Katyn
Andrzej Wajda (2007)
Almost half a century separates this film from Ashes and Diamonds, the only other Wajda picture I’ve so far seen, but I found them similar in their narrative measure and lucidity, and their complete lack of surprise – although Katyn has more moments that are shocking. Ashes and Diamonds takes place on the day of the German surrender in 1945. Katyn begins on 17 September 1939, the date of the Russian invasion of Poland. The opening sequence takes place on a bridge. A crowd of Poles are heading eastwards (and moving from the left to the right of the frame). They bump into a much smaller group of their compatriots, travelling in the opposite direction. The first group are fleeing the occupying Nazis; the second group are escaping the invading Soviets. As an idea and an image, the symmetry of this encounter, with its real and symbolic aspects, is grimly, simply powerful.
Yet the scene is underwhelming. The exchanges between the frightened, in some cases frantic, people on the bridge lack immediacy: their faces, movements and words seem to belong to characters in a drama. This isn’t just because refugees in war are so familiar from other films. It’s rather that the actors are putting themselves at the service of Katyn in a way that suppresses their personalities – as if, on such a major and solemn project as this, it would be shallow egotism to do otherwise. This opening is a taste of what’s to come: the cast is evidently accomplished but they seem to operate in a no man’s land. They’re obviously actors, they don’t have the power of witnesses in a documentary, and few of them come alive as individuals. Of course, given what the film is about, you can understand the actors’ self-restraint. The subject matter of Katyn is such that you feel you’re being trivial criticising it as a piece of drama. If you’re Polish, the imperative to treat the material with a proper degree of respect and humility must be all the greater.
Even for a country that suffered on the scale that Poland did in World War II, the massacre of Polish officers and civilians in the Katyn forest in 1940 is a huge national trauma, largely because of the protracted post-war deception – and self-deception – that it entailed. According to Wikipedia:
‘During the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Nazis used the massacre for propaganda purposes against the Soviets. However, after the war, when Poland fell under Soviet influence, the truth about the event was suppressed by the Soviet authorities, who maintained an official line throughout the Eastern Bloc that the massacre was committed by the Nazis.’
The same article explains that Soviet responsibility for the massacre was acknowledged for the first time in 1990, by Mikhail Gorbachev. It seems obvious that in Poland people will bring their own family histories and memories to watching Katyn: the material will tend to be vivid and particular, regardless of how it’s presented on the screen. If Katyn has this kind of significance to people in the audience, an impersonal perspective on the part of the filmmaker may well be preferable to one which impinges on personal connections to the events being described. This is clearly a uniquely complex issue for the director himself: Wajda’s own father was one of the officers murdered in the forest.
Even so, Katyn appears to be designed to present and animate the material through the experience of a few, ‘typical’ families and particularly the women of those families. (It’s based on a novel, called Post-Mortem: The Story of Katyn, by Andrzej Mularczyk, who co-wrote the screenplay with Wajda and Przemyslaw Nowakowski.) It fails because it’s the actresses who are particularly constrained as performers so that the women they’re interpreting don’t develop beyond the way they’re conceived – as stock characters. I think too that Wajda’s scrupulous approach hems him in so much that the few flourishes in the film are too salient. They don’t just fracture the monumental earnestness of the piece; they come across as examples of what the director and his actors are elsewhere at such pains to avoid. In an early sequence in a holding area where Polish officers are being readied for deportation to the Soviet Union, there’s a shot of a wall – an empty space except for one carved human arm: it’s all that remains of a crucifix. A few moments later, a woman (Maja Ostaszewska, as one of the main characters in the story), with her young daughter, is desperately searching in this area for her officer husband (Artur Zmijewski). The daughter thinks she recognises his greatcoat, which appears to be covering a corpse. The wife rushes over, turns up the coat and the remainder of the body of Christ is lying under it. The final sequence, which describes the murders in Katyn forest, is an amazing piece of filmmaking: the appalling rhythm – almost choreography – of the murders is extraordinary. But Wajda has each successive victim, in the moments before his death, mutter a few lines of the Lord’s Prayer – and in relay: one picks up where the last one left off. This device seems all wrong – it’s actually a relief that it reduces the relentless horror but its jarring theatricality is cheapening.
The depth and clarity of the images in Katyn (the cinematography is by Pawel Edelman) are impressive but what else has been achieved by dramatising this material rather than making a documentary about it (especially since Wajda occasionally inserts archive film, which overpowers the rest of what we see)? The illustrations of the post-war suppression of the truth of what happened at Katyn aren’t imaginative: for example, when a bright-eyed young man applies for a place in art school and the teacher interviewing him says there’s a problem with his CV, it’s very obvious that he will have written on his application form that his father was murdered by Soviets rather than Nazis. Perhaps what is achieved at certain points is the kind of shock that’s part of the inherent potential of dramatic cinema and which is beyond documentary – the shock of getting to know characters and then seeing them die suddenly. (It’s the Psycho syndrome really.) It happens here when one of the officers puts a bullet through his brain. It happens when, a few minutes after the art school interview, the bright-eyed young man is killed. (The shock is magnified by the fact that the actors in these parts make a more individual impression than most of the others – Andrzej Chyra as the lieutenant, Antoni Pawlicki as the student. Another performer who registers, in his one scene as a politically cautious young Catholic priest, is Jakub Przebindowski.) And there is a moment in which Wajda achieves a perfect balance between making a point and illuminating character. In a cemetery, two of the women argue about how they should now live. One of them (the art school teacher) accuses the other of being morbid. The latter’s rejoinder -– ‘I choose to live with the murdered, not with the murderers’ – looks crudely aphoristic written down and it rather sounds that way when spoken. What makes this moment is not what’s said: it’s the sight of the two women turning and walking away from each other. Their walks are equally implacable, utterly individual.
9 July 2009