Der Mann ohne Gesicht

Having recently watched Jerzy Kawalerowicz's "Night Train" (1959), and being genuinely impressed by it, I had high expectations from the same director's "Shadow", made only three years earlier, but it didn't live up to them. Ironically, the best sections of "Shadow" also involve trains, but they are short - they come only at the beginning and the end. The rest of the film gets derailed (pun intended) by other stories that are not very interesting. "Shadow" lacks "Night Train"'s narrative economy and discipline; it is rather long-winded and incoherent instead. It does feature some good camerawork, though. *1/2 out of 4.

Having just completed watching Kawalerowicz's classic CELLULOSE pair of movies, I followed up with THE SHADOW (Cien), a marvelous and innovative experiment in suspense. This film, heavily influenced by not only Hitchcock but Kurosawa's RASHOMON, is out on DVD and needs to be rediscovered.

It's an interesting and unpredicted twist of film history that in the video era, basically the past three decades, all manner of obscure and previously reviled titles (porn, cheap-jack horror, roadshow exploitation) have been revived and even taken center stage of cinema for a huge number of retro fans. At the same time, masterworks of previous eras, especially the foreign films that dominated art houses in the '50s, have fallen by the wayside to near-complete obscurity. For my pop quiz, ask any young film buff (under the age of 40) if they've ever heard of SUNDAYS AND CYBELE, once the prototypical art film.

THE SHADOW is among the forgotten, yet watching it last night I was struck how it covers, in radically different style and theme, the very popular current terrain staked out by Christopher Nolan. Much of THE SHADOW is even more complex (and certainly more subtle) than Nolan's recent crowd-pleasers including MEMENTO, INCEPTION and THE PRESTIGE. Yet its thematics, heavily under the sway of the Stalinist era in which it was made in Poland, are a major roadblock to contemporary audiences' embracing its content.

Formally, THE SHADOW takes the RASHOMON gambit of a narrative that keeps shifting the point-of-view so that the audience sees events from radically different perspectives. Instead of focusing on a single event as Kurosawa did (seen by different people), the structure is more in the nature of a Bunuelian trick. One person relates (cueing a flashback) their pivotal unsolved mystery, and this inspires other people to relate analogous mysteries, which have some intriguing and surprising points of overlap.

Film begins with a couple joy-riding in their car, only to be shocked at a passenger plummeting from a nearby train. They rush to the body and find it mangled, taking it to the authorities. One go-getter cop comments that a man always leaves a shadow, that will inevitably unwrap the mystery of his existence (a sort of "Bones"/"CSI" approach), while a doctor on the case points out this is not always true, inspired to spin his yarn of a WW II incident he was never able to adequately unravel.

He was part of a communist underground group the People's Guard during the Nazi occupation, assigned to rob a store to raise money for the cause. Caper goes awry with the arrival of a group of guys who open fire, with the doc surviving the battle but unable to find out what went wrong. Later he discovers a maimed antagonist who turns out to member of a different cell, as someone orchestrated sending both groups on the same raid simultaneously to have them wipe each other out. He was never able to identify the mastermind.

Back at present day, the authorities pick up a young guy who had grabbed the dead man's coat on the train and cannot come up with a reasonable alibi for his suspicious behavior -he is the prime clue as to the corpse's identity.

A detective recalls his own unsolved mystery from 1946 when he was fighting against a mysterious traitor nicknamed the Dwarf. With his buddy they finally infiltrate the Dwarf's lair, but his presumed pal turns on him, selling him out to save his own skin. This builds to an unbelievably suspenseful confrontation (worthy of Clouzot or Hitchcock) which I won't spoil, and returning to the present day we see the permanent damage suffered by the detective as a result.

Film picks up with a flashback of the young suspect's back story leading to his apprehension with the dead man's coat. He's a fall guy in a terrorist bombing, with some exciting chases including a scary, ultra-realistic (no Hitchcock process screens) pursuit on the train. Film's open ending leaves the mysteries fairly intact, but with the viewer pondering the unknowability of many bizarre events. Like the first cop, we crave certitude but Kawalerowicz and his talented scriptwriter Aleksander Scibor-Rylski (who later wrote Wajda's MAN OF MARBLE and MAN OF IRON), demonstrate there are many things that cannot be explained.

The mood of paranoia, gradually accreting suspense, and eventual hopelessness is superbly essayed by Kawalerowicz's fanciful camera-work, exploiting the popular neo-Realist use of locations, but plenty of low angles and subtly distorting lens closeups -not exaggerated but effective. Jerzy Lipman is the cinematographer, famous for his Wajda classics as well as Polanski's debut KNIFE IN THE WATER.

I loved this strange movie and would recommend it to anyone open to expanding their view of cinema, beyond the effective but increasingly tired clichés which have encrusted what audiences want and expect in a suspense film. This is all about the loose ends.

Jerzy Kawalerowicz (pronounced 'cavalerovitch', 1922-2007) was one of the most talented Polish film directors. His films are insufficiently known outside of Poland but are slowly being revived, with English or German subtitles, so that this Polish master of cinema technique becomes familiar to wider and newer audiences. I have already pointed out the sheer genius of his film NIGHT TRAIN (aka POCIAG, 1959, see my review), which may be the best 'train film' ever made. In fact, there are hair-raising and wonderful train episodes in this film as well. Kawalerowicz was obviously a great lover of trains and knew how to get the most out of them cinematically. This film is listed on IMDb by its Polish title CIEN (pronounced 'tsyen', because a 'c' in Polish when on its own is always pronounced as a hard 'ts' sound). That means either THE SHADOW, as the English subtitles put it, or simply SHADOW, as the DVD box says. The reference is to a line spoken by a policeman in the film where he says 'you can always find a man from his shadow'. This is a mystery and suspense film of enormous power and dynamism, due to the cinematic techniques of the director. He specializes in shooting upwards close up to strong, Slavic faces, and his actors, all having lived through the War and Stalinism, did not need acting lessons in how to convey fear and desperate anxiety. Considering how bland, soft and pampered modern Western faces are, these gaunt Polish faces of the 1950s are a true history lesson in themselves. The stories and screenplay are by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski (1928-1983), who later wrote Andrzej Wajda's two famous films MAN OF MARBLE (1977) and MAN OF IRON (1981). CIEN was his very first screenplay, but already it was something of a masterpiece. The story consists of strands of remembered flashbacks from different people threaded together on an investigation of a mysterious death. We see episodes from 1943 when Warsaw was occupied by the Germans, and even more harrowing episodes from 1946 during the struggle for control of freed Poland. These all relate to the events of the mid-1950s when the film begins. Kawalerowicz is especially strong on powerful and dynamic moving shots, shots which are either driving towards something or fleeing away from something, or otherwise following something. This film is far from being static or stagey, it is always on the move. The train episodes in the latter part of the film are simply amazing, and the actors risked their lives by doing all the stunt work themselves. This film is concerned with duplicity, treachery, identity, and has a mood of loss and sombre sadness about it. The various searches for people who can never again be traced reminds one of the many novels of Patrick Modiano, and the same pathos at the irrecoverable past and the hopelessness of ever explaining its lingering mysteries runs through the entire film like a pungent trail of smoke from a fire of sad memories. The atmosphere is so strong, the acting so good, and the direction so inspired, that this film ranks with the best American noir films, alongside its even more dazzling successor three years later, NIGHT TRAIN. If non-Polish people could only pronounce his name, Jerzy Kawalerowicz would probably be really famous round the world by now.