Thursday, March 6, 2008

"KANAL" Legendry film by Andrej Wajda








The 10th MAMI International Film Festival will celebrate the 50th year of Andrej Wajda’s legendary film “Kanal’. The Festival will also hold a special screening of the Film.


“You cannot harm us! The choice is yours,
You can help us, you can deliver us
Or still delay and leave us to die...
Death is not terrible; we know how to die.

But know this: from our tombstones
A victorious new Poland will be born
And you will not walk this land
You red ruler of bestial forces!”

During the Warsaw Uprising, Jozef Szczepanski, an officer cadet aka "Ziutek", a soldier of the "Parasol" battalion, wrote a poem which speaks the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ...

Kanał is a 1956 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It was the first film ever made about the Warsaw Uprising, telling the story of a ragged company of Home Army resistance fighters escaping the Nazi onslaught through the city’s sewers. Kanał is the second film of Wajda's War trilogy, preceded by A Generation and followed by Ashes and Diamonds and it does make a sufficiently powerful and convincing picture on the screen.
A symbolic depiction of hell on Earth set in the last days of the Warsaw uprising in 1944. September, 1944. It's the 56th day of Warsaw's uprising against the Nazis. The third Platoon of the Resistance is down to 43 heroic men and women, and they're penned in. After a last day of fighting, and of good-byes to family, to love making, and to music, a handful of doomed survivors wade into the city's underground sewers in hopes of escape.
Written by Jerzy Stefan Stawiński who himself survived in the sewers as a soldier of Armia Krajowa (the Polish underground resistance army) during the Warsaw Uprising. Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives,” announces the disembodied voice of a narrator, foreshadowing the tragedy that unravels.


Kanał earned Wajda the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1957 (the second most prestigious award after the Palme d'Or), solidifying his position as Poland's premier director. Polish critics state that the film paved the way for other films of the Polish School of filmmakers
The decisive factor of Kanal, which proved to be the first and the most important success in Andrej wajda’s life, was provided by Tadeusz Konwicki. It was he who gave him the story by Jerzy Stawinski, and as the literary director of the "Kadr" studio did everything to ensure that the film would be produced.
The tragedy of the people who believed to the very end that the fight they had undertaken is right has found disturbing expression in Wajda's film. The drama assumes a shape of a metaphor, all the more meaningful because its ordinary heroes have been, for many years, forced into the shadows of silence, to endure the mudslinging, false accusations and slander.


The film is a Dantean nightmare. It is also an unforgettable testimonial. . Credible or not, it seems he could have dispensed with some images of a vaguely surrealistic nature. But let's be fair: these excesses aside, Andrzej Wajda's work is executed with the hand of a master and brilliantly acted. There are, unfortunately, experiences which must never be erased from human memory.


































No comments: