Cinema
Too Real.
By ISABEL QUIGLY Kanal. (Academy.) THE Polish war film Kanal (direc- tor: Andrzej Wajda; 'X' certifi- cate) raises the question of how far —quite apart from how—suffering can be used, artistically. It takes realism as far as it can go and is probably the most pulverising film to have come out of the last war. Pulverising, but curiously not very Moving. Though I came out feeling battered, the battering was outward, a physical assault on the eyes, a physical sickness, rather than an emotional catching of the heart and senses to- gether. And I have an uneasy suspicion that this was largely my fault and not the young director's; my fault because I could not bear to face the fact—and it was a fact, apparently, and not fic- tion—of forty-odd men and two women dying before my eyes (which was what it really seemed) in unspeakably awful circumstances in the stink- ing sewers of Warsaw—of which we were shown pretty well everything except the stink—fourteen years ago during the Warsaw rising.
I have no aesthetic quarrel with realism as such and not, I think, too squeamish a stomach; and this is realism lit by a heartening, indeed in the circumstances surprising, deal of idealism, the point of at least two of the individual Stories being that the human spirit is a lot stronger than anY physical horrors. The direction, too, is strong enough and impressive enough to use horror with• out, in the end, an effect of ugliness, and the most revolting suffering without the smallest suspicion of sadism; there is not even the covert sadism of attitude, in relation to the enemy, which is treated as a huge impersonal machine rather than an arnlY composed of individual men. When the GcstaP° waits to catch each man coming up the man-hole into what he thinks is a heaven of fresh air and freedom, it is not so much a German as a pair of impersonal symbolic-looking boots that stands, there. The tanks coming across the rubble 01 what was once a city are manned not by peoPle but by creatures as remote as men from Mars. Nothing counts in this last fight but heroism; fof hope is passed, and heroism, in the near presence of death, is understated. This is the kind of uncle' statement that British war films often aimed for' and generally missed; and here, in this fantastic situation, it has an extraordinary impact. Yet in spite of all this I wonder whether direct realism can ever achieve the effect it wants in story like this; whether the shock and fear is not too great for the senses, and one spends one's time, not accepting, not participating, but putting out protective hands. In one of the film's many incidents of savage irony, a man climbs up a man- . hole to the light only to find it booby-trapped, and cheerfully and confidently starts to dismantle it. As he undoes the last mine his foot slips and the Mine goes off in his face. Now the director is reticent enough not to show us his face; only his legs, body, and the face of the man coming up from below to climb out over him. But the whole incident is so unbearable—the narrow confines of the explosion making it somehow so much worse than it might have been—that, instead of pity and involvement, one feels- terror and the longing to escape. The fact that nearly all the film takes place in such a claustrophobic atmosphere makes one feel too closely, claustrophobically involved with it all. Something inside me kept gabbling 'Don't show his face, don't show his face,' and this desperate escapist horror makes me wonder about the wisdom, the artistic not the moral wisdom, of harrowing the nerves in this kind of way. And yet, in spite of it all, one is left with an extraordinary feeling of the resilience of human nature, and of Poland in particular, in producting a film like this —with its message of underlying glory—after the pounding it has taken from both sides, and the apparent hopelessness of its long history.
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