A Film Canon

The first film in Wajda's magnificent war trilogy, A Generation evokes the liquid collectivity of Eisenstein, but in a more frenetic register, presenting the slippage between sight and speech that constitutes the Polish resistance as the attempt to elude a pursuant gaze that has fractallated from the mere overseers of a factory to the omniscience of an occupying army, for which the camera can only act as the roughest surrogate. To this end, Wajda presents the screen as a magnetic surface, alternately attracting and repelling the intertwining dramas of three young Polish communists, whose trajectories repeatedly curve towards and away from it, reproducing the movement of the mass-produced swinging doors around which the narrative hangs, and opening up a tripartite depth-of-field that is gradually contained by the claustrophobic - if peripheral - presence of the Warsaw uprising. This containment is beautifully graphed in the extended, spirallic shot that opens the film, which segues from pan into tracking-shot, panorama into close-up, and political into personal vantage point - as well as its echo, the vertiginous fall through the well of a spiral staircase that anchors the third act - providing a far more compelling dialectic between individual and class consciousness than the slightly jingoistic script and narrative trajectory.