Andrzej Wajda's War Trilogy. - Review - video recording review

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 2000 by Robert S. Rothenberg

ANDRZEJ WAJDA'S WAR TRILOGY HOME VISION, THREE CASSETTES, $24.95 EACH

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issues an honorary Oscar, it is usually a salute to a Hollywood luminary who has failed to corral a coveted Academy Award despite a long and illustrious career. Recipients have included Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mickey Rooney, and Orson Welles. When the Academy elected to bestow a foreign director with an honorary Oscar, the names were familiar to most moviegoers, especially the art house crowd. Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, and Akiru Kurosawa fell into this category, but when the Academy decided to honor Andrzej Wajda, there was almost a universal "Who?" among all but inveterate film buffs.

To clear up the mystery, Wajda is Poland's leading moviemaker, most noted for his World War II trilogy--"A Generation" (1954), "Kanal" (1957), and "Ashes and Diamonds" (1958). Wajda has been honored with the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize for "Kanal" and the British Film Critics Guild award for best foreign film and the Venice Film Festival International Film Critics Award for "Ashes," but the Academy totally ignored him until handing him the honorary Oscar in 2000.

With Home Vision's reissuance of the trilogy, America has a chance to see what Wajda's reputation is largely based on. It requires sitting through three black-and-white films with Polish dialogue and English subtitles. Despite somewhat dated techniques and low-tech production values, they hold viewers' interest, especially the gripping "Kanal."

In "A Generation," a group of teenagers join the Resistance to fight the Nazis almost as a lark, but then find themselves in a deadly serious series of confrontations. Alert viewers will be able to spot a very young Roman Polanski in a small role. "Kanal" follows a band of Resistance members through the sewers of Warsaw in a desperate effort to unite with the remnants of the forces trying to hold out against the Nazis during the Warsaw uprising. "Ashes and Diamonds," the most sophisticated of the trilogy, is set on the last day of the German occupation of Poland, focusing on an assassination attempt against a Communist Party official as various factions start to draw up battle plans for the postwar power struggle.

While Wajda's war trilogy is credited with putting Polish films on the cinematic map, leading to the international reputation of director/writer Roman Potanski and director Jerzy Skolimowski, a curious omission sparks memories of the nation's heritage of anti-Semitism that made Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps possible in Poland. At no time in the three pictures is there any mention of the Warsaw Ghetto per se and the eradication of the city's Jewish population. All the fighting is credited to the Warsaw uprising and the Resistance, as if the Ghetto never existed. This historical whitewashing takes more than a bit of the shine off Wajda's honorary Oscar.

Reviewed by ROBERT S. ROTHENBERG Publisher and Editor-in-Chief