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Polish tragedies of World War II are particularly and unavoidably dramatic tragedies. The battleground for many of the world's most notoriously odious war crimes (scratch that - call them crimes against humanity), Poland toward the middle of the 20th century was a veritable breeding ground for crippling, soul-crushing devastation.
What makes Andrzej Wajda's work so notable is that it is able to peer directly into the steely heart of Polish xenophobia, and the cultural disbelief and shock that infused its very social core without looking away. This is especially true in this three-disc Criterion Collection box set containing three of his most accomplished works: A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds,
A Generation - Wajda's first film - is particularly notable simply because of its youth. The film isn't jovial or effervescent in any real sense - that's not the kind of youth Wajda wants to show - but its ability to showcase both the wide-eyed curiosity of those not long in the tooth and the fatalistic, Sisyphusian road blocks confronting the youthful Polish culture of the time is a cinematic perspective very few other movies have ever strived to show.
John Boorman did good work with Hope and Glory, but in that particular wartime film, he infused a certain degree of sexual coming-of-age with the struggle of his under-20 characters to ingest the ever-worsening battle world around them. A Generation has a bit of child's play to it - the film begins with a long pan of three boys playing a simple farmyard game - but that play is immediately hushed and replaced with world-weary realism.
What brings A Generation full-circle is its ability to be both unpredictable and sincerely true-to-life. Wajda's narrative in the film is incessantly light and fast-paced - despite the film's serious-as-hell thematic motifs - but is able to manifest the multi-faceted truisms of a child's world at war. It houses the kind of lilting, colloquial cinematic language that is found in a child's recounting of a dire situation: severe, imperative, yet garnished with the exaggerations and storytelling nuances of youthful enthusiasm.
Kanal, the middle child in Wajda's war trilogy also begins with a massive pan, but this time there is no ideal of child's play to start us off with a modicum of hope for the film's narrative. Buildings are on fire. Buildings - no, entire cities - are no longer blossoming urban locales, but dusty, crushing fossils of a civilization whose progress has been brutally interrupted. This civilization teeters on the edge of a knife, waiting to fall to the ground in a dusty cloud.
Kanal is Wajda's impression of Hell on Earth, an examination of what one's world looks like when the absolute shit has been pummeled out of it. The soldiers that march the grounds of Wajda's homeland don't have the soul of A Generation's youthful brigade - these souls have seen what men look like when they die a slow and painful death. They've seen what we writers and filmgoers of the new world only know through reenacted imagery in films and television shows.
Even the love triangles in Kanal have a browbeaten bloat to them. The world in this film - arguably the stand-alone triumph of Wajda's output - is sweaty and undernourished. The unfortunate but tragically unsurprising end result of a war that sprung up around Poland on all sides. Kanal is also the least overtly hopeful of Wajda's war films, and this borderline cynical worldview infuses the picture with a steely documentary feel. Any war film that showcases fighting and battle idolizes the war it portrays in a certain regard, but Wajda's ace up his sleeve with Kanal is the way he appears almost resigned to glamorize these particular facets of the war that he knows all too well.
The success of the film lies in the fact that you want to squint or look away the entire time, but with filmmaking this solid, you simply cannot.
By the time we get to Ashes and Diamonds, it's obvious we're watching a provocative filmmaker working at the top of his game. His most controversial work of the period, Ashes and Diamonds is both a literal cap on his war trilogy and a chilling reminder that there can never truly be an end to the stories that can be - and need to be - told of this time and situations in Poland's history.
Where the first two films in this trilogy could be argued as looking outward at the war that comes quickly and deftly into the Polish cultural fray, Ashes and Diamonds attempts to weigh that uncomfortable foreign entrance with an assessment and dramatic investigation of Polish popular thought in terms of war and wartime ethics.
Ashes and Diamonds is also the only Wajda film in this collection that borders on convoluted, simply because it takes such a big bite out of the Polish view of wartime efforts. More uncomfortably and intimately violent than the other two films, Ashes and Diamonds takes the Polish placement in the miasma of WWII and aims all inconsistencies, frustrations, and realizations toward the heart of the Polish beast just to see what lies beneath the country's shaky, tumultuous surface.
Ambitious and wildly provocative, Ashes and Diamonds is less a successfully cumulative film than it is musings on the state of war and how people view the horrors of battle. Its placement here echoes Francis Ford Coppola's diatribe that The Godfather films were a film, its sequel, and an epilogue. Ashes and Diamonds is less a symbolic wrap-up of his war trilogy than it is an establishment of an ever-distancing horizon that storytelling and artistic prowess can never truly reach.
The world in Ashes and Diamonds is one that has repeated itself and will repeat itself again. There is hope for evolution and social escape from the terror of invasion, but Wajda's gorgeous, interrogating camera rests on no laurels and takes nothing for granted. The future may bring wonder and relief from trauma, but as anyone expert in wartime survivability knows, trauma can eventually be forgiven, but never forgotten.
The same could be said for these three outstanding films.
The Video: How Does The Disc Look?
A Generation looks good, but not great by any means. The main problem is that the transfer print is chock-full of scratches and grain; even though there obviously has been some attention paid to its restoration, it still doesn't hold a candle to other Criterion releases. Line quality is also a bit on the blurry side, and while black levels and shadow detail are okay, the overall impact of the film is diminished simply because of the film's shaky, messy look. It's not enough to completely disengage viewers from the film, but it definitely leaves a bit to be desired.
Kanal is better looking than A Generation , but not quite up to the standards of Ashes and Diamonds . Grain and dirt on the transfer print is still an issue - though perhaps not quite as much as with A Generation - and the strobing problem that plagues Ashes and Diamonds appears here, as well. Again, it's not enough to ruin the DVD experience, but one wishes there was something more Criterion could have done with these transfers.
Ashes and Diamonds is the best-looking picture in the set, even if strobing is particularly noticeable here. Line quality is strong and black levels are thorough and engaging, but between the occasional inconsistency in the prints and a strobing that affects almost every moment of the picture, it's difficult to call this one a slam-dunk transfer. Not bad, by any means, but not quite up to Criterion standards.
The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?
Typical Criterion - mono, baby, mono. Dialogue sounds okay, music cues are tinny but passable, and while sound effects and the occasional atmospheric are truncated within these mixes' minimal dynamic range, nothing sounds completely abhorrent. They sound like they must have sounded upon their initial release.
Also included are English subtitles.
Supplements: What Goodies Are There?
A Generation gives us a splendid thirty-minute interview with Wajda (by film critic Jerzy Plazewski), but the real treat is his second short film , made as one of the first students of the Polish Film School. Ceramics from Ilza (Ceramika Ilzecka) (1951) is a strong ten-minute film that showcases the potential Wajda has as a major filmmaking talent. There is also a stills gallery here.
Kanal also offers thirty minutes of interviews with Wajda, Jerzy Plazewski, and Janusz ěKubaî Morgenstern (2nd unit director on Ashes and Diamonds ), as well as another particularly special interview with Wajda and Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, a courier for the Polish underground army and an eventual consultant to the U.S. National Security Council (30:00). Fascinating. There is a stills gallery here, as well.
On Ashes and Diamonds , the main goodie is a screen-specific audio commentary from film scholar Annette Insdorf, professor of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University. Her thoughts on Ashes and Diamonds are astute and unique, and her presence on this track is impressive. It may get a little dull toward the end - most film studies lectures do, after all - but compared to other academic Criterion commentary tracks, this one stands tall.
We also get some excellent interviews with Wajda, Janusz ěKubaî Morgenstern, and critic Jerzy Plazewski (36:00). Rounding out the special features here is a 2-minute Polish newsreel touting the film and a nice stills gallery .
Exclusive DVD-ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?
No DVD-ROM materials have been included.
Final Thoughts
The transfers in this three-disc box set are not Criterion's best, but the films in this Three War Films edition are exemplary. For eighty bucks, you're paying for the Criterion name and for the wealth of lovely bonus features also included here, but for any cineaste, these are certainly worth a look - regardless of the price. Highly recommended.
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