Andrzej Wajda, the Searcher

Rewriting Polish history to fit the rigid notions of Communist propaganda was one of the most dispiriting practices that Wajda confronted in his career, starting in the 1950s. The Poles’ heroic World War II effort included the marginalized anti-Communist underground, the Home Army, and its grossly overpraised Communist counterpart, the People’s Guard. While People’s Guard soldiers were presented in state propaganda as indomitable giants (most notably on a now-infamous 1945 poster by Włodzimierz Zakrzewski), Home Army soldiers were viewed as “sniveling reactionary dwarves.” It was within this political reality, which severely distorted the nation’s memory of itself during wartime, that Wajda had to find a cinematic language that would speak to Poles’ actual hopes and fears.

Throughout his career, even as early as his debut feature, A Generation (1955), Wajda was able to locate that language. Named “the single most important breakthrough in Polish film history” by no less than Roman Polanski, who played a supporting role in it, A Generation embodies Wajda’s struggle to get his films approved by state authorities while also maintaining their subversive potential. Based on a novel by stalwart Communist Bohdan Czeszko, it’s an overt homage to the wartime bravery of the People’s Guard in which the Home Army is mentioned only briefly and unfavorably. But by infusing the film with the youthful energy of its cast, who exude a measure of postwar, proto-hipster cool, Wajda allowed the audience to largely ignore the name of the organization the film was supposedly praising.

The authorities actually did sense the ruse, and the film was barely approved by the state censorship board. At a time when the benchmark of ideologically correct filmmaking was stiff and preachy fare like the then-classic Chapaev (1934), by the Vasilyev brothers, and the more recent The Young Guard (1948), by Sergei Gerasimov, Wajda offered a vision of passionate freedom fighters that eschewed overt ideology and instead connected to the audience’s need to honor those who gave their lives in the war. It’s appropriate that A Generation remained Lindsay Anderson’s favorite Wajda film: the young antischool guerillas in If…. (1968) may even owe something to Wajda’s youngsters, who perish in their fervent struggle against their German foe.

While Wajda’s death inspired a slew of appreciative articles across the globe, it also inadvertently revealed just how selectively his oeuvre is known outside of Poland. There are the obvious landmarks: Kanal (1957), Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Man of Marble (1977), Man of Iron (1981), Danton (1983). There are the lesser-known titles, such as Promised Land (1975) and The Maids of Wilko (1979), both Oscar-nominated but perhaps too cryptic to achieve international acclaim to match their domestic stature. And then there are the obscure films still awaiting proper home video release, many of which contain the key to understanding Wajda’s highly adventurous approach to filmmaking. For Wajda was not as much of a classicist as a movie like Afterimage might indicate.

With the possible exception of Grzegorz Królikiewicz, whose debut feature, Through and Through (1972), remains an underappreciated masterpiece of avant-garde film, Wajda might have been the single most adventurous filmmaker in Polish cinema. Traces of his innovative, restless approach can also be found in his more classical work. Man of Marble not only chronicles the making of a fictionalized documentary film but also includes a number of expertly faked newsreels mixed with actual archival footage. Man of Ironcontains entire sequences documenting the shipyard strikes that occurred in Poland in 1980, all woven into a narrative that both mythologizes and documents the nascent Solidarity movement. Most striking, perhaps, is Pilate and Others (1972), an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita that stages the final hours of Jesus Christ amid the urban spaces of modern Berlin, using the city’s artifacts to evoke wartime violence.

Among the director’s most underseen works, The Conductor, listed by Ingmar Bergman as one of the best films of all time, may be his greatest. Beautifully restored in 2016 but currently unavailable on DVD or Blu-ray, the film tells the story of a young provincial conductor named Adam (Andrzej Seweryn), whose world is shattered by the arrival of a superstar conductor (John Gielgud) revisiting his native Poland after a fifty-year absence. Shot one year after Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal, which also focuses on the act of orchestra conducting as a metaphor for wielding power, the film features captivating rehearsal scenes that tie into Wajda’s fascination with the artistic process. It also stands as one of Wajda’s only portrayals of bitter, unquestionable failure. He was great at endings, and The Conductor contains what may be the most shattering final shot in his entire filmography. As Adam’s wife tells him the truth—that he doesn’t love music, only the social status it affords him—he suddenly realizes his misspent ambition and disappears into darkness, as Wajda and cinematographer Sławomir Idziak blur the image completely out of focus.