Boguslaw Linda as Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Afterimage directed by Andrzej Wajda, 2016).
Friends and readers,
The almost systematic erasure by Trump of whatever the Obamas and their gov’t did legislatively and through executive order, most of it tending to provide better lives for the peoples of the countries involved (one must except the wars and use of drones to kill without trial people “suspected” of “terrorism”) has been noticed. Down to removing a school lunch program set up by Michelle Obama. Hatred of black people and deep resentment that a black man’s gov’t (which included two black attorney generals, one a woman) should shape the US future lies behind this as much as hard-line ruthless capitalism. I remembered this as I watched Andrzej Wajda’s Afterimage, a movie whose central story shows Polish gov’t agents, police, and officials of the Communist party systematically erasing the work, all means of living, the right to food of a then famous avant-garde artist, Wladyslaw Strzeminski. Strzeminski is refusing to make and teach art which under the banner of “socialist realism” is made up of cliched, stilted propaganda images celebrating the military might and ultimately (it is hoped) socially beneficial policies of the Communist party. This erasure and larger undoing of an art school, museums, any cafes and ejection of any students or other faculty who objected was chilling: it is the act of a state which is a dictator. Or (as we see in the undemocratic rump that now rules the US and its corrupt lying leader) aspires to be.
“Powidoki” 2015 rez. Andrzej Wajda
Fot. Anna Wloch
http://www.annawloch.com
anna@annawloch.com
Na zdj od lewej : Zosia Wichlacz, Adrian Zareba, Mateusz Rusin, Irena Melcer, Boguslaw Linda
Our film club at the Cinemart Theater in Fairfax, Virginia: once a month for 5 months, beginning in May, a retired film critic who wrote for the Washington Post (among other papers), Gary Arnold screens an unusual and fine film. A much respected film and theater director, Andrezej Wajda (he made over 40 films, considered one of the world’s renowned film-makers) has ended his career (he just died, at age 90) by telling the inexorable slowly devastating story of the destruction of a great artist, Wladyslaw Strzeminski between 1951 and ’52, when the Soviet Union consolidated its hold on nearby Communist states under pressure from the hostile fiercely anti-communist US and other allies (NATO): one means was imposition on everyone of single uniform thoughts (education) in all areas of life. I am not sure all people were so regimented, but someone as visible and prominent as Strezeminski was important: his case is rather like Sir Thomas More. He is ripe to be made a symbolic example of. If anyone protests openly, they are arrested, beaten up, transported to camps deep in eastern Russia. You can view a summary of Strzeminski’s artistic aims and movements he belong to and images of his art
The painful process is covered step-by-step: first the school authorities are replaced by hand-picked loyal agents; then the professor is denied a classroom; then his students are told his courses are cancelled; his rooms are given over to someone else. He is told if he will preach the Communist art norms, show his students to paint that way, himself paint that way, he will be reinstated. He refuses. We see the hired thugs come and rip up paintings in a exhibit, destroy the students’ art in the building. He gets a commission to decorate a club and his work is ripped up and the cafe destroyed — though in this case the image was realistic enough, of black people exploited in Africa by corporate bosses over a chain. No matter, Strezeminski is not obedient. The gov’t agent turns up and offers him his place back, his students, his daughter, an “existence” if he will cooperate. Streminski can get himself to reply only “I don’t know.” It won’t do. His identity papers are confiscated; then his ration card is taken away. One of his students gets him a menial job where it’s said the employers will not recognize him, but the agents catch up and he is fired. He cannot get food, money, heat for his rooms. Still he holds out to protect his legacy: pictures put in a basement of an art museum, his typescript smuggled out of Poland. We see him stumbling along in the streets until he falls, is taken to hospital, found to have TB in a late stage. He gets a job working on mannequins in a department store window, but sick, weak, confused, he cannot handle these creepy dolls, fall down among them, and dies.
“Powidoki” 2015 rez : Andrzej Wajda zdjecia : Pawel Edelman fotosy: Anna Wloch www.annawloch.com anna@annawloch.com
The story is is made subtle and nuanced by the on-going relationship of Strzeminski with his daughter, various of his students (especially one young woman who is in love with him and attempts to come and live with him), some of his friends (a poet, colleagues at the institute) which evolve into estrangement — or they are whisked away by arrests or threats — or his advice to him. His daughter, Hania (Sofia Wichlacz), who is at first visiting him from her mother, his wife’s apartment. The mother dies (estranged apparently, an artist herself) and the girl attempts to live with her father, but she is gradually alienated from him as she naturally adheres more and more to her school. So she leaves to live in a “girls’ home,” where she is treated as an impoverished orphan. He says he knows his actions will lead to her having a hard life. We glimpse these individual fates as events on the side. It’s filmed partly in black-and-white so it feels as if it were made 40 years ago; in fact like some somber classic of the 1940s. Perhaps the film is too relentless, allows for no one under this new regime to be having a good time. But its message is all the more effective, and make no mistake as it is also about what is happening across the world today as dictatorships spread and humanistic ideals and goals are swept aside, impoverished, punished. As they are in Poland today. It’s also cinematographically beautiful: the austerity of the shots, numbers of them feeling like artists’ photos, or pictures (Hania seen from the side of a window is like a Vermeer), its gritty realism precludes its being felt as didactic.
Wajda filming in 1974
A review by Glenn Kenny in the New York Times: an angry, vivid, passionate film. Piers Handling of Tiff includes some effective clips.
Strzeminskis’s Theory of Vision is not on-line, and very few of his pictures made available to the public. Here are three:
Lodz — The film takes place in Lodz where in a ghetto there was a systematic starvation and enslavement of Jews during the war; a hard-to read book about this slow-motion humiliation and extermination by the Nazi was edited by (among others) Robert Lapides.
Cubism
Arnold (as he often does) retold the artist’s life briefly and then went on to talk about Wajda’s parentage, career, and why he identifies with Streminski. Both were products of poorer people, both lived through the traumatic years of World War Two, Wajda’s father was one of the Polish calvary officers slaughtered by part of the Russian military so as to destroy its most effective middle class members, thus enabling the USSR to dominate Poland in the 1950s with ease. Wajda himself was harassed and never given a lot of money by the state for his films or theater, but unlike other artists (Polanski) did not move to France, the UK or Hollywood. He more or less stayed the course as Polish public figure doing important art for his country. The screenplay by Andrzej Mularczyk (Arnold said) is old-fashioned, long dialogue, literary in its feel, with allusions to history, other art. Arnold did not bring up the parallels with today in the US or elsewhere but he had them in mind while he talked of peers of this director (I couldn’t catch the names, except for Ingmar Bergman).
I don’t know if the film will achieve much commercial distribution. It is not playing anywhere in the DC area just now, and the list of places where it’s been screened are all art festivals (a recent one in Munich). But I daresay it might turn up on Netflix, or as a DVD to buy. Until very recently Strzeminski’s art was relatively neglected. Decades after his death, the work left was exhibited in the school he worked at and founded. There has been an exhibit and a book of essays. You can view all the many awards the film-maker received on wikipedia.
“Powidoki” 2015 rez. Andrzej Wajda
Fot. Anna Wloch
http://www.annawloch.com
anna@annawloch.com
Na zdj: Boguslaw Linda /Strzeminski/
Ellen
You might be interested in Wojciech’s Róza, then. Not easy to watch by any means; it’s more or less all the horrors that Marta Hillers never had to live through…
A reviewer of Róza criticised the overall problem with modern Polish films portraying the WW2/communist era, of which Wajda’s works are a part, after all (though I admired his Katyn very much): They always show the “noble Polish”, the perfect hero, in contrast to the nasty, ugly little communist collaborators.
Those films are inherently nationalistic. By always harping on the horrors of the communism era (justified as that may be, no doubt) and praising the upright, noble, self-sacrificing nationalists of the fictive past, the film makers did their part in creating a political climate in Poland today where liberalism is often equalled with communism and therefore has to be stamped out.
Good point. I realize I didn’t sufficiently bring out how the way the repression by gov’t agens, the thugs used, the way that fear motivates most who work with and near Strzeminski are may be seen as functioning in the film seemingly to indict communism as a great evil when it’s more the kind of people who grab power and want to stamp out any dissent.
Communism as we saw in the 1990s when these gov’ts fell from power was a often a veil for people who were there to have power; those did believe genuinely in a pro-social egalitarian vision were thrown out swiftly. Not that much progress in living standards had not been achieved despite two horrendous world wars, and the Stalin dictatorship era. What was left were the pirates and thugs; one of them is now in charge of the USSR. When the agents don’t care that Strzeminski’ s picture indicts colonialism we see they have no political vision.
Gary Arnold is very mainstream in his politics — as he is in the way he discusses films, ever leaving room for a commercial criteria for each film – how well is it doing or will it do in the box office. He never mentioned that Wajda may have stayed in Poland out of deep loyalty to the Polish nation — or some decent socialist vision. I don’t know enough about Wajda and wikipedia articles can go only as far as the people who write them know about their subject matter.
Thank you for this intelligent informed comment.
I too can be made uneasy or queasy by an unthinking equating of totalitarian dictatorship with the social welfare state, as if we have to stomp out the social welfare state to be “free” of dictatorship: certainly a meme of the far right, and circulated as if they are not establishing an even worse dictatorship or aspiring to do so–this one with all the disadvantages of dictatorship and none of the advantages of a (mostly) guaranteed job, retirement, etc. My understanding is most Eastern Europeans miss the social welfare state the Soviet umbrella provided, but like the new freedoms, as far as they go: what people consistently want is democratic socialism, freedom and security. They are not incompatible.
Leaving that aside, this seems a very interesting and worthwhile film: I will keep an eye out for it.
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