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 Andrzej Wajda, 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, Poland, 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, surrealism 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- (Zbigniew Cybulski), eventually becoming a nists of Kanał, during the Warsaw 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.