POLISH FILM ACADEMY

50 Years of Polish Film School, Warsaw 2008

Cross of Valor

Mariola Dopartowa

At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s novella films came into fashion. Not once did they make a whole through a title only since individual novellas were often made by different directors or screenwriters. The fashion was inspired by literature – in existentialism, being the leading philosophical and cultural trend, short literary forms such as  novellas, short stories or one-act plays were common. There must have been a rule binding these seemingly incoherent elements into a whole and allowing to grasp the illusive truth about the hard and complex post-war reality. After a number of propaganda films in the Mid-Eastern Europe, which were complex in their form and abundant with ideological pictures of the world and ardent characters engaged in fighting and expressing their veto, suddenly a different film dimension appeared, reduced to the simplest signs and symbols, deprived of any ornaments and accompanied by apparently background characters only and a vague plot.

The cultural thaw of 1956 appreciated simple plebeian or actually rural characters who had nothing in common with the ideological heros of social realism and its newspeak. It tried to recover the lost truth through the return to the simplest forms, to the concise, brief, reportage-like pictures devoid of psychological retrospection, of which Andrzej Munk's pioneer “Man on the Tracks” was a good example. This new type of literary protagonist was not merely plebeian but civilian and anti-heroic; was not for or against anything; was not particularly perspicuous or impressive. However, the viewer studied this character attentively to see his own self, his difficult choices and decisions and his astonishment or dismay at the insane reality. The previous false film characters were heroic in any circumstances and invariably idealistic; they chose rather to die than to betray their beliefs; they always knew what to say and how to behave. In this way an ordinary man full of doubts and apprehension was deprived of all values and persuaded that his experience was meaningless. He was forced to think he suffered from national, social or other complexes and was unable to be an independent person or to perform a vaguely-defined heroic deed.

Kutz's early films revealed the director's special talent to spontaneously reconstruct and tranfer into film images the way ordinary people on the train, in the street or at the frontline perceived the reality. He was called the creator of plebeian wave and he never disputed this label, but probably saw a chance to grow distinctly familiar in broad public consciousness. For years he has created time-resistant, truly universal pictures of man facing defeat, collapse, cultural and ethical void. He has remained under his first master's (Andrzej Munk) influence, which in no way makes him secondary.

The ”Cross of Valour” is one of the best films in the history of European film industry, which is rather uncommon for a debuting director even though he had had a long apprenticeship with the most accomplished tutors. His three novellas complement one another in a very interesting way although they do not seem to have much in common apart from the communication problem in a collapsed world.

What draws the viewer's attention in the ”Cross of Valour”, Kutz's first novella, is Franek Socha's ballad-like way of speaking. His story cannot be told in full, because of the lack of people interested in it or able to understand it. It sounds like a folk tale, giving account of both pain and pride of a simple heroic boy, who left his home village at a very young age (was it an escape to the east from the attacking Germans in September 1939?). He has survived and now he is coming back with a military medal for heroism and a short leave. His great sufferings have neither broken him nor taken away his hope, but soon he is going to fall into apathy, lose his will of life and his future fate in the army will be determined – it will either be his physical or spiritual death. The last scenes show Franek lying in his bed, consumed by dispassion and struck dumb just like concentration camps' victims. Having many a time persistently uttered the sentence about his mysterious Russian peregrinations, he is no longer willing to turn to people. His companions setting out for another military action are optimistic about him. They think he needs to be left alone for a while and then he will be all right. Their false belief that his collapse is temporary and that the cure for it is lying there in silence proves that the character's experience is never understood and that the language is only a system of signs extending the distance between humans and the speech has become empty, more or less harmonic sounds reminding one of barking. Such is the barking of the dog from the next novella, which has also experienced a lot.

This kind of character appeared later in the famous Różewicz's play titled “Card Index”. The character was unable to reassemble the language so it reflects his experiences.

         Franek's companions fail to understand the meaning of  the shell-pits, fire debris and a terrified madness-stricken elderly man being the only inhabitant of the place where Franek's village used to be. Franek perceives himself again as a loser who has not come back in time and has not rescued anyone. A new consciousness should be born through his active initiation in struggling with fate and history, instead, there is an inevitable regress. It is not doom that makes it inevitable. He becomes a victim of fate and history because his lament cannot be successfully expressed. Not only is he bereaved of his family and home, but also of his freshly-gained feeling of becoming a real man, a brave soldier and a decent human. There is an absurd but highly interesting scene in which he is handed in an axe by the Russians (have they found it in the burnt village?) as a token of appreciation for his medal. A question arises what sort of soldier Franek Socha will become now if he survives. Will he become a ”dog”, possessed by hatred at every sight of German uniform, a vengeance machine, a madman dwelling in the burnt village always to be seen with the axe high in his hand? Or will he use the axe to build a new house? And if the latter, then what would it be built upon? What seems the most important is the viewer's reply. It is worth noting that during the thaw of 1956 unequivocal, clear and legible images of good and evil, joy and distress, hope and dispair disappeared from the scripts. It is curious how these extremes transform in Kutz's film, one suddenly becoming its own opposite.

This phenomenon can also be observed in the story about the dog (”The Dog”) where the inhabitants of the land conquered by Germany, suffering from the war trauma, consider the animal's loyalty to be equal with the Nazi fierceness and training. The shepherd one of the soldiers starts taking care of (similarly as later in Vladimov's “Faithful Ruslan”) becomes a metaphor of one of the most terrifying truths about man – the dog which is a camp officer murdering prisoners and the dog which is a friend clinging to soldiers regardless of which uniform, is but the same animal easily assuming one role after another, depending on the stimulus, being it either the prisoner's striped garment or a soldier's uniform. The only difference between animal and human is that human is able to think in an abstract way, which makes the distinction boundaries more vague for him and makes him understand that the distinction between the hunter and the hunted is only conventional and changes in the course of history.

In the third novella titled “Widow” the inhabitants of a surrealistic town located somewhere on the “recovered land” are striving to bring stability and safety back. In order to do this they imprison captain Joczys within the boundaries of their heroic myth. The relationship between the historical truth and legend is not as important here as the metamorphosis of the heroic cult into a secular religious cult. This oxymoronic expression perfectly reflects the paradox of both existentialistic and Marksist idea of godless holiness. Captain Joczys turns into god, saint and angel guardian at the same time and anybody who threatens this cult (e.g. Mrs Joczys's suitor, Więcek) personificates evil. In this situation, the widow inevitably becomes the myth's hostage. This seemingly peaceful small town is actually under omnipresent surveilance. Everybody sneaks here – from kids to the elderly – and the young widow is incessantly spied. Initially it seems that it is the town's defence against an intruder who charmed the woman but does not deserve to be the patron's widow's husband. It soon turns out, however, that the hostility against the intruder is more complex. His presence is the same kind of trigger that made the dog attack at the sight of a clean-shaven head or striped garment. This provincial, ostentatiously artificial town, still resounding with the song about Joczys, turns into a microcosmic totalitarian land, where artificially created myths begin living their own lives. The inhabitants have their own mythological past, a fallen hero, a new religion and their priests, so now they also need an enemy to make them feel a “real community”. Now that all the important buildings, organisations and institutions bear the name of Joczys and the mourning time is over, the town's life of ceaseless celebration need to be sustained in yet another way, demanding not only more patent rituals but also offerings.

If you watch the film more attentively, you will easily notice that it is also a story about a lost home, the return to which is impossible. It is not the kind of story depicted in Homer's epic poem where Odysseus comes back home, but a story about a final, irreversible loss, about a dying world which cannot be reconstructed by reviving dreams about a restored house with a garden or even by settling down in one. The house is the town council's gift for the widow. It is no different from the cottage destroyed by the Germans in the first novella and it is not unintentional that the woman escapes from this dead zone on whose boundaries the guardians of Joczys's legend stand. The story about the dog jumping at the camp survivals, a new Cerberus guarding the boundaries between one world and another, is between the other two stories and is the source of interpretation. Those simple soldiers in the role of life and liberty defenders and the occupied land's saviours, who want to shoot the dog, are unable to understand that their hatred towards the hunted away Germans is identical with the shepherd's hatred towards the prisoners. In this way they enter the realm of death, having no prospects of rebuilding a real life. Some crucial questions emerge as with the first novella: who will they be when they enter the German land? Will they be bandits participating in mass murders and rapes, killing machines? And, most importantly, what foundations will they use to reconstruct their burnt houses when they come back?

     The stories show three stages of human deprivation. In the first story, the character loses not only his house, family and the whole home village, but also the recipent of his lament, the listener of his tale, through which his war experiences might have been closed, enabling a new life and bringing him back his speech. In the second one the human is also deprived of the animal symbolising a house guard and defender. Human insanity soaks into nature, making it part of human crimes and hostile blindness. In this way both human dwelling is destroyed and the world of humans and animals ceases to be an asylum for the orphaned, destitute man. In the third story the man loses his dream about a reconstructed home, which might be able to give him real shelter. The dream cannot come true because none of the community relationships shaped by culture or civilisation has been reconstructed. Nor has the language, supposed to serve communication and not control over another man. Their place has been taken by horrifying substitutes, such as the ghastly cooperation of “decent citizens” and the sentimental, heroic gibberish, replacing real communication.

Kazimierz Kutz's film is a perfect example of the reason why a secret regulation ruled out artistic film experiments from the Polish cultural life in the early sixties. The film industry,  referred to (however righteously or not) as the Polish film school, integrated the most talented scriptwriters, literature writers, directors, musicians and other artists and helped  to rebuild the relationship with the old Polish cultural traditions and contemporary Europe – the relationship that was broken in the times of Stalin. The depth of the works of art created at that time is still waiting to be discovered and explored. Moreover, the interpretation is the key to understanding our own, shattered reality and difficulty we have in building a home we can share.

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