Berlinale Dispatch. 4. Katyn.

It is tempting to see an epic like Katyn by Andrzej Wajda, which played in the Competition at the Berlinale, as a lot of fuss over a matter that was settled quite some time ago. In 1940, after the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland in late September of 1939 as part of its Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis, huge numbers of Polish soldiers were taken prisoner and shipped East. After the rank and file were sent home, the officers (most from the elite of the Polish intelligentsia) remained confined, and in 1940 some 20 thousand of them were executed under orders from Stalin in the forests of Katyn. Most were shot with a single bullet to the back of the head. Their bodies were bulldozed into mass graves.

When the Nazis broke their pact with the Russians and headed East, they came upon the graves and announced the truth to the world, complete with visits from the International Red Cross and services for the dead performed by the Catholic clergy. It was easy for the Russians to undermine what the Germans were saying, in spite of the overwhelming evidence. Official word from Moscow was that the Germans had exterminated the Polish officer corps, just as the Germans had exterminated Polish partisans and thousands of Polish villages, not to speak of industrial killings of millions of Jews from all over Europe in death factories located in Poland. Why take the word of Nazi mass murderers on mass murder?

The Russians and the Polish postwar government repeated those lies until the end of the communist period (when they spoke of Katyn at all), although by the 1980s you would hear about it all the time in Polish conversations. No one believed that the Germans had slaughtered the officers, but no one believed much of what the governments in either Warsaw or Moscow were saying. In the 1990s, when Russian documents ordering the execution of the officers were released, the facts were confirmed once again. Boris Yeltsin even issued an apology. And now Andrzej Wajda, whose father was one of the officers killed, has made a convoluted and cumbersome film that dramatizes the story of the killing of the officers and the communist regime's systematic efforts to cover up that killing.

Why single out Katyn in a war epic? It's tragic and dramatic, and Polish officials spent decades denying it. And yet more Poles died in Soviet camps after the invasion than were executed in Katyn, and Russian troops were given orders by the NKVD to seize (and in many cases kill) the clergy and educated elite of every town that they occupied in 1939. Also, as the Nazis retreated back to Berlin five years later, just as Poles were rising up in Warsaw against them, the approaching Red Army stopped and stayed a few kilometers away on the east bank of the Vistula River rather than intervene in a way that would have saved hundreds of thousands of Polish lives, and saved most of Warsaw, which was burned along with its inhabitants.

If that weren't enough, vast sections of what had been Poland became part of the Soviet Union after the war - these were some of the very same regions that were overrun by Red Army troops as part of the deal with Hitler in 1939. The Russians eventually did get what they wanted.

With an exception or two, all the Poles that I ever met in the 1980s and since knew these facts, and had no illusions about the Soviets. Yet the Polish government denied them as long as it felt that it needed to.

Since 1990, Katyn has been accepted as a national tragedy, and volumes of documents confirm that. You will see some of those documents appear in English, and more attention paid to the massacres now that the film is a finalist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (It is curious that such a film would get the Holocaust-sensitive Academy's nomination. At no point in the film is there ever a mention of the Jews who were being slaughtered in Poland at the same time.) If the film wins, it won't be for any cinematic virtues. The script is all over the place, that facts are assumed (as they would be in an epic repeating an oft-told story for an audience that already knows it well), and the significance of this story today isn't always clear. Was this Poland's "greatest generation," as American pop mythologists might call it?

If the film's only effect is to show a massacre and to call it just that, then this is already a welcome event, even though the movie is a far cry from the early work (Ashes and Diamonds, Samson, Kanal, The Wedding, Landscape After the Battle, Promised Land, etc) that made Wajda one of Europe's great directors. And those films were made at a time when making them in Poland really took courage.

Katyn should also remind us that genocides aren't always called by that name, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Would the same Academy whose members nominated Katyn for an Oscar nominate a film about the Armenian Genocide, which George W Bush now seems to think did not happen? Screamers, by Carla Garapedian with System of a Down, comes out on DVD later this month. Watch it for a modern approach to depicting gaps in memory that is an encouraging alternative to Wajda's clumsy teleplay. We know what Poland's excuse was for so many years in denying the facts about Katyn. What is America's in denying another genocide?

- David D'Arcy

To David's comments, I'd simply add that the most debilitating problem with Katyn is its screenplay. The core of the project is the sequence toward the end depicting the actual executions of the officers - and it is indeed as horrific as it needs to be. But the roughly 90 percent of the rest of the film leading up to decrescendo-ing from that sequence is, unfortunately and unnecessarily, the rote stuff of countless WWII dramas. Wives and mothers wait for their men in uniform to come home - and then suffer the shock of the bad news the audience has known all along. A surviving officer cooperates with the Soviets, tries to drown the voice of his conscience in vodka, and then, once drunk, speaks the unspeakable at a bar before walking outside to blow his brains out. Attempts at resistance by one young woman and one young man are brutally put down. Sadly, all this comes off as a hodge-podge collage of war movie clichés.

Wajda these days is reminding me a bit of another well-intentioned European, Volker Schlöndorff - though, of course, the past glories of the former are richer than those of the latter. Still, in the past couple of decades, both directors have taken on projects so inherently honorable as to seem irreproachable. They aren't, exactly; when the telling doesn't measure up to the story, that story is somehow tarnished after all.

- David Hudson

"First work in five years by Andrzej Wajda, Polish cinema's leading eminence grise, doesn't feel like the personal project one might expect from the son of one slain at Katyn," writes Leslie Felperin in Variety. "Instead, this plays almost like an academic master class, meticulously exploring the event's ramifications but only catching full fire at the end."

"This is a very Polish story with deep resonance for Wajda's countrymen but it may have trouble attracting a wide audience elsewhere," suggests Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter.

Film Zeit rounds up reviews and related stories in the German press.

Earlier: Excellent piece by Anne Applebaum in the New York Review of Books.

Posted by dwhudson at February 16, 2008 7:12 AM