Brutal Art-House Drama Describes Stalin's Atrocities

Katyn
Running time 118 minutes
Written by Andrzej Wajda, Wladyslaw Pasikowski, Andrzej Mularczyk, Przemyslaw Nowakowski
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Starring Artur Zmijewski, Maja Ostaszewska, Maja Komorowska, Wladyslaw Kowalski

Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń, from a screenplay by Mr. Wajda, Wladyslaw Pasikowski, Andrzej Mularczyk and Przemyslaw Nowakowski (in Polish with English subtitles), is based on Mr. Mularczyk’s novel Post Mortem. Katyń re-creates the horror of the World War II massacre of 15,000 Polish military officers, intellectuals and professionals in the forest that gives the film and the slaughter its name. For decades, the Russians blamed the massacre on the Gestapo in the German Army’s march through Katyń in 1943; Russia’s wartime allies, including the United States, accepted the Soviet account.

The 82-year-old Mr. Wajda lost his own father at Katyń when he was 14 years old. But Katyń is not a film about his own involvement in this gruesome period of Polish history; it is instead an attempt to reproduce the period in all its horrific dimensions, beginning with the almost simultaneous invasions of Poland from the west and Russia from the east as a direct consequence of the nefarious Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to respect each other’s territorial integrity.

Indeed, the picture begins with a stream of Polish refugees from the victorious German Army in the west, about to encounter the Russian Army units in the process of occupying Poland’s eastern provinces. This historically absurdist dilemma is expressed by the director and his cinematographer, Pawel Edelman, in dark, foglike clouds that seem to enshroud the narrative without ever bursting into the illuminating sunlight. In fact, its final images are even darker and grayer than its opening passages, when, at least, the grimness of the future was still unknown.

In his Director’s Statement, Mr. Wajda discusses several paradoxes in his treatment of the subject: “After many attempts and much thought, I am now certain that a film about Katyń cannot possibly discover the whole truth about that event, since it is now a historical and political fact. Those facts, to the viewer of today, serve as a background to human experiences, since only they, shown on the big screen, can move the viewer in contrast to the relating of our history.

“Therefore, I see my film about Katyń as a story of a family separated forever, about great illusions and the brutal truth about the Katyń crime. In short, it is a film about individual suffering, which evokes images of much greater emotional content than naked historical facts. It is a film that shows the hurtful truth, not only that of the murdered officers, but the women who await their return every day, every hour, suffering inhuman uncertainty. Loyal and unshaken, certain that it was only a matter of time before they would open the door to see their men returned, as the tragedy of Katyń concerns those who live and lived then.

“Years after the Katyń tragedy, from the German exhumation in 1943, the Polish research work in the 90s, and despite a partial disclosure of the archives, we still know too little about what the Katyń massacre looked like in April and May of 1940—a crime committed on the orders of Stalin and his comrades in the Politburo of Moscow’s Communist Party on March 5, 1940.”

For years Mr. Wajda and his family believed his father could still be alive, as the name Wajda appeared on the Katyń list, but with the first name of Karol. His mother, almost until she died, was convinced that Jakub Wajda would return. A combatant of the Great War, the Polish-Soviet War, the Silesian Uprising, and the September campaign of 1939, Wajda Sr. was the recipient of the Silver Cross and the Order of the Virtuti Militari, awarded posthumously.

“I would not like the Katyń film, however,” the director continues, “to be my personal search for the truth and a candlelight vigil on the grave of Captain Jakub Wajda. I would rather tell a tale about suffering and drama of many Katyń families and about the Katyń lie whose truth triumphs over the grave of Joseph Vissanionovich Stalin, after it was forced into silence for half a century by the USSR and its then allies in the war against Hitler: Great Britain and the United States.”

Even so, it is hard to create a compelling drama about a completely hopeless situation for all your sympathetic characters, confirmed by a facelessly implacable and all-powerful antagonist. Also, the arithmetic of Katyń, like that of Schindler’s List and Defiance, is dwarfed by that of the Nazi Holocaust, much of which occurred on Polish soil with the tacit complicity of many Polish anti-Semites. This is one reason that the Polish film renaissance of the ’50s and ’60s, sparked by Mr. Wajda’s own Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), had tough sledding in the New York market at that time. Even today, the popular success of Katyń with Polish audiences may not be a harbinger of local art-house reaction. Even so, Mr. Wajda has made a heroic effort to translate a historical crime into a saga of human hope and delusion in the crucible of two of the most brutal regimes in world history.

His exemplary cast of characters is led by Artur Zmijewski as Andrzej, captain of the Eighth Uhlan Regiment in Krakow; Maja Ostaszewska as the indomitable Anna, the captain’s wife; Maja Komorowska as the captain’s mother; and Wladyslaw Kowalski as the captain’s father, a Jagiellonian University professor in Krakow, who, despite his advanced age, suffers the same fate as his son. The 15 or so other major characters rotate around this family, many as temporary survivors but ultimate martyrs of an evil force determined to suppress the truth about Katyń. As a portrait of hell on earth, Katyń deserves to be seen by anyone with a feeling for history, however horrifying it may be. Actually, it puts just about every other horror movie to shame.

asarris@observer.com