| Author | Message | | gadfly | | Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 8:26 pm Post subject: 20.000 Polish officers on ww2 executed by judaic communists |
| But blamed on Germans.
Andrzej Wajda offers up a riveting memorial to the Katyn massacre
By Mike McCahill
Published: 5:03PM BST 19 Jun 2009
Andrzej Wajda; Krzysztof Penderecki; (15, 121 mins) Rating: * * * *
Andrzej Wajda’s wrenchingly powerful Katyn serves as a testament to one of the blackest moments in Polish history. The details are set out in a few stark lines of text at the beginning of the film: in September 1939, the Soviet Red Army marched into Poland, activating a pre-existing arrangement with Nazi Germany to round up and imprison all Polish officers as they went.
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Will Poland again bar German expansion to the East? Apr 4, 1939The following spring, at Stalin’s behest, 20,000 of these officers were executed and buried in unmarked graves in the Katyn forest.
Smoke disperses to reveal the film’s opening images, establishing from the very start Wajda’s intent to make patently clear the atrocities that happened, but for the most part Katyn foregoes the fluency of a conventional historical epic in favour of a deliberately fragmented syntax. The events leading up to and immediately following the massacre are dramatised as vivid, jagged vignettes – a series of painful memories, unresolved traumas.
The interned officers debate whether to stick to the rules of engagement or cast off their uniforms and rise up against their captors. ('Buttons,’ predicts one, 'That’s all that will be left of us.’) On the home front, a university suspected of fostering anti-Nazi dissent is closed and its staff marched into the cattletrucks. All the while, propaganda vans tour the streets, insisting 'the Red Army is your friend, your best chance for liberation’.
This hypocrisy and public deception evidently angers Wajda as much as the massacre. The film jolts ahead to 1943, when the Nazis began using Katyn as a political tool, coercing relatives of the missing to denounce this 'Bolshevik barbarity’ (and threatening them with deportation to Auschwitz if they failed to comply).
The same images of the disinterred bodies are used in Nazi and Soviet propaganda reels, with only the voiceover changed to point accusatory fingers. He did it, sir; no, he did it.
In the move towards questioning the official state line, Wajda perhaps sees a continuation of the popular resistance that inspired his breakthrough trilogy (A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds) in the Fifties. But the massacre’s unspoken horrors would linger on for decades to come.
With its scar-raw subject matter and constant shifts of focus – introducing characters who represent successive generations struggling to grasp the scale of the atrocity – Katyn is not an easy watch; nor, you might well say, should it be.
Yet in its deeply felt sense of outrage, its unblinking seriousness – exemplified by Krzysztof Penderecki’s score, with its low electronic groans rising up as though from the centre of the earth – this riveting and hugely important memorial-movie puts labour-camp tourism like The Reader to shame.
This review also appears in Seven magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph | |  | | Cowboy | | Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 1:54 am Post subject: |
| | Quote: | | 20.000 Polish officers on ww2 executed by judaic communists |
Now all communists were 'judaic' ???
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