Kanal, ils aimaient la vie

I saw this film in a film festival in Dhaka, in early sixties(Now Bangladesh, then East Pakistan). For me as a student, Sattayjit Ray's Apu trilogy was my only exposer to any kind of art film then. Visual realism was a new thing for us in Indian sub continent. Audience were so spellbound that they could smell sewage sitting in the cinema hall. I think like all great directors, Wajda had the cinematographic sense to create that environment where viewers reality could blend with creative fiction. In post war period of late forties and in early fifties like the School of Polish Posters, all creative mediums went through this fatalistic phase. It was grotesque but realistic.

This is an excellent movie. It tells the story of the last stages of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. A small unit of Polish Resistance fighters are ordered to fall back to a central position by going through the sewers.

Most of the actions happens in the eerie confines of the sewers, which creates a very gripping atmosphere. However, the most interesting aspect of the movie is the character development. All of the characters are so different and changeable. No stereotypical characters in this movie!

Andrzej Wajda is a truly great director. He is able to make unique movies based on the character development, rather than relying on gimmicks to gain the audience's attention. In this movie you never know what is ultimately going to happen to the resistance fighters until the final scenes.

"Kanal" (Polish, 1957): This is the second of Andrzej Wajda's trilogy about WWII in Poland. I love the photography – the light, the angles, the flowing camera movements. "Kanal" is about a group of resistance fighters and civilians who, out of necessity, band together to fight (what appears to be a losing battle) against the oncoming Nazis. First set in an incredibly bleak ruin of Warsaw, the story and acting only intensify as they begrudgingly try to escape through the underground sewer system. This one will take it out of you. It is relentless. It is relentless. It is relentless. It is relentless. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless. Relentless.

I think everyone who saw this film knows that it's a masterpiece, but maybe not everyone knows how authentic the film is. The writer of the screenplay - Jerzy Stefan Stawinski - is in fact the Lieutenant Zadra responsible for his platoon. Stawinski wrote down his own war experiences here with impressing honesty.

Another thing that may be interesting in this film is the main female character - Daisy. She isn't supposed to be a superwoman as some suggested. In fact there were several thousands of women fighting in this uprising. All of them that survived it were given the status of soldiers by Germans. It was the first time in the world's history when women received such a status. During the uprising many of them were carrying mail via sewers, so Daisy is rather a typical character in this role. It would be more surprising if the guide was a man.

Watching Andrzei Wajda's war movie 'Kanal' one is stuck just by how short the interval was between the making of this film and the horrors it depicts. And while there were plenty of British and American war films made in the 1950s, it was perhaps easier to turn "our" story into the black-and-white banality of heroic fable, besides which, "we" could also make movies without communist censors looking over our shoulders. Wajda here chooses to fashion a tale centred on the collapse of the Polish resistance to the Nazis: the last survivors take to the sewers, the Germans pump gas down, and you know as soon as the film starts that there will be no happy endings, even for the survivors. It's a tale whose laconic nihilism would be remarkable in any era: I was reminded of the (much later) BBC nuclear-themed drama 'Threads', another tale of underground life facing extinction, while the dialogue, stoical in the face of impossible fate, offers more direct echos, for it made me think of the films of another Polish master, Krystoff Kieslowski. The most remarkable things in this film are the poetically bleak sequence of scenes that end it; it's biggest failing is the score, that (as with many films of this era) feels the need to describe the plot, and not merely to complement it. Occasionally other aspects of the movie also give away its age, but what's much more notable is the modernity (and hopelessness) of its approach to its material. A fine achievement, dating from an era when the events it portrayed were the present, not the past.