Film and History Annual Conference
University of Wisconsin - Madison, WI
Presented November, 2019
From 1956 until roughly 1963 Poland experienced a moment of creative freedom that for the first time in over a decade allowed artists to negate the perspective of communist authorities and instead reflect the attitudes of Polish society. Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev’s denouncement of Stalin’s methods in 1956, and the death of Party Leader Boleslaw Biereut’s death in March of that year loosened the Party’s enforcement of the doctrine of Socialist Realism established during the 1949 Wisla Congress.[1] By not having to produce art that was party-line jingoism they could focus on preserving censored histories, discuss cultural transformations in the wake of World War II, and critique governing political authorities. Unlike Italian neo-realism for example, the Polish Film School is less an aesthetic style than it is an informal group of young filmmakers who were all at one point students of the Lodz Film School, and were independently reacting to a shift in Poland’s political leadership.
Script censorship by the Script Assessment Commission encouraged filmmakers to rely instead on a dynamic mise-en-scene to express their philosophy, which included inserting obscure cultural symbols that would resonant with a Polish audience. According to Polish film scholar Paul Coates, the uniqueness of the Polish Film School lies precisely in its potent Aesopian language that successfully disguised contemporary problems in plots taking place in World War II.[2] These films explored such taboo subjects as the impact of Polish complacency with anti-Semitic laws during Nazi occupation, overall indifference to Socialist occupation, and the tragic fatalism in heroically fighting against either of these historic forces. A majority of these films do indeed address the source of religious and cultural tensions of contemporary Poland by taking place in World War II. However, a more striking and arguably more peculiar similarity that these films share is the various ways in which they feature trains as a symbolic repository of meaning and value. In them, trains act as a visual allusion to the Death Camps, a mechanical double for an impersonal, deterministic, and seemingly autonomous political system, or instill an existentially threating space that, as Alice Jenkins writes, “blurs the boundaries of the home, ‘real’ world and the utopian, dystopian, or fantasy world.”[3] While there are another handful of films that highlight train carriages or train stations as a background or theme, I will be focusing on the three that situate trains as the primary site of meaning: Andjrez Munk’s Man on the Tracks, Kazimierz Kutz’s People from the Train, and Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train.
One of the main reasons trains are presented so prominently in these films is because they were given an important ideological role throughout the previous decade in socialist films. In the first Polish color film, Leonard Buczkowski’s An Adventure at Marienstadt, workers in the overpopulated countryside would take trains to Warsaw to help rebuild the city. This narrative trope was meant to propagate and instill support for Party leader Boleslaw Bierut’s “Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw” beginning in 1950. Polish cinema in the late 1950s would repurpose trains as a commanding site of ideological opposition. The juncture of labor and railway travel in An Adventure at Marienstad leads us well into Andjrez Munk’s Man on the Tracks which is also considered the inaugural work of the Polish Film School having been released in January of 1957, just three months after the Polish October.
Man on the Tracks begins with the mysterious death of Wladyslaw Orzechowski (played by Kazimierz Opalinski), an experienced train operator who was killed by an oncoming train. The appearance of a malfunctioning railway stoplight by his body complicates the cause for his death. While no vehicle was derailed, Orzechowski’s superior is suspicious he tried to cause an accident to avenge his unwanted early retirement. Throughout the film Orzechowski’s superior along with two other characters provide different psychological portraits of him. Film scholars such as Marek Haltof rightfully emphasize how the film mocks the omniscient socialist realist narrator.[4] The viewers are given a break from didactic socialist messaging and are instead invited to question the truthfulness of each of the characters narratives.
While the narrative structuring is a powerful component of the film, much of its critical bite is punctuated by the fact that it questions the mythological heroism associated with railway workers. Unlike in Stalinist film, it is not the youth who, having no memory of pre-war bourgeois values, are tasked with teaching the old the benefits of socialism; instead, we empathize with the old traditionalist Orzechowski. The varied accounts of Orzechowski’s work habits, especially of his younger apprentice, lead us to interpret his death as an unintended consequence of the efficient, speedy rationale of the socialist work quotas. The railway stoplights Orzechowski quickly attempted to relight before his death would have been fully functioning had the station worker been more attentive. Orzechowski saved the lives of dozens of passengers by placing himself on the track to stop the oncoming train from derailing.
This is a modern update to the literary trope famously analyzed by Leo Marx of the rushing train disrupting pastoral revelry and tranquility.[5] In this case, however, the train as a great symbol of modernity and progress becomes one of forced acceleration that in turn destroys both the old moral order and the personal fulfillment that came out of a professional work ethic of craftsmanship, care, and safety. The young, meanwhile, become impersonal cogs in a machine.[6] The roles of socialist stock characters are thus wholly reshuffled. The wise, prudently speaking party secretary has the least insight on Orzochowski’s life, and the classic negative character who is the enemy of the new is in fact the hero.
The purpose for the focus on trains is twofold: First, the juxtaposition of linear and circular imagery that the railroad affords reflects the narrative structure of the film: Through a series of flashbacks we are provided various tracks of logic to follow that may or may not lead us to the same destination. It is a plot set off its track. Second, by recognizing the importance of the railroad imaginary to the USSR the film’s critique acquires stronger symbolic resonance. In the film, the unwarranted suspicion of sabotage to derail a train carries the political weight of accusing Poles with outmoded views for standing in the way of history. We learn, however, that the “saboteur” is a martyr who saves everyone on board from catastrophe caused by negligent socialist work policies.
The focus on the railroad as a metaphor for the country in Man on the Tracks would be relocated to the train station in Kazimierz Kutz’ 1961 People from the Train. The film takes place at the provincial station of Kurjanty, and opens with a bouquet of flowers being tossed from a passing train. The young, beautiful assistant of stationmaster Kalinski, thinking the flowers are for her is corrected when Kalinski explains that the flowers are instead connected to an incident from 1943. A group of passengers, he tells her, had to be unloaded from two carriages because of a malfunction and await the next train. Through small interactions between the passengers while waiting for the train we learn of many of the characters stories, which altogether presents a broad spectrum of Polish society. Among the main characters are a young resistance member and his girlfriend, a blackmailer, a Polish war widow who is hiding a young Jewish girl, and a young boy who befriends her. All of the passengers become endangered when a German SS patrol discovers a machine gun in the station’s waiting room that, unknown to them, belongs to a drunken German railway policeman. They demand to know the owner of the gun, threatening to punish silence by killing every fifth passenger. The young Jewish girl is brought out amongst the selected group, but the Polish widow steps forward to replace her. A teenage boy additionally steps forward and claims the gun as his own. The guards beat the boy and, before long, the stationmaster finds the drunken policeman. The widow and young boy are perceived as accidental heroes who sacrifice themselves in defense of those in the community more vulnerable and targeted by the occupiers.
By situating the story in a train station Kutz can further magnify the strong distinction between life during and after occupation. What is typically a space of freedom and international mobility has in his film become a space of constraint and imprisonment. The station is a microcosm of society in its channeling of bodies and its regulation of crowd flows, but here it is purgatory. Either the next freight train will arrive to carry the passengers to their destination, or a German patrol unit will arrive first and violently seek the owner of the misplaced machine gun. In this crisis the damnation of Poland is expressed: One must successfully flee because staying leads to violence or possible death.
With the plot relying on the arrival and departure of trains carrying life or death consequences, Kutz harnesses much of the newly developed unsettling interrelations with the railroad. In Poland trains were surely used by many Jews to flee the country, but their barbaric transformation into vehicles of death for 22 percent of the Polish population including 90 percent of its Jewish gentry, accorded them a dark, supernatural attribute. Additionally, the Germans were able to more quickly invade Poland in 1939 because, unlike the Russians, they used the same track gauge.[7]
The year of this tale is also significant. 1943 looms large in collective memory as the year of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In his study on Polish films and the Holocaust Marek Haltof notes that one of the consequences of Socialist policies was the inability for filmmakers to portray the quantity of Jews who died in the concentration camps. Party leaders held that Polish trust was best earned by making films exclusively about Catholic Polish martyrdom. In People from the Train the heroism of the widow to sacrifice her life to save the young Jewish girl reflects this trope, but outside the edge of the frame are several dozen Poles who did not step up to save the girl. Kutz is able to indirectly critique Polish complacency and make present the complexity of Polish responses to Jewish suffering. The film recognizes trains as a potent image of national trauma but concludes by affirming its emancipatory possibility to unite the country. The last scene of the film returns to Kalinski and his assistant who, having just been told this tale, is now proud to be working at the station that was the site of such a dramatic, heroic affair. Taking control of the trains has the weight of taking control of national destiny. The trains are Polish again, but the memory of the Holocaust remains as it haunts both Polish cinema and its trains.
The third film, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s 1959 Night Train, continues this thread of national mourning and further removes us from socialist criticism. Its highly stylized film noir aesthetic, moody jazz soundtrack, and decadent characters appropriately reflect its thematic exploration of loneliness and spiritual paralysis. The film is an atmospheric tale of restless passengers riding a night train from Lodz to the Baltic Sea. Once the train starts moving rumors spread that a murderer might be hiding on board. We suspect it is main character Jerzy because he is antisocial, wears dark sunglasses, and is so insistent on his solitude that he offers to pay for both beds in his sleeper; instead, he is stuck sharing his room with Marta. Both are seemingly running from some sort of trouble: for Jerzy it is possibly the police, and for Marta it is her love-dumb ex-boyfriend who is also aboard the train but rides the lower class compartment.
The uniqueness of Night Train is its utilization of darkness as a canvas for metaphysical reflection. By virtue of travelling by night the passengers have nowhere outside the train to fasten their gazes. In the windows all they can see are macabre reflections of their faces floating in a void not unlike a curious specter. Instead of relaxing distractedly to the sight of the passing countryside the darkness forces them to visually and spiritually look inward.[8] Rebecca Harrison’s description of the tunnel in early train films as a portal between the material and ethereal realms can be similarly used to describe the train that travels overnight.[9] The perpetual darkness and absence of a familiar, physical environment makes waiting on the train a supernatural experience. Indeed, many of the passengers find they are hanging in existential suspense as the topic of purgatory is found in multiple conversations between them. One continuously asks a priest on board how God will judge the murderer. Marta and Jerzy are settling into the consequences of recent life decisions while another passenger cannot sleep because the compact sleeping quarters remind him of his experience living in the Buchenwald concentration camp for four years. The search for spiritual resolution is perhaps best expressed in a group of nuns who are on a religious pilgrimage. The paradox of feeling spiritually directionless while physically advancing on a moving train is inverted in the brief moments outside of the train.
The passengers are allotted a brief respite from considering their personal lives when the murderer is found on the train. Many of the passengers redirect judgment at the escaped killer and chase him into the foggy Polish countryside for retribution.[10] The overhead camera angle of collective comeuppance visually parallels the opening shot of the film. In both shots everyone is momentarily de-individualized – bodies are seemingly hypnotized as though thoughtlessly moving through a predetermined path. When on the train, however, they ruminate on their own lives and consider how they either will or, in the case of the concentration camp survivor, have been judged.
Several commentators from Ewa Mazierska to Roger Ebert have remarked that the thesis of the film is one shared by Fritz Lang’s M, that is, people without personal direction are susceptible to group psychology.[11] However, in Night Train the characters’ unsettling compulsion to punish the killer demonstrates the rare experience of moral certainty in late 1950s Poland. The positive tone of Passengers from the Train’s resolution is swapped in Night Train with an irresolute assessment of the wandering, unguided spiritual disposition of the country. The confined condition of the world on the train is the focus, and it reflects the moral discomfort of Poland still dealing with the horrors of World War II. Communism, meanwhile, hasn’t offered a redemptive totalizing moral code, and the moral certitude offered by Catholicism so pronounced in Poland is presented as attractive but no longer adequate. The train itself thus only provides a deceptive sense of advancement. It can never provide a proper escape from the past and thus alleviate us of its weight.
The political thaw that began in October of 1956 would last until roughly 1963 when cultural production was slowly forced to return to a more ideologically corrected stance. Films that took place in World War II would again highlight the supportive role of the Red Army in the fight for Polish freedom with Polish characters happily fighting alongside them such as in Bohdan Poreba’s Road to the West.[12]
In his 1981 film Blind Chance Kieslowski would continue a trend inaugurated by the Polish Film School to utilize the train as a filmic means of transporting us to considering the fate and identity of a country caught in a crossroad.[13] In the early 1980s Poland was simultaneously experiencing a moment of strong economic decline, coping with the consequences of Wladyslaw Gomulka’s anti-Semitic policies, and reacting to the political repression of the Solidarity movement by the government’s institution of martial law.[14] The precarious state of the country is reflected in the various life trajectories of the main character, Witek. The film shows three different versions of his life, with each being contingent upon the specific small interactions he has at a train station. In the first version he catches the train and becomes a communist; in the second he misses it, is sentenced to doing community service for shoving a station guard, and becomes a religious anticommunist: In the final version he misses the train, avoids bumping into the station giuard, and returns to his apolitical life as a medical student.
Kieslowski uses the train station as a quasi-magical space; it acts as a cinematic conduit to consider different narrative imaginings of a character’s life. The train station in Blind Chance reflects Alice Jenkins’ analysis of trains in the literary and cinematic consciousness in that they conjure a sense of the “parallel, imagined life that could have been” and “encourage us to consider fate, and our own hand in it.”[15] Witek’s third life in which he avoids politics and appears most happy ends tragically in an early death when he boards a plane that explodes upon takeoff. Political activism is portrayed as futile while an apolitical life is fatal. Despite the plot of the film ending in tragedy, by sideshadowing his life for the audience Kieslowski performs an emancipatory gesture. In his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time Gary Sail Morson defines sideshadowing as “a technique that suggests to the viewer that time is not a fatalistic line but a shifting set of possibilities.”[16] Film theorists such as Annette Insdorf and Slavoj Zizek have argued that the triadic structure of Blind Chance leads us to believe there might be more versions of Witek’s life set up by other small differing encounters at the train station.[17] It is up to the imagination of the viewer to project what that alternative, and more fulfilling life might be.
This contingency of fate, while perhaps not as pronounced as in Blind Chance, plays a strong role in Man on the Tracks, People from the Train, and Night Train. An additional common thread is that the form of these films, with the exception of Night Train, contradicts the unidirectional pathway of the rail track.[18] Unlike the sideshadowing found in Blind Chance, they heavily rely on backshadowing and subjectively recounting events from the past. This narrative framing is what Anna Krakus in her book on 1970s Polish cinema calls the “aesthetic of unfinalizability.”[19] Ambivalent endings, false starts, and nonlinear narratives, she writes, are a radical political act because they did not appropriately mirror teleological historical determinism the way a simple and straightforward plot progression would. The ambiguous ending of a film like Roman Polanski’s 1962 Knife in the Water, however, produces a different conversation precisely because its plot is situated on a boat adrift a lake, and ends with a car at a fork in the road. The boat and the car reflect the aimlessness or indecision of its driver. The individual freedom those vehicles afford do not so immediately implicate such national conversations as collective movement, history, and political direction that the railway does.
Examining the varied presentation of trains ranging from the memories they conjure to the places they bring us offers valuable insights into the evolving nature of communist rule in Poland and the existential makeup of the country. Man on the Tracks, People from the Train, and Night Train present a range of cinematic responses to inhospitable governance by socialist leaders, the death of Polish-Jews in the Holocaust, and victimization of the nation during World War II in which trains played a crucial articulating role. While the railroad in them suggested none of the optimistic limitlessness of American trains, they were instead instrumental to obliquely explore taboo themes, especially the determined one-track view of history mandated by communism. They cinematically perform Walter Benjamin’s critique of Karl Marx’s maxim that revolutions are the locomotives of history. Revolutions, Benjamin rebutted, could be seen as the human race grabbing for the emergency brake on the train.[20] Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Kazimierz Kutz chose to fasten Polish viewers attention to trains, a machine of national unity, as a means to pause and reflect not only on the country’s recent history but also on the shared nature of its destiny and the course that it is on.
[1] Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 263.
[2]. Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 7.
[3] Alice Jenkins, “Getting to Utopia: Railways and Heterotopia in Children’s Literature,” in Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (Children's Literature and Culture), ed. Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry (New York: Routledge, 2003), 23.
[4]. Marek Haltof, Polish Cinema: A History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 67.
[5]. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 27.
[6]. Ewa Mazierska notes that the film could be read metaphorically as a film not only about trains but also about films. The care for engine and the refusal to “feed: low quality coal is advocating for “quality” cinema. Ewa Mazierska Poland Daily: Economy, Work, Consumption and Social Class in Polish Cinema (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 142.
[7]. Additionally, Poland was able to defeat the red army in 1929 because Russia used a different track gauge and were thus unable to more easily access the country. Christian Wolmar Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World (New York: Atlantic Books, 2010), 93.
[8]. Lynne Kirby notes how the train in early cinema is often utilized as a “special ‘nowhere” outside the sphere of normal rules and codes of conduct. In comedies gender roles were played upon, but in more dramatic films the train journey is both a dream and a nightmare in which anything could happen, especially in tunnels. Lynne Kirby Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
[9]. Rebecca Harrison From Steam to Screen: Cinema, The Railways and Modernity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 34.
[10]. The chase appropriately ends at a Catholic graveyard foregrounding the religion’s structural emphasis on the division between those who are saved and those who are damned.
[11]. Eva Naripea “Postcolonial Heterotopias: A Paracinematic Reading of Marek Piestrak’s Estonian Coproductions” in Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
[12]. In Road to the West an old railroad worker and his young, uncaring assistant are tasked with guiding a train loaded with explosives to the Red Army on the Western front.
[13]. Trains would remain visible in the symbolism in Polish Cinema throughout this time. One of the eight film units was called “Tor” for “tracks.” Another, “Kadr” for “frame,” had a logo that bears resemblance to tracks. The greatest actor of the Polish Film School, Zbingiew Cybulski, would die young in 1967 by attempting to jump onto a moving train.
[14]. Jerzy Lukowski and Hubert Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 276.
[15]. Alice Jenkins, “Getting to Utopia: Railways and Heterotopia in Children’s Literature,” in Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults (Children's Literature and Culture), ed. Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry (New York: Routledge, 2003), 23.
[16]. Gary Sail Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven, NH: Yale University Press, 1994), 83.
[17]. Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzystof Kieslowski (New York: Miramax Books, 1999), 86.
[18]. Paul C. Santilli “Cinema and Subjectivity in Krzysztof Kieslowski” in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 149.
[19]. Anna Krakus argues that “unfinalizability” is a product of transforming doubt into artistic expression with frustration as its goal. Anna Krakus No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 4.
[20]. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, 1938-1940, Volume 4; Volumes 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 402.
