-By Maria Garcia

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In Katyn, a fictionalized version of an actual massacre that was for decades misrepresented in Poland, writer-director Andrzej Wajda could have led his audience down the well-worn path: Inspire indignation over the injustice of obfuscation. At key moments, soaring music, mostly strings, would cue the audience to the victims’ suffering and that of their loved ones who were prevented from mourning them. A handheld camera would add grit and immediacy. Not Wajda, who has had nearly 70 years to contemplate the murders—he was 14 when his father became one of about 15,000 men killed near Smolensk, Russia, in a forest named “Katyn.”

Wajda’s film opens on a bridge where fleeing Poles are trapped between the Nazi invasion from the west and the Soviets advancing from the east. It’s September 17, 1939, and Poland is an occupied country. Wajda’s protagonists are on that bridge, suspended, as they will be for the rest of the war: Time stretches out for Anna (Maja Ostaszewska), who waits for news of her husband (Artur Zmijewski), a captain in the Polish Army, and for a general’s wife (Danuta Stenka) and the sister (Magdalena Cielecka) of a pilot (Pawel Malaszynski), who also wait and wonder. The bridge connects us, the audience, across time and space, to Wajda’s wartime Poland, and to him, to the teenage boy who grieved for his father, and the artist who waited so long to reclaim his past. Even after Wajda learned that his father had been killed, 45 years would pass before the real story of the Katyn Forest could be told.

In a Hollywood movie, Wajda’s bridge would first be seen in a master shot, perhaps from above, or in extreme long shot with the camera moving closer until there was a cut to a medium shot of the characters. In Katyn, this and other conventions of contemporary filmmaking are disposed of: Wajda wants first to dislocate his audience, to alter the established cinematic way of seeing and hearing, so that we remain in the “then” and the “now.” The mass grave in the Katyn Forest was discovered by the Nazis who rightly identified the killers as the Soviets, but after the war ended, the Allies supported the Soviet propaganda that blamed the Nazis for the deaths of the soldiers and members of Poland’s intelligentsia who were interred there. In order to have us experience that long suppression of truth—to keep us suspended on that bridge—Wajda almost steadfastly refuses to ground us in the master shot, at least not at the start, and sometimes not at all.

On the bridge, Anna is told that Polish officers wounded in a battle with the Soviets are being treated in a nearby churchyard, and she heads there in search of her husband, Andrzej. Wajda begins the sequence in the usual way, in a master shot, but from Anna’s point of view—when she first enters the makeshift hospital, we see it in medium long shot. Then he cuts to a close-up of the bloody head of a soldier who is undergoing an operation. It’s an unusual and bracing shift, one that communicates Anna’s fear—and throws the audience off balance. Soon, Anna learns that Andrzej is being held nearby, along with his regiment, and she goes to him. He can escape his Soviet captors but he refuses to abandon his men. During the entire affecting scene, especially when husband and wife embrace for the last time, we hear only ambient sound. At the end, emphasizing his departure from cinematic convention, Wajda inserts music, but rather than underscoring emotion, it signals the coming danger, the approach of the Red Army’s cattle cars.

Several times, Wajda uses the tracking shot in a way not often seen today: He moves the camera across a column of soldiers or across their dead bodies lying in a shallow grave. Then, unafraid of repetition, he exposes the terrifyingly methodical assassination of the men—which took place over three days—by illustrating many times and in detail how each POW was moved from his cell to the vehicle that would transport him to the gravesite, and then how each was tied, shot in the head and shoved into the pit. In every one of these instances, in the farewell sequence, in the tracking shots of the men, and in the depiction of the assassinations, Wajda changes our accustomed way of seeing these events on film. Mostly, he stretches time. The lack of music accomplishes that, as does the tracking shot which is, of course, a shot in real time. Rather than a montage, say, which would have shortened the killings of the soldiers, Wajda simply repeats the movements of the captors and their prisoners in what feels like real time.

The Red Army did not leave Poland until 1989, and during their occupation of that country the Poles were not allowed to erect memorials to Katyn’s victims or even to speak of the incident publicly. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev officially admitted that the Soviets had carried out the massacre, but Wajda, like others who lost family members in the spring of 1940, had always known the truth. In Katyn, Andrzej keeps a diary, and the Nazis film the mass grave. There were survivors, too, like Andrzej’s friend (flawlessly portrayed by Andrzej Chyra) who had become a Soviet collaborator. So, if Wajda stretches time, it is because his present has always been his past, and that past has for so long been shrouded by revisionist histories. He is, in some ways, still on that foggy bridge, suspended in the then and now, hoping with Katyn to correct the schoolboy he heard on the radio who, when asked if he knew the significance of September 17, replied that it was a school holiday.