Travel Blog

Polish competed with Spanish last night at Regal South Beach Cinemas as the local community of Poles came out for Andrzej Wajda’s final film, Afterimage. (If you watched the Academy Awards the other week, you saw a photograph of the great director during the In Memoriam montage.)

The film tells the story of Wladyslaw Strzeminski, an artist and art instructor in Lodz who, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, refused to submit to the state-mandated ideology of socialist realism. In an early scene, Strzeminski is in his apartment, about to dab paint on a blank canvas, when the room, and the canvas, are suddenly washed in red. Outside men are raising a huge banner to Stalin on the building’s façade. The artist, who is missing an arm and a leg, uses his crutch to rip a hole in the banner and return natural light to his living quarters. It is the beginning of his demise: He eventually loses his job, gets kicked out of the artists’ union, finds himself unemployable and ineligible for food stamps. In one heartbreaking scene, he is even refused paint in a store he’s shopped at for years.  

 After the movie, there was a reception, attended mostly by Poles. One expressed regret that Americans were seeing such a depressing depiction of Poland. I had a different view: Americans tend to know about the horrors of World War II, but what came after has not received all that much attention in the States (despite the efforts of Wajda, Milosz, and many others). Poland suffered greatly under Stalinism, a suffering that seems all the more cruel when you consider that, in the war, Poland was on the winning side.