Between semesters, my discipline for study wanes, and I persuade myself that attending to the Facebook posts of my Polish cousins, visiting the home page of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and watching a Polish movie—subtitled in English—count as language and culture study. They do, sure, but it’s scholarship lite. One catches a few new words, accustoms oneself to actually seeing or hearing phrases in genuine Polish use, and notices those curious features of language that make us (nerds) love words. A cousin posted a snapshot of herself at a costume party and used the word zdjecie (“photo”). Then, that very evening, I encountered it again in the opening movie credits as zdjecia (I read “cinematography”). Thus, a single root encompasses the high and low, the full range of visual expression from party pic to Academy-Award-nominated framing shot, just as, in English, we “paint” the bathroom and the Mona Lisa. (An artist brother of mine, MFA University of Hartford, calls them all “pichers.”)
Andrzej Wajda is probably the best and best known of the Polish film directors of the modern era, which has been mostly Communist, though he is hardly a socialist ideologue or propagandist. Ziemia Obiecana (“Promised Land,” 1974) depicts the 19th-century industrialization of textile production in Lodz (pronounced “Woodj”) in antique tints as much Dickensian and Oliver Stonian, as Marxian. The film inhabits a misty, smoky industrial sfumato; exteriors draped with the black effluent of factory smokestacks, interiors with cigar smoke and the wafting fog of torched millworks. Excellent zdjecia.
The main protagonist, Karol Borowiecki (I take special ironic note of the name: mine was originally Charles Borowicz), handsome, energetic, driven, dabbles with, when not committing outright, just about every possible serious felony and human sin in the tragic achievement of becoming a captain of Polish industry. He ultimately orders the shooting of striking workers, but along the way demonstrates an equally perfect indifference to human suffering at all points, but on a smaller scale: a factory worker who loses at least an arm, probably two, much blood and probably his life in a rolling machine earns no sympathy and hardly a response from Borowiecki, who instead orders everyone else back to work and laments the loss of cloth to blood stain; he brushes off a fellow industrialist looking for a temporary personal loan with a recommendation to set fire to his own factory for the insurance money, and he disregards the industrialist’s muttering in despair an intention to kill himself—an intention the latter shortly fulfills with a pistol shot to the head; Borowiecki betrays his fiancée with his mistress and eventually his pregnant mistress as well for a lucrative marriage of convenience; he sells his noble patrimony to a sugar-sucking, upwardly-mobile boor, probably a peasant; and he traffics in conspiracy and insider-trading, though these habits are less explicitly crimes or sins in capitalist economies and more like standard operating procedures. My almost namesake Borowiecki represents an object lesson in how dehumanizing ambition can be, in this case with capitalist trappings.
It is unclear what Wajda meant by the “Promised Land”: perhaps, the previous Poland of the noble tradition, which is represented with surprising nostalgia, or the coming socialist Poland represented by a wounded striker’s red kerchief. Or, more possibly, to a socialist Poland that was yet to come, even in 1974—and one destined never to arrive. Or, to the living myth of a “Promised Land” that has been promised to all people and nations (cue the Boss), for which, alack, there is just not enough real estate on earth. Watching the film unassisted by subtitles, I tallied understanding just over 100 words and a dozen phrases, many of which were used more than once, to be sure; however, at the moment, mine is too meager a vocabulary for gaining entry into any promised land.
