November 20-26, 2003
screen picks
Kanal/Ashes and Diamonds ($29.95 each DVD) If they weren't speaking Polish, the hard-bitten fighters of Andrzej Wajda's Kanal (1957) might have been lifted straight out of The Dirty Dozen. "These are the tragic heroes," the narrator intones as they trek through the ruins of Warsaw. "Watch them closely, for these are the last days of their lives." Strong, even corny, stuff, but like a de-pulped Samuel Fuller, Wajda erects war-movie conventions, then blasts away at their base; heroic statues fall, leaving bloody, bespattered figures standing in their place.
A former resistance fighter himself, Wadja set the second part of his War Trilogy on the 56th day of the Warsaw Uprising, among a group of bedraggled but determined souls struggling to carry on the fight. The opening scenes are mechanical, but once the characters are introduced and make their way into the Warsaw sewers (the source of the title), the film takes on a chiaroscuro intensity that never relents. Using the narrow, unpredictable tunnels to navigate between the Warsaw ghetto's liberated and occupied zones, the band of resisters soon splinters into small groups, which play out their internal conflicts in the ever-fading light. Struggling to find their way in the darkness, many lose the way, and some are lost for good, but the faint light never wholly fades.
Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the trilogy's conclusion, can't match Kanal's hallucinatory intensity, though its complex structure and deep-focus cinematography are an obvious attempt to expand the trilogy's scope. (A Generation, its melodramatic first part, is still available on video.) Zbigniew Cybulski stars as Maciek, a spike-haired, sunglass-wearing anti-Communist assigned to assassinate a Communist Party functionary on the last day of the war. Again, Wadja sets up expectations and inverts them. Maciek's proto-punk cool is dictated more by necessity than choice; he wears sunglasses because he ruined his eyes tramping through the sewers during the Uprising. Ultimately, Ashes spreads too thin, but the trilogy's attempt to grapple with Poland's postwar history is awesome in its ambition, and evocative when it succeeds.
Shoah ($149.99 DVD) As the camera scans the green grass of Chelmno, where the bodies of exterminated Jews were once condemned to the flames, Simon Srebnik reflects, "It's hard to recognize, but it was here." Srebnik's words serve as a mission statement for Claude Lanzmann's epochal film, whose importance only increases over time. In as little as two decades, there will be no more living witnesses to the Holocaust, and Lanzmann's nine-hour film, which took 11 years to complete, will stand as a monument as hard and definite as stone.
Of contemporary filmmakers, only Errol Morris has managed to bring as much visual life to the one-person interview, and yet the filmmakers' methods could not be more different. Where Morris uses his multilensed Interrotron to film the subject from dozens of angles at once, Lanzmann uses a single, unblinking camera, and presents his subjects in long, uninterrupted takes, up to 40 minutes at a stretch. To many, that will sound as appealing as dentistry, but Lanzmann uses exterior shots to hypnotic effect, with the camera scanning the land as if for clues while his subjects testify. A simple shot of the camera approaching Auschwitz's front gate becomes agonizing. (Sometimes, though, the device seems merely reflexive: The long shots of Manhattan don't establish anything except that the interview is taking place in New York.)
As much as it accumulates evidence of the Holocaust's horrors, Shoah investigates how they stayed secret as long as they did, to the point where European Jews would run frantically to catch the train cars taking them to the camps, or women could get "dolled up" at the Sobibor train station, convinced they were going on a journey and not to their deaths. "It seems impossible, but you get used to it," say the peasants who worked the fields near Treblinka, where the cries of the Nazi's victims were plainly audible. As Srebnik, one of only two survivors of the Chelmno camp, stands among the villagers decades later, they talk blithely of the Jews' complacency, and of Christicide, and the camera takes it all in.
It's hard to imagine the proper procedure for watching Shoah at home; watching each half (mostly) without interruption, I felt overwhelmed to the point where the ability to absorb details started to slip away, and the breaks between the four discs don't come at particularly sensible moments. (More care could have been taken with the presentation; the set includes only an excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir's preface and what looks like a VHS transfer that still shows breaks at 2-hour intervals.) While none of the film's repetitions are superfluous, Lanzmann can justly be criticized for relying too much on scale to convey scope. (Pauline Kael made that point rather callously in one of her most controversial reviews.) Lanzmann's Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m. , constructed of footage collected during the Shoah interviews, uses the same techniques to more acute effect, but still ends its brief 95 minutes with an endless crawl of the names of those who died in the Sobibor camp -- a fitting tribute, until it becomes just a list. When Lanzmann shows you the empty synagogues in Eastern European towns that used to be full of Jews, their absence is deafening. The silence says as much as any words.
Hell's Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films ($29.95 DVD) For subject matter alone, Bret Wood's documentary rates a look, though its chaotic organization makes for tougher going than its blood-on-the-tarmac excerpts. A history of the gory highway safety films of the 1960s and '70s, a portrait of the people who made them and an examination of their social context and impact, Hell's Highway goes in more directions than a fishtailing Caddy, often tantalizing but rarely satisfying. For the most intriguing viewing, pop in the second DVD, which offers three driver's-ed classics in their entirety, as well as a collection of clips from others. Say what you like about the blood-spattered moralists who tried to terrify children into driving safely; the fact that their work is now mostly "enjoyed" as camp says some pretty ugly things about the road we're on.
Misc. Picks The Secret Cinema brings its new and improved (extra-clean, whiter than white) Cavalcade of Commercials to Moore College of Art (Fri., 8 p.m., 20th and the Parkway). Chris Deaux and Chris Emmanouilides bring Talk Fast to the County Theater (20 E. State St., Doylestown) Nov. 24, and the Ambler Theater (108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler) Nov. 25; the highly entertaining documentary follows a host of Hollywood wannabes (including Carnival of Souls star Candace Hilligoss) as they hone their screenwriting pitches. The Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association hosts the Nov. 25, 7:20 p.m. screening of Nathaniel Kahn's moving My Architect at the Ritz, as well as a post-film discussion with Kahn, 10 p.m. at N. 3rd (801 N. Third St.). Both the screening and free discussion are open to the public.
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