The early 1960s were a good time to be the child of British communists. For every achievement of capitalism, we were able to point to a similar triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Half the globe lived under some kind of Marxist regime; the USSR was way ahead in the space race and the Daily Worker reported successes all over the east in the sciences and the arts. But for somebody in their early teens obsessed with the idea of cool, this was one area where communism couldn't compete with the decadent west.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip. No matter how hard I searched I couldn't find anybody in Bulgaria, Russia or North Korea who possessed the combination of effortless style and sinuous-hipped sensuality of an Elvis, a John Lennon or a James Dean. That is until 1968, when I went to see a double-bill of Polish films, Andrzej Wajda's Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, and first saw Zbigniew Cybulski.
This charismatic young actor styled his hair in a luxuriant black quiff, wore a leather biker jacket and tinted sunglasses. Later I read that he had to wear them because he'd fought in the Warsaw Uprising – the three month long insurrection against the Nazis – where the guerillas moved about in the sewers, so he couldn't take bright light. Which, even if it wasn't true, was a brilliant excuse to wear shades after dark. In Ashes and Diamonds Zbigniew Cybulski not only got to wear an outfit that was completely wrong for the period, but he also got to carry a German 9mm MP 38 submachine gun all the time – which was pretty much my dream. There was, too, an air of doomed romanticism around Cybulski, because the year before I came upon him he had, like James Dean, lost his life in an accident. Though unlike the Hollywood star, who was killed at the wheel of his Porsche, Cybulski died in true socialist fashion, running for a train.
Until my discovery of Cybulski and Wajda the only films from the communist sphere that I had seen were either po-faced socialist propaganda or the movies of Eisenstein, films such as Battleship Potemkin or Alexander Nevsky which, though clearly masterpieces, were highly stylised early-20th-century artefacts with seemingly limited relevance to my postwar world. In these Polish movies there existed characters who were not symbols of dialectical and historical materialism but instead possessed inner lives as complex as any of those portrayed in western cinema.
Now Second Run DVD is releasing a quartet of Polish movies from the late 1950s – Night Train, Innocent Sorcerers, Eroica and Goodbye, See You Tomorrow?, two of which star Cybulski and one of which is directed by Wajda. If you didn't know Night Train was the product of a communist country you would not deduce it from the film. There is no hint of socialist propaganda, only the atmospheric tale of a disparate group on a night train, one of whom may be a murderer. The film won best actress at the 1959 Venice Film Festival and something called the Golden Duck, as voted by the readers of Polish magazine Kino.
Innocent Sorcerers is about Andrzej, a young, hipster medic with bleached blond hair, who divides his time between being a doctor at a boxing stadium, having sex with women and playing jazz in a local dive. Goodbye, See You Tomorrow? is a romantic comedy set in Gdansk and, as well as Cybulski, features a young Roman Polanski in a supporting role.
There is the occasional episode of eastern European ludicrousness in these films. The opening credits of Goodbye, See You Tomorrow? featuring the work of the Bim Bom Theatre group and their "Theatre of Hands" brought back memories of my time as a child in communist Czechoslovakia, forced to sit through officially sanctioned puppet shows. "Theatre of Hands" turns out to be somebody's arms waving about incomprehensibly against a black screen. Nevertheless, watching these films was an intensely rewarding experience, once I had adapted my mind to their different rhythms, manners and concerns. In trying to come to terms with these movies I was reminded of the process of meditation. I found you have to quell your expectation for fast-cutting monkey-minded western cinema and instead try to acclimatise yourself to the slow-breathing pace of these films. The US psychologist John Kabatt Zinn describes the process of meditation as not trying to fall asleep but instead trying to "fall awake". And if you can manage to match yourself to these pictures' alien style you will find you're suddenly tumbling into a world that is rare and strange and unlike anything you may have encountered before.
• Restored versions of Night Train and Innocent Sorcerers are are screening as part of this year's Kinoteka Polish film festival. The Polish Cinema Classics DVD box set is released on 12 March.
Comments
1 March 2012 8:15PM
Kanal is gruelling to watch - by the end you can almost smell the shit they are forced to wade in throughout the entire film.
I'm intrigued to know how this film reated to your life.
Because the USSR officially banned Christianity many churches disguised the Apostles and Saints as Russian cosmonauts ( the first official Soviet heroes ) in their murals in an attempt to disguise the true function of the buildings.
So Yuri Gagarin was a holy figure for both communism and religion.
1 March 2012 10:36PM
Well, I related to those films of Wajda's War Triology too, which i first watched as young teenager -I think they may have been on BBC tv.
The scene at the end of Kanal , where the resistance fighters finally emerge from the sewers, to find German soldiers waiting for them is etched on my imagination.
And, as for Ashes and Diamonds - I still watch it on dvd today - such a powerful performance from Cybulski - in such a powerful, and groundbreaking film in cinematic terms - one of my favourite films.
In fact, I like all Wajda's films, and also those of Kieslowski - and a lot of east European and Russian cinema...yes, I agree that it has a meditative quality. - and something you jut don't find in most films we see in the west, but which is hard to define.
The Polish movies from the 50s being released on dvd sound great.
2 March 2012 8:01AM
Great article Jerzy. I mean Alexei. I had always thought Cybulski was a pipe-fitter welder from Harrogate.
2 March 2012 9:02AM
Good old Alexei, still making mileage out of the fact his parents were communists. I would imagine when Alexi is in his 80's he'll still be talking about his "communist" childood.
2 March 2012 10:11AM
Bit unkind, when someone is sharing something they clearly love with you.
2 March 2012 11:24AM
More on hte 4-DVD Polish Cinema Classics Box Set here at the Second Run website www.secondrundvd.com - looks great! Can't wait to see them.
2 March 2012 11:30AM
My understanding of Wajda early works was that they were deliberately subversive of the communist order: depicting sympathically the Home Army fighters of Kanal, for example, who were officially "bourgeoise gangsters" in communist eyes.
Wajda I think one of the greatest directors of all time. Katyn is one of the most truthful and hence bleakest depictions of the Second World War ever made - a heartfelt film if ever there was one as his own father was murdered there by Nazi-allied troops, known to history now as Soviet Red Army.
2 March 2012 11:44AM
Aye, he's a right laugh, that one
2 March 2012 11:47AM
" I would imagine when Alexi is in his 80's he'll still be talking about his "communist" childood."
Whereas you'll be telling us all about your sarcastic comments to people you don't know personally on free websites.
2 March 2012 12:05PM
I saw Man of Marble as a student in the early 80s and it was certainly a seminal experience for me. I just wish it could be released on DVD so I can see it again.
2 March 2012 3:55PM
"Whereas you'll be telling us all about your sarcastic comments to people you don't know personally on free websites."
Oh I do apologise, I didn't realise you had to personally know people before you could comment on something they have written (does kind of make the comments section redundant, apart from family/friends of the writer/columnist). Although, do I know you, I don't think so, so why have you commented on my post. Tut, tut, that's not on.
2 March 2012 3:59PM
One of the most telling details in Kanal comes when two of the characters look across the river through the bars of their sewer-prison. Wajda knew that his Polish audience would know that this was a reference to the Soviet troops waiting on the other side for the Poles and the Germans to finish killing each other.
Ashes and Diamonds is even more ambiguous - on paper, as far as the authorities who greenlit the project were concerned, it's the Communist, Szczuka, who's the good guy. And this stands up to a certain extent: if you look at his behaviour in almost every scene, he's actually a pretty admirable character in terms of his genuine concern for the masses, etc. By contrast, the leather-jacketed Chelmicki (Cybulski's character) was the villain, the kind of nihilistic wrecker that the Communists wanted rid of - hence his unceremonious death on the rubbish tip. Obviously, Wajda intended typical Polish viewers to interpret this very differently (and of course they did), but he was subtle enough in the way he constructed the film to be able to get it past the censors.
2 March 2012 5:19PM
My iconic Polish film scene is in Ashes and Diamonds when Cybulski sets the glasses of vodka alight (on All Saints Day?).
2 March 2012 11:08PM
Many thanks for this, MonsieurK, for a fine, thoughtful and informative piece. Keep well.
3 March 2012 3:04AM
Vintage Polish cinema is stranger than anything I'll encounter? That's interesting, because you mention that you grew up in Czechoslovakia and I had always been under the impression that the films that came out during their time as a communist state were pretty strange. But this was something that was mentioned to me in passing once, and I have seen only a fair few Czech films since. Anything you might be able to clarify or add?
3 March 2012 9:55AM
Alexei Sayle grew up in Liverpool,but he went on holiday to Czechoslovakia more than once - his parents had contacts there.
As for the "stranger than anything you'll encounter" line, I strongly suspect that this was written by a Guardian sub-editor rather than Sayle himself. Sayle's own version is:
...which is much more bet-hedging! (The word "may" alone makes a big difference).
In fact, on a historical note, in the late 1950s, Polish films almost certainly were stranger than the others - the Czechs and the Hungarians have the closest film culture, but they were still enmired in compulsory socialist realism, with their own cultural thaws not happening until the 60s were well underway.
If we think of weird animation, the name of the Czech Jan Svankmajer is probably going to pop up well before that of the Poles Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica - but those two were active from 1957, whereas Svankmajer didn't make his debut until 1964. Similarly, Roman Polanski was making waves at short-film festivals in 1958, while his Czech and Hungarian counterparts like Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel and Istvan Szabo were either still at film school or hadn't even enrolled.
So while there are plenty of weird and often wonderful delights in Czech and Hungarian archives (and indeed ones in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav territories, even Russia and the former Soviet states), the Poles arguably stole a march on everyone else. In fact, Britain's groundbreaking 'Free Cinema' screenings in the late 50s acknowledged this - the six programmes of shorts included three all-British ones, one French, one a mixture of nationalities... and one that was entirely Polish.
Which is why it's ironic that the Poles never had a proper "new wave" of their own, whereas the Czechs and Hungarians did.