Man on the Tracks.

Man on the Tracks Directed by Andrzej Munk; written by Jerzy Stawinski; with Kazimierz Opalinski. DVD, B&W, 86 mins., Polish dialog with English subtitles, 1957.

Eroica Directed by Andrzej Munk; written by Jerzy Stawinski; with Edward Dziewonski, Kazimierz Opalinski and Barbara Polomska. DVD, B&W, 80 mins., Polish dialog with English subtitles, 1957.

Bad Luck Directed by Andrzej Munk; written by Jerzy Stawinski; with Bogumil Kobiela, Krystyna Karkowska, Barbara Lass and Roman Polanski. DVD, B&W, 108 mins., Polish dialog with English subtitles, 1960. All three films are Polart Distribution releases distributed by Facets Video, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614, www.facetsvideo.com.

Passenger Directed by Andrzej Munk; written by Zofia Posmysz-Piasecka and Andrzej Munk; completed by Witold Lesiewicz and Wiktor Woroszylski; with Aleksandra Slaska and Anna Ciepielewska. DVD, B&W, 58 mins, 1961/1963, Polish dialog with English subtitles. Also includes the documentary, The Last Pictures, directed by Andrzej Brzozowski, B&W and color, 47 mins., 2000. PAL format. Distributed by Second Run DVD, www.secondrundvd.com.

Among the 'Polish School' filmmakers of the 1950's, Andrzej Munk has always been far less well known in the United States than his slightly younger compatriot Andrzej Wajda. Born in 1921, this son of a Jewish engineer from Cracow somehow survived the most devastating war in Polish and world history disguised as a common laborer. The slightly younger Wajda, born in 1926, had an equally difficult time. His father was among the many thousands of Polish military officers massacred by the Red Army in the Katyn Forest. Both subsequently participated in the Polish underground resistance--Wajda joined the right wing Home Army, the Armia Krajowa, while Munk worked for the Polish Socialist underground--and then they became one of the Kolumbowie, the youthful postwar generation of "Columbuses," who were determined to create a new Poland from the rubble and ashes.

Both started out in other fields--Wajda as a painter and Munk in architecture--and then attended the new film school in Lodz in classes only one year apart. Upon graduation in the early 1950s, they emerged as fledgling film artists in the dangerous era of high Stalinism in Poland but came to maturity during the 'thaw' that followed Khrushchev's disclosure of Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. From their very first shorts and features they were identified as significant, if slightly unruly, talents capable of rebuilding the depleted ranks of Polish filmmakers. Their early careers illuminate the limits and possibilities, both in content and style, of Polish cinema during the crucial transitional period of the 1950's, the very years in which the 'Polish School' came into being.

While we have long been able to assess Wajda's achievements over five decades, thanks to the robust distribution of his many films, first in the theaters and now on DVD, Munk has fallen into relative obscurity. Undoubtedly this is due to the brevity of his career--he died in a car accident in 1961, just short of his fortieth birthday, after having made only four and a half features as well as several well-received shorts. Even in the 1950's, unfortunately, the cooler, skeptical, more intellectual sensibility of his films hardly made a dent in the American art-cinema markets; since then, the absence of regular opportunities to see his work in the U.S. has led to an undeservedly diminished stature. Therefore, despite their shortcomings, the new DVD's under review presenting four of Munk's key works help immensely to bring his contributions into sharper focus. They are truly welcome additions to the canon of Polish cinema now accessible to American viewers.

Facets missed an opportunity to include some of Munk's short documentaries like Peasant Memories (1952) and Sunday Morning (1955) or his first feature, Men of the Blue Cross (1955), on any of their rather stripped down discs. (Contrast this stinginess to many of the recent, excellent Kieslowski releases that include one or more samples of his early docs.) Perhaps they may be forgiven for overlooking the ways in which these works deviated, if only slightly, from the 'Socialist Realist' esthetics imposed by the U.S.S.R. on filmmakers in the captive nations in its orbit. The craggy faces of ordinary people are very much on display, and the characters of Men of the Blue Cross perform heroic deeds in stunningly photographed landscapes that are distinguished from standard Soviet-style fare only by Munk's fine eye for visual composition. Munk, in any case, would soon switch gears and negotiate the winds of political change in order to evolve as a distinctive stylist in the three and a half feature films that remain his lasting legacy.

Man on the Tracks was the first of Munk's many collaborations with the novelist and screenwriter Jerzy Stawinski, perhaps best known for his screenplay for Wajda's Kanal, also made in 1957. Orzechowski, an exacting locomotive driver and old-fashioned martinet clearly out of step with the new era of comradely labor relations, is found dead on the tracks at the outset. The rest of the plot centers on an investigation of this citizen not above suspicion of sabotage. Several extended flashbacks convey the impressions of his bosses and underlings about Orzechowski's all too human flaws and dubious political orientation. The influence of Rashomon and Citizen Kane--hardly films then approved of by communist artistic authorities--on Munk's plot structure is clearly apparent, and so, too, is the core story's rather provocative allusion to the coercive practices of show trials so prevalent in 1950, the grim period when those responsible for 'errors and deviations' from the party line paid exorbitant personal prices for their 'mistakes.'

Even more provocative, however, is the investigating committee's communist chairman's conclusion that Orzechowski, whose personal resistance to the communist managers is made clear, sacrificed himself to prevent a train crash. Such a rehabilitation of class enemies was still as relatively rare as it was urgently needed. Still, Munk had taken genuine risks pouring such new content into new forms; only the momentarily freewheeling debates about political reforms and a changing of the political guard that swept across Poland in the wake of Stalin's death and after Wladyslaw Gomulka's return to power in October, 1956 had made his work politically acceptable.

Munk's style throughout remains sober. At times, the looming, wide-angle closeups of the committee members at work in cramped quarters are reminiscent of his earlier work. In the flashbacks, mostly shot outdoors, however, Munk took advantage of the lenses to create deeper, long-take shots with multiple compositional centers that create atmosphere. Some critics have discerned the influence of contemporary Italian cinema's commitment to filming on location, although the major neorealist films from Italy were not widely seen in Poland until after the release of Man on the Tracks. Whether Munk had any first-hand awareness of such films or not is not clear, but he had already made a short about railwaymen (Kolejarskie Slowo, 1953) and may simply have been tempted to capture once more shots of the railyards at night with clouds of steam enveloping the looming forms of the locomotives that years ago had captivated Abel Gance in La Roue (1923) or Renoir in La Bete humaine (1938). The film's soundtrack, too, is of interest, entirely given over as it is to isolated sounds of whistles, sirens, and puffing pistons that envelop the sparse dialog in a rarefied, almost Bresson-like musique concrete.

Eroica's two parts represent a great leap forward in both style and tone, although several inexplicably (and unacceptably) dark scenes in this DVD at times makes the action almost illegible. The first part, marked "scherzo all polacca," recounts the story of a Polish antihero named Dzidzius whom we meet as he drills with Polish partisans during their 1944 rebellion against the Nazis. A bombing run by a German airplane quickly persuades this somewhat shady and selfish black marketeer that he is not cut out for military service, and he deserts his unit to start an odyssey home to his wife in the suburbs of Warsaw. There is no outrunning history, however. Much against his better judgment, although perhaps with an eye to getting rid of a Hungarian officer billeted a bit too comfortably with his wife, Dzidzius agrees to carry the Hungarian's offer to join the Poles to the Polish command bunker on the front lines. The offer is rejected. Demoralized, Dzidzius gets drunk with an old flame, miraculously avoids death at the hands of both the Germans and suspicious Home Army partisans, and then makes his way back home for a second time, only to have the demon of history intervene once again to convert his cowardice and inebriation into a form of moral resolve. In the last shot, we see him walk off--this time with somewhat greater, if not total, conviction--with his commanding officer.

Munk's and Stawinski's send-up of Polish heroism precisely at the moment when party authorities had grudgingly accorded some official recognition to the non-communist, anti-Nazi resistance groups was akin to lobbing a stink bomb into a crowded theater. Dzidzius, a Polish cousin to Hasek's 'good soldier' Sveyk, though without his Czech counterpart's common sense, may have ultimately, despite himself, shared the ingrained Quixotism of Polish fighting men, but he was not exactly the sort of hero ordinary Poles wanted to see. They preferred Wajda's sentimental attachment, in Lotna (1959), to images of Polish Hussars flamboyantly riding superb horses, pennants flying, into the muzzles of German armor to an evasive, antimythical figure sketched in a minor and rather dissonant key.

Nor would audiences have been likely to respond to Eroica's second part that also deconstructs the myth of Polish heroism. Set in a German POW camp for Polish officers where many had been held since the ignominious defeat of 1939, the patriotic soldiers have been degraded into mutual alienation and endless arguments by the time the hapless Warsaw partisans of 1944 are added to their barracks. Only one thing holds them all together: the mysterious escape of one of their number has become for those remaining a symbol of continuity of the Polish fighting spirit. Little do they know that their purported hero has only stowed away in the barracks' attic where two accomplices support him even as he rots and dies, a victim of the elements and a yawning, gnawing sense of despair. At the end, his corpse is cleverly stashed in the water tank that serves as his coffin and carried away by the unsuspecting guards. His glum comrades continue to work in the circle of the exercise yard in "ostinato lugubre" rhythm, as Munk's subtitle would have it.

Munk enlisted the composer Jan Krenz, with whom he had already worked on several shorts, for the music of Eroica as he would for his next film, the intellectual black comedy Bad Luck. Krenz's scores recall the sprightly humor of Nino Rota combined with acid asides in the style of Hanns Eisler. The music animates and comments on the comic misadventures of Dzidzius and even more so on those of Piszczyk, the anti-hero who is the main character in Bad Luck. Piszczyk's name is overtly related to the Polish verb piszczec, meaning to squeal or to squeak, and the squalling, tooting trumpet in Krenz's score gingerly continues the conceit in a musical register to produce broad comic effects entirely in keeping with the picaresque life story of its hapless hero.

Traditional East European Jewish humor held that all Jews were down on their luck, but some were more luckless than others. Those designated as schlimazels were those who never got a break. But there were others who seemed perpetually to court disaster by consistently making ill-advised decisions. These were the schlemiels of this world. Although he is not Jewish but a Pole, Piszczyk, as scripted once again by Stawinski, is neither heroic nor commonsensical: he is a schlemiel. The son of a ladies tailor, he seems always to be out of step. As a scout, he is the butt of the other boys' pranks; as a university student, anti-Semites misread the length of his nose as a Jewish trait and beat him. In order to protect himself, he joins an anti-Semitic student society in time to be beaten by the police, then attempts to join the defeated Polish Army just after the Germans have overrun the barracks. He marches docilely into captivity, but in the camp, he is revealed to be an impostor. After his desire to impress a girl leads to an all too brief act of valor as a member of the resistance, he returns to the dark side of Polish life as a postwar black marketeer. He is jailed.

We meet our hero just as an aged Piszczyk is protesting his release from a communist prison, which he has come to know as a safe haven in a very challenging world. Bugumil Kobiela, a friend and colleague of Zbigniew Cybulski with whom he costarred in Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds in 1958, plays Piszczyk. He looks rather like the young Gene Wilder but Kobiela clearly schooled himself by studying the great American silent comics such as Keaton and Chaplin. Munk once again reverts to the flashback strategy he had first explored in Man on the Tracks although he now exploits this narrational device for its potential irony and humor. Piszczyk's plea to the prison warden is a launching pad for extended, not so reliable voice-over accounts of his lifetime of worry and woe. His unbelievable tale is a lacerating indictment of various key moments of Polish social and political history but Munk exploits the gap between words and images for comic effects.

The satire, though broad, cuts in several directions, sneakily edging up to mug Communist pieties more than the censors could discern. (Was life in a communist prison really so attractive to resist being expelled from it?) And the whole is less picaresque than it may initially appear to be since the stories are contained by a thoughtfully worked out cinematic architecture that holds the diverse episodes in place. Short scenes build to longer ones toward the middle of the film, which are dramatized without (or with fewer, at least) comments by the narrator, and then move back toward shorter scenes with commentary, thereby producing a kind of symmetrical structure whose solidity markedly contrasts with the fluidity of the narrative. Bad Luck is Munk simultaneously at his most acid and most controlled.

Though apparently presented inaccurately in a 1.66 aspect ratio different from the wide-screen format in which it was shot, Second Run's splendidly crisp version of Passenger, packaged with an informative booklet and an illuminating profile of the director by one of his closest associates, is excellent. Passenger is the last and most celebrated of Munk's works, no doubt because of the serious story it tells. The plot once again is narrated in flashbacks by an unreliable narrator, in this case, Liza, a former German concentration camp guard. Years after World War II, she is sailing on a pleasure cruise to Europe with her husband when she spies someone who resembles one of her former prisoners, Marta. This brief sighting triggers a series of recollections in which Liza at first denies all responsibility for Marta's fate. Gradually, however, Munk exploits disparities between reconstructed images of the camps and Liza's voice-over to suggest the truth about her abysmal conduct. The boat--a rather heavy symbol for indifferent, forgetful modern societies and individuals--sails on.

That this film whose shooting was interrupted by Munk's death should be praised so highly is puzzling. It is, after all, merely a torso, and it is not at all clear what the film would have become had Munk lived to complete it. The version his close collaborators, Witold Lesiewicz and Witold Woroszylski, concocted from stills of the not yet completed ocean voyage sequences and the rough cut of the concentration camp scenes is, at best, highly speculative. (It is to their credit that they admit as much.) The film is perhaps best regarded as a sketch, and it is therefore something of a stretch to argue, as Ewa Mazierska does in her otherwise informative liner notes, that the film's truncated form reflects an insightful ethic of Holocaust representation based on ellipsis, suggestion, and the evacuation of horror. It is certainly not clear that Munk was searching for such effects.

Clearly, he was attempting to evoke what the former Auschwitz internee Primo Levi called the "grey zone" of the camps, that is, the way in which their brutality coupled with the will by individuals to survive produced a distinctive zone in which moral action no longer possessed the clarity of black and white. All was ambiguous and relative, often beyond good and evil; right and wrong remained fixed stars, to be sure, but only in constellations whose light rarely reached past the guard towers to the frozen ground on the Appellplatz. But Munk pushes the idea too far. According to Liza, she was actually the true victim of the grey zone because, bound up as she was in a bizarre reprise of the master-slave dialectic, it was Marta who allegedy preserved her inner freedom by rejecting Liza's blandishments and orders.

How such a quasi-Sartrean emphasis on personal freedom can be reconciled with Marta's probable death is not easily explained from the dead prisoner's point of view, but it does perhaps explain the high regard Parisian cultural circles, then particularly enamored with Sartre, have always expressed for Passenger. Today, I am sorry to say, knowing what we now know about life in the camps, this tale of victim and guard seems naive and contrived.--Stuart Liebman