New Waves in Cinema by Sean Martin

Author:Sean Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781842434468
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2013-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Andrzej Munk

Andrzej Munk (1921–61) is arguably the most important Polish School filmmaker after Wajda. Like Wajda, he was concerned with the impact of history upon ordinary Poles and explored it in the five features he was able to complete before his untimely death in 1961 (he was killed in a car crash).

Man on the Tracks (Człowiek na torze, 1956) tells the story of Orzechowski, an elderly railway engineer who is struck and killed by a train in the first minutes of the film. What follows is a multiple-flashback investigation into his death – was it murder or suicide? – and also his life, revealing him to have been a not entirely sympathetic character, but one who is also a kind of folk hero, ‘a spokesman for the superiority of practical experience over any idealism’.259 In this sense he is a critic of the communist system; Munk gets out of being openly critical of the party by having Orzechowski killed in an apparent accident. On another level, the film is also a critique of the ordinary Pole as represented in popular culture, something Munk would address in his next feature.

Heroism (Eroica, 1958) deals with the Warsaw Uprising, but in a much more irreverent way than Wajda’s Kanal (both Man on the Tracks and Kanal were written by Jerzy Stefan Stawinski). The first part, Scherzo Alla Pollacca, chronicles the misadventures of a character called Dzidzius (Babyface), who is more concerned with wine, women and song than the struggle to defeat the Nazis; he is, in effect, a sort of Polish Good Soldier Švejk. He is frequently shown looking in the opposite direction to other characters, or standing still while everyone else is in motion. In one of the film’s most celebrated sequences, Dzidzius sits down to recover from enemy action by gulping from a bottle of wine, unaware that a German tank is approaching him from behind. In another sequence, he is charged with the mission of getting the Hungarians to come to the aid of the uprising. The film’s second part, Ostinato Lugubre, takes place in a POW camp. One of the inmates, Zawistowski, attempts to escape from the camp. His fellow Poles aren’t sure whether he actually got out, but they eventually become convinced that he succeeded; in reality, Zawistowski has been hiding in the attic of one of the other huts in the camp; he had not wanted to escape, merely to get away from the unbearable patriotism of his fellow countrymen.

Bad Luck (Zezowate szczęście, 1960) features another anti-hero, Jan Piszczyk (Bogumil Kobiela), who ricochets through history (the action takes place between 1930 and 1960) like some hapless pinball, switching sides whenever he deems it expedient to do so. Often he is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: in one of the pre-war sequences, he is beaten up twice by the police, who mistake him first for a Jew and then for an anti-Semitic agitator. (He is neither.)

Munk’s last film, Passenger (Pasażerka, 1963), is a very different piece of work.

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