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Flames up above and smoky streams below, the inverted Hades of occupied Warsaw. A four-minute lateral tracking shot through the capital's rubble ca. 1944 introduces the characters and gives a glimpse of the pulverized piano never forgotten by Polanski. "It's going to get cramped around here," muses the lieutenant (Wienczyslaw Glinski) to his depleted company, "no sense in philosophizing." German tanks disfigure the landscape, the last barricade falls, into the sewers the comrades retreat. The platoon aide (Emil Karewicz) and the impressionable messenger (Teresa Berezowska), the feverish cadet (Tadeusz Janczar) and the resolute guide (Teresa Izewska), the underground swallows them all. Pabst's Kameradschaft is the foundation, the connection to Dante is voiced by the unmoored artist (Vladek Sheybal), a note from Gorky. Bobbing corpses and distorted howls fill the labyrinth, its channels like an infernal cave and the collective hardened arteries of national resistance. Tinged newsreel-gray in the bombed-out streets, Andrzej Wajda's camerawork grows baroquely bulbous in this purgatory, filled with tenebrous curves and diagonals out of Piranesi's Carceri. (When illumination pierces the murkiness, it's followed by a grenade blast.) The merciless development from gallantry to fatalism, an acrid touch ready to prick any hint of grandiosity. "We're walking through a dark, fragrant forest," mumbles the soldier waist-deep in slime, and his companion promptly corrects him: "We're stumbling through stinking shit." What Wajda takes from Aldrich's Attack he passes on to Ten Seconds to Hell. The suffocating punchline is that the light at the end of the tunnel is yet another prison, a bitter toast to doomed Polish valor. (Ashes and Diamonds completes the requiem.) Cinematography by Jerzy Lipman. With Tadeusz Gwiazdowski, Zofia Lindorf, Kazimierz Dejunowicz, and Jan Englert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |