A
young man took the stage. He was earnest, pale, and underfed. "We are
about to show you a film."
We
students were excited. Kids love it when class is canceled and the teacher
shows a film.
The
young man continued in that weird English that could be heard only in the old
Soviet Empire. The Iron Curtain guaranteed that its detainees didn't have much
of a chance to converse with outsiders. Those very few people who could speak any
English at all sounded as if they had memorized a purloined dictionary, reverse-engineered
the grammar, and practiced only on Mars.
"Since
you are Americans, you will not understand this movie," the young man
promised, with a familiar resignation. The waiters in the restaurants with no
food; the train station clerks who couldn't sell you a ticket and couldn't
explain why; the librarians whose shelves were off limits: resignation flowed
more reliably than water through the noisy pipes in the student dorm.
"Our
history is peculiar," the young man informed us. We knew. We could
exchange one dollar for fistfuls of Polish money. My Australian roommate,
Kirstin, was about to visit West Germany. My Polish friend, Beata, gave Kirstin
her entire month's salary, so Kirstin could bring back to Beata one spool of
turquoise thread.
The
movie began. Understand it? It swept me away. The 1973 film The Wedding (Wesele) manipulated images so skillfully that it might have been an
amusement park ride. Through every breathtaking twist, The Wedding owned my rapidly beating heart, my flip-flopping guts,
and my spine pressed against the seat.
The
wedding in question was between an urban poet and a peasant. It was a bacchanalia,
with orgiastic flirting, frenzied dancing, and percussive folk tunes, but there
was simmering tension underneath. That juxtaposition – of celebration over the
open mouth of hell – made it impossible for me to look away.
Images
from The Wedding have stayed with me
for forty years. A pretty young partier, her white face slick with sweat, elaborate
red ribbons springing from her coiffure, stares blankly ahead. She holds a
snifter of vodka in her fist, and sausages project out from between her
fingers. She gulps the vodka and rotates her hand to bite off the tips of the
sausages. Such crude power requires no subtitles.
There
is a flashback. Years before, Polish peasants – just like those at this wedding
– had sold Polish aristocrats' heads to Austrian overlords. The Austrians placed
the heads in a wicker basket that bled onto the floor. A peasant whose face was
caked with dirt dipped his hands into a bucket of blood. These memories are
dredged up at the wedding. The poet sneers at his peasant bride. His face
expresses all the hatred the elite feel for the great unwashed they try so hard
to love.
I
wish that I could find that earnest Polish man and tell him. No, I didn't
"understand" The Wedding in
that I had a command of all the facts. I didn't know that Polish nobles sometimes
called serfs, my ancestors, "cattle." I didn't know that in 1900,
poet Lucjan Rydel married a peasant girl as part of an effort to bridge the
divide between the upper classes and the peasants, a rift that Poland's enemies
reliably exploited in divide-and-conquer strategies. Only fifty-four years
before Rydel's wedding, Jakub Szela led an uprising against serfdom, an
uprising that took the lives of a thousand nobles. Austrian colonizers did
purchase the heads of Polish nobility. Peasants brought in so many heads that
the price was lowered from coins to salt.
Rather,
I understood universal tensions. The poet was, in modern parlance, a
well-meaning, politically correct elitist and virtue signaler who "went
native" and tried to paper over tectonic divides with high ideals of
universal brotherhood. The wedding guests struggled to allow the loud music –
the musicians might have been playing "Kumbaya" – to unite them. This
social engineering was doomed. Class conflict could not be mended with one
party – nor, later, with one Party.
Other
images from other films followed, in further visits to Poland and arthouse
movie theaters in the US. In the 1958 film Ashes
and Diamonds (Popiol i diament), a
young patriot shoots a man he is convinced is part of the Communist Russian
takeover of Poland. In fact, the assassin killed the wrong man – definitely
once and possibly twice. Only twenty-four hours later, this assassin meets his inevitable
fate. He is shot in the back. He attempts to hide from his pursuers among
sheets hanging out to dry. His blood soaks through the sheets. I didn't understand
all the implications of Ashes and
Diamonds. I'm still not sure if it's a moral or an immoral movie. I do
understand what I feel when I watch a beautiful young man stain sheets with his
own blood.
In The Promised Land, (Ziemia obiecana) a 1975 film about the Industrial Revolution,
robber barons celebrate while striking workers mass outside their mansions. A rock
crashes through a window. The jagged rock is filmed with such skill and poetry
that it becomes a character in the film. It demands, and gets, the viewer's
full attention. Several moments of subsequent action are filmed from the rock's
point of view. From the rock's perspective, the robber barons are marginalized
and reduced in size. The rock is now in charge.
In A Love in Germany (Eine Liebe in Deutschland, 1983) race theory is demonstrated by
Nazis investigating a Polish slave laborer who has had sex with a German woman.
The Nazis use a tray that contains replicas of human eyeballs. Some eyeballs
are typical of members of the master race; some eyeballs belong to life
unworthy of life. The Pole is proven to be racially inferior. He is executed.
Maximilien
Robespierre was the mastermind of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror,
which took the lives of an estimated 30,000 victims. He was known as "The
Incorruptible." Robespierre, scrupulous gentleman and ruthless mass
murderer, is perfectly captured in brief visual gestures in the 1983 film Danton. Robespierre meets with a former
ally, Georges Danton. Danton, trying to seduce Robespierre and rescue their alliance,
now strained by Robespierre's mass killings, offers him a repast of French
delicacies. The luxurious meal says to Robespierre, "Life can be good.
Kick back and enjoy."
Danton
challenges Robespierre: you want people to perfect, like the characters in
novels. If they are less than perfect, you execute them. You have to love
people as they really are. Danton
fills a goblet level with the brim – a glass impossible to lift without
splashing. By offering this to Robespierre, Danton implies: if you want to
engage with life as it is, you have to get messy.
Robespierre
lifts the brimful glass of blood-red wine, and, defying physics, and exercising
perfect self-control, he manages to sip from it, without spilling a drop. Robespierre
later sends Danton to the guillotine. His head is dropped into a wicker basket
seeping blood, a visual echo from The Wedding.
I delayed
seeing 2007's Katyn. The title
intimidated me – it left no elbow room for what the film would entail. It's like
titling a movie Auschwitz. The bulk
of the film is not spectacular, genocidal bloodletting, but, rather, a focus on
widows and orphans stumbling through the aftermath, women and children who had
no idea what happened to their husbands and fathers. It is not till the final
moments that the eponymous massacre is depicted in cold, efficient scenes. Boxy
Soviet trucks drive across a dirt road in a pine forest. Soviet soldiers open
the back door of one truck; a Polish army officer emerges. The Soviets rapidly
force the Pole's hands behind his back, tie his wrists and neck with rope, walk
him to a mass grave, and shoot him in the back of the head. He falls forward.
The Soviet soldiers walk back to the truck, and pull out another Polish
officer. In the distance one hears shot after shot. This is assembly-line murder.
In
the 1957 film Kanal, filthy and
doomed Warsaw residents fight from sewers. The film's claustrophobia and sense
of defilement gave me nightmares.
And
finally two films that inspired me throughout my life. Man of Marble (Czlowiek z
marmuru, 1976) and Man of Iron (Czlowiek z zelaza, 1981). In Man of Marble a woman filmmaker tries to
tell a story. The Communist government will not allow her to tell her story. Thwarted,
she returns in frustration to her childhood home and curls up on the couch. Her
father, a plump blue-collar worker, listens to her. He tells her, "You
have told your story. You just told me."
The
story she wanted to tell was about a Stakhanovite, a Stalinist hero. I didn't
know the word "Stakhanovite." What moved me so much about this film
was the focus on a woman trying to tell a story, and being thwarted at every
turn. I knew the experience from graduate school in the United States.
Andrzej
Wajda directed all these films. He released artistically and politically relevant
films from 1954 to 2016, the year he died at age 90. Poland, as the earnest man
reminded us, has had a "peculiar" history. In the twentieth century,
it was occupied by European colonialism, as part of the Hapsburg, German and
Romanoff Empires, and by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Wajda lived this
history. His father was
murdered at Katyn. Wajda himself served in the anti-Nazi, underground Home
Army.
No
doubt Poland's "peculiar" history inspired Wajda, but his themes are
universal. He dramatizes the individual against the collective, and against the
tsunami tide of history. Wajda transcribes the conversations idealists have
when they are constructing their Utopias, and Wajda itemizes the price exacted
by those Utopias. Wajda's individuals do not plan to be martyrs, but just by
being who they are, they confront, and often succumb to, the ultimate
sacrifice. In the opening of Ashes and Diamonds, a Pole who has cheated death says to
other Poles who are sick of constant, ideologically-motivated killing, "Today,
tomorrow, or the day after, any one of us could die. Chin up. You have to do your duty while you are
alive. That's the important thing."
I
feel like the above-mentioned earnest young man, the man who wanted to show us
a movie he assumed we didn't want to see, in my attempt to encourage you to see
Wajda's final film. Powidoki,
released in America as Afterimage on
May 19, 2017, tanked at the American box office.
It has brought in only $24,000. There's no love story, no hope, and very few
laughs. And yet for me Afterimage was
a fully satisfying experience, and I want you to see it.
It's
1948. Wladyslaw Strzeminski, a fifty-something painter with international
standing, is teaching a plein air class. Hania, a new student, arrives. She is
dewy and lovely, and carrying a bouquet of daisies. Strzeminski stands above
her on a hill. He is silhouetted against the sky; one can see that he is
missing an arm and a leg. He lost both in WW I. When Strzeminski sees Hania's
arrival, he rolls down the hill to meet her. His adoring students joyously
follow, rolling down after him. Strzeminski delivers a spontaneous lecture. He
tells his students that we see only what we are able to see. After we close our
eyes and look away, an afterimage, opposite in color to what we have seen,
lingers. "Every choice is good," he says, "because it is
yours." His students beam at him. Hania has just developed a crush.
This
is the one moment of joy, freedom, love and success Afterimage allows. Thus, it reverses
the conventional bio-pic narrative arch. Usually we witness an artist's salad
days, being misunderstood, alone, and poor. Eventually the artist is discovered
and the film ends on a triumphant note. Not in the world controlled by Soviet
Communism.
Strzeminski
is in on the floor of his dingy apartment. He is working on a painting when
suddenly the white canvas, and the light in his apartment, turn red. A banner
celebrating Stalin has been raised over his apartment building. Strzeminski punctures
the banner with his crutch. He is arrested.
A
representative of the worker's paradise lectures Strzeminski in a drab office. Historians
frequently debate the question: who was worse: the Nazis or the Soviets? The
Soviets certainly make less stylish cinematic villains. Strzeminski inhabits a purgatory
for artists, where the Communist bad guys all wear bad suits and worse haircuts
and look as if they just chowed down a trough-full of potatoes. Every light
switch is haloed by the grime of hundreds of fingers. Unlike Nazi Germany,
there are no sexy Hugo Boss threads or shiny leather boots in this people's dystopia.
The
Communist reads to Strzeminski. It's a manifesto declaring that the line
between art and politics has evaporated. Art must be used to advance the
workers. Individualistic art that reflects merely the impressions of the artist
is decadent.
Strzeminski
must acknowledge that he wrote those words himself. (Indeed, in 1936, Strzeminski
named his daughter "Jakobina" –
a name shared with French Revolutionaries.) But that was years ago, he says.
His views have changed. With this mention of changing views, we are reminded of
the opening scene. When Strzeminski, the onscreen character, recounts his
theories of vision and art, he is also providing the viewer with program notes
for the movie. Vision, the biological function and the metaphorical mental
process, changes over time. We can never accept one vision as complete.
"Whose
side are you on?" he is asked.
"On
my own side," Strzeminski replies.
The
Communist mixes honey with his vinegar. Join the revolution, Strzeminski is
told. Create art that meets the revolution's needs. You will be rewarded with
money and power.
Confronting
such lures, Strzeminski is implacable. He will continue to create the art that
his own individual vision demands.
Strzeminski
returns to his apartment and his teaching. The naïve viewer might conclude that
that wasn't so bad. Strzeminski wasn't sent to a concentration camp. That is
true. He was not. Under Nazism, Germans had to confront the moral dilemma of
participation in efficient and immediate genocide. In the Soviet Empire, all
you had to do to compromise yourself morally was raise your hand at the same
time as everyone else at a Party meeting, or withhold a bowl of soup, or a tube
of paint, as we shall see.
Another
Communist, this one bald, and more menacing than the first, delivers another
lecture about the role of the artist in the revolution: deviation is verboten. To
understand him, we must remember that Marxism understands itself to be
scientific truth. An artist who creates art that deviates from Marxism's
demands is comparable to a doctor who attempts to treat cancer with snake oil.
That doctor is killing his patient. The non-Marxist artist is poisoning
society.
Back
in class, Strzeminski is delivering a lecture about Van Gogh. We tend to think
of Van Gogh's art as completely subjective. Surely sunflowers and stars don't
look, in real life, the way they look in Van Gogh's paintings. No, Strzeminski
says. Van Gogh's work is an objective record of Van Gogh's impression. Again,
vision, literal or metaphorical, changes over time, and changes depending on
the viewer. This is more than a throwaway observation in a country that has
lived under several different forms of government in the past hundred years.
Strzeminski insists that it is the artist's job to record his own impression.
The vision that springs from his individuality – apart from governing ideology
– is his sacred gift.
The lecture
is disrupted. Strzeminski is fired. The
Neoplastic Room, founded by Strzeminski and containing art by him and his
sculptor wife, Katarzyna Kobro, is "liquidated." A former student is
escaping Poland for Israel. She requests his artworks entitled "To My
Friends the Jews." They were inspired by his witnessing of the Lodz
Ghetto. She takes the artworks to Israel for safekeeping.
If
nothing else, Strzeminski might have been able to comfort himself with the
thought of his disciples, his students, who will carry his work into the
future. No. The Party that could not efficiently deliver consumer goods
delivers betrayal quite expertly. One of Strzeminski's acolytes is pressured to
turn on him by "voting" against him. His other students put on an
exhibition. Thugs arrive before the grand opening and destroy each work of art.
Wajda's camera shoots the empty room of shredded canvas and broken glass. We
hear approaching laughter and high spirits. It is Strzeminski and his young
friends. They reach the door, open it, and witness what the Party has done to
their individualism, their vision. Their laughter dies.
Strzeminski
had created an artwork that the Party might embrace: a mosaic in an
exotic-themed café. Africans labor under colonial oppression. Strzeminski
arrives at the café to see chisels gauging his ceramic images out of the wall.
He is a non-person; his art must be non-art, even if it flatters party
obsessions.
Strzeminski,
though a celebrated artist, had lived a simple life. Every day a plump matron
brought him one bowl of soup and two slices of bread. Late in the film she
arrives, smiling, and ladles his soup into his bowl. He admits that he can no
longer pay. She dumps the soup back into her pot. "We'll talk when you can
pay." She leaves. Strzeminski stares at the bowl. He licks it.
He
takes work creating propaganda posters. He coughs. He is coughing blood. He
wipes the blood on a red rag. The red of the Stalin poster that overwhelmed his
apartment has co-opted, and is now sucking up, his essence. His red blood
disappears into the red rag, as he disappears into the collective.
At
least he can create his own art in his own time – no – he goes to a paint shop,
where he has purchased supplies for years, and the clerk refuses to sell to
him. He is no longer a member of the recognized painters' collective that has
the right to buy paint.
At
least he can escape with a trip to the movies with his young daughter. No. The newsreel
before the film shows Aleksandr Laktionov's Socialist Realist painting, "Into the New
Apartment." A smiling, babushka-clad woman, arms akimbo and a medal on
her chest, gloats over her red-and-gold walled apartment. Her belongings are at
her feet in a knotted rag bundle. Next to her, a Young Pioneer displays a
portrait of Stalin. Strzeminski leaves the theater in disgust.
In
addition to an artist's destruction by the state, Afterimage, in brief, subtle touches, gives us an intimate portrait
of Strzeminski the man. He had been married to a sculptor, but he now has no
contact with Kobro. She dies without his knowledge. Their daughter, going by
the nickname "Nika," is lone mourner at Kobro's funeral. She marches
to the grave in a red coat. Old women chide her. "It's the only coat I
have!" Nika protests. She turns it inside out, displaying the black
lining.
Strzeminski
is angry. Why could he not attend the funeral? "She didn't want you there,"
Nika must inform him.
"I
wanted to bring her blue flowers. She had such blue eyes. Like yours," he
tells his daughter.
"You
too have blue eyes," Nika says.
Strzeminski's
student, Hania, has continued to bring him daisies. These bouquets are an
irritant to Nika, who does not relish sharing her father's affection with an
infatuated student not much older than herself. Nika throws the daisies into
the garbage. The innocence the white flowers represent is discarded.
Strzeminski
is unable to reciprocate Hania's crush. He takes a bouquet, dips it in blue
pigment, and lays it on his wife's grave. An artist, he transforms the blank white
canvas of the white flowers into a blue reflection of his eye, of a love gift
to him into a love gift to another, a gift that emphasizes the bond between
him, his wife, and his daughter. That he must "re-purpose" Hania's
flowers demonstrates his desperate economic plight.
I
asked poet Oriana Ivy
what she thought of Wajda's use of blue. Ivy said, "In Polish 'blue' has
the connotation of 'heavenly' and 'free.' Artists and other exceptional people
can be called 'blue / heavenly birds.' Always said with envy. As my mother
would say, he's the 'lover type, not the husband type.' His kingdom is not
quite of this world. There is also a phrase, 'blue almonds.' It indicates
unrealistic desires about what can't be."
Penniless,
hungry, ill, Strzeminski is hospitalized. His friend, poet Julian Przybos, visits
him. Przybos had joined the Polish Workers'
Party. Przybos has medicine. The doctor is shocked. "Where did you get
medicine?" he asks. "In Switzerland," Przybos responds. As a Party
member and diplomat, he travels to the West, and purchases medicine that a Pole
in Poland could not access. The doctor informs Przybos that it is the right
medicine, but it is too late. Even so, Przybos says to Strzeminski, "I
envy you. Through everything, you have remained yourself. You produce art that
is a reflection of your individuality."
Strzeminski
makes a final attempt to work. He will become a clothing store's window
dresser. He makes a few attempts with naked, disjointed mannequins. He is overcome
and collapses in a clutter of plastic arms and legs. Shoppers passing by the
window do not notice him. An artist whose art it became a crime to display, a
man missing an arm and a leg, dies on display, but without witnesses.
Wajda
was himself a student in Lodz at the time of Strzeminski's persecution. There
is a statue in Afterimage that looks
very like the Stakhanovite statue at the center of Man of Marble. One has to wonder if Afterimage was not a very personal project for Wajda.
I find
it hard to explain to Americans that though I lived in countries in Africa and
Asia that are among the poorest in the world, I found Soviet-era Poland to be
more depressing. In Africa, people had the sense that they could change their
fate through their own choices. In Poland, I felt as if some behemoth was
attempting to suffocate souls, and every breath was a heroic act of defiance.
In visits to Poland and Czechoslovakia, my parents' homelands, I met men like
Strzeminski. These were brilliant, ambitious men who had been erased by the
state. They could not publish or have contact with their professional peers. They
conversed with me, an American teenager, with the urgency of the wrongfully
damned pleading their case to Dante. I rarely talk about these men because I
know that most people would not begin to understand. I am intensely grateful to
Andrzej Wajda for creating Afterimage. This
is not a depressing film; it is a masterful, sympathetic evocation of one
individual who, as Przybos said, never surrendered his individuality.
Boguslaw
Linda's performance as Strzeminski is seamless. One sees no acting, only
Strzeminski. Bronislawa Zamachowska, who, at only 13, played Nika, brings an
astounding emotional gravity to her part and great heart to the film. Zofia
Wichlacz's beautiful, unguarded face perfectly captures Hania's young, doomed,
obsessive love. Krzysztof Pieczynski, as Julian Przybos, communicates the
decency, craftiness, and regret of the man who played his cards right in a bad
situation.
I
want to show Afterimage to Bernie
Sanders' supporters who like to chant, "Free college!" Free college,
like free everything, has a hidden cost. This film depicts one potential cost.
This
essay first appeared at FrontPageMag here
