A Film Canon

The first installment in Munk's war trilogy, Eroica is divided into two sections - Scherzo Alla Polacca, which describes how a desertee of the Warsaw Uprising's (Edward Dziewonski) mercenary opportunism results in his military decoration, and Ostinato Lugubre, which elaborates the operations of a POW camp set up to detain Polish insurgents. Although the first section tends towards metonymy and picaresque, and the second towards metaphor and social realism, both are suffused with a heterodox absurdism that finds its epitome in the concentration camp inmates' double response to one of their comrades' attempts to escape - firstly, as the best kind of joke, in which "he made fun of the enemy...a glorious entry to the chronicles of our camp"; and secondly, upon his refusal of his reward of cigarettes, and the whole economy of honour that they represent, as a joke that has gone too far, and turned against itself; or, alternatively, as a joke that has been enjoyed too much, and so passed from pleasure to jouissance - an overdetermination that recalls Ashes And Diamonds in its poetic evocation of the sheer ideological chaos suffusing Poland throughout and after the war, as if the struggle between fascism, communism and nationalism were so pervasive as to revive the language of slapstick, with its dual compulsion to translate competing ideological demands into a brutally physical register, and elaborate the nexus between disorientation and oblivion, both encapsulated in the sublime conclusion to the first section, in which the protagonist stumbles with an abject, inviolable fluidity - washing, drinking, urinating - through a explosive, terrifying battle zone.