Rough treatment

The film that Ukrainians have heard and read so much about was screened first in Kharkiv and then in Kyiv, on April 16 and 17. Katyn is the latest film by the legendary Andrzej Wajda, a classic of the Polish and international cinema.

Wajda is an extraordinary personality, who is still actively involved in culture at the age of 82. He directs films (including for television) and theater productions. One of his latest plays is The Possessed (also known as The Devils and The Demons), which is based on the novel by Fedor Dostoevsky and now on stage at Moscow’s Sovremennik Theater. He also writes books (his autobiography, entitled Cinema and the Rest of the World, was published in Kyiv four years ago in a translation by Vira Avksentieva), and he is the founder of the School of Film Directing.

“COULD I HAVE ACCEPTED THIS?”

In his autobiography Wajda writes: “Who brought me up? My parents: military traditions of honor and duty, my father in a uniform buttoned up to the neck. School: a classical gymnasium, ancient Greek and Roman culture. The Catholic Church: God’s truth. With this patriotic and moral worldview I went to war in 1939. What did I see? That it is completely unnecessary to declare war because it is more productive to attack the enemy by surprise — therefore, deceit prevails. That nobody defends the vanquished, and the weak must die, and you can plan on wiping out entire nations, not just your political enemies. That military campaigns and propagandistic slogans can be the only gain of a winner. I saw that Roman law and the values of the Mediterranean culture had lost their value. Could I have accepted this without taking into account this experience when I began making films?”

Wajda was a priori primed for a conflict with the system that emerged in mid-20th-century Europe and which — this was a discovery made by Wajda and the Polish school of cinematography in general — was not too changed by the terrible and sudden reversals in the confrontation between the two totalitarian regimes — Stalin and Hitler’s — perhaps because one of them survived and is still bucking and spitting out its devilish bile. For its descendants and followers, the collapse of the USSR is “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century” — not the Jewish Holocaust, not the Ukrainian Holodomor, and not the tragedy of the Russian people to whom so many “technologies” were applied, which only fueled their imperialistic illusions.

The Polish school of cinematography, one of whose founders was Wajda, carried inside itself a “moral anxiety,” a terrible fear for the destiny of the Poles and all of humankind, which does not want to be better, despite everything. “We believed,” the film director writes in his autobiography, “that people in various countries and continents would become friends and allies once they saw themselves in the movies. However, the world is seriously ill and even if you give it new toys, as if it were a child, it will not recover. In the evening cinemas screen more and more new films, but the hope that the world will understand its mistakes and find a common path to happiness has disappeared somewhere.” It has indeed disappeared because, instead of moral anxiety, over and over again we see the undisguised propaganda of cynicism and moral perversion, and filmmakers are increasingly often trying to persuade us that the road to a private paradise lies through deceit and the flouting of all written and unwritten moral commandments and standards. Ukraine practically has no cinema of its own, and what it has either does not reach moviegoers or is morbidly interested in making sure that, God forbid, the cinema will portray Ukrainians and Ukrainian realities on the screen.

Meanwhile, television is making up for this by showing a wide range of manifestations of dishonor as models of behavior. Wajda’s oeuvre is the best proof that whoever is indifferent to the destiny of his own people will never be interesting to the world at large.

The distinguished Polish director made his first film, Generation, in 1954. His next two movies, Canal (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), propelled the director to fame, especially the latter one, which shows the existentialist problem of choice that Zbigniew Cybulski’s hero faces. Years later Yurii Illienko would present a similar situation based on recent Ukrainian history in the film White Bird with a Black Mark starring Bohdan Stupka in the role of a man who tries to solve an insoluble problem. Wajda does not agree with Jean-Paul Sartre, the founder of existentialism, who said that “hell is other people.” Yet this can also happen, and the way out of hell is only through the death of a loner.

Moral anxiety never left Wajda: not in 1969, when he made Everything for Sale, about transformations within the artistic community, not in 1978, when he made the film Rough Treatment depicting the Polish elite in its true colors. His dilogy consisting of Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (Palme d’Or at the 1981 Cannes Festival) is an outstanding example of an individual’s resistance to the system in spite of a rather contradictory artistic result. The impression is, however, that Wajda seldom harbors illusions about the ability of films to make a decisive impact on the life of society. You may think that everything has changed and you have also played a part in this, but then suddenly you realize that those who benefited the most from the revolution are in fact the very people against whom you had fought (like the history of our glorious Orange Revolution).

The Polish director seems to turn most often to the works of Fedor Dostoevsky, and it is clear why: the same “anxiety” torments Dostoevsky’s heart and soul, forcing him over and over again, both in dreams and in reality, to play out the terrible situations that crop up in life. Seeking a common denominator for the stage production of The Possessed, Wajda directed attention to the epigraph to the novel. Christ exorcises the devils out of the possessed. They ask for permission to be turned into a herd of swine and in this form they plunge from a steep cliff into a lake. Those “mad boars possessed by evil spirits are the characters in the novel, and in their breathtaking ante- mortem race I found the most important instruction that I, as the director, wanted to put across to the actors.”

It is the age-old dream of man that this “army” will assume its true swinish face and grace us with their departure forever. But all you have to do is switch on the TV and see the pigs’ race going on, the only difference being that these pigs don exquisite suits and speak exclusively about our “well-being” and “morality” (without anxiety, of course) that they are bestowing on us.

WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

Wajda admits that for many years he was thinking about making a film about the Katyn tragedy. This is one of the 20th century’s most horrible tragedies, when Soviet security forces shot tens of thousands of captured Polish officers in 1940 in Katyn, near Smolensk. Who is still ranting about the “humanism” of the Soviet system and the universal “wisdom” of Comrade Stalin? This is called fascism in plain and easy-to-grasp language. It is high time for those who are still carrying red flags and the portraits of mustachioed leaders to define their priorities.

Wajda’s father Captain Jakub Wajda perished in the Katyn forest. There was no information about him, and to her dying day the film director’s mother cherished the hope that her husband would come home. The burial site was discovered in 1943 by the Germans, who widely publicized this atrocity. Later, Soviet propaganda shifted the blame to the German army. This lie is still promoted to this day: there was no such atrocity, we don’t know.

Today Wajda knows practically everything there is to know about this tragedy. He knows that almost corpse had a bullet hole in the back of the skull because the officers stood facing the woods (where they expected to see the killers), with their backs to the fence from behind which the shots were fired. He knows that German-made weapons were used because these were the weapons the Germans had “shared” with the Soviets after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and so on. Even a date is known: on March 5, 1940, Stalin approved Lavrentii Beria’s idea of executing the Polish military elite.

The characters in the two-hour-long film Katyn only have first names, no surnames. Wajda explains that he was afraid of coincidences. Too many people are still waiting for some concrete information about their relatives. But this is not the whole story: surnames would have robbed the story of its parable-like nature. These people were driven into a situation from which there was no way out. It does not matter what is in your heart — heaven or hell — because the bullet is ready for your head. At first glance, the goal of the mass execution appears senseless: why kill unarmed people if you can use them in the same war?

But there is nothing very surreal about it. During the war many Poles began to fear their own shadow and the slightest hint about their personal and national identity. “And if Poland gains independence one day?” one postwar government official asks another. “That will never happen!” the other answers. “Forget about it!” This is why Ukrainian villages were wiped out by means of a famine so that the slave instinct would be ingrained forever in people’s minds. Who will say that this was not successful?

One of the highlights of the film is documentary footage of the Katyn tragedy. First you see Goebbels’s propaganda, according to which several thousand Polish officers were executed by the Bolshevik NKVD, which left its “autograph” in the shape of holes in the backs of their heads. This is followed by Soviet cinematic propaganda with the same emphasis and practically the same voice-over — the only difference is that all the blame is put on the Germans, including the “trademark shot” from the back.

This is a film about Poland and the Poles, who were crushed by two empires — German and Soviet. This is the film’s key concept, which contains the pivotal question: what is one supposed to do in this situation? In the beginning, in September 1939, there is complete disorientation: the Germans are advancing from the west and coming from the east is the Red Army, supposedly not an enemy. There is a symbolic episode in the film where the Polish army is between the two armies, caught in a trap. But the Reds are supposedly “dearer” because, after all, they are Slavs. The Red Army eventually interns the Polish officers.

Yet the plan to massacre them had been prepared well in advance. This is clear from the words of a character, a Soviet captain played by the well-known Moscow actor Sergei Garmash, who saves the family of one officer. The point is that not only the military but also their families were destroyed.

The film tells the story of the family of a Polish officer named Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski) unfolding against the backdrop of great history. It should be noted that Katyn, The Mongol by Sergei Bodrov, and The Twelve by Nikita Mikhalkov (all nominated for this year’s Oscar) talk about the absolutely real and important problems of social philosophy in the language of the cinema. The reality of today’s world is becoming increasingly horrifying. Cinema, too, when it is genuine, non-embellished, with warts and all (unlike our current movies) speaks to audiences in a tough and relentless manner: one must not live like this! These are the movies that win acclaim as art.

The world premiere of Katyn was held at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. I heard some complaints about archaic cinematic language and the “grandfather cinema” complex — Wajda is old, so he makes old movies. As far as I can judge, there was a lukewarm attitude to the film in Poland, although this attitude became noticeably warmer after the Oscar nomination. Recognition abroad has as much impact on the Poles as on Ukrainians. In the long run, three million Poles saw the film, which became a number-one box-office hit earning 34 million zlotys (14 million dollars). Some people are already playing the anti-Russian card: Wajda has made a movie about Russian atrocities. The director categorically denies this and he is right: I saw nothing “anti” in it. The only Russian in the film, the Soviet captain mentioned above, is a very positive character. This is not about the responsibility of a certain nation: it is about evil that has no nationality, odor, or color. It is faceless because it always changes faces. All one can do to oppose this is to apply personal will and gallantry, like Wajda’s other hero, a fearless young man who sacrifices his life to sow the seeds of the Poles’ future liberation from falsehoods.

But never say “never”: the devil’s army is once again marching against us. And from the screen I hear the words of the great Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, which Dostoevsky used as another epigraph to The Possessed:

“Sir, I tell you on the level: // We have strayed, we’ve lost the trail.// What can we do, when a devil // Drives us, whirls us round the vale?... // What a crowd! Where are they carried? // What’s the plaintive song I hear? // Is a goblin being buried, // Or a sorceress married there?” (Translated by Genia Gurarie)

Ukrainian filmgoer should see and hear the old young Andrzej Wajda, who truly speaks a somewhat old-fashioned language, raising questions that some may regard as the naive phraseology of an old European intellectual. But his words should still be heard.