The Pinocchio Theory

Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1966) is probably the best-known film (though probably not the best) from the Czech New Wave of the early 1960s. (It won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1968). It is the first of five Czech New Wave films (actually, four Czech and one Slovak) that I am showing in my Eastern European Film class this semester.

Closely Watched Trains is a film of many little virtues. With an emphasis on the “little,” as this is a film which eschews larger ambitions, much as its young protagonist, Milos (Vaclav Neckar) does — he tells us that he is glad to work as a train dispatcher at the local station, because he is basically lazy, and this job is one that doesn’t demand too much of him. The film is set during World War II — a politically safe subject to choose in mid-1960s Czechoslovakia. But it is much more a coming-of-age film than a war-and-heroism one, even though this latter is what it becomes at the end. Aside from doing as little work as possible, Milos is most concerned with losing his virginity — or overcoming the condition of “premature ejaculation” that has thus far prevented him from losing it. In his despair over this, he even tries to commit suicide at one point, though the film doesn’t take this happening very seriously.

So, we have a film with quirky, singular characters, each of whom has his (generally it’s a he) own little obsessions; with finely observed details, organized around the slow and sleepy pace of provincial life; with an abundant, but wry and very dry, humor; with an empathetic but somewhat distanced point of view; and with a bittersweet tone. My description comes very close to being a cliche: both of a certain type of unambitious but much-beloved art film, and of an alleged Czech sensibility. What then, distinguishes Closely Watched Trains in particular? (aside from the fact that it more or less set the pattern for what I am calling a cliche).

Closely Watched Trains has antecedents, of course, both in Czech literature — Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk, as well as the novel by Bohumil Hrabal on which the film is based — and in cinema — I sense the presence here of Francois Truffaut’s early work. But it feels fresh nonetheless. The question is why. I notice that both Richard Schickel’s notes for the Criterion Collection’s DVD of the film, and Tom Keogh’s notes on the film at Amazon both approach the film by way of expressing a certain degree of (rhetorical) surprise at how well it holds up after all these years (and all the imitations).

I think the power of the film has a lot to do with its cinematography, and its pacing — both of which are far less laid-back and casual than they might at first appear to be. (Of course, the appearance of casualness actually requires quite a lot of difficult planning and work on the part of the filmmaker). As was the tendency for the Czech New Wave (as for the French New Wave a few years earlier), Menzel does not interested in elaborately setting up the film’s plot events and situations: he just plunks us into the middle of them. Also, he makes us infer motivation and mood from behavior, and from visual and sonic set-ups, rather than bringing us more directly into the minds of the characters. Once past the opening titles, the film begins with Milos’ first-person voiceover narration — but this is quickly dropped, and does not reappear later in the film. There are almost no close-ups, and no elaborate speeches or other indications of the characters’ motivations for doing what they do. Camera angles are continually varying, which has the effect of suggesting variation and change even when not much is happening, and which generally works against sort of deep identification with the characters (not that ti is “alienating,” but just that it denies us the sense of repetition which is necessary in order for identifications to form). Non-diegetic music is used sparingly, and then mostly just for ironic contrast (like the somewhat comic martial music that comes up whenever the local Nazi boss makes a visit).

All of this makes for a film that is more concerned with sensation and observation than with affect. And thus for a film that privileges wry humor and sympathetic distance, rather than the far more frequent cinematic mechanism of hysterical overidentification (I am using this latter phrase in a purely descriptive, rather than pejorative, sense). I am tempted to say that Closely Watched Trains is something like an inverted Rube Goldberg machine. That is to say, in this film the chains of causal relations are as oblique and surprising as they are in Rube Goldberg machines — it is always a question of external relations. But whereas Rube Goldberg machines rely on an absurdly hyperbolic and methodical, even paranoid, overorganization, Menzel’s film makes its (equally contingent and absurd) associative links through subjective states of drift and inattention. The film’s humor comes from its incongruities, but the narrative moves forward through incongruities as well. There is a series of connections, but these connections unfold at seeming random, sort of like a Rube Goldberg machine in slow motion.

Let me give an example, even at risk of both giving away the plot, and of making that plot sound convoluted and “difficult,” when in fact it is quite slack and laid-back, and altogether clear and easy to follow. Milos, after being rescued from his suicide attempt, goes around asking everyone, without any sense of propriety or embarrassment, for help and advice with his ejaculation problem. (This utter lack of shame or self-consciousness is part of what makes Milos, and the film in general, so charming and endearing). One of the people he asks is the stationmaster’s wife — as he approaches her, she is sitting calmly, and preparing a goose for the cookpot by smoothing or shaving (I wasn’t quite sure) force-feeding a duck, making the food go down by stroking its long neck — in what, in this context, cannot help but appear as a phallic gesture. The promise of this gesture is taken up a few scenes later, when one of Milos’ superiors, the womanizer Hubicka (Josef Somr) sets him up with an “experienced” slightly older woman, who does initiate him into sexuality with an attention to his needs such as that which the scene with the goose sort of implied. But this woman is a resistance fighter, delivering to Hubicka the bomb to blow up a German train; and it’s because Hubicka is made the subject of a (more ridiculous than scary) inquest by the Nazis on account of his womanizing activities (he is accused of offending the dignity of the State by stamping the official bureaucratic ink stamps of the train office on a young lady’s posterior) that Milos becomes the one who actually has to throw the bomb onto the train — which is what leads, at the end of the film, to his almost accidental death (he is shot by a Nazi soldier who acts more on principle — kill any of the locals who might be seen as stepping out of line — than by any awareness of the bomb — which the soldier has not seen, and which does successfully destroy the train a few seconds later).

In this way, Milos’ death at the end of Closely Watched Trains — and his thereby becoming, quite unintentionally, a hero of the Resistance — unfolds with exactly the same logic, and the same sort of weightlessness, as all of the comic incidents throughout the film. And this is Menzel’s way of describing the odd, and thoroughly contingent, ways that individual lives get inscribed into History. Throughout the film, the Nazi occupation is described as a burden, but nothing more — the employees at the train station have to pay obeisance, and pay attention, when the local Nazi little tyrant comes around, but as soon as he leaves, they go back to acting as they always did, ignoring whatever orders and exhortations they have received. Milos’ death reminds us that such a lackadaisical attitude does not provide any sort of exemption from the horrors of war and tyranny; but it does suggest (once again) that these relations are, in principle, external ones rather than innerly determining ones — however mortal they may turn out to be in practice. And that is how Menzel clears away a sort of free space, even amidst the horrors and traumas of 20th century history. Closely Watched Trains does skirt close to the edge of a certain cliche. as I suggested earlier (and to a postmodern taste, “charm” is far more troubling than any sort of sleaziness or exploitation or even frank stupidity could be), but it manages to remain deftly on its razor’s edge through its gaps and silences, its comic digressions, and its oblique meditation on history and contingency.

Knife in the Water (1962) was Roman Polanski’s first feature film, and the only one he made in Poland (and in Polish) before leaving for the West and English-language cinema. It is evidently of a piece with Polanski’s subsequent work, in terms of its nihilism, its chill and creepiness, its generally smothering affect.

Knife in the Water is quite strikingly different from the films made by the Polish directors of the previous generation (or half-generation, given that these directors were only a decade or so older than Polanski) like Wajda and Munk.. In Polanski’s fillm, there is no reference to World War II, or to Poland’s other historical traumas; and no sign of the Italian neorealist influence that was evident in Wajda and Munk.

Polanski seems to evacuate history and society quite deliberately, as his film has only three characters (no other human beings are seen, not even as extras), and unfolds first in a car driving through uninhabited forest, and then largely on a yacht, sailing through a series of lakes that mostly seem devoid of human habitation. We see, at best, the debris, byproducts, or tools of human labor: construction vehicles standing idle, because it is Sunday; logs floating in a lake, near the shore, waiting to be sent downstream. The car seen at the beginning of the film is left parked overnight; when the owners return to it the next morning, at the end of the movie, the windshield wipers have been stolen. But we do not see the vandals, or get any hint of who they were.

In the context of “actually existing socialism,” it’s hard to read this as anything but a violent, willful negation of historical consciousness, of socialist (or any other sort of) humanism, of social realism, and of political and social “responsibility.” Polanski’s attitude is brattishly asocial or anti-social, even though, at the same time, the film suggests that there is no escaping society. For we need other people to exploit, or to demonstrate our superiority over.

All this is expressed as much in the style of the film as in its script and story. There are lots of claustrophobic closeups, but rarely of just one character: usually two, or even all three, of the actors are squeezed into a single shot. Often one character is quite close to the camera, but the other two are also present, slightly further back. Thus we get the in-your-face, affect-heavy effect of close-ups, but — how do I put this? — without the kind of overflowing intensity that one gets from, say, the close-ups of Falconetti in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (or for that matter, the close-ups in many of Samuel Fuller’s films). Instead, there’s a tension: the affect not of any of the characters, but between them, the affect of the void. In the background, and in the rare longer shots, there is always the wilderness, which never looks inviting, but either blank or ominous. There’s no identification with these characters, then, despite how we are almost thrust in their faces. The film is suffused with the affects of coldness and cruelty.

(I should also mention the soundtrack, as well as the images. The score, by Polanski’s frequent collaborator (until his untimely death in 1969) Krzysztof Komeda, has a tense, 50s-jazz sort of vibe. But this score doesn’t suffuse the film, it only punctuates it at certain moments — or rather, I should say the reverse: the score is itself frequently punctuated by silence, long stretches when all we hear is ambient noise. This punctuation, or scansion, makes for a lot of the tension in the movie).

The three characters are a 40-something married couple, Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka), and a younger (20ish?) student or drifter, who remains unnamed (Zygmunt Malanowicz). [Digressive Note: I see from IMDB that Leon Niemczyk just died this past November, and that shortly before his death he appeared in David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which is probably the one new film that I am most itching to see]. Andrzej and Krystyna are driving through the woods, when they encounter the young man hitchhiking; they give him a ride, and then invite him aboard their yacht.

The social world is present in the film precisely, but only, through what we learn of these peoples’ backgrounds. Andrzej is apparently a sportswriter, and he and Krystyna evidently belong to the Party elite (what in the Soviet Union was called the nomenklatura), as is evidenced by the very fact that they own a car and a yacht (as well as, Krystyna says at one point, a 4-room apartment). They also exude a sort of smugness, deriving from a reflexive sense of privilege, which they completely take for granted.

The younger man says very little about his background, and what he does say is unreliable. He describes himself variously as a drifter, a hiker, and a student; he seems, like most of the population in this alleged “workers’ state”, to have few or no possessions. Aside, that is, from the large, mean-looking switchblade knife he is prone to display at every opportunity.

Given the deliberate decontextualization of all these differences, and the limitaitons in what we know about the characters’ pasts, the “class struggle” — as well as the generational struggle between the two men — gets played out in a Hobbesian or Darwinian register, rather than in a Marxist (or Freudian) one.

All the exchanges between the three characters are driven by buried suggestions of aggression and violence. Andrzej’s and Krystyna’s relationship is evidently several degrees below dead. Andrzej insults and patronizes the hitchhiker, then invites him aboard through a sort of vicious condescension. The young man accepts the invitation through a kind of swagger — he seems anxious to take on a dare. (We first encounter him when he stops Andrzej’s and Krystyna’s car by standing in the middle of the road as it approaches — giving them the sole alternatives of stopping for him, or running him over).

The outing quickly turns into a macho duel (a pissing contest?) between the two men, with the woman serving as spectator and judge of the contest, as well as being its stake. Andrzej asserts the authority of his age, of his social position, of his superior knowledge as a seaman and a social insider, and of his authority as the “skipper” of the ship. The young man responds with arrogant cockiness, physical daring (he shimmies up the mast at one point, and — on a dare — holds a pot of boiling water in his bare hands at another), and displays of his superior virility (on account of his youth, and also through overt phallic displays — there’s no ambiguity as to the connotations of the knife). (It’s worth noting in this respect, and apropos of the title of the film, that Andrzej is unable to appropriate the knife — he can only deprive the younger man of it by throwing it overboard).

In this contest, the younger man gets the better of Andrzej — at least in the sense that he gets to bed the woman, and then walks away scot-free. But summarizing the plot of the film in this way is misleading. For one thing, the real “winner” (to the extent there is one) is Krystyna. She manages both to put the younger man in his place, and to get the sexual gratification from him that her husband fails to provide. And she manages thereby also to humiliate and subjugate Andrzej, taking his pretensions down a few notches, and altering the balance of power between them in her favor. At the end of the film, Andrzej is (metaphorically) paralyzed or castrated, stopping the car at a (both literal and metaphorical) crossroads, and not sure which way to go.

Krystyna’s “victory” also marks a defeat for the younger man. His virility has been reduced to a merely instrumental status. For all his confident and contempt-filled self-assurance, he turns out to have been nothing but a go-between, or a tool, in the power struggle between the couple. (We realize that Andrzej and Krystyna are the people who really hate one another, although this is not expressed openly at any point in the film. The young man does get to walk away at the end of the film: he’s not trapped in the situation the way the two of them are. But the young man also hasn’t gained anything from the contest, besides (we presume) a fleeting instant of pleasure; and he has amply paid for this with the loss of his knife.

I still haven’t managed to explain what is the most powerful thing about Knife in the Water, which is its obliqueness. Nothing of the contest (or three-way war) that I have been describing is quite there on the surface. I don’t mean that it’s hidden, exactly: the three characters are all fully aware of what’s going on, and so is the audience. But in this strange battle, no blows are ever thrown directly. Rather, the fighting is all done in the form of insinuations and implications. The young man doesn’t actually threaten the older couple with his knife, for instance. He doesn’t have to; the mere presence of the knife is enough. Throughout the film, even the most casual statements and gestures are fraught with heavy, and usually ugly, meanings. But for this very reason, nearly all the film’s statement and gestures are (merely?) casual and impromptu. One of the many things the film withholds from us is the hysterical sense of rising to a climax of craziness or viciousness.

By the end of the film, we are forced to realize that what we have witnessed is nothing more than a series of futile stupidities. And this, I think, is the deepest sense in which the film is nihilistic and anti-humanist. Polanski offers us no redemption; even more, he condemns our very desire for redemption (or for narrative resolution) by so deliberately frustrating it. This is profoundly subversive and unsettling, both to the “socialst” state in which the film was originally made, and in the hypercapitalistic state of things within which we experience the film today. Macho contests are a staple of Hollywood cinema, after all, and they generally end by promising some sort of redemption through violence. (Think of nearly anything from Straw Dogs to Reservoir Dogs, or from Charles Bronson to Sylvester Stallone to Mel Gibson). Even Clint Eastwood, who uses his iconic status as a hero of masculine violence in order to demystify and deconstruct such violence from within, never made anything nearly as disillusioning as this. In Knife in the Water, even the emblematic gesture with which the masculine hero tosses away his badge, or his gun, after having inflicted and survived all the violence — even this gesture is reduced to triviality and stupidity. Polanski leaves us with no alibis.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) was made by Jaromil Jires after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia put an end to the Prague Spring, and to most of the efforts of the Czech New Wave directors (for instance, Jires’ previous film, The Joke, was banned). Valerie is based on a surrealist novel by Vitezslav Nezval (which I haven’t read); it doesn’t involve politics in any direct way (though some viewers have seen an implicit, anti-Soviet political allegory hidden within it). The film’s eponymous heroine is a 13-year-old girl menstruating for the first time and coming to sexual awareness through a series of fantastic, oneiric events and encounters.

It’s hard to know what to make of this film, especially in its original Czech context. I remember its being marketed in the US, in the 1970s — though I never managed to see it back then — as a psychedelic, counterculture cult film, i.e. one you were supposed to see stoned. But I doubt that this was the way it was marketed, or received, in post-Soviet invasion Czechoslovakia. (By the way, pardon the digression, here is an amazing account, by the great Czech director Jan Svankmajer, of being given LSD in 1972 by the Czech military, as an experiment similar to ones the US military had conducted 10 or 15 years previously. Of course Svankmajer had a horribly bad trip — as who woudn’t under such circumstances?).

Anyway. Valerie is intensely, and quite classically, surreal. The plot is more or less linear, but filled with strange transformations and reversals, and involving themes and images of blood-menstruation, vampires and sex-as-vampiric-possession, and all sorts of suggestions of incest (father-daughter, brother-sister, mother-son). There’s a very beautiful shot, for instance, of a flower on which a drop of Valerie’s menstrual blood has fallen.

The oneiric disassociations and repetitions/variations of bizarre sexual motifs are worthy of Bunuel (think of Belle de Jour) — but alas, the film entirely lacks Bunuel’s dryness and irony. Instead, Jires aims for a tone of rapture combined with frissons of horror. The images are suffused with light (for daytime scenes), and subtly shaded (in nighttime scenes) in ways that are often gorgeous, but also, often, so overdone as to feel rather cheesy or kitschy (terms that I intend descriptively, and not pejoratively); at times, the film modulates into the picture-postcard excessive prettiness of softcore Europorn (it’s not as explicit as, say, the Emmanuelle series, but we do get to see the breasts of the lead actress, Jaroslava Schallerova, who — like her character — was 13 years old at the time the film was made: this is something that would be impossible today. And then there are all those insert shots of a group of young women, all dressed in virginal white, cavorting and making out in a stream).

Still, despite this male-gaze prurience, Valerie does manage to maintain, for the most part, a female-sexuality based point of view, appropriate to its adolescent heroine. (Tanya Krzywinska, in the best article I have been able to find online about the film, rightly compares it to the fiction of Angela Carter, and to The Company of Wolves (1984), Neil Jordan’s film from Carter’s script). The look may sometimes be Europorn, but the narrative organization isn’t: there are none of those phallic climaxes that gratify the hetero male viewer, even when (as in Emmanuelle) the woman’s pleasure is being stressed. Or, to put it another way: Valerie is a film about female pleasure. But whereas in 70s Europorn, like so much straight porn, the male characters — and through them, vicariously, the male viewers — get the credit, or the gratification, for inducing and producing this female pleasure, in Valerie there is much more of a sense of the woman’s (I mean the girl’s) autonomous ability to acquire and sustain such pleasure.

I’ve said that Jires aims for (and often achieves) a tone of rapture. But this is less a St. Theresa-esque bliss beyond words, than it is a continual modulation of affect (and, in cinematic terms, of lighting and coloring) in ways that skirt (or flirt with) terror (the erotic/horrific frisson). Valerie is nearly raped by the local priest — but she escapes; the priest then has her burned at the stake as a temptress (but she emerges unharmed). And adult sexuality appears to Valerie as something (literally) vampiric: the figures of father, priest, and lover tend to become confounded with that of Nosferatu, and the pious grandmother with whom Valerie lives is transmogrified into a raging demonic figure of ungratified lust (at one point, she attains what she hopes is eternal youth by drinking a virgin’s blood). But these demonic and vampiric elements don’t have the sorts of puritanical connotations (dread and sexual repression) that they would have in an Anglo-American context. I hesitate even to call them psychoanalytic. The film is quite easily (as Krzywinska notes) open to psychoanalytic interpretation, but this very openness and obviousness obviates the need for any sort of depth psychology.

Valerie is about surfaces, not depths: the innocence and lightness of a play of metamorphoses, rather than the weight of sexual fixations and intractable ambivalences. This is why its moments of (generic) horror are never particularly horrifying or dread-inducing. And I think that this is also the reason for what I called, above, the cheesiness and kitschiness that its extraordinary visual beauty is always just on the verge of lapsing into. (I should add, sonic beauty: the score, with its harmonic tinkling and its vaguely religious a cappella choruses, is also quite ravishing in a way that comes perilously close to something entirely generic). There’s almost nothing that separates bliss from banality: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is poised right on that nearly invisible edge.

In Andrzej Munk’s Bad Luck (1959), the tragic history of 20th-century Poland is repeated as farce. The main character, Piszcyck, is a sort of hapless Everyman who stumbles through two decades of war, revolution, and political infighting without ever understanding what is going on, or why his life has taken the turns that it does. Piszcyck is played by Bogumil Kobiela, who (as my students noted) had already played a similar role in Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, where he provided a buffoonish counterpoint to the tragic ambivalences of the main plot. Here Kobiela dominates the movie, walking idiotically through history in a manner that prefigures Woody Allen’s Zelig and Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump.

Bad Luck is, however, a considerably harsher and more sardonic film than either Zelig or Gump. Piszczyk displays a boundless desire to conform, to fit in, to do what everyone else is doing; but he remains utterly unconscious of the moral and political stakes of everything he does. Before the War, he manages to be beaten up, both by fascist thugs who mistake him for a Jew, and by cops who misidentify him as one of those fascist thugs. During the War, he finds himself successively as a collaborator with the Nazis, as a black marketeer making money off people’s misfortunes, and as a courier for the Resistance. After the War, he works both as a fake lawyer engaging in shady, dubious deals, and as an enthusiastic bureaucrat helping to build the glorious Communist society of the future.

Actually, this is only a partial list; Piszczyk’s story, which he narrates in a series of flashbacks, is incredibly convoluted and self-contradictory. The only constant elements are: Piszczyk’s boundless enthusiasm and good faith (no matter what he is doing); his disposition to take credit for — and to recklessly exaggerate — whatever good or creditable thing happens to him, while at the same time disavowing as “bad luck” whatever disasters he brings upon himself; his inability to comprehend (thanks to his childish narcissism) either the motives and feelings of people around him, or the larger social significance of whatever situation he is in; and his rather endearing ability to shrug off one disaster after another, since of course everything he tries to do ends badly. A weathervane never changes; only the wind does (as Daniel Singer once wrote of Philippe Sollers).

Munk’s mise en scene is clearly influenced by silent film comedy. Indeed, scenes from Piszczyk’s childhood are played like a silent film (or, more accurately, like the way silent film is typically perceived in the sound era) with generic music, exaggerated gestures, no dialogue, and the film speeded up to reflect the experience of watching a silent film shot at 18fps, but seen at the sound speed of 24fps. The rest of the film unfolds with normal dialog and pacing, but the influence of the cinematic imaginary on Piszczyk’s sensibility is indicated at least once, when he goes to the movies and sees some sort of exaggeratedly romantic melodrama, which helps to fuel the fantasies that drive him. He’s always particularly deluded about women, and many of his more idiotic moves are made in order to impress them, or as a result of his failing to understand their lack of interest in him.

There are several scenes that wonderfully epitomize the many levels of irony at work her. In one (set in pre-War times) Piszczyk finds himself sandwiched in between two political rallies: a pro-government one ahead of him, and a fascist one behind him. He doesn’t quite know what to do, so he shouts slogans of both groups alternately.

The other scene is set right at the start of the War. Piszczyk is in a cabbage field, when German airplanes fly overhead. At the first pass, he naively waves at them. The planes return, and start bombing the field; Piszczyk runs away from them in a zigzag, continually changing direction in order to avoid the explosions. It’s sort of like a Keystone Kops mishap, but with considerably higher stakes.

Piszczyk’s idiocy, or innocence (the two here are synonymous) does several things. In the first place, it clearly works (as critics have noted) as a critique of Romantic nationalist myths, which portray the Polish people as unfailingly noble, heroic, and courageous. It’s possible to see Piszczyk as, in spite of everything, a survivor, who manages to muddle through everything thanks to his weird combination of infinite adaptibility and an (unjustifiably) clear conscience. His pathetric delusions and stupidities are perhaps to be preferred to those grandiose ones which have led the nation to catastrophe time and again.

It’s revealed at the end of the film that Piszczyk has been telling his story to the warden of a prison from which he is about to be released — Piszczyk is begging to be allowed to stay in jail, because this is the one place where he is told precisely what he has to do, and therefore he is able to avoid the “bad luck” that inexorably awaits him in the world outside. I don’t know whether Munk and Wajda were carrying on a sort of argument by means of their films dealing with World War II; but the ironies of Bad Luck‘s comedic situation are as dizzying, and as deep, as the ironies of the tragic, existential situations of Wajda’s contemporary films Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds.

But there’s something more. Piszczyk is always characterized, as I have already mentioned, by his optimism and sincere good faith, his boundless enthusiasm for whatever enterprise he is involved in, no matter how this contradicts what he was doing, and what he ostensibly believed in, before. This comes out especially in the last long sequence of the film, when he is working as a socialist bureaucrat in the government statistics office. Not only is he enraptured by the vast quantities of data he is collecting (and for which there doesn’t seem to be any further use), he is also thrilled to be able to inform his superior about the bad (and implicitly anti-Party) behavior of one of his co-workers. The superior carefully writes down all the information Piszczyk gives him; but he also voices suspicion of Piszczyk himself on several occasions, because Piszczyk strikes him as being just too enthusiastic to be believable. He feels all his suspicions confirmed when the co-worker frames Piszczyk for similar anti-authority behavior, and gets him fired and jailed.

Now, numerous accounts of life under state socialism have emphasized that there was enormous pressure both to inform on others, and to express boundless enthusiasm for the state’s vacuous and deeply flawed and failing projects. The result was a kind of universal cynicism: everyone was complicit in the ostentatious public affirmation of ideals and rituals which they all privately knew to be hollow and false. Everybody goes through the motions; and everybody “knows better.” Piszczyk’s true “failing” is that he entirely lacks this cynicism and hypocrisy: this is precisely why his Party superior finds his enthusiasm suspect. How can anyone truly serve the Party, if he fails to be aware that everything the Party stands for is a sham?

This is something like what Zizek calls “overidentification” (see the discussions of this concept here and here). Only where Zizek praises (deliberate) overidentification as a subversive and critical strategy, Munk presents it entirely immanently: Piszczyk doesn’t intend, and is entirely unaware of, the potentially subversive implications of what he does. And even leaving aside questions of intent and awareness, Munk is far more pessimistic than Zizek, as he doesn’t see overidentification as having any power to disrupt the system, to gum up the works. (To use Zizek’s own Hegelian vocabulary, Munk suggests — contra Zizek — that, not only are Piszczyk’s actions not liberating “for themselves,” they are not even liberating “in themselves” or “for us”).

There are two points that arise for me, out of this comparison between Munk and Zizek. First: overidentification is one of those concepts that arose in the context of “really existing socialism” — where it is quite appropriate — but that Zizek brings over into his analysis of postmodern capitalism as well, where it is arguably far less relevant (because consumer capitalism’s ability to appropriate and co-opt is far greater than the ability to appropriate and co-opt that was possessed by socialist cynicism and hypocrisy). Second: overidentification doesn’t have the political efficacy Zizek would like to endow it with; it is only relevant contemplatively or aesthetically (which is not a problem in any way for me, as a self-proclaimed aesthete — but which is a problem for Zizek). Part of Munk’s genius is that he was able to see all this so clearly, a generation before Zizek and NSK.

Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is more ambiguous, less monolithic and stark, than Kanal, but for that very reason is perhaps even more troubling.

The film takes place at the very end of World War II, in a small town in the provinces that has been spared the destruction of Warsaw. The main character, Maciek, is a soldier turned assassin; having survived fighting the Nazis in the War, he is now under orders to kill a prominent Communist Party leader. The Nazis are gone, but now, instead, Poles are fighting Poles. Maciek is played by the exceedingly charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski, described by some of my sources — rightly — as a sort of Polish equivalent of James Dean. He’s simultaneously sexy and just a bit menacing, appealingly cocky (and even a bit insolent) and yet at the same time filled with not just a James-Dean-like vulnerability, but also an anguish that he is only willing to express (I should say, betray) indirectly.

The opening shot of Ashes and DIamonds shows a church tower with cross, then pans downward the whole length of the church to a foreground in which two men lie on the ground — to the right, sitting up slightly and speaking, Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), to the left, lying fully on the ground, eyes closed, Maciek. At first, he seems to be asleep; but then, somewhat indolently, and without opening his eyes, he asks a question. He wants to know something about the man he has been assigned to kill.

The killing is botched — the wrong car is identified, and Maciek shoots down in cold blood two innocent factory workers instead. He spends the rest of the film (which unfolds in the span of 24 hours, like a classical tragedy) both angling for a second chance at his assigned target, and continually being tormented by reminders of the men he has in fact killed.

Amidst all this, Maciek also manages — thanks to his charismatic good looks and determined teasing and flirting — to pick up the barmaid at the local hotel. But their one-night-stand turns, over the course of the night, into something like love: or at least, Maciek finds in her a kind of tenderness, and the possibility of connection to another human being, that has been completely absent from his life as soldier and assassin. In plot terms, I’m not sure this “falling in love” is entirely believable: it is too quick, too much of a cliche. But Cybulski’s performance is so remarkable that he carries it off and makes it affectively compelling. Maciek is filled with a macho charm and swagger, and yet underneath this — barely expressed, but nonetheless clearly visible — there are vast depths of anxiety, incertitude, openness to pain, and an oppressive sense of his own mortality.

Some of this ambivalence is mirrored, although in a less complex way, in Maciek’s intended target, the Communist leader Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzerzynski). Szuczuka is a much older man; he hasn’t faced the horrors that Maciek presumably did, since he spent the War safely ensconced in Moscow. But he still remembers, and broods over the fate of, comrades killed nearly a decade before in the Spanish Civil War; and he is trying to deal with the pain that his son, whom he has not seen since before the War, has joined the same resistance movement as Maciek, and is now fighting the Communists just as he did the Nazis.

You might say that Szczuka’s unexpressed torment — no less than Maciek’s — means that he cannot fully and unreservedly represent or embody the will of the Party (which it is his job to do) — just as Maciek finds it increasingly difficult, in the course of the film, to fully and unreservedly identify with the role of assassin, even though this is a role that he has volunteered for, and willfully taken on. And this, perhaps, is why both of them must die by the end of the film.

This isn’t really the old cliche of stubbornly personal concerns coming into conflict with social and political one, or of the heroic individual in conflict with the Party or the State. Rather, it is something subtler and much more interesting. Both Maciek and Szczuka, insofar as they are “subjects” or “personalities”, have “identities” that are entirely in accord with their public positions or roles (as romantic soldier, and dutiful bureaucrat, respectively). What conflicts with this is something that isn’t quite their “inner selves” — because it is something that they are unable to express, or bring into full consciousness, even for themselves.This “existential” dimension (to use the terminology of the time) is inchoate, affective but not cognizable, present but not able to be “expressed.” It’s this that is irreconcilable with the public dimension of History, of duty to Nation, Class, or Party. And this inexpressible dimension is what’s conveyed indirectly, by Cybulski’s acting (as I have said already) and also by Wajda’s noirish cinematography, with its use of shadows, oblique angles, and tight two-shots, as well as by the pauses, the moments of inactivity or anticipation, woven into the unfolding of the events of the film.

Finally, after much hesitation, Maciek does shoot Szczuka. It happens in a dark, noirish street. Badly wounded, Szczuka stumbles forward, and literally dies in Maciek’s arms. At just that moment, fireworks go off in the night sky behind them, in celebration of the news from Berlin that the German Army has finally surrendered, and the War is over. All the film’s ironies and contrasts come to a point in this one powerful cinematic moment. All that remains is the cruel anticlimax of daytime, impossibly bright and sunny after the long night of anguish and storms and rain, a daytime in which Maciek in turn is shot by Communist soldiers, so that he can die like a dog on the garbage-strewn banks of the river.

Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1957) was one of the first post-War Eastern European films to become known in the West. It’s an intense film about a group of Polish soldiers, during the last days of the failed August/September 1994 uprising in Warsaw against the Nazis. These soldiers are doomed; they know it, and we know it (a voiceover narrator informs us of their fate right at the beginning). The film’s power comes from the way it makes us inhabit the duration of lives with no future and no prospects.

The first third of the film more or less follows war-movie genre conventions: we get to know the members of the platoon, their personalities, traits, and foibles; and there are some battle sequences. This part of Kanal is most noteworthy for its harsh landscape of smoking, bombed-out urban ruins, and for Wajda’s long tracking shots of the troops lost, or hiding, amidst the rubble. (All this is a bit reminiscent of early Italian neorealism, especially Rossellini’s war trilogy).

But after this introduction, the film takes place entirely in the Warsaw sewers (apparently the Polish word “kanal” means, not “canal,” but “sewer”), into which the soldiers have descended in an effort to escape the Nazis, and hopefully reach the one downtown section that is still held by the rebels. We are immersed in a spooky and terrifying underworld (“immersed” and “underworld” are meant both literally and metaphorically). Groups of men and women wander through miles of tunnels, waist-deep in water filled with sludge and excrement. Some die, some go mad, some make it back to the light above, only to face various ironic fates nonetheless. Space is limited in the tunnels, and Wajda’s shots are claustrophobically close and tight. The lighting is dim and unsteady, and rather eerie.

Some moments are downright hallucinatory (though the POV is always strictly objective, never going into the delirium of any individual character): the appearance of a light in the distance; a sudden surge of water sweeping through the tunnel like a miniature tsunami; a hysterical crowd runs through the tunnels, beset by imaginary terrors; an excruciating, scarcely human moan and cry that turns out to be the death-rattle of a soldier lying unconscious in the water. It’s these details, these small, horrible events, that drive the film. Something happens, and then we subside back into the torpor of soldiers slogging through the tunnels, getting more and more fatigued, waiting, waiting, and slowly dying.

The film does depict, and affirm, a certain kind of heroism, rather than attacking the very ethos of war and heroism, in the way that certain other nearly contemporary films (Kubrick’s Paths of Glory in the West, and Andrzej Munk’s Eroica in Poland) do. But this heroism is existential rather than political and military: it has more in common with the ethos of Samuel Beckett ‘s plays than it does with that of the typical war film, from West or East, that is largely concerned to glorify the military and the nation. Ultimately, Kanal is a film entirely without hope; not the least of its virtues is that it entirely refuses the upbeat-ending-in-spite-of-everything that was de rigeur as much in “socialist realism” as in classical Hollywood (and that is still maintained today by the likes of Spielberg, who almost obscenely insists on finding that “upbeat moment” even in films like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan).

The Fireman’s Ball (1967) was the last film that Milos Forman made in Czechoslovakia, before he left for the West, and a distinguished Hollywood career. It was shown for a few weeks in Czechoslovakia in 1968, but banned as “anti-Party” when the Soviets invaded and crushed the “Prague Spring” reform movement.

The Fireman’s Ball is slyly understated and satirical; it makes no direct political statement, but works clearly as a political allegory. It’s the story — as the title indicates — of a ball (together with beauty pageant and raffle) put on by the volunteer firemen’s unit of a small provincial town in Bohemia. The whole film is a nearly plotless display of buffoonery, corruption, and pomposity. The sheer organizational incompetence of the old men who make up the firefighters’ unit, and who organize the ball — the Central Committee, as it were — is matched only by their petty dishonesty and their attachment to the (supposed) dignity of their uniforms and office.

The film takes place mostly during the course of a single evening, that of the ball. Everything possible goes wrong: all the raffle gifts are stolen (evidently by the firemen themselves), the beauty pageant never takes place (the young women who are the contestants, embarrassed and worn out, hide in the bathroom instead of taking their places on stage), the senile former leader of the unit never gets his (belated) retirement present (though he frequently toddles up to the stage, always at precisely the wrong moment, to receive it), and the firemen are unable even to put out the nearby fire that breaks out in the course of the evening (their truck gets stuck in the snow, and they are reduced to ineffectually shoveling snow onto the fire, while a large crowd drinks beer as they watch the spectacle).

My description makes the movie sound like a straight-up, knockabout farce. But one of the noteworthy things about The Fireman’s Ball is the way it resists such a categorization. Its touch is (deliberately) too light for physical comedy. The cast of non-actors doesn’t go for big laughs, but instead plays everything fairly naturalistically. Even when a young couple are groping each other under a table, while the fireman sitting at the table tries to stop them without calling attention to what’s happening, we get a sense of slightly pained befuddlement rather than outright slapstick.

Throughout the film, pointless arguments go on at almost excruciating length, without ever reaching a moment of open conflict, let alone resolution. Everyone remains polite throughout, respecting the code of “saving the appearances,” no matter how inane the circumstances. A hypocritical veneer of civility is always maintained, even when the firemen are issuing pompous orders, and the people of the crowd are finding ways to flout them. Throughout it all, the band continuously plays its waltzes, and the crush of people in the ballroom fills the screen. All this, plus a reliance mostly on medium shots, makes for a busy, clotted, exhausting mise en scene: just as there is never a sense of climax, there is also never one of release or relaxation. I’m inclined to say that this is an instance of form matching content: the pace of the film, its indirections, its failure or refusal to cohere even into a purely negative meaning, reproduces the feeling of what (I imagine) it was like to live in the bureaucratic “socialist” society of the time (though, of course, the film makes the situation entertaining, in a way that actually living there and then would not have been).

The closest thing to a climax in this deliberately anticlimactic films comes when one of the firemen is exposed to the crowd trying to return one of the items he had stolen (an enormous cheese), and faints from the humiliation of being thus discovered. The other firemen strongly disapprove of his gesture; the leader of the group declares indignantly that he would never let any impulse towards honesty let the dignity of the organization be called into doubt. In an interview included as one of the extras on the DVD, Forman says that this was the line that incurred the wrath of Antonin Novotny, the Communist Party boss of Czechoslovakia at the time. (The Prague Spring began when Novotny was deposed). What this demonstrates, I think, is less the violence and absolute control of the post-Stalinist system than its complete (and absolutely demoralizing) cynicism. That is to say, it’s not totalitarianism (understood as a system in which every aspect of life is completely regulated and controlled by the State and the Party, whose ruthlessness would belie the underlying ideals that they claim to respect), but rather a generalized state of venality, pettiness, and favoritism: a condition that (in the words of Kafka, the greatest Czech author, though one who predated both Fascism and Communism) “turns lying into a universal principle.” Forman’s achievement is to create an aesthetic rendition of this condition, without offering an apologia for it, but also without even the slightest hint of heavy-handed moralizing.

I’ve long been a fan of the underrated Czech director Ivan Passer, who emigrated to the US after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but who has never attained the fame of his compatriot and colleague Milos Forman (with whom he worked as a screenwriter and assistant director on Forman’s pre-1968 Czech films). In the US, Passer has directed one film I really love, the brilliant and downbeat neo-noir Cutter’s Way (1981), and several other interesting ones, like Born to WIn (1971, starring George Segal as a self-deluded junkie who is never able to pull himself together) and Haunted Summer (1988, a melancholy, surprisingly absorbing, and psychologically rich drama about Mary and Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, and Mary’s writing of Frankenstein).

But I had never before seen Passer’s best-known film, Intimate Lighting (1965), the one feature he made in Czechoslovakia before he left. Intimate Lighting is a beautiful film, which creates an odd feeling of stasis or suspension, both because of its gorgeous high-contrast black and white cinematography, and because it’s a film in which almost nothing happens. I don’t mean by this that it’s a film that somehow embodies pure duration, the form of time passing, of temporality in its pure state (which is how I would characterize the films of Antonioni and of Bela Tarr). But rather, Intimate Lighting dwells entirely within the quotidian, a time that is ordinary rather than extraordinary, overtly uneventful, and yet filled with the microscopic actions and passions and happenings that fill and consume our lives, often without our even noticing.

The plot of Intimate Lighting, such as it is, is quite simple. A musician, no longer young, but just starting to push middle age, with his chic younger girlfriend in tow, comes from the city for a weekend, to visit an old friend of his in the provinces. The friend lives with his wife and kids, and his old but still active parents, and has pretty much given up on his musical career — he works, instead, as the headmaster of a small music conservatory out in the sticks. Various personal interactions ensue, but nothing that’s the least bit “dramatic.” We go to a funeral, at which the provinical son and father play mournful music, followed by a wake, at which they play energetic, upbeat tunes while elderly peasants drink and dance. The girlfriend wanders the grounds of the house, plays with some semi-feral cats, and has a sweet conversation with the “village idiot.” The provincial friend is always complaining to his wife and mother about how the hens are always getting into the garage, and trying to lay their eggs under his car. The two friends get drunk together, act silly and dumb, and reminisce about their old times as music students.

And so on. We are left, not with anything tragic, nor even with the sort of global sense of disillusionment and disappointment that we find, for instance, in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, but only with a series of local, trivial, transient irritations and frustrations (and also fleeting moments of minor pleasure), that stubbornly don’t add up to any sort of bigger picture. There are hints of the contrast between the pretentious cosmopolitanism of the city (where the visiting musician and his girlfriend come from) and the weary traditionalism of the country; but this distinction is never directly articulated, and never comes to a point of conflict. And neither of the alternatives seems that attractive, anyway.

I’ve been describing Intimate Lighting in terms of what’s “missing” from it. But such a description is a bit misleading. For the film doesn’t withhold anything (in the way so many modernist narratives do). Nor is it empty (in the sense, mentioned above, that Antonioni’s and Tarr’s films are deliberately “empty”). Rather, the film is quietly contemplative, and (how do I say this?) entirely immanent to, on the same plane as, its subject matter. Quotidian. The everyday is subtly aestheticized — as much on account of the luminousness (if I can put it this way) of the lighting as anything else.

But aestheticism itself is de-idealized and drawn into the quotidian. I am thinking especially of a sequence where the two protagonists, the country protagonist’s father, and a friend of theirs from the village (an older man, a retired pharmacist) are playing a Mozart string quartet. They do this for themselves, without an audience, just for their own pleasure. The performance is not a polished or concentrated one — they are continually interrupting themselves, engaging in teasing banter and petty bitching and quibbling, and ceaselessly complaining about one another’s performance — not to mention irritated outbursts at any of the women who interrupt them for so much as a moment. And yet, we get the sense that playing this music, getting absorbed in it, is one of the few pleasures in life that these men have. And yet, on the other hand (for, in this movie, there is always an “on the other hand”), this aesthetic pleasure is itself ordinary rather than extraordinary: it doesn’t bear any meanings beyond itself, it doesn’t valorize itself as a superior instance of “culture”, it is fleeting and entirely unredemptive.

In an interview that comes as a bonus feature on the DVD, Passer says that he had hoped to make a film that people would watch many times; that he wanted the experience of watching it to be like visiting old friends or family: you already know exactly how these people will act, what they are going to do, and yet you get pleasure in seeing them again anyway. Exactly.