Dir:- Antoni Krauze

Starr:- Michał Kowalski, Marta Honzatko, Cezary Rybinski, Wojciech Pszoniak, Piotr Fronczewski, Grzegorz Gżył

It would seem that of all the great Polish filmmakers from the last century Andrzej Wajda is the one who is having the most significant effect at the ‘serious’ end of the current Polish cinema landscape. Wajda’s Oscar-winning film on the Katyn massacre managed to establish a new ‘historical-realist’ agenda in Polish drama, that has seen an increasing number of movies in recent years focusing on the events of Poland’s last combustible century of history as sources for dramatic action. This has, in particular amongst those films set during the Soviet-era, led to a sort of ‘anti-propaganda propaganda’ that attempts to rewrite the failings  and omissions of the Soviet record of history, replacing it with an account that emphasises modern Poland’s abiding concerns with heroism, patriotism and religion. Next year Wajda will return with a biopic about Poland’s folk-heroic former-President and Solidarność leader Lech Walęsa, but in the interim comes a lean and particularly vicious account of the 1970 Gdansk/Gdynia Shipyard massacre that served as a backdrop to Wajda’s 1981 movie Człowiek z żelaza

Director Antoni Krauze (Akwarium, Palec boży) comes from much the same period of Łódź film school students as Kieślowski and Polanski, but has clearly been influenced by the interests and technique of Wajda. Czarny czwartek looks to construct a multi-layered examination of the events of the winter of 1970 in the trójmiasto area. It focuses on three distinct areas of action: the political decision-making level of closed-door military and politburo meetings, the street level conflicts between protestors and the army and military police, and, finally, the pained heart of the movie which examines the experiences of the Drywa family during that fateful period of violence and unrest. This is a classic ‘realist’ film structure in Poland, that clearly demonstrates the large-scale operations of society and how they then filter down to impact upon the everyday working man and woman. It frequently dominates Wajda’s work in particular, but can also be found in recent ‘cause’ movies such as Enen. Krauze deviates from the well-worn script a little, primarily in the way he chooses to frame the events of the day in a pseudo-documentary, mock newsreel style.

The symbolism of Polish blood upon a Polish flag makes the long solemn march, in the movie's tense opening 40 minutes, particularly impressive.

One of the most striking aspects of Soviet-era Polish history is the manner in which certain stories were simply never told, or were deliberately erased from the public record. Krauze manages to emphasise this lack of a public narrative to events, by subtly showing the events as they occur upon the street and then juxtaposing them against the complete lack of radio and television information being given. The fact that so little media attention was devoted to events during the 70’s presents both possibilities and difficulties for a filmmaker like Krauze. Without the public record very little can be proven outside of the conflicting accounts of eyewitnesses. One image that did become synonymous with the 1970 protest movement, is the image that gives the film its sub-title and provoked a poetic and musical response from Polish artists of the time. Zbigniew Godlewski, a young shipyard worker from Elbląg was shot and killed in Gdynia, by militia firing into a crowd of protestors from an overhead helicopter. His fellow protestors managed to hoist his body up onto a door and carried him through the streets of the city until they were confronted by more armed militia units. At the time of this event nobody knew Godlewski’s identity, so he was given the common Polish name Jan Wiśniewski, which then served as the title of a particularly frank and forthright political poem and song ‘Ballada o Janku Wiśniewskim’. The song was sung by Krystyna Janda at the end of Człowiek z żelaza and as a direct reference is reprised at the end of Czarny czwartek, in an even more guttural and impassioned manner, by Kazik Staszewski, lead-singer of one of the foremost Polish rock bands Kult.

Polish cinema is generally having a bit of an identity crisis, similar to many other ‘national’ cinemas within Europe. With its undoubtedly rich traditions (Jerzy Hoffman’s epic cinema on a shoestring, deserves a particular mention at this point) and its assortment of Internationally recognized filmmakers Polish film could, and perhaps should, be some of the most inventive and challenging of the former Soviet nations. However, popular Polish cinema is pretty much an unending stream of bland Hollywood derivatives that often don’t even attempt to hide their glaringly obvious English-language origins. As a remedy to this, many ‘serious’ Polish filmmakers have perhaps mistaken solemnity of tone and overarching portentousness for involving, high-quality filmmaking. The combined effect of these conflicting and ‘unofficial’ policies, has left modern Polish cinema with a dearth of interesting and entertaining film. Czarny czwartek is undoubtedly an important piece of cinema, as it neatly brings to light a piece of Polish history that hasn’t been fully explored and will almost certainly be unknown to an international audience. Yet it is a difficult film to watch and the style of the film seems haphazard and needlessly chaotic, as if the filmmaker was trying to unsuccessfully demonstrate the ways in which a work like this might have been censored back in the period it depicts.

This said the acting is uniformly convincing throughout, particularly when it comes to the central roles of Stenia, Bruno and Leon Drywa. Krauze does an excellent job of keeping the personal story and the political story separate for as long as possible, which when they eventually do overlap makes the events all the more shocking. Brunon Drywa (Michał Kowalski) is depicted as a reliable family man and shipyard employee, who cares most about his three children: Romek, Gabrysia and Mariolka. Living in cramped quarters alongside a live-in-lodger, Brunon and his wife Stenia (an excellent performance from Marta Honzatko) are struggling to make ends meet, but this doesn’t stop Marta from splashing out on tinned ham for Christmas, nor does it prevent Brunon from dreaming about owning his own taxi cab. The initial phases of the protest movement – which began as a result of Polish politburo leader Władysław Gomułka’s price increases on food and other everyday essentials – are viewed from a distance by Bruno and his family. Little information is revealed through the media, but hearsay spreads rumour and on a few occasions Bruno and his family are able to directly observe events unfolding in the centre of the city. Yet nothing directly impacts upon the Drywa’s until Brunon boards a train to go to work at the shipyard on the 17th December 1970.

Krauze in the chilling opening exchanges of militia fire manages to capture the incomprehensible brutality of a nation turning in upon itself. The chaos of the shooting sequences at Gdynia Stocznia train station, as well as later during the solemn protest march with Jan Wiśniewski’s body, hammer home, in much the same way as the final moments of Katyn, exactly how morally unacceptable the events unfolding are. Later Krauze’s focus upon the military police’s continued brutality toward protestors seems increasingly stylized and ineffective, particularly the protracted beating that an innocent bystander receives at the hands of an army unit and its head. But for the controlled panic and tension that spreads through the opening 45 minutes of the film this should, perhaps, be overlooked.

As with all modern Polish films about the Soviet period there is an in-built awkwardness in the way that the politburo hierarchy are depicted. The tendency is to create broad black and white discriminations between the innocent protestors for democracy and the craven and conceited protectors of the Communist status quo. Krauze initially seems to be following this pattern, as the likes of Zenon Kliszko (Piotr Fronczewski) talk in ideological soundbites with an almost inhuman ideological zeal. Amongst the party lackeys, such as Gdynia’s council head Jan Marianski (Grzegorz Gżył), there is a general feeling that action cannot be taken against a Polish city, by a Polish army and that to slaughter citizens would be utterly outrageous. However, Kliszko and the equally zealous politburo chief Gomułka (played with alternating savagery and senility by Pszoniak) effectively bully the Polish bureaucracy into order. Gomułka’s justification for turning upon his own people was the fear that Russia would commit troops to Poland in the same way they committed troops to the Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring uprisings.

The implacable face of politburo ideology. Zenon Kliszko (Piotr Fronczewski) tells it like it really isn't.

These slight ambiguities within the high-level political narrative are then also explored in the personal story of the Drywa family. In one particularly effective scene the politburo arrive in the middle of the night to inform a still shocked Stenia that her husband is to be buried immediately (a way of enabling the politburo to gloss over the events of the massacre). The city official who accompanies the politburo operative into the Drywa flat has the temerity to ask the lodger for a cigarette, but later on this action becomes an exchange of human courtesy, as the city official stands up to the politburo operative enabling Stenia to call on her brother-in-law Leon (Cezary Rybinski delivering a beautifully understated performance) and get him to attend the funeral also. These little vignettes show that often ‘reasonable’ people found themselves stuck defending a corrupt system, which offers a little more narrative texture than the broad Communist (bad) democratic protestor (good) dichotomy.

At the very end of the film there is a delightfully constructed series of closing shots, that effectively works as a climactic emotional montage. With the Drywa family attempting to escape their politburo organised fate by getting on a train to Słupsk, the carriages pass by the scenes of the worst violence along the trójmiasto’s shipyards. Krauze focuses the viewer’s attention on young Romek Drywa and these snapshots of his father’s workplace (and the sight of his father’s death) have all the more resonance for being suggestively located in the youthful consciousness of the next generation. This artful sequence transcends some of the seemingly televisual limitations of what has come before, but regardless of this unevenness Czarny czwartek is still a haunting and fiercely angry work, worthy of more widespread attention.