Commentary

Representation and Ruination under a Soviet Shadow: Wajda, History, and Chris Marker’s Re-thinking of Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’

PAUL COATES, Western University, Canada; email: [email protected]

94 DOI: 10.2478/bsmr-2018-0006 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY ABSTRACT Following the recent death of , a reconsider- ation of his work is timely, and all the more so because he provides a reference point for many East Central European cinéastes. Thus this article uses his work as a main switch- ing point between meditations on the issues his films raise. It theorises the status accorded History in them, and in Marxism in general, in relation to Walter Benjamin’s work on allegory and ruin, as well as to questions of characteri- sation. Also considered is the degree and nature of existen- tialism’s influence on this cinema, with blockages of choice foregrounded as necessarily entailing a thematics of doubling, contradiction and masking, and a reworking of the meaning of accusations of ‘treachery’ that have been a leitmotif of oppressed cultures, particularly when – as in cinema – access to the means of production depends on real or apparent collaboration with state authorities. The particular meaning of certain delays in production will also be considered, as will certain figures from the Polish culture (this writer’s primary specialisation) with an obvious ‘Baltic connection’, i.e. a Lithuanian origin, such as Tadeusz Konwicki and Czesław Miłosz. The thematics of doubling will finally be related to notions of ruination and of a filmic language adequate to it, which it will be argued may be seen prototypically in ‘the Zone’, Chris Marker’s name for a particular method of image-presentation, named in homage to that great Soviet film shot in Estonia, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Сталкер, Russia, 1979). To revert to the title of Wajda’s final filmAfterimage (Powidoki, , 2016), and invoke Miłosz also, the Zone may be called the native realm, not only melancholic but also surprisingly utopian, of the after-image that is the ruin.

95 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY INTRODUCTION representation of war, taking as its start- If the films of Andrzej Wajda inspired film- ing point Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of makers throughout the countries compris- allegory in terms of the ruin. Using Wajda ing the post-war Soviet sphere of influence as my central example, but also drawing on and control, they did so in part because such figures as Miłosz, Tadeusz Konwicki their eclecticism, even syncretism, draw- and Leonīds Leimanis, I will also trace the ing in particular on American and Soviet interlocking of themes of ruination, contra- cinema, and neo-realism, offers diction, doubling, treachery and suicide in a highly representative sample of the rep- the work of artists growing up in the Soviet ertoire of paradigms, opportunities and sphere in the aftermath of war. The ques- constraints under which directors worked tion of the adequacy of representations throughout this spatio-temporal area. of war and its memory – one central to After all, Wajda’s career spanned most of Wajda’s oeuvre – meanwhile raises issues the period, and even at its close was still of filmic language, which will be central to dissecting the Soviet-imposed system, my argument’s final recruitment of another in a final film appropriately titled Afterim- exemplary, recently-deceased figure, Chris age (Powidoki, Poland, 2016), about the Marker, whose travels arguably rendered travails of the abstract painter Wladysław him the first director of world cinema. Strzemiński (Bogusław Linda) under Sta- linist socialist realism. Wajda’s death two WAR, HISTORY AND ALLEGORY years ago offers an opportunity to consider The period immediately after that devastat- the extent of this paradigmatic status in ing occasion of ruination, World War II – one homage as well as analysis. This move is whose representation in the arts of all the not intended to impose the template of a countries in question has proved extremely ‘Polish’, and hence relatively ‘large’ cin- contentious, and centres Wajda’s best- ematic culture upon ones stemming from known film, Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i smaller populations and industries, as it is diament, Poland, 1958) – suggests that one worth noting that all Soviet-influenced cul- may speak of a phony war after as well as tures shared the status of victims of war- before the ‘real’ one. The Hungarian novelist time and post-war colonisation, while the Sándor Márai described just such a post- definition of ‘Poland’ itself has long been war phony war, one uncannily akin to the complicated by graftings in, detachments, pre-war one, as the spinning of a spider’s and reattachments, operations including web, before the newly-installed authorities its historic coupling with Lithuania – enforced their demands most insistently, a one-time attachment reflected particu- larly powerfully in the final chapter of a What was so natural yesterday – widely-acknowledged reference point for political parties, freedom of the interpretation of the Soviet empire, The press, life without fear, freedom Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysł, 1953; see of individual opinion – still existed Miłosz [1953] 1981), whose author, Czesław the next day, but more anaemi- Miłosz, himself from Lithuania, entitled it cally, the way the elements of ‘The Lesson of the Baltics’. An image from everyday reality continue to live near the end of Wajda’s Kanał (Poland, on more pallidly in anguished 1957), showing Stokrotka (Daisy) (Teresa dreams during the night. Iżewska) staring through bars across the (Márai [1972] 2005: 306) Vistula, towards its opposite shore, could arguably even be the Varsovian equivalent Ashes and Diamonds is true to this sensa- of a Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian gaze tion of dream, of a post-traumatic surfacing across the Baltic towards freer, luckier, of nightmares long after their original occa- more northerly states. My analysis sion, still trailing signs of their nocturnal will focus on allegory, history, and the origin. In a personification of Márai’s more

96 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY abstract analysis, the democratic press still with day and night is echoed in the surreal- haunts the official banquet that dominates ist texture of Wajda’s film, much of whose the latter stages of Ashes and Diamonds, imagery seeks a material and socio- but its defeat and phantomisation is antici- political ground or alibi for surrealism’s pated in the work’s caricaturing of its rep- interest in dreams; not surprisingly, in an resentative, Editor Pieniążek (Stanisław interview of the period Wajda would praise Milski). Indeed, the whole film swarms Luis Buñuel (Wajda 1967: 235). The ontol- with phantoms, with figures doubling one ogy of political marginalisation becomes another and functioning as each other’s a hauntology. Maciek has only apparently afterimages or prefigurations, its protago- emerged from the underground crawl- nist, underground fighter Maciek Chelmicki space he moved through, like the protago- (), eventually becoming a nists of Kanał, during the Uprising. ghost surprised to find itself bleeding and Conceptualising historical develop- touching and smelling the blood to test ments in such sinister terms, Márai’s ideas its reality (the haptic in cinema seeming parallel – albeit following a very different, to attempt to subject the screen’s visual liberal humanist trajectory – Walter Ben- image, whose distance renders it possibly jamin’s description of the allegorical face hallucinatory, to a reality-test). (Figure 1) In of history in his theorisation of the German one form of a contradictoriness in Wajda’s Trauerspiel: work to which I will return, Maciek’s action collapses end of life and afterlife into an When, as is the case in the Trauer- image both supernatural and materialist. spiel, history becomes part of In another, perhaps even more memo- the setting, it does so as script. rable evocation of the surreptitious change The word ‘history’ stands written suggesting a phony war, Márai again uses on the countenance of nature in the day-night contrast, this time in terms of the characters of transience. The differences in those shifting, accidental and allegorical physiognomy of the highly cinematic qualities of day and night nature-history, which is put on known as lighting: stage in the Trauerspiel, is pre- sent in reality in the form of the Such changes don’t have names. ruin. In the ruin history has physi- I can’t say it was as if ‘night had cally merged into the setting. suddenly fallen.’ Rather, it was And in this guise history does not like the parts of the day when assume the process of an eternal it was still bright, but the light life so much as that of irresistible which had till then illuminated decay. Allegory thereby declares the region cheerfully and vividly itself to be beyond beauty. Allego- suddenly becomes more solemn, ries are, in the realm of thoughts, turns, so to say, gloomy. People what ruins are in the realm of took notice and, like the light, things. (Benjamin [1925/1928] like the landscape, grew somber. 1998: 177–178) (Márai [1972] 2005: 304) History here may be capitalised not simply Language falters as qualities associated because the German language requires it, with daytime come to seem accidental, but rather like so many allegorical figures. in the sense that word has in Aristotelean The personification involved (perhaps per- medieval scholasticism. Losing the sharp- sonification in general itself) is also a mor- ness of light-dark distinctions threatens tification, as Benjamin deems that face of cinema particularly acutely, as its bright- history skull-like. That sense of an identifi- ness feeds on the blackness the projector- cation with history as a reduction is appar- beam brushes aside. Márai’s preoccupation ent also in Svetlana Alexievich’s statement,

97 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY in The Unwomanly Face of War (У вайны If allegories can relate to thought as не жаночае аблічча, 1984), that ‘[a] human ruins do to things, as Benjamin argues, being is guided by something stronger it is because the allegory is like the brick than history’ (Alexievich [1984] 2017: xix). chimney that alone remains standing after Some later words by Alexievich could even a conflagration, as in the US South both as be used as a review of Wajda’s War Trilogy, traversed by Mary Chesnut during the Civil from within the wartime experience shared War and as it still is, ironically preserved by both the Soviets and the countries they from burning, as it were homeopathically, would occupy: by its past hosting of fire. And here I return to the question of personification to argue A human being is most visible and that this solitary, charred persistence is open in war, and maybe also in that of a single quality left after loss of the love. To the depths, to the sub- complexity of the human – just as in The cutaneous layers. In the face of Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, USA, 1915) death all ideas pale, and incon- war momentarily turns Mae Marsh’s Little ceivable eternity opens up, for Sister into the embodiment of Hatred, which no-one is prepared. We or in Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge still lie in history, not the cosmos. (Kriemhilds Rache, Germany, 1924), after (Alexievich [1984] 2017: xxiv–xxv) the death of Siegfried (Paul Richter), Kriem- hild (Margarete Schön) comes to personify Maciek’s astonishment at the reality of his Revenge. In the extremity of experience that own blood expresses that unpreparedness, characterises melodrama, a single emotion the very thing Freud deems a precondition overwhelms one. If the result may seem of trauma. like a dehumanisation, that one remaining History capitalised, as if it were indeed quality represents a backbone, the sign the cosmos, of course controlled Marxism’s that the ravaged human is still standing, master narrative even as its positive History albeit only after a fashion. Thus although clearly also displayed a negative, skull- Benjamin may have resisted this theoreti- like shadow in the work of the most impor- cal move, the inherent loss of complexity of tant directors of the post-war Sovietised the allegorised person aligns his advocacy countries; little surprise that Wajda criti- of allegory with the Romantic critique of its cism often cites History as a, if not the, ostensible poverty. This suggests a twin- major protagonist of his works, and the ning of Romanticism with its contemporary curse of its upper-case may be fused rival, the Realism that so valued complex- with a geography, the landscape of flat ity, its own version of the rich interiority that fields open to neighbours’ incursions. seduced the Romantic, unaware that com- A concern with History can lead also to one plexity was a luxury, that history’s impov- with film language, something apparent in erishment of humanity has been a norm Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (, 1983), only briefly and partially abrogated during to which I will turn more fully later, History the nineteenth century, Realism’s heyday. and its failures being one of its central Allegorical thoughts and ruins are indeed protagonists. Marker in the end establishes consubstantial in the imagery of stone an alternative imaginary geography that haunting the Eastern European post-war is also the seed-bed of a history that imagination. has not happened, one privileged in the ver- Benjamin’s idea allows one to read the sion of speculative fiction he calls the Zone. allegorical quality of socialist realist char- Here history perhaps ‘becomes history’ acters (each clearly aligned with a Vice or indeed, rephrased in a new visual language, Virtue, all lacking the complexity sought in the ruined site near Tallinn in Tarkovsky’s by the traditional, mostly nineteenth- Stalker (Сталкер, Russia, 1979) that century realism taken as a yardstick by inspired Marker’s idea. Győrgy Lukács [Lukács [1938] 1977: 57])

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FIGURE 1. Andrzej Wajda, Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, Poland, 1958). Half-way to becoming a ghost, Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) smells his own blood.

99 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY as testifying to the ruin underlying them. masks’ rigor mortis is that of death, the Their enforced positivity compensates deathliness they express is concealed by repressed awareness of the ruins out of its particular association with the melodra- which Socialist construction arises, be they matic and sacrificial villain (above all else, material or the mental ones of a devastated the saboteur) who merits consignment, like inter-war bourgeois humanist ideological Maciek, to the dustbin of history. Insofar order. Socialist realism’s setting of so as the death embodied in masks – all of many works on building sites is not just which can become death masks – antici- hopeful realism but also seeks to repress pates transformation, ironically enough it is knowledge of the uncanny and persistent indeed lit superhumanly by a radiant future. psychological aftereffects of the ruination In socialist realism, as in all melodrama, on which it depends: it presents it only as the Last Judgement is executed on earth, a loosening of bricks, the extent of whose among humans, with any driving transcend- re-use also allegorises a pre-war-style ent principle itself masked as the verdict human’s happy cementing into a good, non- of a History whose paradoxically immanent bourgeois order. Thus the official Marxist transcendence is just as essentially opposition to psychoanalysis becomes one sacrificial as any previous system. to the archaeology to which Freud so often likened his enterprise (Freud [1896] 1950: HISTORIOGRAPHY 184–185, Møller 1991: 31–35) – in this AND BELATEDNESS case, an archaeology of the mentality of the One way of writing history – one indebted present. More apposite than Lukács’ advo- to G. W. F. Hegel’s well-worn notion of the cacy of realism therefore is his own ironi- zeitgeist (Hegel [1837] 1956: 54–79) – casts cally allegorical reading of Benjamin’s the- it in terms of what (descending the ladder ory of the Baroque as really one of modern- of consciousness) is thinkable, sayable ism (Lukács [1955] 1963: 40–43), though he and even dreamable at particular times. cannot see the extent to which it represents This issue is also of relevance to possible realism’s afterlife, as the amputation of differences in what can be said in particu- human beings into personifications and lar media, as evidenced in the time-lags shadows that is particularly prevalent in between certain issues’ airings in litera- , the German form of mod- ture and film, and their degree of proximity ernism, really indicates a mind’s break-up to a verbal language usually – though not into conflicting qualities in the face of always, as the Lacanian example indicates real traumas. (Lacan [1957] 1966) – associated with Stripped of the complexity of the consciousness. Given the totalitarian human, the allegorical figure is either sub- or quasi-totalitarian regime’s lack of or super-human (if one likes, either pre- mechanisms for non-violent transfers of dating or succeeding the bourgeois order); power, regime changes tended to occur it thus functions like a mask and serves in near-catastrophic circumstances fol- just such a form of melodrama as social- lowed by rituals of official repudiation of ist realism proposes. At the same time, the norms of the preceding period. Thus in its political unconscious it also crypti- very often works shelved or simply not pro- cally tells another uncomfortable truth duced in one period were then instrumen- about the system, as it corresponds to a talised in an effort to legitimate the next. reality – the one many would call totalitar- The political issue of new rulers’ use of ian – in which all must wear masks. The shelved works was sometimes masked by figures’ apparent reality itself masks their the socio-aesthetic one of whether the right status as masks, blocking the expression time for confrontation of certain issues had of impulses inconsistent with the require- really come or actually passed, an inability ments of the increasingly fully internalised to speak at the right time being one of the system monitoring them. Inasmuch as the curses suffered by these regimes’ artists.

100 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY Despite such fears, in certain cases the in the more heavily-policed ‘most important delay in production clearly could, somewhat art’, despite (or perhaps even because of?) surprisingly, serve all parties. The delayed literature’s apparently greater openness making of a film about the Warsaw Upris- to conscious scrutiny than the images ing until after 1956 could both permit the Wajda always insisted could smuggle con- arrival of a filmmaker sufficiently talented tent ‘between the frames’ (Wajda 2003: xvi). to confront the issue seriously and cred- The Horse-Hair Ring, by way of contrast, ibly and also mute the reverberations of an also from a Ścibor-Rylski work, lacked the underground trauma that seemed to render resonance Wajda sought, probably because artistic representation all-but impossible, the time-differential between text and even indecent, according to the rhythm of film straddled the passing of the soi-disant trauma representation summed up in the Socialist system to which it had been obvi- Freudian term Nachträglichkeit (‘belated- ously relevant, rendering it something of a ness’) (Caruth 1996: 16–18, 91–95). No postscript to urgently dissident discourse. wonder representation plays out under- Somewhat piquantly, this issue could even ground even when the theme sees the affect films about the Socialist counties light of day. made outside them, as Pauline Kael mused Apart from Kanał and Ashes and whether The Confession (L’aveu, France/ Diamonds, the implicit subjects of my Italy, 1970), Costa-Gavras’s film based on previous sentences, Wajda’s career would Artur ’s book about the Slansky trial, furnish other examples, such as the would have been most relevant during decade-long delays between the proposal the period of debate about the mentalities and the shooting of (Człowiek of Communist true believers sparked z marmuru, Poland, 1977) and, later, of by Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon The Horse-Hair Ring (Pierścionek z orłem w (Sonnenfinsternis, 1940) (Kael 1973: 200– koronie, Poland, 1993). In all these cases, 205). Internal Warsaw Pact convulsion the delay was also mapped onto the time- affected that film’s making, of course, as differential between the original text’s pub- the Prague Spring’s approval of its shoot- lication and the film’s making. In three of ing in Czechoslovakia was rescinded by the the cases – Kanał, Ashes and Diamonds and Soviet invasion, and Costa-Gavras ended up Man of Marble – there is no evidence that a shooting it in Lille. Chris Marker’s The Last film shot earlier would have been superior Bolshevik (Le tombeau d’Alexandre, France/ to the one actually made, though it may be Finland, 1993) offers a telling footnote to argued that the extra time that elapsed in the film’s history by noting its later screen- the case of the Man of Marble script (finally ing in a Soviet Union in the process of disin- approved only because a particular Minister tegration. The question of the role of delay of Culture, Józef Tejchma, hankered after a in the shooting of a script recurs in the case filmic monument to ’s construc- of Rock and Splinters (Akmens un šķembas, tion [Tejchma 1991]) permitted an epic Rolands Kalniņš, Latvia, 1966), whose first extension of its subject-matter to the 1970s script dated from the mid-1950s but – as that also, more problematically, allowed a Inga Pērkone-Redoviča has noted when rather cartoonish, both semi-modernistically discussing Wajda’s influence on Latvian and partly generationally alienated pres- cinema – could not be filmed until 1964, entation of the frustrated young film- following a Latvian Communist Party Cen- maker, Agnieszka (). If Alek- tral Committee call for ‘new and engaging sander Ścibor-Rylski’s novella that formed historical films’ (Pērkone-Redoviča 2017: the script’s starting-point was published 199). If this delay owed a good deal to the officially in the early 1960s, long before work’s controversial focus on the Latvian its filming’s approval, this also raises the Legionist divisions formed under Nazi rule issue of the degree to which topics could be to combat Soviet forces, its approval surely broached more easily in literary form than owes something to Ashes and Diamonds’s

101 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY creation of a template for conceptualising Such a double consciousness may be one anti-Soviet fighters as not simply fascists source of the doubling I will discuss shortly. (as in Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel and ear- Might inner rebellion, splitting, and hence lier proposed scripts based upon it) but as duality, particularly affect artists in the youthful, forgivably misled by superiors, Baltics, unlikely to be able to adopt and caught up in a struggle whose defini- Gamma’s submission to the ‘socialist tion as ‘fratricidal’ restored dignity to all realist’ discipline, as Miłosz also remarks, parties and brought black sheep back into having grown up there pre-war, that ‘there the family through its quality of tragedy. were so few communists in these countries’ (Miłosz [1953] 1981: 228)? The historically THE ART OF COMPROMISE stronger Communist Party presence in a There are of course differences between country like Poland rendered possible there the artistic options for states accorded a career such as that of Aleksander Ford, in some independence of the Soviet empire whom any duality was less ideological than and those grafted wholesale into it – a dif- aesthetic, taking the form of a move from ference in the degree of leg-room within a pre-war proximity to the avant-garde to the chains. Thus Miłosz would distinguish post-war realism. states where ‘certain valuable cultural In the case of filmmaking, of course, activities went on that were impossible in the likelihood of compromise generating such countries as, for example, the Baltic guilt shrinks with the dissipation of indi- states which were directly incorporated vidual responsibility, and the proliferation into the Union’ (Miłosz [1953] 1981: 167). of mythological attributions, within the col- When considering artists’ reactions to lectivity authoring any film. One may won- political state approval, censorship and der therefore to what extent Roland Bar- self-censorship one may wonder to what thes’ famous ‘death of the Author’ (Barthes degree it may be said of them, as Miłosz [1967] 2011) responds unconsciously to did of Gamma (aka Jerzy Putrament), the conception of authorship introduced by in The Captive Mind, that certain art- the cinematic studio, whose resemblance ists ‘thrived on a strict diet of the doc- to the Medieval and Renaissance artistic trine, for “socialist realism” strengthens one discloses a paradoxicality and even weak talents and undermines great ones’ undecidability in the relationship between (Miłosz [1953] 1981: 161). Would only the collectivism and individualism in the ide- greater talent strongly feel the force of the ology of late modernity. In this context, a ‘repressed feelings’ Miłosz said ‘poison[ed] mea culpa such as Wajda’s post-1989 The every work’ (Miłosz [1953] 1981: 238)? Per- Horse-Hair Ring, which revisits, revises, haps every other artist within the Soviet and even quotes Ashes and Diamonds, is as sphere inhabited a dilemma that blos- unusual as his particular power of author- somed most acutely in Sergei Eisenstein ship, though it was arguably particularly when making Ivan the Terrible (Иван Грозный, fostered by a film unit-based production Russia, 1944/1958), regarding which system such as the Polish one. Other- James Agee speculated that wise, filmmaking’s reduction of individual responsibility could well preclude the more he may … be split between a demanding self-criticism voiced in the liter- compulsion to choose the most ary context by Christa Wolf, who critiqued dangerous theme possible, and her own début, Moskauer Novelle (1961), in virtual paralysis in its develop- a public response to Gerhard Schneider’s ment: a paralysis which might be request for authors’ accounts of the gen- a natural effect of being unable, esis of their first works (Wolf 1991). All the on pain of death, to say honestly, same, Wolf’s auto-critique, unlike Wajda’s, or even surreptitiously, what you may well presuppose or be haunted by really believe. (Agee 1964: 249) the habit of performing that required

102 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY Marxist exercise, the public self-criticism, such thoroughgoing changes during pro- and hence in a sense still lie within the duction that the result could be called an charmed circle it seeks to escape, albeit unmaking or ruination of a scenario the inhabiting its outer edges. In either case, authorities considered too focussed on a work’s redeemability might depend post-war ruin and not enough on Social- upon a Cabbalistic, Benjaminian reading ist construction. Indeed, the presence of between the lines whose extreme form is ruins may be the main lode of truthfulness the one Miłosz performs on a letter sent running through immediately post-war him ‘from a family deported from one of the films right up into the late 1950s, provid- Baltic states in March 1949’, whose indi- ing implicit recognition of a key presup- vidual lines’ last letters could be read verti- position of the post-war period’s most cally to reveal the message ‘Eternal Slave’ influential movement, neo-realism, whose (Miłosz [1953] 1981: 232). As Miłosz’s abandonment of the studio reflected not example indicates, such redemption may only distrust of the realities studios and require not just the allegorical reading so professional actors can fabricate, but dear to Benjamin and so widely practised also the physical studio’s initially ruined by audiences in Soviet-ruled states but a post-war state. The extent of the dispar- privileging of something on the verge of dis- ity between the Miłosz-Andrzejewski script appearing, the line-end that could so easily and the work that emerged eventually can sink into the margin’s oblivious snow and be inspected through its documentation not really be seen, simply because readers’ by Barbara Mruklik (1974: 223–226). Only knowledge of the word’s beginning com- after 1989, and the collapse of the institu- pleted it in advance, hindering attention to tions of politico-aesthetic censorship, could its very last element; while all but the most Szpilman’s work – though not the Miłosz- zealous censors could ignore it because it Andrzejewski screenplay – be filmed, as was so near to not being, and such prox- Roman Polański’s The Pianist (France/ imity to non-existence acknowledged the Poland/Germany/UK/USA, 2002). system’s verdict upon it. Miłosz’s mention of ‘the spiritual death of people condemned EXISTENTIALISM, to work hard all day and to swallow the poi- SELF-DIVISION AND DOUBLING son of films and television at night’ (Miłosz It is not just the engagement with Marx- [1953] 1981: 234), indicates that for him at ist thought signalled by a prominent dis- least quite a few texts, particularly ones of course about History that renders Wajda the kind concerning us, would need quite paradigmatic for post-war Eastern bloc a lot to redeem them. cinema; it is also his work’s simultaneous At the same time, though, the multi- dialogue with existentialism, as defined plicity of the elements comprising a film, by Michael Hamburger: ‘the point at which however compromised it may be, means “the strange institution that is this world” – that almost every and any one may con- to use Kleist’s words – ceases to tally with tain something redeemable, something it any of the systems that have been designed is worth digging into the rubble of archives to explain it’ (Hamburger 1957: 110). Exis- or images to unearth. Just how much may tentialism became pointedly oppositional be buried is suggested by Miłosz’s own par- by privileging individual choice over col- ticularly bitter experience with filmmaking lective identification (the collective iden- in Poland in the immediate aftermath of tification rivalling Marxism, nationalism, the war: Robinson warszawski, a script he being officially forbidden, except as what co-wrote with Jerzy Andrzejewski (subse- psychoanalysts would call ‘identification quently, of course, author of Ashes and with the aggressor’, i.e. the Soviet task- Diamonds) on the basis of Władysław master, while co-productions with other Szpilman’s description of his experience Warsaw Pact states might be assigned to in the , underwent what Juliet Flower MacCannell calls ‘the

103 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY regime of the brother’ [MacCannell 1991]). of the self it confronts, to which it once was Artists’ existentialist leanings are hardly tied. If folklore associates its appearance surprising, of course, as the writings of the with imminent death, its contemplation key existentialists (Søren Kierkegaard, Frie- can be one of suicide, which offers the pos- drich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, sibility of being outside one’s body, looking Albert Camus) all included art-works, while back on it, asserting an existential freedom Martin Heidegger forged a neologistic and by choosing the necessity that is death. quasi-artistic language Theodor W. Adorno The question of suicide had of course been derided as a pseudo-poetic ‘jargon of posed by Camus as the primary existential authenticity’ (Adorno 1964). Pertinent both one (Camus 1983: 3) (one surely linked to to Wajda and other artists influenced by his own double identity as a French writer existentialism is the requirement to define from Algeria), while the oeuvre of Kierke- the self through a conscious choice of gaard poises agonisingly on the verge of project, the concomitant cancelling of the a suicide of the aesthetic self in the name unconscious becoming officially accept- of a projected religious one. A relation- able by chiming with Soviet Marxism’s anti- ship between self-splitting, suicide and psychoanalytic thrust. In his case, as in implicit doubling is apparent in the power- that of other East Central European artists, ful Latvian melodrama The Frost in Spring a desire for a Sartrean choice expressing (Salna pavasarī, Latvia, 1955), by Leonīds freedom collides with the State’s signpost- Leimanis and Pāvels Armands. Although its ing of one particular road. What results is central female protagonist, the orphaned a traumatic splitting variously haunted at Madara (Zigrīda Stungure), does not com- some level by the road not taken, a dispo- mit suicide until the work’s end, when she sition continually mindful of the self not realises the impossibility of winning back chosen, a double walking other roads but her first love Andrs (Oļģerts Krastiņš), her whose difference can be embodied only early agreement to become the second wife implicitly, in others who have chosen dif- of an old landowner places her in the exis- ferently and whom the State compels one tentially threatened position of doubling to seem to condemn. Its relation to the self another woman, and she herself is dou- may be suggested implicitly yet explicitly bled later in life by Liena (Mudīte Šneidere), denied. (Consider Ashes and Diamonds who grows up during the film and wins again.) One’s self-condemnation for seem- Andrs’ affections. Here it is the passage of ing to condemn will usually be denied con- time that renders doubling implicit. How- sciously, in which case the other may haunt ever, Madara’s self-splitting is apparent one as an hallucinatory embodiment of not only in her vacillation before accept- conscience, much as in Edgar Allan Poe’s ing the rich farmer’s (Žanis Kopštāls) hand, William Wilson (1839). If any attempted but also in her frozen expression during self-divesting of part of the self can never the marriage ceremony, as if she has seen succeed entirely, any reunification with the the Medusa, as the sense of death associ- other, disavowed, wandering self becomes ated with the double enwraps her, as well stunningly problematic in Mirosław as in her later tearing apart between love Kijowicz’s paradigmatic animation Droga for her son and for Andrs, who she believes (Poland, 1971), where the other self left at will return to her if the son is removed and the crossroads finally converges with the Andrs can become master of the house. one that went another way to yield a disap- Her disastrous early choice may be con- pointingly misshapen body, its halves now ceptualised, in terms of the allegory that of disparate size. is one of my subjects, as one of Ambition over Love; the dividing of the self’s house DOUBLING AND SUICIDE presages its ruin. During the wedding cer- The double is a shadow that has put on emony the farmer’s order to Andrs to flesh and assumed partial independence with her recognises the doubling between

104 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY these two men and seeks to control the road not taken) is always implicit. The much threat of death hanging over himself as the later début enjoyed by a filmmaker such older. Here, as in a film such as the Ger- as Krzysztof Kieślowski, when the Stalin- man The Student of Prague (Der Student ist danger had ebbed, may have enhanced von Prag, 1913, 1926, 1935), which features his ability to practise a doubling that is an impoverished virtuoso duelling student explicit, even well before the Round Table whose reflection is appropriated by a dia- talks and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bolical intermediary offering him wealth, most startling example being Blind Chance the duel and the double form one complex, (Przypadek, Poland, 1981, released 1987), and the killing of the double reveals itself which accords a single character parallel, as a suicide. radically different lives. The persistence of Suicidal ends of individual and danger, however, is apparent in the lengthy collective military action pervade Wajda’s shelving of that film, as well as of quite a war films in particular, the most obvious few of his early documentaries. The differ- examples appearing in (Poko- ence between Wajda and Kieślowski, quite lenie, Poland, 1955), and Samson (Poland, apart from any personal ones, is that of 1961). Doubling can, of course, be implicit one and the same situation, but differently or explicit. In Ashes and Diamonds, the dou- inflected by history. bles remain implicit by virtue of their plu- Doubling therefore can be seen as an rality, partly to reflect the self’s paralysis internalisation, by the eclectic Wajda, both before choice (at the two extremes: should of the different influences upon him and of one be a time-server like Drewnowski the potential contradictions of the collec- (Bogumił Kobiela), or intransigently mili- tive subject that is the author of a film, a tant, like Szczuka’s son?). (Figure 2) When feature of his work that may motivate his implicit, such status indicates that the self particular productivity in repeated efforts has not yet chosen definitively, and may not to resolve it. be able to, underlining the work’s own self- chosen primary identity as a realist text, DOUBLING, ALLEGORY without the element of the fantastic explicit AND HISTORY doubling introduces. The temptation of Although Wajda’s designation as an artist of suicide is itself double: despair at the lack the Baroque has long been a critical cliché, of acceptable options is also a weighing of it can yield insight through pairing with the an ending of the tension of prevarication. idea of doubling and with the Benjaminian If even explicit doubling postpones suicide account of the allegorical view of History, by keeping a self-alienated self hovering which in Baroque art always breathes the within its own orbit, its edge the jagged one violence of contradiction, the Alexandrine’s of its own shattered reflection, implicit dou- recurrent breaking in the middle arguably bling, which obscures the threat to the self resembling a splitting of thought’s atom and the necessity of choice, does so to an to release the dynamism of such interest even greater extent. (In Wajda’s own case, to both Baroque artists and Marxists. The of course, the last double is Władysław prevalence of contradiction put the psy- Strzemiński, who clearly represents roads che on a war footing. In one intriguing early not taken: the painting career eschewed characterisation of Wajda as double agent, because Andrzej Wróblewski seemed the that of Eric Rhode, the tutor contradiction more effective double, and the abstraction others discerned between a Marxist- most cinema has eschewed.) socialist position and a nationalist-patriotic Since Wajda’s basic strategies of self- one (forget for the moment the potential preservation evolve during a period that contradictions within each of those pair- heightened the danger of choices beyond ings) becomes one between a Marxist the officially-sanctioned ones, the doubling and a courtier (Rhode 1966: 172–173). (the other’s status as a representative of a Transferring the idea of contradiction to

105 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY stylistics, and to the stylishness central to looking down on one (the double as a the courtly life, it may be seen in the way shadow mockingly able to shrink or enlarge a panning camera movement (sideways itself so as to elude attempts to grasp it) (cf. or down, but in Ashes and Diamonds pre- Žižek 1989: 92–95, 103–107), suicide may dominantly down) passes from life’s loco- be the name of an attempt to escape its motion to a form of death that freezes the humiliating gaze: a crossing of the border to image, perhaps thereby reminding Wajda death. of the dead painter within him, as when Maciek lifts the sheet in the ruined church DOUBLING AS BORDER and the gaze slides down to reveal the CROSSING: THE CASE OF workers he assassinated while bungling TADEUSZ KONWICKI the first attempt on Szczuka’s (Wacław Doubling can also be cast in terms of a bor- Zastrzeżyński) life. If this is a micro-textual der crossing categorisable as ‘going over to form of the contradiction between Wajda’s the other side’, as the self crosses the axis identities as filmmaker and as visual artist, of action and becomes visible to itself. Any it is revisited in Afterimage. Again and again hint of betrayal of the unified image of good horror arrests movement: in A Generation national subject might be cast by others as Jasio (Tadeusz Janczar) finds a barred win- treachery in general. In the Polish cultural dow blocking his escape at the top of the sphere at least the question of ‘treachery’ spiral staircase; in Kanał similar bars block is widely posed, and some of its literary the exit from the sewers by Korab (Tadeusz manifestations have been documented by Janczar) and Daisy. In each of these two Stefan Chwin (1993). To some extent, such cases, the assumed linearity of movement a traditional question is fed by Stalinist-era bends back to reveal a circular space paranoia about espionage, exacerbated preventing clear vision of what lies ahead, by a climate of thaws and freezes, of chal- cutting the tie between vision and locomo- lenged, modified and re-established norms. tion; the shape of movement here is that of The question ‘To which side do you belong?’ History twisting into a futureless labyrinth, can also be glossed as ‘Were you blown monsters stationed cruelly even at its exits. in by history’s winds, or is this where you Although Wajda’s central contradiction may really want to be?’ or ‘Which (of these dou- be posed as one between Marxism and the bles) is the real you?’ Baroque (realism and ornament), each of In the case of Tadeusz Konwicki (born those thought-formations privileges con- in Lithuania), it is worth noting his agree- tradiction itself as an engine of dynamism. ment to do an interview-book upon learning Meanwhile, the hero is of course chronically of its proposer’s interest in Wileńszczyzna, caught between opposites, as are the spec- as well as Jan Walc’s contention that the tacles through which he is viewed, one lens landscapes of Konwicki’s books in fact belonging to irony, another to tragedy. This reproduce those around Vilnius (Wilno) is, of course, the prototypical contradic- (Bereś 2003: 13). Konwicki would tell tion of East European cinema identified by Stanisław Bereś that although he lived in Yvette Biró, though I would classify its two Kraków and Warsaw, these places meant modes as co-existent, feeding and frus- nothing to him. Even though Konwicki con- trating one another dialectically, and not fessed that, unlike his filmmaking colleague simply successive, as she does (Biró 1983). Stanisław Lenartowicz, he had lost the abil- It is the contradiction between disaster as ity to speak Lithuanian in the course of his it feels (from within the individual) and the years in Poland, images of his Lithuanian way it appears from without, which feeds a youth and childhood pervade his novels and quasi-existentialist sense of the absurd – films. Might the addition of films to novels doubling can be seeing oneself as the Other even follow logically in the course of time, sees one. Insofar as this is a version of as he begins to lose his Lithuanian, Vilnius Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian ‘Big Other’, becoming in his mind more an image, seen

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FIGURE 2. Andrzej Wajda, Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, Poland, 1958). Maciek hides from his unacknowledged double, Drewnowski (Bogumił Kobiela), with ruins behind them.

107 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY from a distance, than a soundscape still an address of the self in and as the second existing within the head, with the title of the person, is of course as central to Konwicki’s film that resembles his novels most closely works as it is to Wajda’s early films, albeit – How Far from Here, How Near (Jak daleko more explicit in Konwicki’s case. If the issue stąd, jak blisko, Poland, 1972) – recording of fidelity or treachery may entail a self’s not just a disjunction between Poland and questioning of its own narrative’s truth Lithuania but intra-psychic ones between to earlier experience, art’s metaphorical sight and sound and between images arriv- nature may institutionalise a difference and ing unbidden, as in the dream to which so protect the storyteller from guilt feelings film is so close, and ones summoned by making divergence seem inevitable, as consciously? If the prominence his work may time itself, conceptualised as in T. S. accords Warsaw’s unloved Stalinist gift, the Eliot’s statement that ‘time is no healer: the Palace of Culture, suggests the city’s identi- patient is no longer here’ (Eliot 1970: 41). fication as Bad Object, the not-home mock- Relations between literature and film ingly visible from his own balcony, that also concern the question of the degree suggestion is complicated in How Far from to which certain things can be aired in the Here, How Near, whose narrator describes Soviet sphere in the more limited circula- Warsaw as ‘our city, sometimes in the mid- tion domain of literature, as opposed to dle of Europe, sometimes East European’. that of ‘the most important art’ (though When talking with Bereś, he would use the one should note as a complicating factor word wy (the plural ‘you’) for addressing that the films of a Konwicki, drawing on Poles (Bereś 2003: 141). He was of course art cinema conventions, have a relatively among the Poles transported from Vilnius specialised appeal, while such cinema may to Kraków, perhaps part of a process Timo- be permitted officially, even where realist thy Snyder has termed the ‘ethnic cleans- aesthetics are the state’s desideratum, to ing’ of that city by a Soviet regime eager to demonstrate the non-oppressive nature of win Lithuanian loyalty, in the teeth of the censorship. Inasmuch as Konwicki makes primarily Polish and Jewish make-up of its his film début long after his literary one, it inter-war population (Snyder 2003). One can be argued that the mould for his work may wonder whether the question of litera- had been set by literature). Aleksander ture/film relationships, one raised inevita- Jackiewicz, writing à propos How Far from bly by Konwicki’s dual career as both novel- Here, How Near (arguably the Konwicki film ist and filmmaker, is relevant here. After all, closest in ethos and aesthetic to his nov- a film’s landscape, although fused with a els), declared that his films have more the sign, is also real, unlike a literary one, and aura of dream, his prose: that of reality. For so bound to differ from the imaginary one Jackiewicz, given the status of these two reproduced continually by nostalgic desire, arts (by which one presumes he means the while its studio versions will differ even relation between their sign-systems and more patently by admitting their quality of reality), it ought to be the other way around controlled, lucid dream. One may also take (Jackiewicz 1983: 233). Could one not argue the delay in production mentioned earlier though that a trauma that is genuine may as prompting a form of doubling, one self be represented more efficaciously through looking back at another. Svetlana Alexievich film than through literature, or experienced gives a suggestively similar characterisa- by audiences as more authentic in the form tion of the narratives of female Soviet sol- of images, as the use of words asserts a diers she recorded in the 1980s: ‘They study comprehensibility and control that sap the themselves, meet themselves anew. Most sense of helplessness and the overwhelm- often it is already two persons – this one ing central to trauma? This contention and that one, the young one and the old one’ might be borne out by noting how Wajda’s (Alexievich [1984] 2017: 131). The question Ashes and Diamonds met with more of the recollection of war, accompanied by public affection than Jerzy Andrzejewski’s

108 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY original novel. If so, does this mean that the unconsciously crave. Marker’s ‘Zone’ may time-lapse between the Polish prose deal- be called also a machine for a ruination of ing with the war, which comes out imme- images that is also their resurrection, al- diately after it, and the films that come lowing them to be seen doubly. Vision of later, determines the relative power of their the ruin is always therefore a double vision, representations of trauma? And is this holding it up to the light like a banknote, why the Polish School in cinema becomes squinting at it to see within it the water- well-known internationally, whereas the mark that is history. And just as close pe- novels and short stories had not been? And rusal of the Eternal Slave letter mentioned if the work of Tadeusz Borowski seems to by Miłosz allows a reading off of its hidden be an exception to this possible rule, may meaning, so earlier images’ immersion in it be because his prose practices a self- the synthesiser’s developing fluid in Sans denying ordinance by mimicking the pro- soleil demonstrates the possibility of build- cedures of the document (one might say ing something else upon the ruined founda- the same of Zofia Nałkowska’s Medallions tions of their documentary function. This is [Medaliony, 1946]), thereby displaying the not the reductive transcendence concealed features Jackiewicz associates with film? behind the melodramatic figures of social- The fact that the novel Konwicki wrote first, ist realism, but one that is open-ended, its about partisan warfare in the woods, Rojsty results unpredictable. It is as if Marker sub- (1947), was not published until 1956, that jects his images to a partly-controlled ru- year of ‘Thaw’ in Poland, also raises the ination to inoculate them against the less issue of what can be said when. predictable ravages of the war whose past forms his film documents and whose fu- AFTERIMAGES: ture ones it fears. A double reading such as A LANGUAGE BUILT ON RUIN Marker’s re-imagines images as redeemed In the light of the material considered by their ruination, which means: as always above, one may well ask whether a viable sparking thoughts both of what was and literary or filmic language can be built now is – and hence of what might yet be, upon trauma and ruination. Should this reconjugation suggesting the redemption of be possible, might that language be one of history posited at the end of Walter Benja- afterimages – to draw again on Wajda and min’s famous ‘Theses on the Philosophy of Strzemiński –, deploying forms of real and History’ (‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’; imaginary superimposition to do justice to Benjamin [1940] 1977). Rather as at the end the phenomenon referenced in the English of T. S. Eliot’s translation’s version of the title of Wajda’s (1922), with its quick-fire autobiography: that of double vision assemblage of quotations, ruination be- (Wajda 1989)? comes redemption, each old image the burst One example might be the project chrysalis of a new life-form (Eliot 1948: 65). Chris Marker describes, in Sans soleil, as an The process is rather like the activa- insertion of images into ‘the Zone’, a term tion of imagination by ruin described sug- he chose in homage to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, gestively by Inara Verzemnieks, upon visit- that great Soviet film shot in Estonia. Mark- ing a farmhouse in Latvia once inhabited er’s Zone is a synthesiser within which the by her grandmother: images of his film’s earlier, relatively more conventionally documentary portion go to There’s an awful beauty to this die and be reborn, rather like the visitors to moment, arriving, finally, at the the Zone in Tarkovsky’s film, though in line scene of one’s past and discover- with the secularism of the Soviet Union, ing only ruin. And yet, ruin resists and perhaps also with an intuition of the simple affirmation, forces us to effects of that state’s passing, Tarkovsky’s place questions over certainties, to protagonists fear the rebirth they surrender what we had imagined

109 BALTIC SCREEN MEDIA REVIEW 2018 / VOLUME 6 / COMMENTARY had always existed, to ask instead, ity of feeling “at home”’ (Crary 2011: 170). what if. Such an aggregated quality of place – like the ‘double occupancy’ Thomas Elsaesser What if: the most accurate ascribes to European cinema in general resurrection of our histories (Elsaesser 2005: 108–130) – is of course depends not on their preserva- arguably the definition of the uncanny, the tion, but on their constant, quiet heimlich negated by the prefix ‘un’ unthink- disassembly. ing it at birth. One memorable evocation of such aggregation is Rebecca Solnit’s What if: we told ourselves that account of how she looked down a San ruin is really a reclaiming, a natu- Francisco street and ral revision of what’s always been assumed. with a shudder perceived, still present as a phantom, the steep What if: I had come here sooner. natural landscape that under- There would have been more for lay the city, the skin beneath the me to see. But maybe less for me clothes, the landscape that reap- to find. (Verzemnieks 2017: 60) peared amid the ruins of the 1906 earthquake and that someday The transformative doubling of images in will reassert itself again. (Solnit the Zone suggests the inherent creativity 2011: 150) of the memory that so preoccupied Marker (who in this respect appears as still the In the context of the historical shifts of con- collaborator of the time- and memory- sciousness within countries whose occu- obsessed Alain Resnais). This creativity piers then left, the events that followed is also that of the temporality thematised 1989, with the advent of globalisation and in Sans soleil, so the ruination washing an increasing transnationalisation of film over his images can recall the blotches, production, bespoke a slow dissipation of scratches and striations coursing through the briefly renewed belief that one could be such rescued images as the orphan silent fully at home in a national reality or osten- films preserved in the ice of Dawson City sibly national image, a belief rendered even and sampled so memorably in Bill Morri- more delusional by these countries’ haunt- son’s recent film of the same name (Daw- ing by the ghosts of their Jewish minorities. son City: Frozen Time, USA, 2016), which Assertions of at-homeness, in the teeth of at one point reads the striations along one the facts, could then assume a defensive, side of the image as a natural outgrowth of even hysterically neo-conservative qual- the supernaturalist themes of the film on ity. The colonisers’ departure precluded which it is found. (Figure 3) The ruin can the quiet self-confidence that would have become the material form of the ghosts flowed from knowing that one had thrown haunting Verzemnieks’ memoir, much as them out. The lack of the strength to do Wajda’s Maciek becomes a ghost, haunt- so meant that others could follow, be they ing his own story and viewers’ recollections, those very neighbours themselves, physi- even before its end in his physical death. cally departed but still present invasively in One can consider this duality of vision, the virtuality of cyberspace, or ones as dis- of temporality, of simultaneous absence tant as the Yanks the youthful Wim Wend- and presence, by tapping Jonathan Crary’s ers once described as colonising the Ger- analysis, in a volume devoted to art and man unconscious in Kings of the Road (Im ruins, of the work of Vera Lutter, which Lauf der Zeit, West Germany, 1976). Amidst he describes as having the effect of ‘an the traces, ruins and scars they left, the uncanny aggregate of places in which we colonisers’ shadow could even recall that as spectators can never intuit any possibil- of the object falling across the ego in

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FIGURE 3. As often in the restored film featured in Bill Morrison’sDawson City: Frozen Time (USA, 2016), print damage gives the image an eerie other dimension. Here damage to An Accidental Christmas (1912) suggests that the accident the children witness is mysterious, even supernatural.

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