Friday, February 27
Landscape After Battle
dir. Andrzej Wajda, Poland 1979

Based on the stories Battle of Grunwald, This Way for the Gas, and Ladies and Gentlemen by writer and Holocaust survivor Tadeusz Borowski, Landscape After the Battle is a poignant, caustic, and resigned portrait of despair, cultural estrangement, and alienation of Poland's postwar generation. Using recurrent images of confinement, encircling camerawork, and incongruous and unusual imagery, Andrzej Wajda reflects the pervasive sense of inertia, anguish, and pessimism of a displaced generation compelled to live in extended exile as their nation struggles to rebuild under the turbulent and uncertain era of a Russian controlled, newly communist Poland: the forbidding barbed wire fences, gated walls, and trenches of the German resettlement camp; the lifeless and surreal reenactment of the patriotic Battle of Grunwald; the emotionally conflicted shot of a church memorial wall dedicated to German military casualties; Tadeusz' alternating hesitant and aroused observation of a young German woman in church. Through repeated patterns of inhumanity, degradation, and barbarism, Wajda provides an incisive commentary and a cautionary tale for the suppression of personal freedom and the propagation of a destructive ideology that rationalizes the practice of internment in the distrustful atmosphere of the Cold War - Poland's figurative landscape after the battle - an alien and oppressive environment of demoralization, human cruelty, and moral decay.- Strictly Film School