All good war movies are actually anti-war movies. This saying of mine has sometimes been contested, but so far no one has been able to provide me with a counter-example. Andrzej Wajda‘s 1957 film ‘Kanal‘ certainly supports my thesis. It is the second film in what would become the Polish director’s formidable career spanning more than 60 years, and the second film in a trilogy devoted to the fate of Poland and the Poles in World War II. It was made only a little more than a decade after the events described on the screen, but unlike most Soviet or other films produced in Eastern Europe at that time, ‘Kanal’ is not a heroic film, we could say the opposite. Wajda details the horrors of war, the material destruction and the human suffering. He questions the very notion of heroism and also confronts, within the limits of communist censorship, one of the most controversial and painful episodes from the point of view of the Poles in the history of the Second World War. He does it without ostentation and with the talent and cinematic force expression of a master in the making.
The story takes place in September 1944, in the final days of the Warsaw Uprising. From the first minute, viewers are warned that what they will watch on screen are the last hours of life of the film’s heroes. These are the 43 survivors of a Polish detachment, mostly young civilians who volunteered to fight in the uprising, led by a few officers. They know their sealed fate and choose to live their last day fighting without hope of victory, playing music, drinking, or making love. Betrayed by their superiors and by the Red Army, the Poles are ordered to evacuate the area through the city’s sewer system. It is a symbolic descent from sunlight into the dark and fetid labyrinth of the underground, from the honor of fighting an overwhelmingly stronger enemy to fleeing for an almost impossible rescue. Most of them will die. Their deaths can perhaps be defined as heroic, but it is a rhetorical and ineffective heroism and the details are in each case painful. Wajda approaches, even if not explicitly (which was not possible due to censorship), tragic aspects of Polish history. The Polish army has a tradition of heroism and honor won on the battlefields, but many battles were lost and sacrifices were in vain. The Warsaw uprising depicted in the film was supposed to be synchronized with a Red Army offensive on the eastern front but the Soviets were stopped, the liberation of Warsaw was delayed for many months, and the fighters, the civilian population and what was left of the city were abandoned to the German army’s reprisals.
Andrzej Wajda eloquently describes the historical context through the desolate landscapes of the ruins of a completely destroyed city. It is in this setting that the film’s characters evolve, mostly young people whose youth was cut short by the war and who now have to face the possibility of death. Most of them take the order to retreat as an affront, preferring death in fight with rather than retreat in the dark underground. The contrast of lighting between the scenes in the canals and those on the surface is symbolic and the black and white cinematography works excellently. The film looks like a combination between post-war Italian neorealism and the American horror in the underground genre, only the latter would not appear until later. So Wajda was making pioneering cinematography here. The couple formed by ‘Daisy’ (Teresa Izewska – beautiful and excellent actress) – Jacek also has something of a Hollywood glamour in the way they look and behave. Another memorable character is Michal, the artist played by Vladek Sheybal, a kind of prelude to the lead character in Roman Polanski‘s ‘The Pianist‘, another memorable film by a Polish director set in Warsaw of the war years. For many viewers, this film will be remembered for its claustrophobic scenes of death and darkness. By contrast, however, I believe that Wajda dedicated the film to freedom, life and light.