Not so heroic

Encouraged by the film of The Passenger, left unfinished with director Andrzej Munk's untimely death in 1961, I looked out more Munk on DVD. Eroica (1957) is a strange little diptych about anti-heroic in the Second World War, its symphonic rhythms ironically evoking Beethoven. The artwork on the Czech DVD combines both elements more successfully than the cheap, American-based Polart copy I was nevertheless pleased to pick up for a small sum.


Of the two 'movements', Scherzo alla Polacca translates least well, I think, to a non-Polish viewer; there's a kind of humour here verging on the clownish which I didn't quite get, though I like the basic premise of a small-time black marketeer who drinks too much and gets caught up with the Resistance. Edward Dziewonski's slightly less than loveable rogue wanders into all sorts of scenarios where explosions and sudden murders seem almost incidental to his trivial preoccupations.


Ostinato lugubre, on the other hand, is haunting. The murderous monotony of life in a prisoner-of-war camp is intensified in a plot where the inmates need to believe in the heroism of an officer who supposedly escaped but is, in fact, hiding above a false ceiling in the barracks. The desperation of his insubordinate friend triggers the inevitable tragedy. In no way does this connect with the first 'movement' other than in its contrasting darkness. But its atmosphere is unique, and as with The Passenger one can only be aware of the film's proximity in time to the events it dramatises. There's a score by Jan Krenz very much of its era, but once it's set the mood of each 'movement' it plays discreet second fiddle to Munk's singular brand of realism.

Munk's Passenger

Weinberg's opera The Passenger is, as we've seen for ourselves, an admirable, honourable attempt to grapple with the human issues of Auschwitz: what keeps the soul alive in an inmate, how strong are the instincts both for freedom and to forget (especially in the oppressor). It has, as I've insisted - and some won't even grant it that - masterly scenes, but overall still seems to me too unwieldy for anything like masterpiece status. Whereas I'd be far more inclined to bandy that phrase about with respect to the (absolutely non-operatic) film by Andrzej Munk now available on Second Run DVD. It's much closer - as the author said to me when we met at the London Coliseum on the opera's opening night - to Sofia Posmysz's original autobiographical novel. Its unfinished status raises more questions than answers; Munk was killed in a car crash on his way to Lodz to look at film designs on 21 September 1961, shortly before what would have been his 40th birthday. To complete a necessary memorial, Andrzej Borowski filmed extra scenes in Auschwitz, while the portion of the drama set on the liner Batory, where former SS overseer Liese Alexandra Slaska, pictured below) comes face to face with her spiritually indomitable one-time charge Marta, had been shot but not to Munk's satisfaction; so stills alone were used - incredibly effectively - against a commentary written by two Polish School acolytes. The result is that it's the present which seems unreal, while the mundane brutality of the camp comes across in all its chilling casualness, heightened by the almost unbearable use of the site 15 or so years after its abandonment. Chinks in the guards' armour are briefly evoked with the subtlety that only cinema can convey: Liese's expression suddenly changes from hard to worried as she looks through the fence at people on their way to the gas chambers; later, in a close-up on one such processional, a young soldier lets a little girl stroke his Alsatian dog, and again for a moment his face softens before he realises what he's supposed to be doing. Marta, who of course has such a strong and radiant voice in the opera, hardly speaks. Yet when, processing past a woman being ritually humiliated to stand semi-naked, she says 'head up!', it's all we need to know about her sense of pride and refusal to bow to Liese's 'help'. Marta is superbly played, with nearly all expression in the eyes, by Ewa Mazierska. Liese's account of their relationship, in the present editing, seems to unfold in two narrative flashbacks: once as soft-pedalled economy with the truth, the second time to reveal the sadism which develops from her own sense of not being loved, as Marta is by Tadeusz. This, too, is summed up in a single moment - when she enviously takes the flowers sent to Marta on her birthday, and walks away along the fence with them. It's all accountable only moment by moment, and I'm still left wondering exactly what the trajectory of Posmysz's book might be. Which means that we have to fight all the harder to get it translated into English, as we discussed with her interpreter at the reception before the ENO premiere. Anyway, here the lady is, so elegantly dressed and gracious, in much-needed colour after all that harsh black and white. And you can hear Weinberg's The Passenger in a recording from the Bregenz Festival (which means, in German, Russian, French, English, which all serve it well) on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow at 6pm. I mull over opera and film with Andrew McGregor before and between the acts. Curiously, tonight BBC 4 also screens Terry Gilliam's much more questionable, but fitfully brilliant, holocaust-related ENO production of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust.