When the 28-year-old Andrzej Wajda made A Generation, his debut feature, he was clearly in thrall to the Italian non-realists. He eschewed the contrivance of studio filmmaking, preferring to work on location with young, untested actors. The opening shot, a long pan across a bleak, urban landscape accompanied by haunting pipe music, wouldn’t look out of place in a Rossellini film. The nostalgic voiceover, in which the narrator recalls his Warsaw childhood, is the same device Fellini uses in I vitelloni.
At first, as we see three boys playing with a knife, this seems to be shaping up as a typical rites-of-passage story. But the gentle beginning belies the harshness of what follows. Bohdan Czeszko’s screenplay, based on his own novel, is set in Warsaw in 1942, during the Nazi occupation. There is very little idyllic about the lives of the youngsters. If they transgress or join the resistance, they are liable to be executed. The protagonist Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki) knows as much. He sees a friend shot by a Nazi sentry merely for trying to steal some coal. Walking the streets, he comes across the bodies of two patriots, hanging from a gallows in a public square. (Wajda shows him staring transfixed at their dangling legs.)
Just occasionally, a hint of agit-prop seeps into the storytelling. The young communists are portrayed as idealistic heroes. Some of the dialogue, notably when a Marxist oldtimer in the carpentry workshop explains to Stach how he is exploited by his capitalist boss, sounds as if it was drafted by apparatchiks. Wajda was making the film for the government, who clearly regarded it as first and foremost a propaganda exercise. However, the energy and lyricism of the filmmaking counters the didacticism. As Roman Polanski, who plays one of the youngsters, put it, ‘for us, it was tremendously important. All of Polish cinema was beginning with it… we worked night and day. Wajda believed in what he was doing. This was something utterly new in Poland (it was the time of Stalinism) that film was different, young.’ (Quoted in Boleslaw Michalek, Andrzej Wajda, Paris, 1964.)
The protagonists are sucked into political resistance in spite of themselves. ‘The others say you’re tough but I think you’re a kid,’ Dorota (Urszula Modrzynska), the beautiful resistance leader tells Stach. At that moment, we realise just how young he really is. Wajda conveys both the exhilaration Stach and his friends feel when they have guns in their hands and their terror in the face of the violence and death they encounter. They are not allowed a childhood. As if to emphasise the fact, in one beautifully observed scene the smoke from the burning ghetto billows around the carousel at a funfair.
Just as Maciek (Cybulski) in Ashes and Diamonds is able to forget the political struggle for a moment when he has a brief affair, Stach too enjoys a short, doomed romance. The same mood of fatalism runs through both films. Wajda’s heroes and heroines are attempting to resist the tide of history. It’s a forlorn, even suicidal endeavour, but there is a very Polish heroism in their folly.
As the neo-realists discovered, bombed out cities provide superbly atmospheric backdrops. In A Generation, Wajda makes excellent use of the wasteland and rubble strewn streets of Warsaw. The chase sequence, in which Starh’s friend Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar) flees his Nazi pursuers over roofs and down side streets, anticipates Maciek’s equally forlorn dash for freedom at the end of Ashes and Diamonds. Wajda shows Jasio caught at the top of a maze-like stairwell with nowhere left to go. It’s a highly symbolic moment, even at a dead-end he refuses to surrender.
Geoffrey Macnab, Sight and Sound, February 1998
While You Are Sleeping
This fascinating short captures a bustling city at night and was shot by Jerzy Lipman, the cinematographer on A Generation.
While You Are Sleeping Kiedy ty śpisz
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Writers: Andrzej Wajda, Konrad Nalecki, Jerzy Lipman
Poems: Tadeusz Kubiak
Photography: Jerzy Lipman
Camera Operator: Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz
Poland 1953
11 mins
Digital (restoration)
A Generation Pokolenie
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Production Company: Film Polski
Production Manager: Ignacy Taub
Assistant Directors: Kazimierz Kutz, Konrad Nalecki
Screenplay: Bohdan Czeszko
Based on the novel by: Bohdan Czeszko
Director of Photography: Jerzy Lipman
Camera Operator: Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz
Editor: Czeslaw Raniszewski
Art Director: Roman Mann
Set Decorators: Jerzy Skrzepinski, Józef Galewski
Costume Designer: Jerzy Szeski
Make-up: Zdzislaw Papierz
Music: Andrzej Markowski
Music Performed by: Philharmonic Orchestra of Warsaw
Sound: Józef Koprowicz
Artistic Consultant: Aleksander Ford
Cast
Tadeusz Lomnicki (Stach)
Urszula Modrzynska (Dorota)
Tadeusz Janczar (Jasio Krone)
Janusz Paluszkiewicz (Sekula)
Ryszard Kotas (Jacek)
Roman Polanski (Mundek)
Zbigniew Cybulski (Kostka)
Ludwik Benoit (Grzesio)
Jerzy Krsowski
Zofia Czerwinska
Stanislaw Milski
Tadeusz Fijewski
Juliusz Roland
Kazimierz Wichniarz
August Kowalczyk
Hanna Skarzanka
Cezary Julski
Zygmunt Zintel
Poland 1955
87 mins
Digital (restoration)
Restored by DI Factory and reKINO
With thanks to
Marlena Łukasiak, Michał Oleszczyk, Jędrzej Sabliński
Presented with the ICA and Ciné Lumière, who will also be hosting screenings of Wajda’s works in February and March
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