We spent the entire last class viewing With Fire and Sword (1999), a three-hour cinematic rendition, with subtitles (yay!), of Sienkiewicz’s epic and not infrequently ferocious novel—Ogniem i Mieczem in Polish. Thankfully no Mel Gibson, the director, Jerzy Hoffman, working in a visual medium, wisely played down the blood-letting, its scale at any rate, and referred to, but did not dwell upon, the specific instances of extreme and prurient brutality, such as the impalement of Chmielnytski’s envoy or the sacking of the fortress at Bar. True, Longinus Podbipienta’s triple decapitation of castle-scaling Turks did receive appropriate graphic attention, but the special effects left a little to be desired. Though I can’t say I’ve ever witnessed even a single decapitation in real life, the streaming of the gore and the trajectory of those unfortunate heads—odd upward bounce—struck me as a bit, hmm …. cartoonish. Earlier, hiding in a barn loft, Pan Zagloba had split the skull, vertically, of a Cossack with a much grimmer realism than Podbipienta’s horizontal sword stroke. On the whole, however, we viewers seem to have avoided the bloodbath that the Poles and Cossacks did not manage to avoid in the mid 1600s, though as I recall now, there were rather a lot of hangings.
The love story between the noble Polish soldier, Pan Jan, and Helena, a Ruthenian border beauty, frames and interlards the war story. The romance, which, we have to remember, was written over a hundred years ago, plays along conventional lines. Physically quite nice to look at (a former Bond Girl, ranked 7th and 17th for beauty and sexiness in the 007 series, according to Wikipedia), Helena was otherwise constrained and passive, chaste and always pretty fully clothed. For a brief moment, when the witch Horpyna inserted her tongue into Helena’s ear, a genuine opportunity arose to complicate the romantic line; but Hoffman took fewer liberties with Sienkiewicz than Sienkiewicz took with history, leaving the possibility of a remake open in twenty years or so—the polymorphous, holograph edition with scentsaround.
Ogniem i Mieczem is, after all, volume one of the Polish national epic, written “to uplift the hearts” of Sienkiewicz’s countrymen at a time when Poland had ceased to exist as a state. His myth-making helped to preserve and consolidate that national memory, so a Polish film-maker cannot trifle with that legacy. Poles take their Nobel Laureates and their national memory very seriously. I don’t know yet whether privately they engage in irony and irreverence—two notorious character traits of mine—but that might be for younger, shallower, more insulated and triumphal cultures.
I give two thumbs way up for the costume, particularly the hats, and the hair styles, particularly the top knots, the queues, the braids, the crests and the long, dangly moustaches: steppe-warrior hair. Pan Zagloba sports a fairly luxuriant red jar head. Pan Longinus is shaved, but with long, white, combed-out chin locks. Cossacks adorned their faces with magnificently wrecked handlebars. The vodka had to dribble off something. Knaz Jarema Wisnowiecki, the scourge of the Cossacks, wore a full mane, long and dark, like some Yanni from hell. It’s a great look it if weren’t for all the killing and dying. And the head wear was awesome, much fur, feather, and jewelry. Whether or not any animals perished in the making of this movie, many did in its haberdashery.
And now, back to the grammar, I guess.
