A Film Canon

The third - and strongest - installment in Wajda's war trilogy, this extraordinary film continues Kanal's project of describing the face in the attempt to register depth-of-field, while translating the latter's inherent indeterminacy into explicitly ideological terms, in the form of the hotel around which the narrative hangs. This labyrinthine repository of challenges to the camera - which, in the hands of cinematographer Jerzy Wojcik, tends to hug the floor, extrapolating an extreme low-angle sensibility from the diagonal slant of the bar - becomes, on the final day of the war, a space of ideologically-bracketed play - embodied by the continual dancing that seems to constitute its main activity - in which assassin Maciek Chelminki (Zbigniew Cybulski) finds himself caught between the claims of Stalinist Communism and Polish Nationalism, both of which exhibit nuances and ambiguities previously held in check by the simplifications of the war. It feels as if Wajda's ultimate aim is to capture the cusp of ideological conversion - or hesitation - through the topography of the face; or, alternatively, to shear the face of those ideological overdeterminations that are ciphered into Cybulski's one-dimensional, poster-boy status as the 'James Dean of Eastern European cinema', and their synecdoche - the  dark glasses that are only removed for the film's central, extreme close-up scene, and are narrativised in terms of Maciek's supposedly irreversible adaptation to the sewers where he spent most of the Warsaw Uprising. In the process, the camera is itself facefied, as its astonishingly agile movements culminate in two sequences that allow it to blink and cry, and its departure from the hotel forces it - like all the characters - back to the reality-principle, as evinced in the final, homogeneous, desecration,  which leaves it - and Maciek - with nothing further to observe.