Afterimage

Afterimage

Poland’s Andrzej Wajda directed “Afterimage,” which is his last film. It concludes the career of one of world cinema’s greats. While many other Polish filmmakers like Jerzy Skolimowski and Roman Polanski left for the freedoms of the west when their careers gained momentum, Wajda stayed in Poland until his death at 90 following a premiere at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival.

He lived in Poland and tried to study that country’s current history and mores. Before the Soviet Union fell apart, this often got him into trouble with Poland’s Communist regime, who gave him a subject for “Afterimage”: what individuals and artists must do to resist demands by soul-killing totalitarian governments.

The new film will mean most to people who know Wajda’s work. In the 1950s he burst onto the scene with his great trilogy of “Generation,” “Kanal” and “Ashes and Diamonds,” which anticipated both the French New Wave’s stylistic energy and sophistication and registered young Poles’ disillusionment and mixed feelings after suffering through Nazism as well as communism.

In next decade, tightly controlled by authorities here, he managed to capture anti-Communist ferment of Solidarity era in films such as “Man of Marble” (1979) or “Man of Iron” (1981), a struggle he retrospectively celebrated in “Walesa: Man of Hope” (2013).

Wajda’s father was Polish cavalry officer killed during Katyn Massacre in 1940, when Stalin ordered Soviet secret police systematically shoot 22,000 men representing cream polish society pointblank back heads; Nazis Soviets were then allies but after alliance broke up Germans invaded soviets blamed it on nazis – lie maintained official policy till 1990 & widely echoed by apologists for moscow abroad.

(Churchill Roosevelt knew better but told their govts suppress truth sake good relations with stalin.) Some documents about this mass murder are still classified in Russia, thus no surprise that Wajda didn’t release bare bones “Katyn” till 2007, which got nominated for best foreign language film at oscars.

Afterimage may be seen as an affiliated work to Katyn both being written by Andrzej Mularczyk who authored book on which former was based; they’re two sides same coin so say some critics. Both movies show what life under Stalinism was really like but while one happens during peacetime another is set wartime. The year 1948 and Wladyslaw Strzeminski (played by Boguslaw Linda) an artist his early sixties missing arm leg due injuries sustained in world war I when polish most famous painter also recognized theoretician beloved lecturer Higher School Visual Arts Lodz.

However though famous well liked it does not protect him from Stalinist thought police. This is announced by Wajda in a visually stunning and witty scene near beginning of movie where Strzeminski’s flat turns red his canvas then whole room suddenly changes color because big banner featuring image joseph vissarionovich has been raised front window blocking out sunlight He cuts hole through this intrusion to let sunshine into dwelling thereby breaking one rule after another against authority figures.

A bigger problem is that he believes in two things that are anathema to the cultural powers-that-be: abstract art and the autonomy of the artist. The former is increasingly verboten as Soviet “socialist realism” becomes the only officially sanctioned style of painting and all forms of non-representational and avant garde art are denounced as examples of Western decadence and American “cosmopolitanism” (a word that in Communist contexts usually has undertones of anti-Semitism, though Wajda doesn’t stress these).

As for artistic autonomy, that’s also disallowed; artists are meant to serve not themselves but the masses, the collective, the Party even if the resulting “art” is the sheerest propagandistic kitsch.

Strzeminski supposedly knew Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich, but we never hear any mention of friends in the West who might help him escape Poland, as other artists did. Likewise he has a young daughter (the excellent Bronislawa Zamachowska) he cares for and a female student (Zofia Wichlacz) who cares very much for him, but neither relationship can put the skids on his rapid downward trajectory.

First they take away his teaching position from him. Then they remove his famous “Neo-Plastic Room” from the Lodz museum under cover of darkness. And then they destroy a thesis art show by his students with sledgehammers. Some would love to stand by him, defend him, but they are told that doing so would mean sacrificing their own futures.

When he’s de-credentialed as an artist when it means nothing anymore it means he can no longer get work. In a bitter irony he secretly gets a job painting giant Stalin posters at night, but when his status is discovered he’s dismissed from even this humiliating position soon enough too. He finds out quick enough that not having credentials means he can’t even buy paints, or food. How will he live? Under Communism “those who don’t work don’t eat,” he’s told.

“Afterimage” is mounted in a classical, beautifully understated style that throughout conveys the assurance of a true master. It’s one of those films that doesn’t ask to be liked or admired, but only to be heard. Like Darkness at Noon, Nineteen Eighty-Four and other anti-Communist literary classics, its descent into the hell of totalitarianism isn’t softened by a glimmer of solace at the end. It’s the testimony of an artist who has seen the worst of Polish history and demands that it not be forgotten.

Watch Afterimage For Free On Gomovies.