Synopsis
Kanał is a Polish war film directed by Andrzej Wajda. The
second installment in Wajda’s War Trilogy—preceded by A Generation (1954) and
followed by Ashes and Diamonds (1958)—Kanał tells the story of a company of
Home Army resistance fighters using the city’s sewers to evade capture by the
Nazis as their defensive position collapses during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
Background
In late July 1944, during World War II, the advancing Red
Army had reached the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, Poland’s capital city. The
close proximity of the Russians prompted the Polish government in exile in
London to order its Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa or AK) of resistance
fighters to mount an uprising against the German occupation. By liberating
Warsaw prior to full Russian involvement, the Poles hoped to bolster claims to
national sovereignty before the Soviet-backed communist Polish Committee of
National Liberation could assume political control of the country. Stalin, of
course, had other ideas. Avid to annex Poland after Hitler’s defeat, he
betrayed the Polish resistance by ordering his armies to halt on the eastern
banks of the Vistula River and not advance into the city to aid the Poles. This
allowed the Germans time to regroup and destroy the Polish resistance, which
fought for 63 days with light arms and little outside support (1 August–2
October 1944). It is estimated that the AK suffered some 22,000 casualties
(16,000 killed and 6,000 wounded) and 150,000 to 200,000 civilians died. Arthur
Koestler called the Soviet refusal to support the uprising “one of the major
infamies of this war which will rank for the future historian on the same
ethical level with [the Nazi extermination of] Lidice” (Koestler, p. 374).
After the war Warsaw native Jerzy Stefan Stawiński (1921–2010)—who served as an
AK company commander during the Uprising—published “Kanał” (Polish for channel
or sewer) in the Polish literary journal Twórczość [Creativity]: a story based
on his own, bitter experiences during the doomed struggle that he soon turned
into a film script. After Stalin died in 1953, his successor, Nikita
Khrushchev, relaxed censorship and other forms of political repression.
“Khrushchev’s Thaw” spilled over to Poland and the other Soviet client states,
making a film on the Warsaw Uprising politically feasible. Even though “Kanał”
refrained from indicting Russian complicity in the defeat of the Uprising,
Poland’s Soviet-dominated political leadership did not want it made. In the
words of the film’s eventual director, Andrzej Wajda, “The authorities must
have realized that society would be against the movie, and would regard it as
the communist voice on the subject of the Warsaw uprising … It preferred not to
make any film on the subject of the Warsaw Uprising, even one with a point of
view they could accept as their own” (quoted by James Steffen, n.d.). Submitted
to the government for vetting, the script was also deemed insufficiently
heroic. Eventually the film was made because Tadeusz Konwicki, a member of the
screenplay commission and an official of Kadr, a new film studio, lobbied
behind the scenes on its behalf.
Production
Kanał was made by P. P. Film Polski at Kadr Studios and on
location in Warsaw in 1956. Some of the above-ground scenes were shot in the
studio, but most were filmed on location at ruins that had not yet been
demolished after the war. Scenes that comprise the film’s first 45 minutes were
shot at Cecilia Sniegocka Street and in an adjacent park in the Solec district,
a mile northeast of Mokotów, and the 10-minute closing sequence was shot
beneath Kamienne Schodki [Street of Stone Steps] and on Miadowa and Długa
Streets in Warsaw’s Old Town. For the scenes in the sewers, Wajda and his crew
constructed an elaborate replica of the sewers, and Wajda’s director of
photography, Jerzy Lipman, provided the evocatively eerie noir-like chiaroscuro
lighting for those episodes.
Plot Summary
During the final days of the Warsaw Uprising (late September
1944), Lt. Zadra (Wieńczysław Gliński) leads a beleaguered platoon of 43 AK
soldiers and Warsaw civilians in retreat to south-central Warsaw. The composer
Michał (Vladek Sheybal) gets in touch with his family, who are elsewhere in the
city. Panicked, she shares that the Germans are in her building and are coming
to take her, and then she is cut off. The next day, Officer Cadet Jacek “Korab”
(Tadeusz Janczar) happens upon the second-in-command, Lt. Mądry (Emil
Karewicz), in bed with a local messenger girl. After apologizing, the officers
go to battle against the Germans. While they hold them off, Korab is shot and
wounded while cutting the guide wire of a Goliath tracked mine (a remote-controlled
miniature tank full of explosives) with a shovel. With his platoon now down to
27 and covered on all sides by the Germans, Zadra is commanded to take to the
sewers in order to retreat. Stokrotka (Polish for “Daisy”) (Teresa Izewska), their
guide, asks Zadra to permit her to help Korab. Zadra gives his consent but
Stokrotka and Korab soon get separated from the group. Korab’s injuries have
weakened him, and he is forced to rest before climbing up to the street.
Stokrotka then directs them toward the river, and they see rays of sunlight
ahead. Korab, extremely weak and near blind, is unable to see that the pair’s
exit is blocked by metal bars. Stokrotka confesses her love for Korab while
they rest and regroup. Meanwhile, the rest of the group gets lost, as they
haven’t had Stokrotka to guide them. Zadra attempts to command Sgt. Kula
(Tadeusz Gwiazdowski) to move the troops forward, but they refuse. Zadra and
Kula lose all of their men except the mechanic, Smukły (Stanislaw Mikulski).
The men who have not followed Zadra and Kula get lost again and eventually end
up dead or captured. Zadra, Kula, and Smukły encounter a sewer exit but it is
booby-trapped by German grenades. Smukły is only able to disarm two of the
three grenades; the third one explodes, killing him. Zadra and Kula finally
come up from the sewer to an abandoned and bombed-out part of the city. When
Kula admits that he left the other men behind, Zadra kills him and returns to
the sewers to find them.
Reception
Released in Poland on 20 May 1957, Kanał was a punishing but
ultimately cathartic experience for those who had lived through the terrible,
tragic events it depicts. In the words of film critic and Warsaw Uprising
survivor Stanislaw Grzelecki, “The tragedy of the people who believed to the
very end that the fight they had undertaken [was] right has found disturbing
expression in Wajda’s film. The drama assumes a shape of a metaphor, all the
more meaningful because its ordinary heroes have been, for many years, forced
into the shadows, into silence, to endure the mudslinging, false accusations
and slander” (Grzelecki, 1957). Other Polish critics, not as understanding as
Grzelecki, initially panned the film for its unheroic grimness. Kanał was
screened in competition at the 10th Cannes Film Festival (May 1957), where it
shared the Special Jury Prize with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and
received rave notices from French film critics, international recognition that
prompted a more positive reassessment at home. Released in the United States in
1961, the film briefly ran in a few art house cinemas. Bosley Crowther found
Kanał as “dismal, dark and depressing a drama of events in World War II as this
reviewer has yet witnessed” (Crowther, 1961).
Reel History Versus Real History
The plot of Kanał is fictional but the general story it
tells about the final days of the Uprising is historically very accurate. As
depicted in the film, by the end of September 1944, German forces had retaken
most of the city. AK fighters were holding out in five isolated pockets,
including an area within the suburb of Mokotów that was less than a mile long
and half a mile wide, defended by about 2,750 insurgents. On 24 September 1944
German forces mounted an offensive against the Mokotów pocket from the south.
Over the next three days of heavy fighting, the Polish defense perimeter shrank
to just a few blocks as advancing Germans executed wounded soldiers, even
hospital personnel. On 26 September 9,000 civilians fled Mokotów during a two-hour
early afternoon cease fire. That evening, as depicted in the film, some 800
resistance fighters and civilians, many wounded, started evacuating through the
sewers and headed for the city center, about two miles due north (Mokotów fell
the next day and the Germans captured some 1,500 remaining fighters and 5,000
civilians). As also represented in the film, some AK fighters (actually about
150) headed in the wrong direction and unwittingly climbed out of the sewers at
Dworkowa Street, in German-held territory half a mile to the southeast of
Mokotów; 120 of them were captured and summarily executed. A monument now
stands there in their memory. Actual conditions in the sewers were every bit
horrific as the film shows. In his review of the film (cited earlier),
Stanislaw Grzelecki observed, “I followed the same underground road from
Mokotów to the centre of town as Jerzy Stawiński, and I, like he, spent
seventeen hours in the sewers. I saw and experienced enough to state that
Wajda’s film is telling the truth.”
