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FILM COMMENT
January/February 2002
Life is Beautiful
Stuart Klawans looks at the brief yet remarkable career of Andrzej Munk and his sardonic take on the political and historical absurdities of mid-century Poland
photo: Bad Luck
Let me begin by quoting a great Polish novel: ãHelp! Police!ä
This cry goes up, to no effect, in Witold Gombrowiczâs Ferdydurke, when the narrator discovers heâs been ridiculously trapped by societal norms. His situation has become ãimpossible,ä he writes, ãbecause it was impossibly stupid. But it was too stupid for me to be able to stop it.ä
In an essay about Gombrowicz, his compatriot Czeslaw Milosz has expanded on this dilemma, characterizing it as ãthe awareness that whatever I do is nonsense, although I cannot do anything else, because I am coerced into it by the interhuman reality in which I have found myself. . . .ä This particular mode of futility, writes Milosz, is ãthe very essence of the 20th-century split, common to everyday life in a technological civilization, to participation in mass movements, and to the establishment of terror.ä For both authors, of course, these aspects of modernity have been experienced most vividly within the ever-malleable borders of Poland. It follows that artists, if they are both honest and Polish, cannot be expected to boost morale. ãReading works by Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Mrozek, Borowski, Andrzejewski, and Rozewicz,ä writes Milosz, ãwill not dispose young people favorably toward the world.ä
May we add to this list the films of Andrzej Munk? There arenât that many of them ÷ an absurd death, at 40, saw to that ÷ but the few that he left us can be as lucidly, horribly hilarious as Gombrowiczâs writings. Think of his pictures as searchlights probing the riptides of stupidity that flowed through mid-century Poland.
In Munkâs films we may see the 1944 Warsaw uprising transformed into a Buster Keaton comedy, or Polandâs political convulsions made into so many slapstick blows. Bear in mind that when Munk flung out these sarcasms, as little as a dozen years separated his audience from events that they might have preferred to recall as heroic or momentous. Most amazing, and most disturbing of all: Only 15 years after the liberation of the concentration camps, Munk took his viewers into the mind of a female SS guard, so they could hear her claim that she too had been a true victim of Auschwitz. Talk about the 20th-century split in consciousness. What kind of a man could make these pictures?
The son of an engineer, Andrzej Munk was born in Krakow in 1921 and moved to Warsaw with his family in 1940. Before the war, he frequented student socialist circles, and after he came to Warsaw he joined the resistance. We know that Munk worked throughout the war as a common laborer, but we donât know exactly what he did as a partisan, or how, as a Jew, he negotiated his survival. Our next solid chunk of information comes from 1946, when Munk enrolled in law school and became general secretary of the student socialist organization. When it became evident that he was cut out for neither politics nor law, he enrolled in the new Lodz Film School, as part of the second class to be admitted. After graduating he got a job making newsreels and documentaries and was soon directing his own shorts: Sunday Morning, A Visit to the Old City in Warsaw, Peasantsâ Memories, Railmanâs World (a subject to which he would return). Then, in 1955, Munk wrote and directed his first feature: The Men of the Blue Cross (Blekitny krzyz).
Munk brought to his debut a few touches of sardonic grotesquerie ÷ only a few, but enough to hint at the films to come. And when the filmâs rescue team skies down a snow-covered mountain with a wounded partisan, the movie takes on a lyrical exuberance that is the surest evidence of Munkâs talent. But as a whole The Men of the Blue Cross is standard Soviet bloc fare, full of admiration for the simple, smiling, craggy-faced folk who could defeat fascism and still find time to pose for their close-ups.
The leap between this picture and the next two would be inexplicable, except for the demonstrations and riots that led to a change of government in autumn 1956. Under the milder regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka, it became possible once more for Poles to do such things as read Ferdydurke. The long-suppressed novel was republished in 1957 ÷ the same year as Andrzej Wajdaâs Kanal and two Munk films: the provocative Man on the Tracks (Czlowiek na torze) and the wholly remarkable Eroica.
Written by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, one of Munkâs regular collaborators, Man on the Tracks takes the form of an inquiry, in which unimpeachably sober officials investigate the death of a railroad engineer (Kazimierz Opalinski). After coming under political suspicion, Orzechowski, an elderly martinet with a Hitler mustache, seems to have planted himself in the path of an onrushing night train. Yet, when the witnesses testify ÷ we see their stories as extended flashbacks ÷ the committee comes to understand that the death was not a suicide but an act of selfless professionalism. The disgraced Orzechowski sacrificed himself to prevent an accident.
ãOpen the windows,ä says a weary investigator in the final line, summing up the filmâs political message ÷ which today would be of little more than historical interest were it not for Opalinskiâs beautifully nuanced performance and Munkâs slam-bang direction. When he looked at a railyard, a signalmanâs shack, a station platform, Munk didnât limit his vision to the needs of the polemic. Fascinated by these places, and the people and things that filled them, he allowed their rough energy to overflow the story. With Eroica, that overflow became a chaotic flood. The film begins in August 1944, with partisans practicing their ragtag drill amid an unexplained litter of papers. In the middle distance, black clouds of smoke swirl up from a fire, while closer by÷much closer÷a dive-bomber is swooping down. ãIâm sick of drilling,ä says Dzidzius (Edward Dziewonski), who then takes off for his suburban villa, where he walks in on a cozy chat between his wife and a Hungarian officer. Dzidzius doesnât bother to play the outraged husband. But when the Hungarians declare theyâll switch sides and support the partisans, Dzidzius does agree to act the part of a hero, repeatedly crossing the lines as a courier.
Unfortunately, he lacks the right image for the role. A middle-aged, middle-class wise-ass lounge lizard, Dzidzius hurries back and forth in an increasing state of drunkenness, sometimes pausing to moon over the woman he ought to have married, more often scurrying clear of the sight gags that Munk detonates around him. In its musical effect, Eroicaâs ãPolish scherzoä movement is bracing and outrageous. Then, in the filmâs second half (scored ostinato÷lugubre), the antiheroism turns on itself and becomes mordant. The setting changes to a POW camp, where the soldiers all feel obligated to escape. But that duty, too, proves to be an unattainable ideal, and so the prisoners redouble their confinement, in cells of their own making.
Bad Luck (Zezowate szczescie, 60) picks up approximately where Eroica left off, in a prison that the hapless narrator does not want to leave. To the accompaniment of the wardenâs impatient finger-tapping, the schlemiel Piszczyk (Bogumil Kobiela) explains how he was bullied by his father, bullied by the boy scouts, bullied by the students at university (who mistook him for a Jew due to his long nose). Hoping to make things easier for himself, he joined the right-wing studentsâ organization but then found himself sandwiched between two opposing groups of demonstrators and was beaten by the Communists, the anti-Semites, and the police. On and on drones this Polish Danny Kaye, as we see how he was successively mistaken for a Polish officer, an informant for the Gestapo, a resistance fighter, a black marketeer, and a foreign spy ÷ through no fault of his own, of course.
At around the same time as he made Bad Luck, Munk also directed a television drama titled Passenger (Pasazerka), written by Zofia Posmysz-Piasecka. This story, too, dramatized a characterâs memories of the war years ÷ in this case, the unreliable recollections of a former guard at Auschwitz. Feeling that the television program had not done justice to the subject, Munk decided to dig deeper, and so began what was to be his final and most extraordinary film.
Yet we canât really call it his. While on his way to Lodz in 1961 to film interiors, Munk died in a car accident. His collaborators, led by Witold Lesiewicz, chose to stitch together the material heâd shot, leaving gaps in the story to indicate that they couldnât know Munkâs intentions. As Lesiewicz and his team state in a prologue, they could only pose questions on Munkâs behalf.
These questions center on Liza (Aleksandra Slaska), who is suddenly obliged to recall, and justify, her SS career at Auschwitz. In two separate accounts, which vary in length and plausibility, she bitterly complains of the deprivation she suffered in the camp, and of the abuse inflicted on her by a Polish political prisoner, Marta (Anna Ciepielewska). In one version of the story, Liza struggles to protect the ungrateful Marta. In another, Liza tries to pressure Marta into collaborating. Either way, we donât hear from Marta herself, whose enforced silence raises one of the most central questions in Passenger. Among the others: How is it possible today for a Liza to go about as a ãnormalä person? How could ãnormalä people do what they did back then?
At one point, a plump, ungainly guard climbs onto a roof, where he opens a can of Zyklon-B as casually as if it were motor oil. At another point, a guard permits a doomed child to pet his German shepherd, as if he were at the park. Liza sometimes notices such details. Mostly, though, she absorbs herself in her own routine in the camp, her rancors and ambitions, to the exclusion of the events that crowd in from the margins of the screen. ãIn the vague, unreal background,ä says the narrator, commenting on the mise-en-scène, ãthere are always people dying anonymously, quietly, over whom she walked unseeing.ä
No, this film will not dispose young people favorably toward the world. In theme, it is a portrait of murderous stupidity; in form, it is partially an artifact of Munkâs senseless death. But those who are willing to risk their morale might discover that there is heroism here, too. Marta keeps up her resistance, in a place where resistance would seem futile. And though the narration mostly deprives us of Martaâs voice, we do hear what she says to a fellow inmate who is being publicly humiliated. While everyone else looks away, Marta calls out to the victim, in words that counterbalance that impotent ãHelp! Police!ä
ãKeep your head up!ä she says.
Stuart Klawans is the film critic for The Nation.
© 2002 by Stuart Klawans
