Kinoblog

Człowiek na torze
1956, black and white, 80 mins

• Director: Andrzej Munk
• Script: Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Stefan Stawiński, based on a story by Stawiński
• Camera: Romuald Kropat
• Production Design: Roman Mann
• Editing: Jadwiga Zajiček
• Sound: Józef Bartczak
• Costumes: Halina Krzyżanowska
• Production Manager: Wilhelm Hollender
• Production Company: Zespół Filmowy Kadr
• Cast: Kazimierz Opaliński (Władysław Orzechowski), Zygmunt Maciejewski (Tuszka), Zygmunt Zintel (Witold Sałata), Zygmunt Listkiewicz (Stanisław Zapora), Roman Kłosowski (Marek Nowak), Kazimierz Fabisiak (Konarski), Ludosław Kozłowski (Karaś), Janusz Bylczyński (Warda), Stanisław Marzec-Marecki (party secretary), Józef Para (railwayman), Stanisław Jaworski (Franek), Celina Klimczak (Zofia Sałata), Natalia Szymańska (Orzechowski’s wife), Józef Nowak (Jankowski), Janusz Paluszkiewicz (Krokus), Leon Niemczyk (passenger - uncredited)

Notwithstanding the fact that The Stars Must Burn (Gwiazdy muszą płonąć, 1954) and Men of the Blue Cross (Błękitny krzyż, 1955) were arguably closer to drama than documentary, Man on the Tracks is generally recognised as Andrzej Munk’s first fiction feature. And in many ways this is appropriate, as his approach here represents a far sharper break with the Social Realist propaganda films of the past than anything he had previously attempted. Although he had gradually been shifting attention from collective to individual achievements, up to now his stories had been told by a single voice, usually in the form of an omniscient narrator. Here, though, the same events are recounted from three different perspectives, an approach presumably inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) - and by the end, our initial impressions of a seemingly straightforward event have been turned upside down.

A brief series of opening scenes sets up the situation: a passenger train driven by newly-qualified engineer Stanisław Zapora is forced to brake hard, after a man is spotted on the tracks frantically waving. The train collides with the man, killing him instantly. He is rapidly identified as Władysław Orzechowski, a former railway engineer who was widely seen as being uncooperative and divisive. Once it’s established that one of the lamps in a nearby signal was extinguished, it’s assumed that it was either a spectacular suicide or an act of deliberate sabotage, designed to cause a train crash in revenge for being forced into early retirement.

The way stationmaster Tuszka tells it, this seems an entirely plausible course of events. From the moment they first met, he and Orzechowski never got on, and relations deteriorated when Tuszka replaced his assistant with his own protegé Zapora, whom Orzechowski regards as a spy. Things came to a head during a mass meeting when Orzechowski flatly refused to go along with a planned economy drive that would involve running the trains on inferior quality coal. In Tuszka’s version of events, Orzechowski is the physical embodiment of the forces that hold back progress.

But when Zapora and Sałata, the two other members of Orzechowski’s team, are grilled, they build a more rounded portrait of a man who, while nobody’s idea of a congenial companion, is nonetheless clearly more complex than Tuszka’s dismissive impression would suggest. And as their versions of events are dramatised in flashback, it becomes increasingly clear that for all Orzechowski’s surface unpleasantness (he’s a stickler for procedure and protocol, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and ranks the well-being of his locomotive considerably higher than that of its human operators), he is ultimately more victim than villain.

In the year when Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes sent shockwaves around the world, Andrzej Munk and his writer Jerzy Stefan Stawiński (who also wrote the novel on which Andrzej Wajda based his film Kanał the following year) offered a subtle parable of how easy it is to jump to conclusions and damn without evidence. They also offer an explicit critique of collective action that would have been unthinkable until very recently - Orzechowski’s “crime” is to be too wedded to the notion of delivering the best possible service in an environment where five-year plans and targets reign supreme. Though Orzechowski is a conservative traditionalist, and the film becomes increasingly sympathetic towards him, it’s not in any sense an anti-Communist film - rather, Munk’s position is like that taken by Mateusz Birkut, the fictional Stakhanovite bricklayer protagonist of Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1976), who also turns out to be a truer socialist than those who profess to represent the ideology in positions of power. Tuszka in particular is rapidly exposed as a grudge-bearing opportunist who is only too happy to compromise his own principles in order to toe the party line and secure his own advancement.

The drama is more psychological than visceral, though Munk pulls off three impressive set-pieces in the opening near-crash, an elaborate bit of fare-dodging by Zapora (who dodges inspectors by clinging to the doors outside the moving train), and a sequence in which Zapora repairs the locomotive while it’s in motion, to score points off Orzechowski. Though perhaps the most impressive bit of narrative rug-pulling comes towards the end, when Munk shows us the real reason for the problems with the lamp. Though this is nominally part of Sałata’s story, he doesn’t witness it himself, as he’s momentarily distracted, and it’s only thanks to an astute member of the railway investigation committee putting two and two together that the correct verdict on Orzechowski’s actions is finally reached.

Working largely with his regular documentary team, Munk makes good use of his experience working with trains in the earlier, very different 1953 documentary The Railwayman’s Word (Kolejarskie słowo). Romuald Kropat is once again the cinematographer and Jadwiga Zajiček the editor, and they both create a powerful sense of a world dominated by giant and impersonal machines: there’s scarcely a shot that doesn’t feature a steam train. This is further emphasised by Józef Bartczak’s soundtrack, which plays out to a constant background of clanking machinery and hissing whistles, an effect enhanced by the total absence of music.

The performances are generally excellent, with Kazimierz Opaliński and Zygmunt Listkiewicz outstanding as the rivals Orzechowski and Zapora. Two scenes underscore the subtlety of Munk’s direction and Opaliński’s performance - when Orzechowski meets and reminisces with an old friend, and when he accidentally encounters Zapora in a park on their day off, treating him with impeccably old-fashioned courtesy and charm as though their daily power-struggles had never happened. And it’s not the least aspect of Munk’s considerable achievement that he ends up treating Orzechowski - a character who could easily have remained the crude archetype peddled by Tuszka - with equal courtesy. Munk was presumably not blind to the irony that he would have to turn to fiction in order to tell something closer to the truth - Krzysztof Kieślowski would make the same discovery over two decades later.

DVD Distribution: There are two DVD releases of Man on the Tracks, though the apparent absence of subtitles on the Polish edition (Best Film Co, Region 0 PAL) means that the only viable option for non-Polish speakers is Polart’s edition (Region 0 NTSC).

Picture: By the standards of this variable label, this wasn’t at all bad, if hardly demonstration quality. The source print is a little battered, and some shots are greyer than others, but on the whole Romuald Kropat’s black-and-white photography comes across well, and the 4:3 aspect ratio appears to be correct. Although it’s a PAL-to-NTSC transfer, the drawbacks are nowhere near as pronounced as they were with Polart’s edition of Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers - there’s a bit of motion judder at times, but it’s easy enough to tune out.

Sound: Typical 1950s mono, but entirely adequate for the purpose, and with no audible flaws worth noting.

Subtitles: A pleasant surprise. Although there are a couple of typos, and they occasionally spill over onto three lines, these are minor niggles compared with the fact that they’re white, clear, idiomatic, properly synchronised and optional.

Extras: The only extras are a short text biography of Munk, a filmography, and a copy of Stanislaw Zamecznik’s original poster from 1957 (which, like most Polish film posters, is a work of art in its own right, and is reproduced at the top of this piece). ‘Also Available’ links to cover scans of other Polart releases, but no trailers or other video material.

• YouTube has an extract from the middle of the film, albeit in unsubtitled Polish.
• Filmpolski.pl (in Polish)
• Internet Movie Database
• Reviews: Critical Culture (Pacze Moi); Dennis Grunes; Strictly Film School (Acquarello); Ozu’s World (Dennis Schwartz)
• Two articles on Munk, from Culture.pl and Film Comment (Stuart Klawans), both discuss Man on the Tracks in the context of the rest of his work.
• DVD available from: Amazon.com; DVD Empire; Polart.com

Spacerek staromiejski
1958, colour, 18 mins

• Director/Script: Andrzej Munk
• Camera: Kurt Weber
• Editing: Jadwiga Zajiček
• Sound: Zbigniew Wolski
• Music: Andrzej Markowski
• Production Manager: Michał Horowic
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

By 1958, Andrzej Munk had already begun his second career as a maker of fiction features, and although A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw was classified as a documentary short (and even won first prize in that category at the Venice International Documentary Festival), it works just as well as a fictional psychological study of a young violin student whose studies have made her hypersensitive to the creative potential of the sounds that she hears during an otherwise routine walk between lessons. It was based on an original idea by the composer Andrzej Markowski, whose electronic score is a substitute for any meaningful spoken content. The few words we hear are deliberately distorted and incorporated into the overall aural texture, the lack of subtitles confirming that they’re not meant to be understood.

We first meet the unnamed protagonist in a class full of fellow violin students. Unsurprisingly, given the lack of attention paid to anyone other than the boy playing at the front of the classroom, her mind quickly wanders, and when she starts looking out of the window at a crane swinging over the city, the sound of her classmate’s violin dissolves into electronic chirruping, which in turn is interrupted by the bell signalling the end of the lesson. Quickly changing her shoes to something more suited to walking, she sets off on a trip through Warsaw’s old quarter (is that Munk himself in the telephone box near the start of her journey?), encountering all manner of aural stimulation along the way.

Hearing a massed verse recitation from another classroom window, accompanied by the (electronically-heightened) sound of a besom broom sweeping the courtyard, she impulsively starts to “conduct” the end result. Popping into a church, she is enraptured both by the sight and sound of an organ being installed (the craftsman painstakingly testing each of the pipes before putting them into place) and the potential offered by the building’s echo - she takes out her violin and experimentally plucks the strings before being interrupted by a stern-looking priest.

After hitching a lift on a passing tractor, she hears a trio of cobblers at work, their tapping and leather-working taking on a distinctive rhythm, which she augments by playing with the bottles on their window sill. A walk past a fortress triggers an aural fresco of its past defensive activities, the camera mounting a whip-pan visual accompaniment around its architectural features. The water flowing out of the two spouts of a drinking fountain (a more recent film would undoubtedly have exploited their stereophonic potential) leads to a pitch-altering experiment with unfortunate consequences for the uniformed man who ends up being sprayed. Children play games in a ruined building, their rhythmic chants and huddled whispering suddenly erupting into full-on battle cries - which in turn are cut short by real fighter planes flying overhead. These and a barking dog introduce overtones of menace, abruptly changing the lyrical mood.

Finally, after racing up a spiral staircase, she reaches her destination - she’s having another violin lesson, only this time presumably on a one-to-one basis. Aside from the brief pizzicato interlude in the church, we never get to hear her play her instrument - but in many ways this would probably be a disappointment. At her age, she’s clearly not going to be able to translate her hyperactive aural imagination into anything meaningful - at least not yet. But the potential is clearly there.

By all accounts, this was one of Munk’s most personal films, and it’s easy to see why: the lack of any spoken content makes it far more open to individual interpretation, and its explorations of the creative potential of pure sound rank among the most inventive of any film of its era. Munk was a long-term music lover, and had already experimented with musical ideas informing a film’s structure in his second fiction feature Eroica (1957). Aside from its central scenario, it’s valuable both as a record of old Warsaw as it stood in the late 1950s, and it could also conceivably be screened as a visual demonstration of the principles of musique concrète, as natural sounds are usurped by Markowski’s electronic reimaginings. It’s certainly the most original of the Andrzej Munk documentaries that I’ve seen, and arguably the best.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). Although the original colours were doubtless more vivid than what’s presented here, the fading is less marked than was the case with its companion-piece One Sunday Morning (Niedzielny poranek, 1955), and the print is in excellent physical condition. Crucially, there are no serious issues with the soundtrack other than some very faint background crackle. The film doesn’t really need subtitles, though the childlike animated opening credits are given a full translation. Online commentary is provided by this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career, which briefly mentions A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw.

Niedzielny poranek
1955, colour, 19 mins

• Director/Script: Andrzej Munk
• Camera: Romuald Kropat
• Editing: Halina Kubik
• Narrator: Kazimierz Rudzki
• Sound: Zbigniew Wolski
• Music: Jan Krenz
• Production Manager: Wilhelm Hollender
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

Andrzej Munk’s second film from 1955 is very different from the first, The Men of the Blue Cross (Błękitny krzyż), and marks another decisive break with the tenets of Socialist Realism that had dominated his early work - in particular, the sardonic humour is much more in line with reports of Munk’s own personality. Nominally, it’s a portrait of a Sunday morning in Warsaw, as primarily seen from the point of view of a number of people travelling on the 133 bus. The narration pays lip service to the notion of highlighting the work of transport staff (”They must stay on duty so that we may take our Sunday ride to the park”), but the tone is low-key and jokey, the commentary as likely to adopt the first person as anyone else’s viewpoint.

We first see Warsaw waking up, the streetlights extinguishing themselves and one or two hardy individuals setting out early. The music by Munk’s regular composer Jan Krenz picks up speed and adds a jaunty piano motif as a bus disgorges a load of transport workers, and reveals that the narration is reading the thoughts of a blond bus driver. He’s waiting for his bus to emerge from a thorough clean from the depot before boarding it with a woman at whom he’s been making eyes all morning - his conductor.

While bleary-eyed, still pyjama’d citizens can be glimpsed through their windows, their more energetic counterparts cycle en masse or get the bus. Not only is a seat guaranteed at this time of the morning, but also a lively chat with the conductor. Jealous, the driver speeds up the bus, almost winging a passing car, to shorten their conversation. This is one of many mischievous touches that would have been unimaginable in po-faced propaganda like Munk’s strictly party-line Destination Nowa Huta! (Kierunek Nowa Huta, 1951), another being the moment when the driver deliberately vibrates the bus while his colleague is applying her make-up (though here she has a speedy revenge). They’ll spend much of the rest of the film winding each other up in various ways: she seems distinctly cooler towards him than vice versa, though he has plenty of attractive young passengers to chat up.

Munk then shifts to a study of these passengers: the man reading another’s newspaper over his shoulder, the woman who’s lost her ticket when asked to produce it during an random inspection, two young boys who time their exit to perfection as the inspector boards, the woman who sits in the seat reserved for mothers with children, at the expense of a genuine child-carrying parent - but he’s a father, so isn’t catered for - at least not until a bevy of Paddington Bear-style hard stares from fellow passengers persuades her otherwise. A man waits anxiously for his beloved by a bus stop, while another - a Hitchcockian cameo from Munk himself - drops off to sleep and nearly misses his stop.

Along the way, Munk also gives us a tourist-guide view of Warsaw, the still scaffolding-bedecked Culture Palace, the popular meeting-point of Zygmunt’s Column by the Royal Castle, promenading citizens, gossiping women (”They haven’t seen each other for ages - not since last night”), tree-lined avenues, squares and parks. Witty trompe l’oeil effects include a bus apparently caught in a downpour (it’s being cleaned) and a hand seemingly about to pick a pocket (it’s a woman alerting a friend to her presence). The bus runs alongside a tram, and two of its younger passengers smile shyly at each other - later, the man will ask the driver to slow down at the exact point when the tram rounds a corner, so he can switch vehicles.

“What is this film about?” asks the narrator at the end. Nothing much, he disarmingly admits. But his second question, about whether we had a good time on the bus, is answered far more positively. In particular, the brief coda is a model of deftness compared with the stentorian propaganda of both Munk’s earlier work and the admonishing Are You Among Them? (Czy jesteś wśród nich?) - the narrator draws attention to the youth of the driver and conductor, and then lets them on their way. Without spelling its message out, the film becomes an optimistic paean to the importance of young Poles in rebuilding their city and ensuring that it functions smoothly, its use of humour rather than sledgehammer ideology ensuring that it lingers far longer in the mind. It duly won many international awards, including prizes at Edinburgh and Mannheim as well as Warsaw.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). Once upon a time, it was in full colour, but fifty years of fading has left it mostly in blue-tinted monochrome with the occasional hint of red and green. It’s certainly not unpleasing to the eye, but it looks much more stylised than I imagine Munk intended. The sound is, as ever, typical 1950s mono, but with no technical problems to speak of. The English subtitles are mostly fine - the meaning of a couple of untranslated sentences can be worked out from the context. Online commentary is provided by this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career, which briefly mentions One Sunday Morning.

Błękitny krzyż
1955, black and white, 56 mins

• Director: Andrzej Munk
• Script: Andrzej Munk, based on the story by Adam Liberak
• Camera: Sergiusz Sprudin
• Editing: Jadwiga Zajiček
• Narration: Karol Małcużyński
• Voice-Over: Gustaw Holoubek
• Sound: Zbigniew Wolski
• Music: Jan Krenz
• Production Manager: Wilhelm Hollender
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)
• With the participation of: Stanisław Byrcyn-Gąsienica, Stanisław Wawrytko, Stanisław z Lasa Gąsienica, Ludwik Ziemblic, Józek Krzeptowski, Józef Wawrytko, Elżbieta Polkowska, Wojciech Siemion

Even more than The Stars Must Burn (Gwiazdy muszą płonąć, 1954), The Men of the Blue Cross blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. So much so, in fact, that at 56 minutes this is effectively Andrzej Munk’s first solo feature, essentially an adventure story about a real-life rescue mission carried out by the Voluntary Tatra Mountain Rescue Service towards the end of World War II. Although Munk’s treatment was adapted from Adam Liberak’s short story, this in turn was sourced from one of the Rescue Service’s official diaries, and additional verisimilitude was added by tracking down many of the real-life participants and persuading them to relive their experience on film. If it’s not quite a Polish Touching the Void (2003) - its narrative is far more straightforward, with nothing approaching that film’s appalling central dilemma - it’s nonetheless squarely in the same genre, as emphasised by the opening scene of a man staggering across snowy wastes before tumbling down an icy slope.

It’s set in early 1945, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt but sporadic fighting was still going on. Three wounded men are trapped in a ‘field hospital’ (actually a rickety shack halfway up a mountain) in German-controlled territory, dangerously near a newly-constructed outpost. Repiszczak was shot in the leg, which he now cannot bend, while Russian paratrooper Maxim Oleynikov has severe frostbite in both legs (in one painful scene, he has to have his toes amputated without anaesthetic to avoid gangrene). Partisan fighter Sedyakov (aka Tikhon) is more mobile, but being shot in the lung has affected his stamina. The hospital’s entire staff consists of Slovak-born Dr Juraj and his foster-daughter Bożenka, and they have to get their patients out to nearby Zakopane if they’re to have a chance of recovery.

So Juraj rounds up a six-strong team of experienced mountaineers, led by Stanisław Byrcyn, who has worn the Rescue Service’s distinctive blue cross armband for half a century. Less helpfully, there’s Byrcyn’s dog Bass, which tags along with them and repeatedly threatens to betray their position to the Germans. The bulk of the film consists of the rescue mission, and aside from the reliance on Gustaw Holoubek’s voice-over narration (there’s very little synchronised sound), it could easily have been shot for a dramatic feature, consisting as it does of a series of action sequences including a close encounter with an avalanche, some high-speed skiing, and a shootout with a passing German patrol. It would take a filmmaker of rare incompetence to fail to do something with the spectacular Tatra scenery, and cinematographer Sergiusz Sprudin rises to the challenge with a series of increasingly vertiginous camera positions that suggest that Munk and his crew took just as many physical risks as the people they were filming.

One immediate difference between this film and its predecessors is that the narration no longer takes a God’s (or state’s)-eye view of the proceedings. By quoting directly from the rescuers’ official diaries, Holoubek effectively becomes a member of the team, drawing the viewer into the operation. The dearth of synchronised sound precludes much identification with individuals (there’s clearly something going on between Maxim and Bożenka, but it’s restricted to sidelong glances), but that’s in line with what was still the dominant Socialist Realist mode of stressing the co-operative element - in this case an international one, as the Soviets, Slovaks and Poles are effectively as one. But this time round, Munk almost entirely rejects the ideological lecture: the narration is as likely to single out achievements of individuals like Byrcyn as it is to champion the work of the Rescue Service as a whole.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). For the most part, the source print is in superb condition: there’s some very minor print damage at times, but for the most part the image is virtually pristine. The contrast range is sufficiently wide to bring out the black and white cinematography to its best advantage, but without ever losing detail in the highlights and shadows. The soundtrack is typical 1950s mono, with a certain amount of hiss and crackle but no seriously distracting problems. The subtitles are comprehensive and generally excellent, with only a couple of minor typos and an inconsistent approach to spelling the name ‘Juraj’. Online commentary is provided by this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career, which briefly mentions The Men of the Blue Cross.

Gwiazdy muszą płonąć
1954, black and white, 64 mins

• Directors: Andrzej Munk, Witold Lesiewicz
• Script: Witold Lesiewicz, Andrzej Munk, in collaboration with Karol Małcużyński
• Camera: Zbigniew Raplewski, Romuald Kropat
• Editing: Maria Orłowska, Jadwiga Zajiček, Halina Kubik
• Narration: Karol Małcużyński
• Voice-Over: Gustaw Holoubek
• Sound: Zbigniew Wolski
• Music: Jan Krenz
• Production Manager: Wilhelm Hollender
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

Most filmographies claim that The Man on the Tracks (Człowiek na torze, 1956) is Andrzej Munk’s first feature, yet two earlier entries in his filmography could also qualify, and not just because of their length. The 64-minute The Stars Must Burn, which Munk co-directed with Witold Lesiewicz, is still nominally a documentary - it’s based on actual events and was cast with real miners - but the techniques of fiction filmmaking are far more apparent than in his earlier work, and the end result is just as effective as a piece of drama.

The film’s three-act structure draws on two stories: the rediscovery of long-abandoned but still potentially productive shafts in a Silesian coal mine (which form the first and third acts) and the mid-point story of old Górecki, a miner who tends the pit ponies but is faced with redundancy. There’s a wraparound bookend that harks back to the overt didacticism of the Socialist Realist period - the title refers to the practice of erecting illuminated stars at the highest point of the mine, which when lit reveal to the world that the miners have achieved their production quota - but Munk and Lesiewicz are clearly more interested in the experiences of the miners as individuals.

Munk’s episode is the one about the abandoned mineshaft, and is much the most successful. This is because he uses its straightforward narrative as an excuse for blending some impressively atmospheric photography with near-constant suspense, as the miners are faced with the ever-present dangers of rock falls and gas-fuelled explosions, and are linked to the surface only by a decidedly unreliable Ariadne’s thread of a phone cable.

The reason why they’re taking such risks is that they’re desperately trying to save the Zagorze mine from closure. In the opening scenes, we see the Polish Office of National Statistics compiling damning figures about its output, accompanied by a lecture about what a 2% shortfall means for the country as a whole (a message underscored by a brief vignette about a near-disaster at the Borek steelworks, forced to run on inferior coke). Formerly Stakhanovite miners like Parolik are considering their positions, but his colleagues Kowol, Kania and Mazur are made of sterner stuff, especially after Kowol uncovers historical evidence that the Zagorze mine used to be rather more extensive than the modern version.

The segment where they start exploring the old mine shaft provides an excuse for the film’s most atmospheric photography . Particularly striking is the shot of the miners navigating the now flooded shaft, the gases settled a few inches above the surface of the water, their journey conducted in near silence as Jan Krenz’s score thins out to a single bass woodwind.

A third of the way through, after the first attempt at uncovering the old seam fails, the scene changes to a different mine in Milkowice, a much smaller operation that’s the last Polish mine to employ pit ponies. Lesiewicz’s middle episode is much more leisurely than Munk’s, and much more prone to cuteness (the scene where the horse Andalusia demonstrates her counting skills) and pathos (the ponies’ days are numbered, as are those of old Górecki), though there’s an effectively lyrical scene when Górecki and his young colleague Tuleja take the ponies out to run free in a nearby field, the accompanying woodwind now in a higher register.

And then we return to Zagorze and another attempt at exploring the old seam, this time with better equipment. But, as the film makes clear, mines have hidden dangers that no amount of technology can entirely defeat - a two-hour oxygen supply seems generous until one is trapped underground. Munk generates a fair amount of suspense from scenes such as the one in which a naked flame is used to test for gas, and the period when the phone goes dead for several minutes, with only the surface operator’s voice echoing through the empty chambers. With voiceover kept to a minimum, this part of the film is almost pure drama, and it’s only the concluding section that sets the miners’ success against the achievements of Polish coalmining as a whole that reminds the viewer that it’s still a documentary at base. The dividing line between fact and fiction would be blurred even more by Munk’s next feature, the mountain rescue drama The Men of the Blue Cross (Błękitny krzyż, 1955).

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). The source print is one of the better ones on these discs, with some damage around reel changes, but otherwise commendably well preserved. A wide contrast range provides a good showcase for the atmospheric cinematography. The sound is equally fine. Aside from two points in which one or two sentences are inexplicably left untranslated, the English subtitles are perfectly acceptable, rendering onscreen text as well as spoken content. Online commentary is provided by this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career, which briefly mentions The Stars Must Burn.

Kolejarskie słowo
1953, black and white, 22 mins

• Director/script: Andrzej Munk
• Camera: Romuald Kropat
• Editing: Jadwiga Zajiček, Maria Orłowska
• Narration: Karol Małcużyński
• Voice-Over: Andrzej Łapicki
• Sound: Zbigniew Wolski
• Music: Jan Krenz
• Production Manager: Jan Lubieniecki
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

The Railwayman’s Word is one of those films that needs a certain amount of historical contextualisation, as its innovations are far less apparent today than they would have been back in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, and long before any cultural thaw. For all its mild unorthodoxies in its semi-fictionalisation of real-life events, it still falls squarely within the genre of Socialist Realism, with a propagandist narrative built around the heroic railway workers ensuring that the chartered delivery from the Silesian coking plants to the Szczecin steelworks runs smoothly. The coke’s function in literally fuelling a productive economy is stressed from the outset, with Andrzej Łapicki’s soft-spoken narration delivered over dynamic shots of steelworkers wrestling with the elements amid flying sparks and rivulets of molten metal.

From the start, it’s stressed that this is “an ordinary story, such as may take place every day”, and what’s most striking about writer-director Andrzej Munk’s approach is that he uses a wide range of cinematic devices to add interest, suspense and even excitement to what are ostensibly utterly routine events. The junction at Tarnowskie Gory (later the subject of Kazimierz Karabasz’ more poeticised Railway Junction/Węzeł in 1961) prepares the engines for their various tasks (steel to Warsaw, coal to Łódź, iron to Gdansk and coke to Szczecin). Without resorting to tacky anthropomorphism, Munk shows how the railwaymen treat their engines as though they were somehow alive, and will return to a visual motif of the locomotive’s water-meter (”the heart of every steam engine - water is like its blood”) on several occasions throughout the film. The other key motif is that of the warranty certificate, the “railwayman’s word” of the title - a written guarantee, signed by various hands, that the train is fit for its designated purpose, the finished document inserted into its own proprietary frame on the side of the engine and held in place behind a metal grille.

Next comes the dispatching process, the entire subject of Karabasz’ film, though given briefer treatment here as we catch only occasional glimpses of the complex logistics that they have to wrestle with to ensure that they don’t, as the commentary puts it, “lose a train”. The remaining three-quarters of the film follows the progress of warranted coke train no. 49281 as it passes various stages en route from Silesia to Szczecin, with telephoned reports on the progress of it and all the other trains in the region constantly relayed back to the dispatchers and forwarded to their colleagues further along the track.

The film’s central drama derives from the obstacles that 49281 encounters en route, from an unscheduled uncoupling to a rail being replaced. Every delay has a knock-on effect, with the dispatchers having to reschedule multiple trains on the hoof, and ensure that all changes of information are passed on to everyone from the signallers to the train crews. Much of the middle section of the film has little spoken content, either onscreen or from Łapicki’s narration: instead, Munk favours a blend of natural train sounds overlaid with Jan Krenz’s score, its driving rhythms matched by pacy editing, with frequent cutaways to clocks to emphasise the inexorable passage of time. There’s one particularly dramatic cut to a warning signal - accompanied by a jarring brass chord - that makes one momentarily forget the film is in black and white, as the signal’s redness practically leaps out of the screen.

A comparison could be made with the work that Alberto Cavalcanti and Benjamin Britten did on the classic British GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Coal Face (1935) and Night Mail (1936), though Munk’s film ultimately lacks their poetic force and abiding interest in the human element. This is particularly marked in the treatment of the workers: in Night Mail, we eavesdrop on a great deal of casual banter, whereas Munk’s railwaymen are completely focused on the job, saying nothing out of turn. On the other hand, Munk probably wouldn’t have had the freedom that Basil Wright and Harry Watt enjoyed to toss in quirky asides - at least not without having to justify them to a po-faced censor.

What’s far more successful is Romuald Kropat’s photography, favouring imposing low-angle shots of the trains both in motion and at rest, when they’re backlit in a way that emphasises the steam, as though they’re sweating copiously after a hard day’s effort. There are also silent close-ups of the workers’ faces, often chiselled into sharp relief by high-contrast lighting, expressions generally serious, though there’s a brief interlude when two small girls wave at the driver and he responds in kind. But these moments are few and far between: group effort and co-operation is still very much the name of this particular game.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). The source print is marred by low-level damage and near-continuous exposure fluctuations - it’s definitely a notch below the two earlier Munk films on the same disc, though this never seriously affects appreciation. However, the soundtrack is a marked improvement on its predecessors - still plain mono, and with a limited dynamic range characteristic of an early 1950s recording, it nonetheless does a very impressive job of blending narration, train sounds and onscreen and offscreen voices. The subtitles, too, are perfectly adequate, with just a couple of minor typos. Online commentary is provided by this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career, which discusses The Railwayman’s Word in some detail.

Peasant Diaries
Pamiętniki chłopów
Poland, 1952, black and white, 13 mins

• Director/script: Andrzej Munk
• Camera: Romuald Kropat
• Editing: Anna Górecka
• Narration: Tadeusz Olszewski
• Voice-Over: Aleksander Bardini, Józef Nalberczak
• Sound: Bohdan Kajan
• Sound Editing: Alicja Krawczyk
• Production Manager: Jan Lubieniecki
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

Made the year after the overtly Socialist Realist propaganda film Destination Nowa Huta! (Kierunek - Nowa Huta!), Andrzej Munk’s Peasant Diaries derives from the same tradition, duly adopting many of the same archetypes and clichés (you half expect the ruddy-cheeked peasants harvesting the wheatfields to break into song, along the lines of Ivan Pyriev’s notorious 1949 musical Cossacks of the Kuban River/кубанские казаки), but overall it marks at least a partial advance on its predecessor.

It was inspired by a 1935 book of the same title, which compiled first-person accounts of peasant life in pre-World War II (and pre-Communist) Poland. By tracking down three of the authors and comparing their lives in 1952 with the situation seventeen years earlier, Munk managed both to meet official requirements and strike out on his own (albeit to a limited extent). Because his subjects’ living standards had dramatically improved across the board, the film became more than acceptable as propaganda, but the subject also allowed Munk the freedom to explore their individual lives.

The first is Andrzej Urban, from Lutcza, a region noted for strikes and similar protests against social injustice. His diaries (or at least the excerpts quoted here) don’t mention this, but instead offer a bleak portrait of his likely future. Which is, of course, thanks to People’s Poland, infinitely rosier than he ever predicted. His son Wladysław is an aviation officer, a job considered quite out of his class league in the 1930s (in a nifty visual touch, the plane takes off from one of the wheatfields). His middle son Stanislaw is an agricultural agent (”his daily work adds to the unity between towns and villages”), while the youngest, Adam, has stayed at home to help run the farm with his wife - though the fields are now owned by the people rather than the local landowner.

The second is Bronislaw Majek, from Babice, a village that has been so transformed since 1935 that only a single old hut survives from the period. His children are much younger, so this part of the film concentrates on the educational opportunities that were denied their father. Wanda has just received a diploma at the end of her seventh year, with university a realistic prospect. By contrast, Bronislaw was permitted just three years (which he enjoyed) before being sent out to manual work.

The third is Antoni Dabin, whose 1935 diary talks about deprivation so severe that even matches were a luxury. Needless to say, by 1952 he has attained both electric lighting and a prestigious job (chairman of the production cooperative in Hrynkow), with his daughter taking the various mod cons for granted. The film concludes with images of Dabin’s cooperative carrying out their harvest - all massed tractors and blond combine-harvester operators reaping the golden wheat, while the narrator waxes lyrical about the spirit of brotherly collaboration.

Peasant Diaries would undoubtedly have been a much better, and certainly more immediately engaging film if the three central figures had been allowed to give their own version of events in their own voices. Instead, they’re presented as though they were part of a National Geographic anthropological study, their silent faces accompanied on the soundtrack by actors reading carefully-selected excerpts from their diaries. But it does at least show early signs of Munk’s interest in breaking with the conventional Socialist Realist mould, which would be developed much further in his later documentaries.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL), and the source print is in broadly similar condition to that of Destination Nowa Huta! - in general, it’s been surprisingly well preserved, though there are occasional exposure fluctuations. While the soundtrack is less crackly, the subtitles are also less satisfactory, with numerous typos (”bread” for “bred”) and other linguistic infelicities - though these don’t detract seriously from appreciation, and are at least properly synchronised. As for online commentary, this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career has a short paragraph on Peasant Diaries.

Destination Nowa Huta!
Kierunek - Nowa Huta!
Poland, 1951, black and white, 12 mins

• Director: Andrzej Munk
• Script: Artur Międzyrzecki
• Camera: Jerzy Chluski, Romuald Kropat
• Music: Tadeusz Baird
• Editing: L. Protasiewicz
• Narrator: Andrzej Łapicki
• Production Manager: M. Ołtarzewski
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

Watching Destination Nowa Huta! for the first time, I felt a strong sense of déjà vu, as this is undoubtedly the film that inspired Andrzej Wajda’s parody of an early 1950s Stalinist propaganda newsreel in his film Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977). That fake film’s poster-boy ‘hero’ Mateusz Birkut (played by Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), also worked in the Nowa Huta region of eastern Kraków, and the deconstruction of his carefully crafted public image by an idealistic young film student (Krystyna Janda) sets in train one of the most vivid examinations of the Stalinist period attempted when the Communists were still in power.

Notably unlike the early documentaries of Kazimierz Karabasz, Andrzej Munk’s film is unabashed propaganda for the Polish state’s cause, extolling the virtues of the giant construction project that sought to establish Nowa Huta as a major industrial centre. It was also deliberately populated by working-class workers who, the authorities believed, would act as a counterweight to middle-class protesters in Kraków who objected to Communist rule - though you won’t find even a hint of that in the film. Here, the stated reason for the Nowa Huta project is to prevent the peasants in a nearby village from either starving or having to travel abroad to seek work.

The film extols the work of various collective groups - one of them identified by Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska’s notes in PWA’s DVD booklet as Służba Polsce (’Service to Poland’), an organisation specifically designed to weaken the links between the younger generation of Poles (especially those from peasant backgrounds) and the Catholic Church that still had a huge influence on their elders, which they often carried out by active protest. Unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of this in the film: just a series of shots of fresh-faced young men exercising outside a row of tents in preparation for their contribution to building a glorious new socialist Poland. The narrator also singles out several individuals as being particularly inspiring in the Birkut mode - though their regional origin seems just as important a part of the collective-labour message.

After an attractive opening where the picturesqueness of the peasant village is at odds with the narration’s story of deprivation and hopelessness, the film’s aesthetic approach is squarely in line with the then dominant doctrine of Socialist Realism. The treatment of the workers is self-consciously ‘heroic’, with much use made of low camera angles to emphasise their muscled bodies against the skyline. The grim concrete blocks of flats in which the workers will live are “wonderful architectural visions” of “a city without basements or attic rooms” (is it reading too much into the narration to point out that basements and attics were traditionally where subversive activities take place?).

The narration (read by Andrzej Łapicki, perhaps best known in the west for playing the Wajda surrogate in his Everything For Sale/Wszystko na sprzedaż in 1968) is appropriately stentorian, leaving no cliché unturned (”Brighter days are no longer pie in the sky - each working day and each thrust of the shovel brings them closer!”). The film also emphasises how the output of Nowa Huta’s steelworks will supply the entire country - and, more tellingly, highlights the input of the USSR in terms of design, planning and logistics. At leisure, a worker is shown reading his favourite book - naturally, by a Soviet writer.

Given Andrzej Munk’s subsequent reputation, it’s tempting to try to read too much into the film, which was one of his first solo directorial credits after graduating from the Lodz Film School, and also represented a return to his native Kraków. In fact, he had been a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, or PZPR) since 1948, though he would be expelled in 1952, the year after this film was made. Perhaps not coincidentally, his subsequent documentaries would show a greater tension between official demands and personal expression, though here he seems more concerned with delivering a polished piece of political propaganda. It’s impossible to deny its historical fascination, but its stature as a lasting work of art is much more suspect.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Andrzej Munk double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL), and is in impressive condition for something nearly sixty years old that clearly wouldn’t have demanded the same standards of presentation as a historically important feature. There are some visual blemishes, but in general the print is in remarkably fine fettle, and if the sound’s a bit crackly, it’s easy to tune this out. The English subtitles, too, are clear, idiomatic, and correctly synchronised, and I spotted just one typo (there’s a reference to “hours pass interceptively”, though surely that should be “imperceptively”?). As for online commentary, Critical Culture has a wonderfully sarcastic demolition of the film, while this Culture.pl overview of Munk’s career mentions Destination Nowa Huta! in passing.