Landscape After Battle [1970] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

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post-war conundrum.......2005-11-20

Wajda excels in showing displacement because of war, and the shattering effects this has on people and their mentality. As in his greatest early film, "Ashes and Diamonds", the protagonist seems to have lost his sense of direction in life, but whereas the hunted assassin hanging out in a town in Poland in "Ashes and Diamonds" has clearly been affected by the Warsaw Uprising, and the post-war Polish Brave New World of Stalinism is never far from the surface,the antihero of this film has been spending a long time in labour camps and being shuttled around from one to another. As in "Ashes", the real consolation in all his alienation is a woman, a Jewish girl fighting her Jewishness, and one of the most attractive of all of Wajda's women, played superbly and hungrily by Stanislawa Czelinska.
The writer whose stories the film is based on was a Communist who committed suicide after he returned to Poland. Wajda has him as a character in the film, but concentrates on a young poet who seems to spend much of his time upsetting the authorities in the camps somewhere in Germany. Even when the Americans come to liberate the people from the camps, he remains displaced. "Which direction do we go to get to Poland?" he asks at one point in the film. Daniel Olbrychski puts in a superb performance as a Pole in the chaos of immediate post-war Germany. This is definitely not a film for people looking for pure entertainment - it is too cathartic for that - but it is Wajda at his best and most searching. Highly recommended.

Landscape After Battle [1970] (REGION 1) (NTSC)

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Landscape After Battle [1970] (REGION 1) (NTSC)
Andrzej Wajda
Manufacturer: Vanguard International Cinema
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: 6307814187
Release Date: 2004-11-30

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