The Andrzej Wajda War Trilogy

Bringing together three seminal early works from Andrzej Wajda, father figure of Polish cinema, this loosely connected ‘War Trilogy’ chronicles the Polish resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. Gruelling and at times unflinchingly pessimistic, Wajda’s raw portraits of disaffected youth photographed in shadowy, noirish monochrome remain the director’s most internationally celebrated works. Wajda’s debut feature A Generation (1954) focuses on the impact that the German invasion had on young Poles, with Tadevsz Lomnicki playing an impressionable Warsaw youth who falls for a beautiful and idealistic resistance leader. The rather blatant agitprop can be heavy-handed at times – soliloquies to Marxist economics abound – but it’s a brilliantly realised depiction of the human cost of war, with gorgeously smudgy, high-contrast camerawork, a spectacularly memorable death scene and a cameo from a very young Roman Polanski to look out for. Kanal (1957), the second film of the trilogy, takes place in the last days of final Warsaw uprising with the Nazis hunting down the few remaining resistance fighters, driven underground into the sewers. A harrowing, intensely claustrophobic descent into hell, the trek through subterranean catacombs is depicted in semi-darkness, a nightmare of black, stinking tunnels with a constant awareness of the inevitability of the characters’ fates. Arguably the greatest in the series is 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds, a dark and gripping account of a young assassin’s disillusionment that made a star out of Zbigniew Cybulski, ‘The Polish James Dean’. A favourite film of Martin Scorsese, who used it as a reference point for Taxi Driver and The Departed, Ashes and Diamonds is obviously the most indebted to Hollywood noirs and the most immediately accessible – blending anti-war agendas with a spy movie pace and a uniquely Polish lyricism. Overall a meaty, rewarding collection, and an excellent introduction to the work of a master. [Laura Smith]