At 80, Andrzej Wajda has made the bravest film of his career: a graphic account of the killing of 8,000 Polish officers. He tells Geoffrey Macnab why the story meant so much to him
Friday May 2, 2008
The Guardian
Unravelling the great lies... Katyn
In his home country, Andrzej Wajda's film about what he calls an "unhealed wound" in Polish history has turned into a full-blown phenomenon. Close to three million people have already seen his depiction of the Katyn massacre. Schools and military organisations have been making special trips to the cinema to see it. All of a sudden, Wajda - one of the most revered European film-makers of the postwar era, a figure who built his reputation half a century ago with films such as Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds - has found himself back in the limelight.
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In many ways, Katyn is the film that Wajda has been building up to throughout his career. His father, Jakub Wajda, was one of the estimated 8,000 Polish military officers murdered in 1940 by Stalin's secret police in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia. Wajda was only a teenager at the time. He witnessed at first hand his mother's "desperate and hopeless" search for his father, not knowing what had happened to him, or even if he was dead. It took three years for news of the mass murder at Katyn to emerge, and it only came out then because the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union and discovered the mass graves. At this stage, as Wajda's film shows, Soviet propaganda blamed the deaths on Hitler and punished anyone who even hinted the Russians might be involved. Only in 1990, at the end of the cold war, did the Kremlin admit that Stalin had given the orders for the massacre.
Whatever else it is, Katyn is bravura film-making. Wajda is in his 80s, but he hasn't lost his knack for marshalling crowds, choreographing elaborate set-pieces, staging chases and cranking up the emotions. The massacre itself is shot in brutal but haunting fashion. Officer after officer is bundled out of Soviet trucks, shot in the back of the head and left to topple forward into a pit.
Wajda doesn't shrink at showing the sheer scale of the slaughter. What makes the sequences all the more chilling is the lack of emotion of the Soviet assassins. Their faces are blank as they pull the trigger. The Poles try to utter the Lord's Prayer when they realise they are doomed, but none has time to get beyond a line or two. Then, as huge lines of corpses lie bleeding in the mud, a bulldozer pushes earth on top of them.
Wajda researched the killing scenes as thoroughly as he could, poring over diaries of the slaughtered officers as well as newsreel footage and official records. "First of all, I decided the massacre must be a part of the film," he says. "Although people knew that these soldiers and intelligentsia were brutally murdered, and could imagine how they were murdered, I still decided that the bloodshed had to be shown. The way the victims were killed was easy to find out after the graves were discovered in 1943."
In the flesh, Wajda cuts a sprightly figure. A silver-haired, bespectacled man in a dark suit, he is clearly relieved that, after so many years of struggle, he has finally been able to make Katyn. The screenplay went through countless drafts with many different writers before Wajda pronounced himself ready to shoot. And when he says that he is the only director who could have made Katyn, his remark does not come across as arrogance.
First, there is his personal connection with the material. Then there is his film-making reputation. Wajda is one of the last links with the "Polish film school", a group of directors who emerged in the 1950s, defining themselves in opposition to Soviet film-making. He wanted to make Katyn in the tradition of that school.
Perhaps as a result, Katyn has an old-fashioned feel to it. Wajda isn't much interested in the complexities of history. He depicts the Polish officers and their families in a heroic light. The Soviet soldiers and the Nazis are villains. There is little grey area between.
Katyn begins with a tremendous sequence, heavy with symbolism - one that sums up perfectly Poland's perennial fate as Europe's football, the country "in between". On September 17 1939, two bands of refugees meet on a bridge. One group is fleeing from the Russians, who have invaded from the east. The others are going in the opposite direction to escape the Nazis, who entered the country a fortnight before from the west.
Wajda has complained in the past that the younger generation in Poland have showed little interest in the country's history. He recalls watching a high-school student interviewed on Polish TV. Asked what he associated with the date September 17, this student mentioned casually "a church holiday". Katyn is intended to jolt such people out of their apathy and to remind them what their parents and grandparents endured.
"But a question I was asked often during the making of the film - and which I asked myself too - was who I was making this film for," he says. "If I was making Katyn for the younger generation, it would have to have a different speed, a different tempo, and to be a different film."
In the end, Wajda didn't make many concessions to younger viewers. This is a very traditional piece of film-making. Nonetheless, the director still believes it is accessible. He describes it as a film more about "individual suffering" than "naked historical facts".
Still, this late flowering must be a source of pleasure for him. Wajda is one of a number of Polish film-makers who risked losing their way at the end of the Soviet era, when they no longer had anything to define themselves against. From the Warsaw uprisings to the solidarity strikes, Wajda's best work was invariably rooted in social and political issues.
A decade ago, he told me he admired Krzysztof Kieslowski as one of the few Polish film-makers who had managed to adjust to the post-communist world. "Kieslowski actually went against the mainstream of the Polish film-making tradition," Wajda said then. "Most of our films were in one way or another political; we were trying to relate to society and history. He chose a completely different way - a psychological, metaphysical way - of dealing with contemporary life. As events have shown, it was the right way."
Wajda had little success when he tried to follow Kieslowski's path in the 1990s with films such as Miss Nobody. It wasn't until 1999 that his revival began, after he had returned to Polish historical subjects, and directed a screen version of the 19th-century nationalist epic poem Pan Tadeusz. Now, with Katyn, he is again probing a painful episode in the country's past.
Despite his father's death in the massacre, Wajda says that the film is not directly autobiographical. "I couldn't make a film about my father because I simply didn't know much about him," Wajda says. "The last time I saw him was 1939 when he went to the front." The director says he had two clear goals in making the movie: to highlight the massacre and to unravel "the great lies" told about it.
The burning issue now is how the film will go down in Russia. At one stage, the producers had planned a public screening of Katyn at the Polish embassy in Moscow on March 5, the anniversary of Stalin's death. But the Russian elections caused some nervousness, so they opted instead hold a private screening, with the first public showing planned for June at the Moscow film festival.
"Katyn is going to be shown in Russia," Wajda insists. "We've not found a Russian distributor yet, but it is enormously important for this film to be shown in Russia if Polish-Russian relations in the 21st century are to be based in truth, not lies.
"This film is not against the Russian people. It is about the horrors of the Stalin regime. In this forest in Katyn, there were many thousands of Russian civilians and soldiers killed brutally and put into mass graves. It was a graveyard for both the Poles and the Russians."
· The Andrzej Wajda season is at BFI Southbank, London, until May 30
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