Andrzej Wajda’s Cinema of Complicated Defiance at 100

Andrzej Wajda’s A Generation (1955) begins with a tracking shot through the slums of Wola, a working class area of Warsaw, which look particularly decrepit: all dilapidated buildings, flat-cap-wearing lads scrapping over a football, rubble and twisted metal. It’s wartime, 1942. Poland has been under German occupation for three years, and suffered from appalling acts of violence and brutality. By this point, German bombs had devastated the city, Polish Jews had been incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Poles were living under permanent oppression. The situation would not get any better by war’s end. Poland would be abandoned by its western allies and the communist forces moved in, leaving the country under a new political oppression until 1989.

A Generation (1955), as well as Wajda’s following films, Kanał (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), which together comprised his War Trilogy, marked a radical moment for Polish cinema. In these films, Wajda portrays the effects of political oppression, focusing on individuals caught in the dictatorial regimes of Nazi and communist authority. The desire for liberation is strong across the trilogy, yet resistance is shown to be tentative, unstable. But rather than offering a consoling vision of national history, Wajda constructs a cinema in which individuals are trapped within political systems that resist a coherent moral interpretation. A century after his birth, the enduring power of his films lies in their insistence that history remains complicated and unsettled.

Seen through the eyes of Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki), a young rapscallion of Wola, A Generation at once illuminates the effects of oppression on the young, and the complexities of resistance to the German occupation. Stach narrates an ethically complicated society: he is from the outskirts of the city, experiencing a life of poverty and difficulty. The camera rests on him and his friends tossing a knife into the dirt as he narrates being unclear on who is a friend and who is an enemy, and expresses his reluctance to work. Alongside the ambiguity of his friendships, the juxtaposition of teenage frolicking and knife skills foreshadows uncertainties about resistance later in the film, and the constant danger facing the youth of Poland through the war. Indeed, it is only moments later when the effect of this becomes apparent in an act of tentative rebellion. The boys board German supply trains to throw coal off the wagons, calling themselves patriotic thieves. A Nazi spots them, and with the slick aim of a gun, kills one of Stach’s friends. Their behaviour appears more that of pointless teenage delinquency than any Polish patriotism.

This moment is a turning point for Stach. After his friend’s death, he begins work alongside an employee and member of the communist underground, Sekuła (Janusz Paluszkiewicz), whose role resembles that of a party secretary in typical socialist realist Polish films. He tells Stach – with dialogue that is almost pilfered from ​‘The Communist Manifesto’ – about rights for Polish workers, and the need for solidarity among the workforce, and Stach joins up quickly. They represent The People’s Guard, a Soviet force who resisted the Nazis and opposed the Polish Home Army, who are depicted as weak in comparison.

Wajda’s depiction of communist ideals is far from simple. Stach’s gung-ho approach is juxtaposed against that of his friend, Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar) – who appears constantly dressed in a white coat, like a ghost of a boy – a figure who is less keen to join the communists. During one meeting between Stach and Jasio in which the former tries to persuade his friend to join the party, the landscape of Warsaw around the pair is depicted as one of twisty tunnels, low ceilings, and window bars, collapsing any political awakening into spatial confinement. The communist underground promises liberation, yet the film repeatedly associates political commitment with entrapment. 

The year following A Generation, the Polish October – a thaw in Stalinism – relaxed communist repression in Poland and allowed national sentiments to be expressed more openly. Yet whilst Wajda’s second film, Kanał, focused on the celebrated role of the Polish underground living and fighting in the sewers during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against German occupation (the largest military effort by a European resistance movement during the war), this was by no means a romantic image of heroism. 

The opening tracking shot emphasises the experiences of Poles descending into the sewers to fight the Germans. This focus reflects the liberation of Polish cinema at the time – and particularly Wajda’s recognition of his role, as a filmmaker from a more liberated country under communism, to show the experiences of life behind the Iron Curtain to the west – yet is immediately undercut by brutality. As the soldiers enter the sewers where much of the action takes place, Wajda extends the dark and claustrophobic imagery of A Generation to further express the physical and moral difficulty of resistance action. The unit descend when there is panic in the streets and underground as different units shout warnings of gas, but cannot remember from which tunnel the gas has been seen. There are no safe spaces, and as the ceilings and walls close in, the shrinking unit becomes lost.

The end of the war does not produce liberation, but merely transforms one unstable political condition into another. The final film in Wajda’s trilogy, Ashes and Diamonds, would move to the post-war years and the ongoing difficulties of Polish resistance amid an overwhelmingly bleak 1940s Poland. In 1945, Poland was taken over by the communists, who enacted new forms of repression, leaving little room for hopes of independence. The film follows a former Home Army soldier, Maciek Chełmicki (Zbigniew Cybulski) who joins the anti-communist underground and is ordered to assassinate the local secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party. The action occurs on a single day, Victory in Europe Day. This should mean resolution, yet for Wajda, and for Chełmicki (whose first assassination is an abject failure involving the deaths of a couple of innocent civilians), it produces uncertainty. The film not only charters his instability about his act, but the broader collapse of the Polish anti-communist resistance. 

Chełmicki’s role is complicated after a love affair with a barmaid, which culminates in a tragic scene in a ruined church, behind the silhouette of an upside-down Christ, in which he explains to her that he wishes for a normal life, where they would be able to be together. The stereotypical images of a Christian Poland – upended, and broken by occupation – not only overtly symbolise Chełmicki’s collapse of mission for a free country, but the ethical tumult in the aftermath of war, where Poles’ hopes were unable to be manifested in a landscape of devastation. The depiction of resistance in the film is, instead, limited, heartbreaking, and set in contrast to the desire for peace.

Wajda would return to the images of wartime and post-war uncertainty of his War Trilogy. One of his later films, Katyń (2007), would mark the first cinematic portrayal of the 1940 massacre of tens of thousands of Poles by the Soviet Union – an appalling atrocity which would cast a shadow over Polish historical memory. It was a particularly poignant film for Wadja, whose father was among the Poles killed.Wajda focuses on one family: Andrzej (Artur Żmijewski), a young Polish captain, his wife Anna (Maja Ostraszewska) and daughter, Weronika (Wiktoria Gasiewiska). The film opens on a bridge, where crowds coming from both directions argue about which route is safer, directly pointing towards the chaotic effect of German and Soviet occupation. Andrzej is taken prisoner, and his refusal to take his wife’s advice and pretend to be a civilian creates the conditions that the film goes on to explore: the suffering experienced by the officers, and the desperation of the family back home, left in the dark about Andrej’s fate. It was only with the fall of communism that those Poles who had family members imprisoned by the Soviets finally became aware that their loved ones had perished at Katyń. 

Wajda never shied away from showing the stark brutality of war and its aftermath of uncertainty in a nation whose sovereignty suffered against the worst of the Nazis and the Soviets alike. Told with a strong humanist spirit and juxtaposed against a wider canvas of wartime tragedy, these individual narratives of turmoil are the acts of remembrance that keep a complex historical memory alive. As we now face the active threats of historical revisionism and nationalist resurgence, these films’ emotional resonance continues to linger and feel urgently significant today.