The Art of Memory:

Andrzej Wajda's War Trilogy

by Stuart Liebman

ttentive viewers of Andrzej Wajda's helped him stay at the outer, though still

A remarkable first feature, A Genera-

tion, will be struck about midv/ay
through the film by a scene thiU pointedly
acceptable, margins of political orthodoxy.
Wbat is so striking is that the young director
is already able to use the only recently
recalls, even as it distinctively glosses, a his- learned tools of his medium to biur tbe
toric moment of Poland's tortured wartime imposed ideological constraints. Wajda
experience once evoked by the great Polish arrives in his debut feature as a filmmaker
poet Czeslaw Milosz in his unforgettable thinking outside the prevailing esthetic
"Campo dei Fiori" (1943). canons of Socialist Realism. And doing so
enables him to reconfigure the image be
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori shapes into a pregnant semantic field that
in Warsaw hy the sky-carousel vivifies tbe history undergirding the scene in
one clear spring evening a way Milosz might have endorsed as kin-
to the strains of the carnival tune. dred in spirit to bis own expressive effort.
The bright melody drowned How much this scene owes to Wajda's
the salvos from the ghetto wall, first great cinematographer. Jerzy Upman,
and couples were flying bimself a Polish Jew and thus hardly indif-
high in the cloudless sky. ferent to the symbolic weight of the
moment, is unclear. In any case, the two evi-
The deep irony of these compact lines dently agreed to approach the scene indi-
expresses the poet's shock at the incongru- rectly. The carousel and another carnival
ous juxtaposition of thoughtless Poles hav- ride on which couples swing dizzily in and
ing fun, while only blocks avt'ay the out of tbe frame to the strains of a primitive
Wehnnacht was exterminating their Jewish organ, are initially shot obliquely from a low
compatriots during the Warsaw Ghetto Andrzej Wajda during the filming angle against a cloudless sky troubled only at
Uprising of late April 1943. Wajda's han- of Ashes and Diamonds (1958). the horizon by the acrid black smoke billow-
dling of the scene, also set in the fairground ing from the ghetto's ruins a stone's throw
at the foot of the Ghetto walls, is rooted in a away. Before any of the plot unfolds, that is,
similar irony. His ostensible hero Stach, a patriot, Wajda, knew the little scene's poli- the powerfully ambiguous perspectives in
juvenile delinquent from a lumpenproletari- tics grossly exaggerated the communists' the composition already tell us we are in the
at milieu turned communist resistance efforts. Yet their presence speaks volumes midst of a world gone awry. Only after he
tighter, iissembles a group of about the twenty-scven-year-old director's establishes an uncanny space, both familiar
like-minded Polish youths to and yet somehow estranged
plan the rescue of their older from itself, does Wajda bave
comrade now fighting along- Poland experienced some of its darkest hours the camera smoothly pan
over to the little band as the
side the beleaguered Jews,
even as their fellow citizens
during World War II. Illumination of that conspiracy takes shape. Tbe
ride the carousels and period comes from a new Criterion Collection accent falls less on political
myth-mongering than on the
swings, indifferent to the
awful human tragedy so close
DVD box set that brings together the three creation of a bravura exercise
at band that they can smell as classic films in Andrzej Wajda's 'war trilogy/ du style by an astonishingly
well as watch it. confident young artist.
Not all the scenes in Wajda's first major
Unlike Milosz, who focuses on a grim, humanistic concerns as well as the compro- directorial effort are as effective as this one,
contradictory present without political mises be. like so many postwar Polish and yet seeing A Generation again after many
resolve, however, Wajda transports us into a Bast Huropean artists, were obliged to make years confirms bow mucb Wajda. trained as
postwar mytb that the Communist rulers of with the powers that held his homeland in a painter, was esthetically alert and open to
Poland strenuously insisted upon to their thrall. Even here, however, at the the examples of other film artists. First
enhance their credentials as the principal beginning of his long and complex career in among these influences was Eisenstein,
Polish group to have resisted the German the Polish People's Republic. Wajda proved whose compositional style intrigued Wajda
occupiers and to claim, not entirely incor- to be no mere political mouthpiece for the enough to publish an essay about it while
rectly, the bigh ground in the struggle communists. He may have been obliged to still a student. Other eye-openers for Wajda
against anti-Semitism before, during and— adopt the party's take on tbe recent history were the first films of Orson Welles and the
despite the panicked (light of the moiority of of his long-suffering native land, hut a Italian ncorealists who, as Andre Bazin
Polish lewry between 1946 and 1950—after canny sense of political tact as well as his use noted iit the time, were committed to stag-
the war as well. Like every other Polish of the mediutn to blunt the script's impact

42 CINEASTE, Winter 2006

Left to right, Urszula Modrzynska, Janusz Paluszkievt/tcz and Tadeusz Lomnicki star as members
of the anti-Nazi resistc nee in occupied Warsaw in Andrzej Wajda's WWII film, A Generation (1955).
ing in depth and the graphic, dramatic, and
symbolic potential of foreground/back-
ground contrasts. Such effects, occasionally
augmented by Wajda's carefially orchestrat-
ed camera movements, often transform the
conventional patches of Bobdan Czeszko's
script into something, at least visually excit-
ing to watch. From ihe very beginnings of
his career, Wajda's films would reward
viewers who scrutinized his images as closely
as they followed the plot.
A Generation's conversion narrative is at
least as old as Gorky's novel The Mother
(later memorably filr.ied by Pudovkin) and
stumbles to a sentimental halt during
Stach's brief love affair with Dorota, the
fearless youth leader of the communist resis-
tance group be joins. Alternately serious and
sunny. Dorota is a Socialist-Realist cliche,
redeemed somewhiit by actress Urszula
Modrzynska's commitment to tbe role and
Wajda's subtle use of off-screen sound and a
musical leitmotif in his restrained handling
of her capture by the Gestapo. Auteurists,
moreover, will be pleased to see in this failed
relationship anticipations of the doomed
affairs in Kanal as well as the most famous
breakup in all of V\'ajda's films, tbat of
Maciek and Krystyna in Ashes and Dia-
monds. In any case, Wajda had the good
sense to surround tbe stolid Stach witb a
number of more vivid characters, both
major and minor, wbo time and again steal
Andrzej Wajda: Three War Films
DVD's Reviewed in This Article
A Generation
Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written by Bohdan
Czeszko; cinematography by (erzy t.lpman; starririg
Tadeusz Lomnicki, Urszula Modrzynska, Tadeu.sz
lanczarand Roman PolanskL DVD, B&W. 87
mins., Polisb dialoi; with i:n[!lish subtitles, I9n3.
Kanal
Directed by Andrzej Wajda; written by Jerzy Stefan
Stawinski; cinematograpby by lerzy Lipman and
Jerzy Woicik; starring Teresa Izewka and Tadeusz
lanczar. DVD. B&W. 96 mins.. Pnlisb dialog witb
EiipUnh subtitles, 1937.
Ashes and Diamonds
Directed hy Andrzej Wajda; written by ]eriy
Andrzejewskj and Andrzej Wajda; cinematograpby
by lerzy Wbjcik; starring Zbigniew Cybulski, Ewa
Krzyzewska. Wadaw Ziistrzezynski. Adam Paw-
likowski and Bogumil Kobicla. DVD. B&W. 103
mins.. Polish dialog with English subtitles, 1958. A
Criterion C'oliection three-disc box-set DVD
release, distributed by Image fintertainment,
w\\'vv. image-entertain ment.com.
the show. The film's true emotional center is
lasio Krone, like Stach a young factory
apprentice, who, though be claims he is a
communist, at first vacillates about his com-
mitment, rationalizing that he needs the
security of a well-paying job working for a
factory supplying the German Army to care
for his father. Only after his fear and latent
anti-Semitism lead him lo turn away
Abram. a former friend escaped from tbe
burning ghetto, thereby forcing him out
into the night and almost certain ticath. does
lasio feel sufficient sbame to join Stach's
resistance celt. (Wajda would later elaborate
on their haunting exchange in the film,
Samson (1961), based on a Kazimierz
Brandys script.) Jasio eventually dies dra-
matically, throwing himself down a twisting
stairwell when the Germans close in on him
after the successful rescue of tlie senior com-
munist leader Sekula from the burning ghet-
to. Played by Tadeusz Janczar in his first
major screen role. lasio—ambivalent about
lews, alternately cowardly and flamboyantly
hrave—is a far more honest and engaging
portrait of a Polish Everyman during World
War II than are the more unconvincingly
noble Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki} and Sekula
(JanuszPaluszkiewicz).
CINEASTE, Winter 2006 43
 overtly celebrate the communists' coming to
power in Poland —although he, in a nod to
the regime, does take some obligatory
swipes at the communists' chief rivals, the
right-wing nationalist Home Army forces,
which figure in different, and hardly com-
plimentary, ways in all three films.
The three films differ stylistically as well,
although perhaps less than some critics have
maintained. Though the time spans covered
are progressively reduced, Wajda's unre-
stricted narrational style continues to
explore multifaceted plots, jumping from
one story line to the next as he develops
character contrast and suspense. Consistent,
too, is his intense mapping of movements
through carefully t)rgimized frames. That is
not to say there is no development from film
to film. Even a casual viewer can observe
Wajda's growing boldness as he progressive-
ly inserts charged symbolic objects into the
mise-en-sc^ne, culminating, in Ashes and
Diamonds, in the unexpected appearance of
the famous white horse, the inverted crucifix
Home Army Lieutenant Zadra (Wienczyslaw Glinski) prepares to lead his men into
in a bombed-out church, and Zbignicw
Warsaw's sewer system to escape Nazi troops in Kana/11957) (photo courtesy of Photofestl. Cybiilski's feral death throes on a vast heap
of rubble. If over the later course ot his work
such symbols have at times seemed arbitrary
For a Polish film, initially commissioned handsomely coupled them with Pokolenie and intrusive, in the.se early films they are
for the tenth anniversary of the communist and the rarely seen student short. Ceramics still fresh, suggestive, and slightly mysterious.
takeover (and then rejected once it was from Ilza, in a fine new boxed set. All are
complete), to feature, however briefly, anti- presented in their original aspect ratios, and
Semitic Polish workers in the factory or the all, happily, are cleaner and finer grained t is hard for me to evaluate Kanal objec-
mass of lumpenproietariat in the shanty than any that have appeared in video or
town Stach lives in, required of Wajda equal DVD format before. The three features are I tively for it was precisely Wajda's second
feature, seen nearly forty years ago, that
degrees of candor and courage. Like the often referred to as Wajda's 'war trilogy,' convinced me that films could be worthy of
minor characters, these secondary plot lines and in this case the tag is not merely a mar- the kind of protracted attention I had devot-
not only help to flesh out the main narra- keting gimmick. Taken together, they repre- ed to other art forms. Even more than the
tive, they also convey the knight playing chess on a
edgy, angst-ridden iitnn)s- beach with a white-faced,
phere ot German-occupied "Small, gruesome details, so casually or black-robed figure represent-
Warsaw. Some of Wajda's
most telling revelations are
briefly present in the background of shots ing death, or the conflicted,
aimless, uncommitted haute
not narrativized at all, but that they might be overlooked, have the bourgeoisie at work and play
conveyed through what
might be thought of as visual
ring of historical truth. They are the mark in contemporary Italy, I
prized Wajda's doomed
asides. The fairground scene of a young director in control of what resistance fighters who could
is certainly one example. he wants to say artistically as well as find no exit from the sewers
Another has an exuberant of Warsaw. For me, they
Stach driving a horse-drawn politically about Poland's recent history." were clearly more genuine
wagon through the Warsaw existential heroes or anti-
streets only to be brought up short before a heroes than those in the work of other
sent the period of Poland's darkest hours in
group of lews at forced labor marching to vaunted contemporary directors; they were
modern times with remarkable intensity'. A
work as they are being beaten by Jewish also more deeply embedded in the real
Generation focuses on the months between
police. Or consider the telling moments world of recent history and politics that
September 1942, when the brutal occupa-
when lasio walks to the factory past a row of intrigued me then as now. When Kanal
tion was firmly in place, until the collapse of
men hung from lampposts while a German shared a prize at Cannes with Bergman's
the Ghetto revolt in early May 1943. The
officer takes souvenir photos. More than the The Seventh Seal, Wajda was almost imme-
time span of Kanal narrows to the fifty-sixth
plot itself, these small, gruesome details, so diately propelled into the pantheon of art
and fifty-seventh day of the Polish national
casually or briefly present in the background film directors like Bergman, Antonioni, and
uprising that commenced on August 1, 1944.
of shots that they might be overlooked, have Fellini. This was fast company indeed for a
Finally, the celebrated Ashes and Diamonds
the ring of historical truth. They are the representative of a cinema culture correctly
concentrates on a sin^e day. May 8, 1945, when
mark of a young director in control of what regarded as provincial for the first fifty years
the Germans surrendered in Berlin, as it turns
he wants to say artistically as well as politi- of its existence. To Wajda's credit, he has
into the morning after, the first day of a
cally about Poland's recent history. consistently remained productive—though
peace that brought, for Poles, anything but.
not always a.s artistically convincing—-
Wajda's next two films, Kanal and Ashes F.ach film represents only an episode in the
despite radical shifts in the party line and
and Diamonds, confirmed his directorial larger canvas of Poland's riven history dur- even since the communist party has been
promise and established his worldwide rep- ing and after the shattering war against the transformed beyond recognition after tbe
utation a half century ago. The routinely Germans. No obvious ixjliticat theme or stance demise of the U.S.S.R.
excellent Criterion Collection has now unites them all. Certainly Wajda does not

44 CINEASTE, Winter 2006

 Wajda once astutHy remarked that many
of his films have been "an extension of a
lack in my biography." Such is the case with
Kanal, which is not about canals at all. The
title simply means 'sewer' in Polish. (Dis-
tributors worldwide were canny enough to
leave it in linguistic limbo since translating
it would bardly have helped sell the movie.)
In fact, fully half tht film takes place in the
nebulous realms under the streets of war-
ravaged Warsaw. That is because the story,
based on the all tco real experiences of
scriptwriter Jerzy Stawinski—experiences
that Wajda, although himself a member of
the Home Army, d.d not share—^rcvolves
around the ignominious end of a band of
partisans just before the utter collapse of the
Polish 1944 uprising. The plot provides a
guiding thread for a trenchant, at times bit-
ter, suite of character studies. Janczar plays
lasio, a fastidious dt ndy (in one of his first
scenes, we see him getting water for a shave
during a lull in the fighting); he is aloof to
the appeal of the earthy but very beautiful
Daisy (Teresa Izewsl^a) who trudges through
the sewers each day bearing messages to the
dispersed partisan units. (She smells, he
says.) 'Wise' (Emil F^arewicz), the physically
imposing second-in command, has hooked
After emerging from their long ordeal, only to discover that he has lost his entire company. Lieutenant Zadra
(Wienczyslaw Glinsk ) descends back into the sewers at the moving conclusion of Andrzej Wajda's Kanal.
up with a brave teenage partisan, Halinka
(Teresa Berezowska), n^lectii"^ to tell her, how-
ever, that he is already married The composer
Midhal (Wbdyslaw Sheybal) Is obviously unused
to combat; shaken by the capture of hisfamily,he
feels unmoored and artistically unfertile.
Only in the eery light of the sewers V^TU he find
inspiration...and then go mad. Leading them
ail is Zadra (Wienczyslaw Glinski), devoted to his
men despite what he knows to be the Home
Army's hopeless, foolhardy struggle against
the Germans' overwhelming power. Already
legends in Polish popular mythology, these
kinds of flawed men earned Wajda's sympa-
thy even as he has insisted that he disagreed
with their misguided, romantic effort to lib-
erate the country from the Nazi yoke.
We meet this band in Kanar^ impressive
first shot, a long take with powerful graphic
impact, as the partisans curl down from the
horizon to be picked up by a protracted
tracking camera that concentrates first on
one, then another, of the characters. (The
excellent extended interview with Wajda on
the disc makes it clear that credit for this
famous shot should be attributed primarily
to Janusz Morgenstern, Wajda's assistant
director, who first mapped it out. ThroLighout,
Wajda is consistently generous to his many
creative coworkers.) A voice-over, added to
the script during production, introduces
each and makes clear that they are not going
to survive. For the rest of the film, we are
thus led to focus on how, and not whether,
the characters will die, and on their physical
and mental anguish as they struggle under
the extraordinary circumstances in which
they perish. Soon trapped in a villa under
siege and faced with the imminent threat of
capture, the partisans' only hope is to escape
through the subterranean realm of laby-
rinthine tunnels under the city.
Wajda's contemporary, .^ndrzej Munk,
had turned down the directorial assignment,
convinced that filming in SLich an environ-
ment was impossible. But Wajda had been
mentored by Aleksandcr Ford, then one of
the most powerful figures in the state-con-
trolled Film Polski, whose Bonier Street
(1948) and The Boys from Barski Street
(1954) had demonstrated how sewers could
be exploited for exceptional visual effects.
Wajda, seconded by his able Director of
Cinematography Lipman and cameraman
Jerzy Wojcik accepted the challenge.
Once descended into what the composer,
alluding to Dante, calls hell, the band splin-
ters into three groups. We follow each in
CINEASTE, Winter 2006 45
 nly the cultural thaw that followed

O the return of the less hard-line com-

munist Wladyslaw Gomulka to
power permitted Wajda's at least partially
positive image of Home Army veterans onto
Polish movie screens. Waida had deftly
managed to avoid rehabilitating their strate-
gic decisions even as he accorded to them a
kind of dignity consonant with Polish public
opinion about their valor. Ashes and Dia-
monds deepened this critique. Jerzy Andrze-
jewski adapted his famous novel of the same
name by radically condensing its time span,
and focusing the plot on the assassin Maciek
Chelmicki, a character dazzlingly invented
by Zbigniew Cybuiski in unquestionably the
greatest role of his movie career. The story
begins as an appalling black comedy when
two extreme right-wing killers ((^iybulski
and Andrzej Pawlikowski), ironically sleep-
ing on the grass beside a roadside chapel,
awake to an accomplice's (Bogumil Kobiela)
excited cries as their intended victims
approach. They have been assigned to kill
Szczuka, the new regional communist party
Home Army gunmen Maciek (Zbigniew Cybuiski) and Andrzej {Adam Pawlikowski) carry out a leader, and despite a certain maladroitness,
political assassination in Ashes and Diamonds [1958) (photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection). they manage to murder two men. Unfortu-
nately, neither is Szczuka. Their failure pro-
tandem as they grope forward in the near a grand piano, goes mad, but finds inspira- pels the rest of the main plot. Charged with
total darkness toward an exit that only tion in the eerie echo effects of the sewers, murdering a man he does not know, Maciek
Zadra eventually manages to find. Wajda which he transforms into a tuneless tune on must weigh his political loyalties against the
demonstrates considerable compositional a humble ocarina. Squad leader Zadra alone possibilities raised by what he least expected
ingenuity in the sewers. He resorts to closer finds his way to freedom, but cannot accept to find in this treacherous, war-ravaged
shots, primarily of faces and bodies, strik- personal survival when he learns that his place: love. His failure to resolve the tension
ingly composed by varying the filming men have failed to follow him. He shoots between these two alternative paths conspic-
angles. Space becomes chokingly claustro- the group's record keeper ('Bullet') who has uously stands as a microcosm for the failed
phobic; the lighting, consistently low key, deceived him about the squad's where- hopes of political reconciliation and the
becomes increasingly phantasniagorical, as abouts, and then descends into the darkness rebirth of love in postwar Poland.
beams from the mens' flashlights and light as Bullet's meticulously kept documents
pouring down widely spaced air shafts play swirl in the dust amid the ruins of the Polish Maciek's one-night stand with the hotel
across the sewer vapors and reflect off the capital. barmaid Krystyna, offers hope that he may
running streams of sewage. Any sense of
time and direction is suspended for the
viewers as much as for the characters. The
camera movements emphasize their exer-
tions and signal the incipient madness that
will overcome some of them. In the last
shots, these movements underscore the
characters' closed horizons with a fierce
irony. As Daisy cradles the dying Jasio, no
longer able even to open his eyes, in her
arms, she comforts him with visions of light,
air, and freedom to come while the camera
tilts up and away to the other bank of the
Vistula River, forever beyond their reach,
through the bars sealing the sewer outlet.
Indeed, irony is Wajda's preferred trope
throughout Kanal. The meticulous Jasio dies
almost happily in the filth hecause he has
finally allowed himself to be enfolded in
Daisy's love. Wise and Halinka. however,
apparently so much in love at the beginning,
break down in the sewers, less from the
strain of finding their way out than from
Wise's dishonesty about being married. As
soon as she finds out, the girl kills herself
and, profoundly shaken. Wise shortiy there-
after surrenders and meekly submits to a
German firing squad. The classically trained
Maciek (Zbigniew Cybuiski) and barmaid Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska) spend the night
composer, earlier incapable of invention on togetber in a seedy, small-town botel in Ashes and Diamonds (photo courtesy of Photofest).

46 CINEASTE, Winter 2006

Krystyna and Maciek visit a bombed-out church in >ls/ies and Diamonds (photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection).
yet pull back tVom his mission, marry the
girl and live happily ever after. Although the
script significantly turtails this aspect of the
novel, Szczuka is aha on a persona! mission:
to reclaim his son whom he has not seen
during his years of exile abroad and who, in
his absence, has been swept up into the
right-vi'ing nationalist and markedly anti*
Soviet cause. But Maciek's love affair is as
doomed as Szxzuka's efforts to redeem his
son. None of tbe characters' hopes can be
realized; each is faied to play to the end a
role for which he or she bad been destined.
Maciek will bave to pull tbe trigger tbat will
end Szczuka's life, and tbis will, in turn,
force bim to abandon Krystyna, canceling
ber opportunity to Ind a way out of tbe dis-
eased polity symbc'iized by the guests at a
raucous banquet beld in tbe botei. Tbe dev-
astating picture of ihe messy, violent incon-
gruities of postwar Poland is pointedly
embodied in tbe bigbly stylized polonaise
tbe local notables dance to music provided
by some tipsy anc! out-of-key musicians
cross cut witb Maciek as be makes a fatal
mistake when be atiempts to flee from Russ-
ian soldiers. Tbinking tbat be bas a gun (he
bad tbrown it away after murdering Szczu-
ka), tbey shoot him. Maciek dies like a dog
on a vast patch of rubble, wbile tbe botcl
concierge unfurls a Polisb tlag and walks out
into tbe new dav^'n. Then, as now, the his-
torical judgment rendered by tbis image is a
bit over tbe top, but remains surprisingly
resonant all tbe same.
Maciek is tbe riveting center of tbe
movie, and Wajda gave tbe notoriously
independent Cybuiski great latitude in inter-
preting the part. "Wben I was making Ashes
and Diamonds." WiXj&a writes in bis surpris-
ingly pallid memoir. Double Vision, "if I had
spent my time teacbing or telling Cybuiski
bow be should act in front of tbe camera,
instead of watcbing bim witb wonder and
admiration, I would bave spoiled one of tbe
great opportunities of my life. For in tbe
final analysis, if you want to create some-
thing more original, something tbat sets
your film apart from all tbe others, you've
got to let your colleagues—t'spec/n//>'the
actors—sdevelop their own style in complete
freedom." Was Wajda, perhaps, too lack-
adaisical, too permissive? Are Cybulski's
very 195O's tigbt jeans, army jacket, and
dark shades too inexplicably anachronistic?
Is tbe actor's buncbing and grimacing too
awkwardly incongruous? I tbink tbe answer
to tbese questions is no. Maciek is a carefully
constructed maudit tlgure, deliberately out
of synch with those around bim; tbus, bis
clothes (help to) make the man. His posture
and at times impulsive gestures tbrougbout
the movie, moreover, are a slow-motion
rehearsal for his desperate run before dying
at tbe end. Today, moreover, bis pbysical
dynamism seems to fit into a calibrated
ensemble of extrovert shticks tbat define
many of tbe other characters. (See in partic-
ular Cybulski's tbeatrical colleague Kobiela's
antics as the mayor's opportunistic assistant
Drewnowksi.) Wajda wa;; right. Letting
Cybuiski loose created a charisma around
bis troubled, indecisive, ultimately tragic fig-
ure tbat tbe passage of the decades bas not
dimmed.
Paul Coates's searcbing sbort essay and
Annette Insdorfs insigbtful running com-
mentary reminds us bow tigbtly structured
Ashes and Diamonds is botb dramatically
and imagistically. Tbe same, certainly
sbould be said of Kanal if not entirely of A
Generation. Indeed, tbese films are so care-
fully constructed, so obviously 'well-made,'
tbat they may seem to insist—too much, at
least for contemporary tastes grown up on
far less demanding, serious and issue-orient-
ed fare—on their status as works of art with
a capital A. But none of tbese most impor-
tant of Wajda's works is a cinematic
dinosaur, worthy only of museal status.
Alert young filmmakers not addicted to the
banal formulas of contemporary industrial
cinema can still mine them for ideas, as
Godard did early in bis career wben be
abstracted and extended tbe lovemaking
scene between Maciek and Krystyna in Une
femme mariee or borrowed tbe rubble-
strewn landscape of Ashes and Diamonds as
tbe setting for Les Carabiniers. •
CINEASTE, Winter 2006 47