Word: wajda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While Director Andrzej Wajda creates several scenes that are both eloquent and taut (Szczuka's death in the arms of Maciek says all it has to say in three seconds), he is also extremely wasteful in his use of detail. It could further be observed that much of the genuinely sophisticated material and technique in this Polish film would be taken for extraneous artiness in an equivalent French or Italian production...
From his minor actors, in particular, Wajda has drawn some striking performances. Several of the tangential characters are turned into important human beings, worth pausing over, and thinking about. Although Zbigniew Cybulski occassionally makes Maciek's confusion seem invalid, he always makes it understandable, and what more I could say about him and the other leads would be entirely favorable...
Director Andrzej Wajda displays more concern with people than ideas, with the emotions of his heroes than with the symbols of any system. His style is disjunctive and expressionistic, but it is also clear and direct. With a fluid, strikingly graphic technique, he achieves some memorable metaphors: the mad, drunken celebration of victory to Chopin's Polonaise in A Major; the ironic reflection of V-E day fireworks in a stagnant pool, beside which the Communist boss lies dead; the lovers in a ruined church, its Christ figure splintered and dangling upside down in the foreground; Maciek setting fire...
...final image is an evocation of the inevitability of death for Polish heroes as interpreted by Andrzej Wajda, who also directed this film. The insurrectionist leader (Wieczyslaw Glinski) pokes his grimy head through a manhole, headed toward freedom. But when he hears from his sergeant that the men he thought were close behind have gone astray, he kills the sergeant as a betrayer and slowly descends once more into the offal that seals his doom...