A Film Canon

Grafting Dante's eighth circle of Hell onto the sewer system that serviced the Warsaw Uprising, and forcing the insurgents to confront the full implications of their designation as vermin, Kanal is unprecedented in its exploration of the relationship between horror, claustrophobia, and internal montage. From the opening four-minute tracking-shot, it feels as if Wajda's ultimate ambition is to entrap the viewer in a single, feature-long take, or at least deflect the latter into a series of increasingly concrete surrogates - a trickling piano, a string of machine gun bullets, the trenches and, finally, the sewer system itself, repeatedly presented as a replication of the hallucinatory, desecrated streetscape above. This produces a pervasive identification of the camera's passage with the sewer walls; or, alternatively, ensures that the deep-focus of A Generation is stretched, accentuated and distorted, to the point where the camera only slides away from the grotesque curvature of faces and walls for the sake of depths and destinations that are so impossibly distant that it can ultimately only hypothesise them - whether horizontally, in the form of the elusive sewer exits for which the three narrative trajectories aim, or vertically, in the form of the heavenly sewer caps, whose ominous beneficence is beautifully explicated in the concluding scene, and contributes to a series of exquisite, iconographic compositions. The result is a sustained vision of the face in the desperate attempt to register depth-of-field - or, rather, as the nascent object of deep-focus itself - as if the most immediate response to claustrophobia were a proportionate recourse to its own distances and depths, chillingly pre-empted by the Nazi entrapment of those very contours within their racial-excremental limit, and anticipating the fascination of later claustrophobic horror with the disfigured eye.