of how man cannot escape fate and how life is both heaven and hell. Understandably, there are few happy endings in either man's movies.

Wajda, now 72, has consistently drawn on Polish history for material suited to his tragic vision. His first feature film, Generation (1954), traces the fate of several young people living under the Nazi Occupation. It was followed in 1957 by Kanal, a film about the failure of the 1944 Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, which film critic John Simon calls "one of the dozen-or-so finest films of all time and a true vision of hell. "The controversial Ashes and Diamonds (1959), became his best-known early film, depicting the corruption and idealism affecting both sides of the struggle between the Nazis and the Polish fighters.

Wajda began to gain recognition in the U.S. with his 1975 work, Land of Promise. The film won a Gold Hugo award in Moscow and in 1976 it received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It is a turn-of-the-century tale of three friends: one German, one Jewish and one Polish, who dream of setting up their own cotton mill in the industrial town of Lodz. Through laborious years full of intrigues and painstaking financial efforts, they finally make their dream come true, only to see it mercilessly crushed by vicious rivals.

Although long, a running time of 140 minutes, and meandering, Land of Promise is an interesting look at a textile industry boom town, and the bitter competition and harsh, heartbreaking lives its denizens must endure.

Wajda's second film to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar was The Maids of Wilko, released in the U.S. as The Young Ladies of Wilko.

This 1979 film is an elegiac romance set in the 1930s about a middle-aged man who revisits five sisters at a country house in Wilko, central Poland. Here, in his youth, he spent a fondly remembered summer with the women before World War I. But now they are all changed. A spark is rekindled, only to fizzle out instantly. This is a story of unfulfilled hopes, disappointed ambitions, and a sense of resignation. The characters come to a realization that the clock cannot be turned back and that something has faded away, never to return.

Wajda etched his name into movie history with Man of Marble, which won the Critics Prize at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.

The film follows a student filmmaker as she obsessively tries to reveal the mystery of Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer and former propaganda hero who unexplainably fell from favor and went into an unmarked grave after the 1967 Polish unrest. Wajda here applies the technique used by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, telling the story with newsreel footage and documentary-style interviews interspersed with scenes of the present day. This 160- minute film is different from Wajda's earlier films. As film critic Stephen Schiff says, it "sprawls and stumbles and irritates ...," but there is a "... seething spirit underneath, the spirit of an artist struggling to say what mustn't be said, to show what mustn't be shown."

Krzysztof Kieslowski, unlike Wajda, made softer, subtler films, which are, however, no less biting. His films speak about the ironies of life, the paradox of fate, and the inevitability of death. Some of these films are depressing and painful, others funny, all are beautifully done. Kieslowski would probably still be addressing the human drama if he had not succumbed to a fatal heart attack in 1996 at age 54.

However, he left behind a legacy of unforgettable movies. Kieslowski first stepped into the international spotlight with The Double Life of Veronique (1991), a deeply intuitive study of two women, living in different countries, who are virtually identical. But that was not his first film which dealt with the big philosophical "what if" questions that revolve around people's lives. He made Blind Chance, which presents three different versions of a young man's life, allowing us to see how each different turn he takes gives his life a different outcome. The film was completed in 1982 but problems with the authorities kept it from being released for six years.

Kieslowski once again dealt with fate in his masterpiece, the 10-part Dekalog (1988), which consists of 10 separate hour-long tales thematically based on each of the Ten Commandments. He expanded two of these short films into features: A Short Film About Killing, which subsequently won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Best Film Award at the European Film Awards, and A Short Film About Love.

"I like chance meetings -- life is full of them," Kieslowski said in an interview, "Every day, without realizing it, I pass people whom I should know. At this moment, in this cafe, we're sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go on their own way. And they'll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time."

This Wednesday, during the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of Polish Independence, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, in collaboration with the Usmar Ismail Film Center, is holding a four-day Polish Film Series. The event began on Tuesday with Wajda's The Maids of Wilko, followed by Kieslowski's Blind Chance and A Short Film About Love, as well as a 1996 comedy by 52-year-old director Jacek Bromski, Seen But Not Heard.

Coincidentally, Teater Utan Kayu (TUK) in East Jakarta is having its own Polish Film Festival this weekend. TUK will screen two of Wajda's works from the 1970s, Land of Promise and Man of Marble, as well as Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. They will also show films by three other Polish directors: Magnate (Filip Bajon), Sequence of Feelings (Radoslaw Piwowarski) and Daddy (Maciej Slesicki).