Westerplatte

Stanisław Różewicz chronicles Poland’s September defeat, but manages to escape simple clichés. His Westerplatte is, on the one hand, an attempt to break with a particular of patriotic war cinema, and on the other, an attempt to propose a new visual language. Jerzy Wójcik’s wide-screen cinematography provides a distanced view of the events and a clear depiction of the action in several planes, while the meticulous reconstruction of the soldiers’ activities affords us the space to form our own view of the events of 1 September 1939. The narrative is similarly ambiguous: Różewicz leaves the conflict between the rational Major Henryk Sucharski (Zygmunt Hübner) and Captain Franciszek Dąbrowski (Arkadiusz Bazak), prepared to die fighting, somewhat unresolved. Years later, Różewicz wrote: “In our retelling of the defence of Westerplatte we endeavoured to stay true to historical facts – rather than rely on the myth of heroic defeat and the legend from Gałczyński’s poem, we chose to be faithful to the truth, to reality. We wanted to do justice to the Polish soldiers.”

Sebastian Smoliński