Heroes, anti-heroes, and melon-eating masses

Heroes

◎ Zhang Yue

The Exhibition of Polish Film Masters of the Shanghai Art Film Union focuses on the masterpieces of four masters of the "Polish School" from 1955 to 1965, Anjay Vajda's A Generation (1955) and Sewers (1957), Anjay Munch's Heroes (1958), Yerzi Kavalerović's Night Train (1959) and Sister Joanna (1961), and Wojceh Haas's Zaragoza Manuscript (1965). The film has different styles, themes, and story ages, and only one story tells the life of poles in that peaceful period at that time, but the overall reflection of their mental state at that time.

The birth and deconstruction of heroes

According to Roman Polanski, who starred in A Generation, Polish cinema began with this one, and together with Sewers and Ashes and Diamonds, it constituted Andrei Vajda's "war trilogy." Less censored and freer, Sewer is clearly artistic, dramatic, and critical, but A Generation also presents Wajda's views on the past, which actually participated in the Resistance's polish home army, and shows his talent as a master of imagery.

In "A Generation", we cannot see the so-called perfect revolutionaries, but death seals these immature lives at any time: young people spontaneously pick up German trains, and may die in vain; they embark on the revolutionary road only because the girl who preaches is too beautiful, and the girl is confused about the tomorrow of the revolution; shoot a certain German only because he has tied a beam, and he is still excited after killing; the old comrade goes to him for trouble because the little comrade stole their gun... Vaida had seen the truth and knew how to write about the weaknesses and emotions of the revolutionaries. Tadusch Janchal plays a trench coated teenager, who refuses to fully join the revolution in order to take care of his seriously ill father, but he cannot resist the comrades' puppy-like pleading eyes, and he goes from fear of escaping the German soldiers to bravely jumping down the spiral staircase, which is one of the most moving passages in the whole film, nervous but artistic.

The girl in "A Generation" has shining eyes, because the love passion of the revolutionary era is about to explode. This kind of love is portrayed more faceted in "Sewerage", from superior and subordinate couples who get together in wartime to get drunk and dream of death, and there are also couples who look like gods- Tadushi Janchar, who is a heroic warrior who is injured this time, rises to the male protagonist - each other's personalities are stubborn, and survival is precarious, but this awkward love and survival instinct is the only driving force to support their difficult trek in the dark, poisonous gas, dung smell echoing sewer. The other fighters, who obeyed the death order of the politician who took the lives of people, to "transfer from the sewers", also had their own unique personalities, and they all fell into tragedy. For example, under the threat of artillery fire, the composer still thinks about new melodies and artistic competition, and eventually collapses in the sewers, becoming a wandering soul in the "Hell Chapter" of the Divine Comedy he chants. The squad travels through a 40-minute confined space to create this real, oppressive, but appealing claustrophobia, which requires both wise light and shadow scheduling to maintain the beauty of the film, and the depiction of the words and deeds of the characters within the psychological range that the audience can just bear.

These two stories shape the revolutionary heroes of ordinary people, and Andrei Munch's "Heroes" completely deconstructs the hero image, so bold, the human glitter is not absent. The film is divided into two stories, one is about the drunken and lustful leper who mistakenly becomes a hero who delivers key letters, and in the end he is busy and absurd, he still has the consciousness to contribute to the peace of the motherland. Another story tells that the Polish soldiers in the POW camp, in order to maintain the dignity of the "hero who strives to escape from the POW camp", will do whatever it takes, while some people flee, but they are tired of group life and eager to be alone, and Munch takes the boring state of the five-year prisoners of war into subtlety, deconstructing at the same time, so that the truth is revealed.

That generation of filmmakers became suspicious of the necessity of the Polish Resistance, exploring the reasons for its failure, while also understanding and loving the revolutionaries who sacrificed, because they were ordinary people like the Poles of peacetime.

There is no shortage of melon-eating masses in Poland

Some directors shoot with very different subject matter, but similar connotations, such as Yelzi Kavalerovich.

The black-and-white "Night Train" tells a contemporary story, and he places a strange man and woman in a relatively confined space filled with melon-eating masses - the night train. The film opens with a high view of the people coming and going from the station, and we gradually understand that the director's intention is to depict a panoramic portrait of a group of melon-eating beings with different personalities. The wife killer lurks on the train, the male protagonist is suspected because of his lonely personality, and after the real murderer is caught, he is regarded as a hero by the masses. Just echo the absurd theme of Heroes. We can almost piece together the causes and consequences of the murder from the small talk of the masses, but the lawyer will not defend his long-imagined "passionate murderer", nor will anyone sympathize with this wife killer who may be desperate, and the crowd is both funny and real and cute. Insomniacs say that the bunk beds remind him of the concentration camps he once stayed in, and when he found that he could actually take a nap, we were happy for him.

Attractive strange men and women were locked in the same sleeper room, and the crowd was looking forward to the two of them. For the girl (the actor is Kavalerovich's second wife, Lucina Winnyka), she is entangled between old love and new love, and it is natural to fall in love with a third person, especially Zbignev Chipblski, who is obviously not as attractive to mature men as women. When the two finally had a dewy affair, the crowd had forgotten to watch the play.

The sudden desire for love and the phenomenon of eating melons were revived in his famous seventeenth-century story, Sister Joanna. He moved the priest's enchantment that took place in Ludán, France, to Poland. Father Granti went to a monastery in a remote area to exorcise demons, and before he even entered the door, he was accused of being a wizard by the nuns and executed at the stake. This strange case was created by the British literary hero Ados Huxley into a documentary work "The Devil of Ludane". But the focus of "Sister Joanna" is the follow-up story, and the audience and the melon-eating crowd in the film care about whether Father Surin, who came to take over Grantie's exorcism, can help The Dean Sister Joanna exorcise the demon smoothly, or put himself in it again. Whether it is the atmosphere in which the nuns imitate each other, the grand exorcism ceremony that the masses watch, or the masses talking in the tavern about the priest being burned or exhorting the nuns to break their vows, there is a collective sense of pressure imposed on the individual, and we naturally enter the theme of individual love and freedom constrained by the religious environment.

At its core christianity is love, but the bean-eating ascetic clergy do not feel love, and those who observe the precepts are bound by religion, and love seems to be contrary to religion. Joanna loves the "devil" to feel happy, and Surin, who has a love desire for her, asks the devil to turn around and commit a felony in the name of love and sacrifice to "save her". Under the director's exquisite details, the two innocent dead are more simple than the other masses. The demonic possession of the clergy, whether it is a real or a big show, and what the nature of love is, are all open to the equally depressed Poles of the early 1960s to experience for themselves.

Banter and dreams, reality and happiness

"The Zaragoza Manuscript" was a big hit, and I heard a few girls excitedly talk about "this is a Novel about Spain written by poles in French", and in one sentence accurately summarized the strange book "Zaragoza Manuscript".

It's an adventure to find the true meaning of happiness in a labyrinth of banter, magic, and nested stories. The 900-page book is very difficult to turn into a movie, just doze off to know who is telling whomse story, it is not as independent as the stories in Decameron and Canterbury Stories. But it has more of a blood-connected internal structure than the story "Matryoshka Doll" "One Thousand and One Nights" with the purpose of procrastination, and director Vojcech Haas grasps a main artery, including some stories related to the protagonist Alfonso and the theme, condensed, not branched.

Alfonso is a student who walks into the story of "Liaozhai", and his adventures and choices of talking with men and women in layers of illusory environments project the desires and desires of many Poles living under the pressure of politics, religion and economy. Zbignev Cibulski is a dragon set in "A Generation" and a confused young man in "Night Train", and this time he is a noble prince Alfonso who abides by the principle of honor and sits on two pagan wives, which also reveals to us the spiritual state of poles from ancient times to the present.