I’d only meant to watch Kanal, but the BFI app had all three of Wajda’s war films so we watched them all. They do not follow on from each other, except to chronicle key moments in wartime Poland: in fact I was a little disconcerted at first to see an actor whose character had died in A Generation playing another part in Kanal. There were blanks in my knowledge that I think I’ve managed to fill a bit – and really, how could it not occur to me that of course there would have been anti-communist resistance to Soviet dominance of Poland once it was liberated from the Nazis? I know all about the Greek civil war, so why not Poland? (Except that the Soviets were already in situ and brutally triumphant, so the outcome was never in doubt.)

More ignorance about the layers of national history and ideology that I just had to guess at. These films were made in the mid/late 1950s so post-date the posthumous reassessment of Stalin and straddle the Polish thaw. They were financed – and hence sanctioned – by the state and were expected to have a pro-socialist message. Like British WWII films, they presented a contemporary view of recent historical events – answering, perhaps, a need for remembrance or catharsis or – for Poland – an alternative to the dominant ideology. Grim, tragic and practically devoid of levity and the semaphored sentimentality you find in British films.

Wajda was born in 1926 and joined the Polish Home Army as a teenager, and his actors would have had similar wartime experiences. That adds a chilling aura to these films. They know what they are talking about, and I just had to listen.

A Generation (1955)

A shanty town on the outskirts of Warsaw mid-war and a young man who swaps petty crime for an apprenticeship in a furniture workshop. He is inspired by a communist co-worker and joins the resistance movement, assisting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The final shot is of him and his handful of comrades – a little, doomed battalion – heading off for further resistance.

Shades of Italian neo-realism in its “natural” shots. According to Wikipedia, the machine guns shot live ammunition as there was at that time no way of shooting blanks – ! I gradually became more and more involved in it and was quite bereft at the end.

More ignorance on my part: I had no idea there was a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as well as the Warsaw Uprising.

Kanal (1957)

The fag end of the Warsaw Uprising. The only possibility is defeat, and the only unknown is when. A group of resistance fighters are ordered to retreat via the city sewers and come to an end in various ways. It’s claustrophobic and gripping – and also raises questions of sacrifice and heroism. It reminds you of the scale of the suffering – both military and civilian.

Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

A more elaborately shot, symbolic film which initially took some working out. It’s a turning point in Poland’s history: 8 May 1945 and the Nazis have surrendered to the Soviets. There is a celebratory banquet in a town’s big hotel. A Polish administrator who has spent the war in the USSR comes to the town to take up a new post under Soviet direction. There are some anti-communist Home Army soldiers and organisers fighting against Soviet rule. Two of them – one, Maciek, looking like James Dean and one William Hartnell in Brighton Rock – are ordered to shoot the administrator but kill the wrong men.

It’s a conflicted film. There are two opposed sides and there are parallel scenes as they remember those they fought beside, but – in 1958 – the anti-communist resistance just had to be the bad guys. In his doomed persona though Maciek knits the two together. He has a tender interlude with a barmaid, and their conversation brings home how the war crushed their young lives. Maciek has a few fellow soldiers left to him (although many have died) but his eyesight is damaged by his time in the dark sewers; she has lost everyone in her life and is totally uprooted.

Towards the end, as Maciek flees for his life, the anti-communist gentry, drunk after the banquet, perform a shaky dance while the band discordantly plays a polonaise. I suppose for the authorities that ridicule might have cancelled out the sympathy that the audience must have felt for the disillusioned – but criminal – Maciek.