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Kanal (1956)
During the Warsaw Uprising the sewers were used to communicate between disparate regions held by the Poles. "Kanal" means sewer in Polish. This film portrays the challenges faced by Polish underground when trying to escape areas held by the Germans. This was young Andrzej Wajda's only second feature film and he directed it during "the days of heady, almost anarchistic freedom" of 1956 (B. Sulik). It is based on a short story by a former Home Army member, J.S. Stavinsky. Wajda himself had fought in the Home Army. Kanal is an oppressive depiction of Poland's utter defeat in World War II and particularly of the total destruction of the Polish capital, Warsaw, during the final phase of World War II when the Poles became victims not just of the German Nazis, but also of a diabolical Soviet strategy. In Kanal Wajda was "concerned . . . with the sheer size and intensity of the catastrophe." (Sulik) Discussion Questions:
Excerpts from the Introduction by Boleslaw Sulik to Andrzej Wajda: 3 Films (pp. 15-18)
We can guess that Andrzej Wajda himself, an ex-combatant of the Home Army, came to feel some sense of guilt at the treatment of the "Nationalist" underground in A Generation, although at the time it must have seemed an absolutely unavoidable concession to official dogma. Certainly the choice of subject and its treatment in his next film would be consistent with some need for expiation. Kanal was based on a longish short story by J. S. Stawinski, adapted for the screen by the author, another former A.K. [Armja Krajova] member. It vas directed by Wajda in 1956--the days of heady, almost anarchistic freedom. The fact that all the leading characters in the film are members of the Home Army may seem Incidental. Kanal does not touch on questions of ideology or political loyalty. It pictures defeat, painted in oppressively heavy, fatalistic colors. This was, no doubt, the prevalent Polish feeling about the last war, and especially about the destruction of their capital. But the leftist underground, communist inspired and directed, won in the end a resounding political victory. Its Poland lay in the hopeful future, not in the ruins of the past. It is only for those, whose patriotism was inspired by traditional sentiments, that the defeat became all-embracing and final. It meant the end of the kind of Poland they were committed to. In this sense Kanal represents a major switch of interest (though not necessarily, of course, of political conviction) on Wajda's part [. . .] from optimistic involvement, controlled by hope, to a fatalistic, self-destroying one. But the director's attitude to this second position remains ambiguous. There is some attempt to present it as a tragedy, with the representative heroic group meeting the inevitable judgement of history. However, this confrontation lacks true nobility, perhaps both because the "fate" is really of human, and questionable origin, and the nature of the compulsion which leads the Poles to defy it is never made clear. The ambiguity which exists in Kanal is not an expression of some unresolved conflict in Wajda himself, but a direct consequence of certain weaknesses inherent in the film. The director was largely concerned here with the sheer size and intensity of the catastrophe, and not content with what could be achieved by direct description, he was searching for a suitably grand parallel, something that would make images transcend the limitations of subject matter. He found it, or thought he had. in Dante's Inferno. The descent into the Warsaw sewers, filled with defeated, retreating insurgents, is likened to Dante's descent into hell. The reference is made explicit through the character of the composer, who, parted from his family, joins the detachment, loses his reason as the pressure builds up, and wanders through the sewer-s playing an ocarina and quoting appropriate verses from the Divine Comedy. It must be said that the parallel doesn't work. In a film which is not really about individual emotions the composer looks like a stray, incongruous figure out of some expressionist drama. The reference to Dante which he presses home with such immoderate insistence, is of literary inspiration, and yet it doesn't transcend certain purely physical. visual associations. Dante's characters in hell all carried a burden of individual guilt, while Wajda in Kanal, though he may hint at the tragic bankruptcy of the traditional outlook, could not have meant to attach any individual blame to his heroes. Again, the tortured humans in the Inferno are all given a truly heroic stature; the insurgents in this film, for all their outstanding bravery, do not reach any commanding stature as individuals, and appear dwarfed by an overwhelming sense of fate. Thus the grand parallel, far from clarifying the author's attitudes, only manages to confuse them, if it is taken seriously. An unsuccessful, undisciplined work often provides more persuasive evidence of an author's talent than an unqualified success. Kanal, now seen as a linking film between the more definite achievements of A Generation and Ashes and Diamonds, shows a marked growth in Wajda's command of the medium. The monumental outdoor scenes, before entering the sewers and coming out of them, often involving battle action and complex crowd movements, are conceived and executed on a level of technical sophistication never approached in A Generation. Take the very first shot of Kanal, devised, most ambitiously, to introduce all the characters, give some indication of the tone and stature of the drama, set the scene and start the action itself, all in one continuous, uninterrupted camera movement. This single, virtuoso take encloses over four minutes of screen time, and must have been impossibly hard to achieve with tracks laid over a long stretch of difficult terrain and the changing action staged on it. There are other, equally brilliant and technically complex scenes: the milling, panicky, disorientated crowd; the terrifying moment when Madry, the second-in-command, comes out of the sewer into the blinding light of day and finds himself surrounded by the Germans. Or the bold change of pace when the men enter the sewers, when the seconds become painfully drawn out and time loses its normal measure. These are the moments where supposedly realistic scenes are seized on by an obviously powerful imagination, condensed and transformed into images of visionary intensity.
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