This Day in Film History (Death of Andrzej Wajda, Influential Polish Director)

Oct. 9, 2016— Andrzej Wajda, a director, writer, and producer who electrified international audiences with poetic, complex treatments of life under totalitarian rule, died at age 90 in Poland from respiratory complications.

Through October 22, New York’s nonprofit cinema Film Forum is commemorating the centennial of his birth with “Andrzej Wajda 100,” co-presented by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and DI Factory and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute. 

It’s a testament to the filmmaker’s tireless productivity that the 25 movies shown during these three weeks represent less than half of his career output of full-length pictures, documentaries, shorts, and television projects.

Like Oliver Stone, Wajda was a political provocateur who examined onscreen the collective traumas his nation experienced in the 20^th century.

Several were linked by theme, if not plot: his “Three War Films” of the 1950s (A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds) treated ethical dilemmas of during the Nazi occupation of Poland, while two movies from a couple of decades later, Man of Marble and Man of Iron, turned to Communist domination of the nation in the postwar period.

This subject matter could be challenging in its grimness. The prologue of Kanal, for example, tells viewers immediately that none of the heroes of the Warsaw uprising in the city’s sewer system that they are about to see make it out alive.

Communist atrocities affected Wajda and his family personally. His father was among the captured officers executed in 1940 by the Russian KGB in the Katyn Forest, a massacre denied by the USSR until 1990. In the 1950s, Communist censors began to interfere with his work—notably during A Generation, when they deleted one scene that became lost forever.

Even in exile from Poland in the early 1980s, Wajda continued to comment on how Soviet-style revolutionary fervor could devolve into terror, albeit through the prism of history rather than current events. Danton (1983), financed with aid from the French government, raised hackles in that nation’s left wing.

At a time when the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand included Communists as coalition partners, an intellectual firestorm developed over the implied comparison to the USSR drawn by its title character, a onetime firebrand of the French Revolution who became one of the most prominent victims of the Reign of Terror. Warning of the excesses of his former ally, radical Maximilien Robespierre, Danton (played by Gerard Depardieu) says, “Revolutionaries, like Saturn, devour their own children.”

The daily exigencies of filmmaking led Wajda to make many critical production decisions on the fly. Sometimes this could drive his associates crazy. In a short documentary, Wajda’s “Danton,” one crew member observed the unusual demands made during that 1983 biopic:

“As one scene or a new idea occurs to him, it’s a disaster for us, because he’ll say, ‘It’s not 20 extras anymore. Tomorrow we need 70, 80, 90.’ And that’s the hardest work for us, quickly to find the people he wants, almost from one minute to the next. That’s because he always has an idea and he wants this idea immediately. He just told us that tomorrow we need 12 men who will be naked and will be thrown in a mass grave, a pit where they bury the dead. We will need 12 men who will agree to be naked and be thrown on top of each other.”

On the other hand, Wajda’s openness to spontaneity from other sources resulted in some of the most resonant performances in international cinema.

Case in point: Zbigniew Cybulski, cast in Ashes and Diamonds as Maciek, a young anti-Communist Home Army resistance fighter assigned to assassinate an incoming commissar, Stefan Szczuka.

Initially dubious about having the actor play what he conceived as a dashing romantic hero, Wajda was even more nonplussed when Cybulski wore clothes more in keeping with the current generation—notably tight-fitting jeans, a green jacket, and pepegi (Polish slang for casual canvas shoes or sneakers).

But, as recounted by Polish screenwriter and film critic Bartosz Staszczyszyn, Wajda reflected: “I let him act as he wished, and that saved me.” The actor’s combination of restless energy, humor and vulnerability led him to be regarded as “the Polish James Dean.”

(In fact, in the 1982 analysis, Running Time: Films of the Cold War, journalist and movie critic Nora Sayre preferred the European to the American, contrasting his raw, authentic portrayal of an ordinary young man caught in a life-or-death political struggle with Dean’s much lower-stakes anguish in Rebel Without a Cause.) 

The film is set at a watershed moment in Poland’s history: the last day of the war, but the first of a very uncertain peace (which, it turned out, was dominated by another foreign power, the Soviets, rather than the Nazis). “The end of the war isn't the end of our fight,” Szczuka says. “The fight for Poland and what kind of country it's to become has only just begun. Today or tomorrow or the day after, any one of us could die.”

Or, as Maciek, in more down-to-earth fashion, says, “The main thing is to find a way through this mess without being tricked or getting bored. What else is there?”

From the opening scene to the fated conclusion, that “mess” is depicted with the kind of visual brilliance that Wajda, who had studied after the war at a Krakow arts academy, brought to all his films. 

Shot through with shadows, smoke, and fog, the cinematography underscores the existential dilemma that Maciek—with his eyesight already severely damaged from too much time in Warsaw’s sewers during the Resistance—now regards as pointless. “In many ways,” according to a "Self-Styled Siren" blog post from eight years ago, the film’s atmosphere of dark cynicism made it “a gangster film, with Poland’s future on the line instead of loot.”

Wajda and Cybulski actor collaborated on three more films and on the Polish theater scene before Cybulski died in 1967 in a tragic train accident.

The director immediately influenced by Wajda was Roman Polanski, who acted in two of his films. But Wajda also had an impact on the work of the film school whiz kids who entered Hollywood in the late Sixties: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg.

Certainly, Wajda’s technical mastery repays frame-by-frame viewing. But his maturity, his ability to look past divisive ideologies to the complex humanity that unites all his characters, is something to be embraced but incapable of being taught.