Andrzej Wajda
Polish film maker and theatre director (1926)
"Taken from the forthcoming Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, edited by Derek Jones, to be published by Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, in May 2000"
Wajda is the most famous living Polish film-maker. After graduating from the Lódz film school in 1953, his first experiences in feature films came under the sign of Socialist Realism. He worked as an assistant on Aleksander Ford's technicolour Five Lads from Barska Street, before getting his own crew for A Generation (1955), the first of a tetralogy dealing with the Second World War.
This story of a young worker who joined the Communist underground appeared at a time when Socialist Realism was being eclipsed and thus found little favour with liberal critics. Orthodox voices disliked the violence and brutality of events depicted in the film, which had in fact been toned down by the censor, as well as the reflection of Italian neo-realist influence. The film became a post-war landmark, however, as a launch-pad for the careers of a number of major artists, including Polanski, associated with the "Polish Film School" (1956-1962).
With Sewer (1957), the tale of a group of insurgents striving to escape the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising, Wajda came to head this trend of brilliant works about contemporary Polish experience which established Polish cinema as a major force. Sewer, which depicted the Uprising for the first time, marked a new ideological departure: it presented the Home Army in a sympathetic, if sceptical, light - in a radical break with its gross misrepresentation under Stalinism. Due to official controls, Wajda could not show the "force of circumstances" - the role of the Soviets - which had dictated the tragic and ultimately futile attempt to capture the Polish capital.
Ashes and Diamonds (1958), whose script by Andrzejewski was a revision of his 1948 novel, proved to be a landmark in Polish post-war cinema. Wajda foregrounded Chelmicki, the assassin, so that he dominated audience sympathy even as the action seemed to uphold official ideology (unlike the novel, Chelmicki dies on a rubbish tip). The whole film demonstrated Wajda's strategy of "rendering the censors inoperative": profoundly ambiguous scenes, such as the dying Szczuka's embrace of Chelmicki, possessed an extraordinary resonance, which censors, used to the primacy of the spoken word, could not hope to control. Official reaction was cool in the face of almost universal approval.
Lotna (1959), set during the September 1939 campaign, provided fodder for the increasingly vociferous, though largely surrogate, debate between so-called "patriots" and "scoffers" in the 1960s. Its vehemence was symptomatic of the Party's lurch towards national chauvinism and its clampdown on culture after 1960. The "patriots", based in the Army, accused the "scoffers" - the "Polish School" and satirists such as Slawomir Mrozek - of deriding the Polish military tradition by misrepresenting it as a series of heroic but absurd deeds. The image of Polish cavalry charging German tanks in Lotna was singled out for particular opprobrium. Wajda's 1965 version of Stefan Zeromski's (1864-1925) epic novel Ashes, which dealt with the sometimes less than glorious role played by Polish legions during the Napoleonic campaigns, also drew attacks from this quarter. In effect, however, the real issue was the continuing relevance of the Romantic model and how it might be exploited by factions in the Party.
The new freeze led to the demise of the "Polish Film School". In 1960 and 1963, the Party leadership openly criticised film-makers for failing to provide works that demonstrated the achievements of People's Poland. Wajda's first foray into the contemporary period, ,b>Innocent Sorcerers (1960), was held up as one such failure. An analysis of the complexes of the post-war generation, it had encountered obstacles due to its original downbeat ending and its release date had been postponed several months. More problematic for the director, however, was the issue of self-censorship: Wajda felt he had ducked the issue of the main character's homosexuality, partly due to the limitations of his own sensibility, but also in response to Polish mores.
Generally, Wajda managed to avoid rigorous official censorship, thanks to his international reputation, but also due to his ability to provide films that at least partly satisfied the Party's desire for ideologically committed works, which raised his stock with the decision-makers. In response to the occasional cultural clampdowns, he returned to the theatre or else adapted 19th-century literary classics, which served as vehicles for his concerns. In the early 1970s, the latter course led to renowned film versions of Wyspianski's The Wedding (1972) and Wladyslaw Reymont's Promised Land (1975).
The Wedding addressed one of Wajda's abiding concerns, the place of the intelligentsia in Polish society. Wyspianski's play presented the impotence of intellectuals and their isolation from the masses at the turn of the century, and thus remained relevant in the current climate. By contrast, Promised Land, set in late 19th-century Lódz, seemed purely historical and won official plaudits for what the Party deemed its properly class-conscious portrayal of "wild capitalism".
In the late 1970s, Wajda turned his attention back to contemporary Poland. Man of Marble (1976) concerned the search by a young female documentarist, Agnieszka, for a Stakhanovite worker, Bierkut, who had briefly been famous in the 1950s. The story, which proved indigestible for more orthodox members of the Politburo, broached one of the great taboos for the whole Stalinist period had been subject to stringent restrictions since 1956. No deviation from the official version had been allowed. Wajda therefore had to negotiate considerable official opposition, both in preparing his proposal and in eventually having the film shown. Clear parallels between his two characters' experiences emerged, so that the Stalinist fifties offered a commentary on Gierek's Poland and vice versa: just as Birkut suffered personal repression in seeking the truth from the authorities, so Agnieszka encountered official resistance as she tried to tell his story. The film's "great unmentionable" was Bierkut's death in the Gdansk riots of 1970 and a cemetary scene indicating this was removed. Ultimately, the audience was being asked to consider what had changed since the "period of errors and distortions" - the official euphemism for the Stalinist era.
The Party leadership seemed to take fright at its original boldness, and blocked the film's release for many months. The film was eventually given limited distribution but had gained such an extraordinary reputation that the Party leadership felt compelled to allow it to be shown more widely, using it as a kind of safety-valve to reduce mounting social tensions. At the same time, it instructed the Censorship Office to enforce uniformly hostile, but infrequent critical reviews, in an attempt to marginalise the film. Any suggestion of approval, such as a statement by Wajda in an interview that the "real hero were the conditions that enabled the film to be made", was therefore accounted a serious oversight.
Wajda found himself in temporary disfavour, and his next film, Rough Treatment (1979), with its account of a prominent journalist's demise owing to official manipulations, seemed to reflect his frustration. With the advent of Solidarity, he could return to the themes of Man of Marble. Man of Iron (1981), conceived as a sequel, developed the story of Agnieszka and Birkut's son up to the rise of Solidarity. Due to the political liberalisation, Wajda could be more open about the nature of Party control and reveal the true circumstances of Birkut's death. As with the earlier film, the Party leadership in closed session determined what cuts should be made, which were largely accepted by the director as minor compromises. However, as before, orthodox critics lambasted the film.
Following the declaration of Martial Law, Wajda came under attack as chairman of the Association of Polish Film-makers, which, like the other "creative unions", refused to accede to Party pressure for a new, more pliable executive. Man of Iron was banned until the late 1980s and Wajda was prevented from making films in Poland until 1986. The political authorities did, however, permit him to cooperate in several foreign co-productions - Danton (1983), Love in Germany (1985) - making him a quasi-exile for a number of years. Public acknowledgement of his outstanding contribution came in the first semi-free elections of 1989, when he gained a seat in the newly-recreated Senate.
Although Wajda continues to make films in Poland, his work finds much less favour among distributors and audiences. This reflects both economic realities (the domination of American films on the Polish market) and the fact that the collapse of Communism deprived his essentially Romantic stance of much of its relevance. The crux of his work - the individual in conflict with society or the state - is nowadays viewed as less problematic under democracy.
His long-term pet project about the Polish-Jewish doctor and children's author, Janusz Korczak, who died with his orphaned charges in Treblinka, did generate a major controversy in France. After ,i>Korczak was shown at Cannes in May 1990, some critics accused Wajda of shirking the issue of Polish anti-Semitism and suggested cutting the oneiric finale where Korczak and the children escape from the wagon taking them to extermination. To an extent, this reflected French disgust at anti-Semitic elements that had emerged during the 1990 Polish presidential election campaign. Whilst similar disquiet had arisen in Scandanavia and the US in 1976 over the Jewish characters in Promised Land, who were seen as conforming to negative stereotypes, it must be said that Wajda has never intended to condone anti-Semitism in any of his films.
Writings by Wajda:
Double Vision. My Life in Film, London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989
Further Reading
Bren, Frank, World Cinema 1: Poland, London: Flicks Books, 1986
Coates, Paul, 'Forms of the Polish Intellectual's Self-Criticism: Revisiting Ashes and Diamonds with Andrzejewski and Wajda', Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. XXXVIII, Nos. 3-4, September-December 1996, pp. 287-303
Coates, Paul, The Story of the Lost Reflection. The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema, London: Verso, 1985
Falkowska, Janina, The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda. Dialogism in Man of Marble, Man of Iron, and Danton, Providence & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996
(ed) Georgakas, Dan & Lenny Rubenstein, Art Politics Cinema. The Cineaste Interviews, London & Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984
Michalek, Boleslaw, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda, London: The Tantivy Press, 1973
Michalek, Boleslaw & Frank Turaj, The Modern Cinema of Poland, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988
(ed) Noel-Smith, Geoffrey, The Oxford History of World Cinema, Oxford: OUP, 1997
(ed) Paul, David W., Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema, London & Basingstoke: The MacMillan Press, 1983
J.M Bates, 13 April 1999