I was just on the cusp of realizing that “foreign” films existed and were a real alternative to what 1950s Hollywood was serving up when Andrzej Wajda‘s first films began appearing. Art houses were far and few between in Falls Church, Virginia. DVDs and streaming video weren’t yet conceptualized. Tape was something we used for music, if at all. For movies we went to theaters and we watched what the theater was showing. War movies ran to The Sands of Iwo Jima [that would be John Wayne], or Run Silent, Run Deep [Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster] . The heroes were inevitably templates for what was held to be the way American men comported themselves as soldiers –stoic, silent and brave, true to their loved ones and noble to those they rescued –in battles which, despite losses and setback, Americans always won. If there were deaths the bodies twisted and fell in the middle distances allowing us to stay wrapped in the same safety we were in our own backyard games. Not known, much less seen, were “A Generation,” [1955] “Kanal,” [1957] or “Ashes and Diamonds,” [1958] Wajda’s famous war trilogy that announced him to Polish and serious European audiences, war films that had a different take on heroism and the glories of war.
Even as I began to appreciate the Italian neo-realists, French noir and then New Wave, Wajda’s name only floated in that distant sphere of film auteurs with unpronounceable names we must one day see — Russians, Japanese, Poles. Somehow I never sat in the dark and absorbed his immense, dark vision. Too bad for me. I’ve been able to begin making up the absence now that technology lets us locate and see films we have long wondered about, have heard or read mentioned of. We can see a short series by a particular director, or follow a theme that interests us, or watch an actor in various roles at various ages. Sitting in a dark room with a big screen in the company of others is still the best way to see a movie, but putting yourself to school in your living room is not a bad second choice.
Katyn is the 85 year old director’s latest film, released in Poland in 2007 and in the U.S in early 2009. It’s available on DVD already.
Katyn for the Poles is a one-word tolling-bell of meaning, as 9/11 is for Americans. Katyn is a place. It’s a town and a forest near Smolensk in Russia. It is a massacre of Polish officers, intellectuals, priests and students by the Soviet NKVD. It is a German propaganda campaign carried out against the Soviets. It is a Soviet propaganda campaign carried out against the Nazis. It is the exhumation of bodies, forensic analysis of bullet holes, pieces of cloth, hidden journals. It is the insistence of the truth of the massacre against denial, punishment, imprisonment and torture. It is, the revelation in secret papers between Stalin and Beria, of what was planned, when and who was to carry it out. And it is, finally, Poland the nation becoming Poland a country and able to stand for its own people and the truths they have had torn from their history. All these things are Katyn.
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