Andrzej Wajda had a viable claim to be Poland’s great national artist of modern times, a virtual cinematic folk memory, a man who sought to intervene in Poland’s history with his movies, converting the ashes of bitterness and historical agony into diamonds of film. He was a director with Poland written on his heart.
In a staggeringly productive career, so much of which he pursued in the face of bureaucratic opposition and censorship — while working in uneasy harmony with the agencies of the state — Wajda took on the big themes of Polish history, from a country at the very heart of wartime conflict between Nazism and communism,and the cold war collision between west and east. The division of Poland, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the fact that his homeland was at the centre of the most toxic acts of geopolitical bad faith in modern history, was something that Wajda grew up with.
His father was one of the Polish officers murdered and buried in the Katyn forest by the Soviets — and communist Poland’s government was for decades complicit in the lie that the Soviets were innocent, a propaganda-untruth whose poisonous byproduct was to help shore up Nazi revisionism and denialism. Wajda himself, like so many other Poles, knew the truth – and took the lead once the Soviet empire collapsed. He made a 1991 documentary on the subject of Katyń and then a vigorous and remarkable feature, Katyń, in 2007 — when he was 81 years old — which became one of his four nominations for best foreign language Oscar.
He is known for two colossal trilogies on these two massive historical phases: his A Generation (1955), Kanał (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) took on the agonies and divided loyalties of wartime Poland, pioneeringly taking on the 1944 Warsaw uprising. Later his Man of Marble (1977), Man of Iron (1981) and Walesa; Man of Hope (2013) addressed trade unionism in terms of anti-statist dissidence and romantic patriotism.
A Generation is about the chaotic and fearful lives of Poles under the Nazi occupation, a film which brings in the Warsaw uprising, a subject fully addressed by the next film, Kanał, which was about a company of resistance fighters: the Home Army. The next film, Ashes and Diamonds, takes its audience to the day of Germany’s surrender in Poland, but makes it clear that the country’s allegiance is not simply transferred to the Soviets: on the contrary, some of the Home Army resistance are now the so-called “damned soldiers” who see it as their duty to carry on fighting — against communists. An assassination plot and its grisly, botched aftermath form the narrative.
The Man of Marble trilogy is in many ways his most formidable achievement, more fascinating for having been completed so late in its own historical span. It is a kind of eastern bloc Citizen Kane — and Wajda’s relationship to Welles is an underappreciated part of his work. In Man of Marble, a young film-maker, Agnieszka, sets out to investigate the truth behind one of communist Poland’s most legendary figures: an inspirational Stakhanovite worker called Birkut, a heroic bricklayer commemorated in many marble statues, but whose whereabouts are now unclear. This young film-maker has to reconstruct what she can from newsreels, an official propaganda film and talking to people who knew him, and she uncovers a shabby story of official mistreatment.
In Man of Iron, Birkut’s son Maciej has married Agnieszka and is now a steel-worker, union activist and transparently a model for Lech Wałęsa. Wałęsa got his own unfictionalised treatment in the final film, which appeared 20 years later: Wałesa: Man of Hope. Putting his name in the title brought this man out of the metaphorical shadows. These films were instrumental in challenging the sclerotic Soviet rule and supplying some of the cultural energy which was to dislodge the first brick in the Berlin Wall. And Wajda played a clever game with the authorities. Dramatising union activity was not something to which Soviet communist rule could instantly take exception, and yet the fact that this unionism was in fact anti-Moscow made Wajda, like Wałęsa himself, a resonant figure in western circles.
These films, weighty though they are, form a fraction of Wajda’s huge output, and he was an almost inexhaustible figure, taking on projects all the time, big and small, very often literary adaptations, both classic and relatively unknown. One of his most successful movies — another best foreign film Oscar nomination — was the rather Chekhovian and bittersweet 1979 drama The Maids Of Wilko, based on a short story by Polish poet and author Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz.
A middle-aged man, Wiktor, suffering what could be a personal or menopausal crisis, takes a sentimental journey to a family property called Wilko where he had once been tutor to some young sisters. But these women are now middle-aged like him, without the carefree gaiety of former times: their reaction to his reappearance is complicated and without the affectionate submission that he might secretly have hoped for. It is a lesson in the inaccessibility of the past.
Wajda is sometimes called a cinematic poet of lost causes: but he made Poland and Polish cinema a great found cause.
