Andrzej Wajda

Andrzej Wajda

POLAND: 

The other cinemas of Eastern Europe endured the same communist and anti-communist periods that effected filmmaking. Mast and Kawin identify the most fertile period of Polish cinema as the years between 1955 and 1964, almost a decade before the Czech New Wave. The Lodz Film School was established in 1948 and by the mid 1950s, the liberal political climate gave rise to the Polish Film School movement that produced the work of Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, and later Krzysztof Kieslowski.

ANDRZEJ WAJDA

As in Czechoslovakia, the Nazi occupation and the resistance to it was a favored subject of the Polish cinema. Andrzej Wajda made a number of films about the Occupation era. Wajda’s style is more violent than many of the Czech New Wave films about the Occupation. In Kanal, Wajda uses the claustrophobic sewers of Warsaw to capture the hopelessness of a group fighting the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Info about the clip:

In the following scene, the soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising are trapped in the sewers beneath the city. Notice the scene's cinematography and the claustrophobic effect it produces. At the scene's conclusion, Michał (Vladek Sheybal) experiences a breakdown and wanders off playing his ocarina.

Kanal (Andrzej Wajda, 1956):
 black and white scenes in the gutter but disgusting not like 3rd man at all. that they're climbing up each other stepping on eahch other... hiding from the germans... Lets save ourselves... they wander along the halls of the sewer. I can hear it i can finally hear it and he starts playing a fife. Shut up... he's gone mad. 

Info about the film:

About the film from The Polish Film Academy 

The first film dedicated to the tragedy of the Warsaw Uprising and the Home Army soldiers, starting a trend soon to be named the Polish Film School. The work, full of expressive, metaphoric images, united a romantic philosophy with the theme of Polish death.

Warsaw, 1944. The Uprising is coming to an end. After a failed attempt to break through the German lines, Lieutenant Zadra’s company enters the sewage canals at the corner of Bałuckiego and Szustra streets in Mokotów. They are headed toward downtown, but out of more than forty insurgents not one will survive.

The unit is soon broken into three smaller groups wandering blindly around the stinking bowels of the capital. Daisy, a liaison, and the wounded Korab, are trapped by the barred exit at the mouth of the canal; Halinka commits suicide; composer Michał succumbs to insanity. Mądry finds an exit at Dworkowa street, before getting captured by a German patrol. After wandering through the canals for 17 hours, Zadra, Kula and Smukły finally find the right hatch. The Corporal is killed while disarming booby trap grenades hanging at the entrance, and Zadra returns to the canaltohis soldiers, not knowing that they had all shared Mądry’s fate.

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Jan Słodowski, Leksykon polskich filmów fabularnych, Warszawa 1996

Picture of Wajda