Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema by Janina FalkowskaReview by: Oscar E. SwanThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 87, No. 4 (October 2009), pp. 752-754Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40650862 .

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752 SEER, 87, 4, OCTOBER 2OO9 at Home), David MacFadyen [Carnival Night) and Birgit Beumers (The Needle and Brother) are informative and engaging, as are those on Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears (David Gillespie) and House of Fools (Marcia Landy). Josephine Woll gives a useful context to Ballad of a Soldier, writing with feeling, style and persuasiveness about the film and script. Similarly, Natasha Synessios describes Ivan's Childhood With lyricism, and encapsulates what needs to be said about the film's style, narrative (and lack oí), putting it into the context of Tarkovskii's career as a whole. Stephen Hutchings convincingly presents The Prisoner of the Mountains as ca dialogue with the war film' (p. 226), as well as discussing the work's relationship to its literary origins, concepts of imperi- alism, and reporting a revealing anecdote from the making of the film. Another multi-faceted, scholarly, engaging textual and contextual analysis is provided by Ian Christie in his chapter on Russian Ark.

The most original chapters, for different reasons, are those by Susan Larsen and Karla Oeler, on Brief Encounters and The Colour of Pomegranates, respectively. Larsen shows how Muratova's wonderful film is remarkable for its narrative innovations, and highlights the way in which it conveys a distinc- tively female subjectivity through its visuals. She discusses all the key aspects of the film and its history: technique, narrative, context and reception. Oeler, for her part, contributes a thoroughly cinematic analysis, illuminating both in its arguments and its style. Her discussions of collage and framing are fascinating.

This book informs the reader not only about the films and film history of Russia and the former Soviet Union, but also about the various ways in which one can approach the study of cinema and the analysis of individual works. It should prove useful to students and others in both these respects.

London Milena Mighalski

Falkowska, Janina. Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics, and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2007. viii + 340 pp. Illustra- tions. Notes. Bibliography. Filmography. Index. $90.00: £45.00; $34.95: ¿I9-95-

This book is offered as a thorough treatment of and reference resource to the life's work of the Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, and to a large measure it succeeds. Written by an unabashed admire infects the reader with her enthusiasm, it makes one wish to vi entire oeuvre from beginning to end. Once past the introduc

r of Wajda who ew the director's tion's obligatory

film-studies boilerplate, the book turns into a highly readable, jargon-free account of Wajda's life, education, formative experiences and, especially, his incredibly varied body of creative work, consisting of some thirty-seven feature-length films spanning more than five decades and still counting.

One might think it premature to put a period after Waida's name as of 1999. Although he slowed down in his 80s, he remains active into the present decade. No mention is made of his on-going or future projects as of

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reviews 753 1999 - odd, because they were surely no secret as this book was nearing completion. It is almost time to write the chapter devoted to the period 2000 to 2009, which will of necessity include discussion of his latest masterpiece Katyn (2007), on the capture and individual execution of 15,000 Polish army officers in 1940 by the Soviet NKVD, a film that exhibits as well as any other the director's ability to weave history, politics, nostalgia, the national cause and romantic love into complex, highly personalized, multi-layered pieces (baroque, as they are often described) whose striking images have staying power long after the viewing is over.

Despite his long being recognized as a national treasure, the director is famously modest, accessible and helpful to people interested in his work. He maintains an extensive archive in Krakow, to which he provided the author full access. She claims to have read every one of the archive's million-plus documents relating to Wajda's directorial activities, and such diligence shows in the meticulously footnoted treatments of the individual films. If there is anything of importance not covered in the body of the book, it is likely to be found among the some seventy pages of references, bibliography and filmography. There is much of interest here concerning Wajda's personal life, friendships, relationships with actors and directorial method (said to be micro- managerial). In general, the author seems to be somewhat more interested in Wajda the person than she is in placing his work in the context of Polish or world cinema, but the readability of the book by no means suffers.

The films are discussed in chapters devoted to the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, each consisting of an introduction, a chronological treatment of the films produced in that decade, and a conclusion. After the plot of each film is summarized, often at considerable length, the author discusses the critical responses to it both in Poland (by no means all positive) and abroad, to which she usually adds her own personal assessment of the film's quality, importance and place in the overall oeuvre. Films are categorized according to major and minor themes, allowing comparison from one film to another, and the reader is constantly reminded of the various films in which a given motif (like a white horse, carousel, or askew crucifix) occurs. Wajda loves self- referentiality, and his work is replete with it. Because the majority of his films are based on literary works, whether 'classics of Polish literature' or lesser- known works, the plot retellings often read like stories on their own merits. One might have appreciated more discussion of where film plots depart in important ways from the literary prototypes, as often happens, sometimes for the better, and sometimes not.

The fact that the film commentaries aim at a certain level of completeness leaves the author open to criticism for not fully treating, for leaving out, or for misanalysing one thing or another. For example, the discussion of Kanal (1957), in which a band of fighters in the 1945 Warsaw Uprising wander through the trackless stinking sewers beneath the city to variously perish, literalizing the metaphor cno exit', manages not to mention the trace of French existentialism. Ashes and Diamonds (1958) contains a description of the possible resonances of the riderless white horse encountered on the street on the night of the assassination of the Communist party boss Szczuka without mentioning

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754 SEER, 87, 4, OCTOBER 2OOg the obvious: the horse symbolizes the now leaderless state, with a romantic past and an uncertain future. Her commentary on Holy Week (1994) fails to mark the hanging laundry scene in that movie which references the better- known earlier one in Ashes and Diamonds, as well as the conscious modelling of the underground freedom fighter Julek in Holy Week on Ashes and Diamonds' Maciek Chmielnicki. Indeed her plot summary omits Julek entirely. The book provides a good interpretational orientation for the general reader, but may leave the serious Wajda scholar driven to seek further commentary in the copious references the author has assembled.

The book contains too many typographical errors for a cover price of $90, although most are easily spotted and are more annoying than misleading. A number of Polonisms creeps into the writing (for example, canals for sewers), but they are not obtrusive. The stills from the major films should have been provided as a glossy-plate insert, in colour, or, if not, then they should have been placed next to the discussion of the films they illustrate.

One suspects that if Wajda, who is his own harshest critic, were writing this book, it would be less admiring in tone. Throughout his career he has worked under a variety of constraints, including censorship, funding, time, forced shooting in unfamiliar locations and other demands (in addition to his many social activities he is a theatre director and was, for a while, a senator in the Polish Parliament), all of which have been less than conducive to his making the 'perfect film'. It is easy to point to flaws in many or even most of them, and Wajda would probably be the first to agree. There are many recurrent strains in the director's work, for example that of Poles' attitudes toward Jews, and Falkowska helps one see that each successive film in this vein tries to explicate the theme better than the one before, striving toward an unachiev- able perfection. The political realities of dealing with ; often resulted in the director's being one or two gene •<-Vn=» -filrv-i_rr/-vi-n rr r-»-i ii-vl-n-» -t't r«/-vi i rrVì rìr' fon If- r'r nio rwim ThV

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Holy Week or Katyn, both excellent World War Two films, could be made, they were out of synch with the times, as Poles of today are concerned with issues other than antisemitism and war crimes. As the author correctly notes, Polish cinema of today has become mainly one of entertainment.

Many or most of Wajda's films, including the latest one on Katyñ (his iciuici was une UL tue iiiuiuucu uiiiL-ci»^, nave <x uccpiy pciauiiai unge xiicy are auteur films par excellence, even when based on independent literary works, and they are uncompromisingly aimed at a specifically Polish audience familiar with its own national history, symbols and neuroses. Still, an astonish- ingly large number make an impression on the foreign viewer, and there is no better word to describe the overall body of work than 'monumental'. This is going to be the standard work in English on this important Polish film director. It does a good job of presenting Wajda to the English- speaking reader, and it should be purchased by any university library with a film-studies interest.

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures Oscar E. Swan University of Pittsburgh

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