Learn about our streaming media
Now Playing:Up Next:
View our complete schedule
There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio.Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio
8:29 AM CST
|
|
|
Learn about our streaming media |
|
Now Playing: Up Next: View our complete schedule |
|
There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio. Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio |
|
Jul 4, 2009 8:29 AM CST |
|
|
|
|
||||||||
| Programs |  |
Events | |
Listener Services | |
About Us | |
Press Room | |
Contact Us |
|
Why do filmmakers disappear? At one time a tragic death at an early age was a virtual guarantee of posthumous fame. It worked well for the reputations of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Poland’s famous actor, Zbigniew Cybulski became a heartthrob after appearing in the great trilogy of films by Andrzej Wajda—A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds. He died when he was forty in a train accident, but his legacy lived on. Years later, Wajda even made his film Everything for Sale as a tribute to Cybulski. Film directors don’t fare nearly as well. Take the case of a truly great unknown: Andrzej Munk. In the United States, the eyes of even knowledgeable film goers will glaze over if you mention his name. Munk died in a tragic car accident in 1961. He was barely 40 years old. Munk, who first studied architecture before coming to film, worked as a cameraman and then as a director of documentaries. This was during the years of harshest communist censorship, the early 1950s, but Munk learned that the way to get ideas past the censors is to develop images which have double meanings. At a time when the state-sanctioned culture bureaucrats preached Bolshevik heroism, Munk’s films featured characters who were confused, indecisive, naïve, dishonest. He laced his films with acid—irony and humor which undercut every seemingly noble gesture, exposing the egotism and falsehood underneath the professed heroism. Now, thanks to a new series of DVDs from Polart, Andrzej Munk’s great film trilogy, in newly mastered, newly subtitled versions, brings the work of this complex and brilliant filmmaker within our reach. In Munk’s Man on the Tracks, the main character is an elderly train engineer. In the first few minutes of the film, he is hit by a passing train and killed. Munk etches the life of this man against a background of Stalinist industrialization: steam engines, burning coal furnaces, mechanics, and the relentless sweat of the industrialized worker. This landscape leaves little room for socialism with a human face. In Man on the Tracks, the faces of the protagonists are often hidden by steam coming from the train engines. It is a world of paranoia and betrayal, of sabotage and denunciation, of political opportunists and their scapegoats. It’s a chilling world. Munk’s film asks: What happens to the human self in this environment? In the amazing film Eroica, which followed Man on the Tracks, Munk takes on the universe of the Polish resistance fighting against the Germans in World War II as a part of the Warsaw Uprising. In a film steeped in irony, a militia soldier named Gorkiewicz runs away from being conscripted into the militia during the chaos of an air raid. When he comes home, he finds his attractive wife Zosia entertaining a Hungarian officer named Istvan. Istvan engages Gorkiewicz in a deal, he can broker the sale of armaments to the officers of the Warsaw uprising. Eroica is an inglorious view of Polish resistance. The film opens with a military drill for civilians just as a civilian points out to the sergeant that a plane is about to attack. The atmosphere is decidedly unreal. Gorkiewicz wanders through a world that’s largely been destroyed seemingly unaware that war is going on around him. He delivers the armaments to the Polish resistance—a theoretically valiant act—in a drunken stupor. In the second part of Eroica, the life of prisoners of war in a POW camp is seen through the eyes of a new inmate, Kurzawa. In a cruel bit of irony, a prisoner who is celebrated as a hero for having escaped from the camp is found hiding in the ceiling. But everyone agrees that to admit this would be too much to bear. They decide to pretend that he has, in fact, escaped. This is bitter, ironic, savagely humorous stuff. It is original, subversive and always brilliant. Together with the third Munk film, Bad Luck, Man on the Tracks, and Eroica constitute a body of work that was astoundingly daring given the political conditions of the time. But the films’ originality has not faded with years; the films of Andrzej Munk seem strangely prophetic, contemporary, and ring with relevance and truth today. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
|
|
|
©1998-2006 WBEZ Alliance, Inc. All rights reserved. | |
|
|||
