Rabban Yochana ben Zakkai observed that he had five principal students, and each one had a unique quality that was rooted in a one of the five element

Chapter 2: Mishna 11: Part 1
He used to enumerate their praises. Eliezer ben Horkonus [is like a] cemented well which does not lose [even] a drop [of water]. Yehoshua ben Chanania -- praiseworthy is she who gave birth to him. Yossi HaCohen is a "chasid" (a pious one). Shimon ben Nethanel is one who fears sin. Elazar ben Arach is a flowing spring that surges forth. (As I wrote when we began the previous Mishna, the Maharal's explanations do not follow the order of the Mishnayoth. I have inserted the next Mishna at this point, but the beginning of our explanation is a continuation from last week. One question that was not yet explicitly answered from the previous Mishna will be answered now, and we will introduce other questions -- not necessarily in the order that they were asked -- that the Maharal will answer about this Mishna.) (Carried over from the previous Mishna: Didn't Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai have more than the five students whose praises are enumerated here?! Furthermore...) Why does our Mishna use the language "enumerate ('moneh') their praises" rather than the simpler "informed ('magid') of their praises?" What is the greatness of Yehoshua ben Chanania that is implied in "praiseworthy is she who bore him?" If his greatness was that he was pious, then the same "praiseworthy is she who bore him" could have also been said about Yossi HaCohen! And if his greatness was that he feared G-d, then this description could have been said about Shimon ben Nethanel as well! And if the praise is because of his great wisdom, then it could have also been said of Elazar ben Arach, whose wisdom was praised as a flowing stream constantly surging forth! Rabban Yochana ben Zakkai observed that he had five principal students, and each one had a unique quality that was rooted in a one of the five elements of the human being. Therefore he enumerated their praises. The word "enumerated" is used, implying the exhaustive nature of the these five attributes, since these praises encompass each of the five elements of the human being. (The Maharal points out many times that when a number is used, it communicates the exhaustive nature of the list that is being presented. The Rabbis shouldn't need to provide the number of components in a list, since we know how to count for ourselves. Telling us the number communicates a conceptual principle, rather than a mathematical summary.) Another implication of the word "enumerate" ('moneh') is that each one stands independently, which is the case of these five virtues. Rabban Yochana ben Zakkai began with Rebbe Eliezer ben Horkonus, saying about him that he was a cemented well which does not lose a drop [of water]. This is an acclamation in the area of the nefesh. Memory is an attribute of the nefesh, and it is through this vehicle that one is able to acquire and retain wisdom. The ability to remember what one has learned indicates that the individual is able to rise above the material ("chomer") dimension of his existence. For "chomer" (matter) has the characteristic of being subject to change, influenced by environmental circumstances due to its instability. Something which transcends the limitations of the chomer isn't limited by the instability inherent in matter which causes it to be in a state of constant change. So by saying that Eliezer ben Horkonus was like a cistern which loses no water, it means that his nefesh is imbued with a transcendent energy, a stability that resists variation, which is the ideal state of the nefesh. It is this desired state of stability which is implied when we use the word "milui," sated, to refer to the nefesh, as it is written (Koheleth 6:7) "Also the nefesh will not be sated." The nefesh grasps and retains a connection to things, due to the fact that it does not have limitations of matter. It is to communicate this attribute that Rebbe Eliezer is called a cistern that doesn't lose a drop. What he receives is retained. Then it is said about Yehoshua ben Chanania "praiseworthy is she who gave birth to him." As we have written, the energy of the nefesh ("koach hanefesh") has to have a material medium through which it can manifest itself. This is the "chomer," the material dimension. Exalting the woman who bore him implies a purity in his chomer, in the material dimension. If his mother didn't have a dimension of purified chomer, it would not be possible for the child to have this purity of chomer. The mother is viewed as being the determining factor in the quality of the chomer of a child (see Nidah 31a) due to her greater connection to the physical world. (We have written extensively on this in Chapter One, Mishna 5.) We find Rebbe Eliezer ben Horkonus and Rebbe Yehoshua ben Chanania paired to together throughout the Talmud, and this is represented here. For Rebbe Eliezer ben Horkonus embodies excellence of the nefesh, which is transcendent, while Rebbe Yehoshua ben Chanania embodies excellence of the chomer, which serves as a carrier of the nefesh in the material world

contractions obscuring and concealmet

Today's Tanya Lesson
Iyar 12, 5771 · May 16, 2011
Likutei Amarim, middle of Chapter 48
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והנה, פרטיות הצמצומים איך ומה, אין כאן מקום ביאורם
Now, as for the intricate details of the “contractions”, how they achieve their effect and what they actually are, — this is not the place for their explanation.
אך דרך כלל הן הם בחינת הסתר והעלם המשכת האור והחיות
But in general they are something in the nature of an obscuring and concealment of the flow of light and vitality,
שלא יאיר ויומשך לתחתונים בבחינת גילוי, להתלבש ולהשפיע בהן ולהחיותם להיות יש מאין
so that [the light and vitality] should illumine and reach the lower creatures in a revealed manner, pervading them and acting in them and animating them in such a way that they exist ex nihilo
כי אם מעט מזעיר אור וחיות, בכדי שיהיו בבחינת גבול ותכלית
in only an extremely minute measure, so that they be in a state of finitude and limitation.
Were their life-force to be revealed within them they would be infinite. “Contraction” ensures that the light and vitality which is their life-force remains concealed from them; all that is revealed is but a minute degree of light and vitality.
שהיא הארה מועטת מאד, וממש כלא חשיבי לגבי בחינת הארה בלי גבול ותכלית, ואין ביניהם ערך ויחס כלל
This light and vitality that is revealed within them after the “contraction” constitutes an infinitesimal illumination, and is truly considered as naught when compared with the quality of the limitless and infinite illumination, and there is no reference or relationship between them,
I.e., they are not quantitatively different, not even immensely different in quantity, but of a wholly different and incomparable quality.
כנודע פירוש מלת ערך במספרים, שאחד במספר יש לו ערך לגבי מספר אלף אלפים, שהוא חלק אחד מני אלף אלפים
as the term “reference” is understood in number values, where the number one has a relevancy to the number one million, for it is a one-millionth part of it;
The sum of one million is merely the sum of one million ones; subtract but one and the million ceases to exist — a clear demonstration of the relation that subsists between one and a million.
אבל לגבי דבר שהוא בבחינת בלי גבול ומספר כלל, אין כנגדו שום ערך במספרים
but as regards a thing which transcends finitude and numeration, there is no number — however great — that can be relative to it,
שאפילו אלף אלפי אלפים ורבוא רבבות אינן אפילו כערך מספר אחד לגבי אלף אלפי אלפים ורבוא רבבות
for a billion and a trillion1 when compared to infinity do not even attain the relevancy of the value of one in comparison with a billion or a trillion,
אלא כלא ממש חשיבי
For the sum of one retains some degree of relevance even when compared to a trillion — it is, in fact, one trillionth of it — while even a sum as large a trillion has no relevance at all when compared to the realm of the infinite, but is veritably accounted as nothing.
FOOTNOTES
1.
“Text of Nishmat; Sifrei, beginning of Parshat Vaetchanan.” (— Note of the Rebbe.)
It would seem that the Rebbe here explains why the Alter Rebbe specifically chose to mention these two numbers: they are cited in the prayer beginning “Nishmat...,” in accordance with the passage in Sifrei indicated above.

au-revoir-les-enfants

http://www.criterion.com/films/549-au-revoir-les-enfants

SYNOPSIS: Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Julien
Gaspard Manesse
Bonnet
Raphaël Fejitö
Madame Quentin
Francine Racette
François Quentin
Stanislas Carré de Malberg
Père Jean
Philippe Morier-Genoud
Père Michel
François Berléand
Joseph
François Négret
Muller
Peter Fitz
Credits
Director
Louis Malle
Screenplay
Louis Malle
Director of photography
Renato Berta
Editor
Emmanuelle Castro
Assistant editor
Marie-France Poulizac
Assistant director
Yann Gilbert
Production manager
Gérald Molto
Unit production manager
Jean-Yves Asselin
Casting
Jeanne Biras and Iris Carrière
Continuity
France La Chapelle
Costumes
Corrine Jorry
Hair and makeup
Susan Robertson
Sound
Jean-Claude Laureux
Sound mixer
Claude Villand
Foley artist
Daniel Couteau
Production design
Willy Holt
Production consultant
Christian Ferry
Disc Features
Restored digital transfer supervised by director of photography Renato Berta (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
Video interviews with Louis Malle biographer Pierre Billard and actress Candice Bergen, Malle’s widow
Joseph: A Character Study, a profile of the provocative figure from Au revoir les enfants, created by filmmaker Guy Magen in 2005
The Immigrant, Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 short comedy, featured in the film
Audio excerpts from a 1988 AFI interview with Malle
Original theatrical trailer and teaser
PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by film critic Philip Kemp and historian Francis J. Murphy
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Au revoir les enfants: Childhood’s End
By Philip KempMarch 27, 2006
“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944 Read more »
Au revoir les enfants: Père Jacques and the Petit-Collège d’Avon
By Francis J. MurphyMarch 27, 2006
The site of Louis Malle’s film Au revoir les enfants was the Petit-Collège d’Avon, a residential prep school located on the grounds Read more »
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“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944? Never again? . . . I’m the only one in this school who thinks about death. It’s incredible.” As the date implies, he could hardly be more wrong. Many of those around him are thinking about death, and in far less theoretical terms.
The moment of adolescent crisis, the point at which the adult world, in all its messy ambiguity, drives in upon and disrupts childhood certitudes, always fascinated Louis Malle. From 1960’s Zazie dans le métro (whose eponymous heroine turns the tables with some disruption of her own) through Murmur of the Heart (1972); Lacombe, Lucien (1974); Black Moon (1975); and Pretty Baby (1978), his young protagonists find themselves confronted with a world that operates according to no rules they’ve been led to expect. With Au revoir les enfants (1987), Malle homed in on the autobiographical reference point of this theme, the moment that “may well have determined my vocation as a filmmaker,” when, age eleven, he watched a Gestapo official enter the classroom of his Fontainebleau school and summon a fellow pupil by an unfamiliar, Jewish name. The film, a “reinvention of the past,” traces the wary, prickly friendship between Julien (Gaspard Manesse), Malle’s surrogate, and a Jewish boy, Jean Bonnet (played by Raphaël Fejtö, with the raw, wounded stare of the young Kafka).
Malle brought us here, or hereabouts, earlier in his career. The betrayal of Bonnet comes through the resentment of a “Lacombe, Lucien” in the making—a crippled scullery lad, mocked, abused, and eventually dismissed for the black marketeering in which several pupils, Julien among them, have actively colluded. This Joseph, returning in the Gestapo’s wake, swaggers uneasily in his flashy new suit, confronting Julien’s gaze of appalled realization. “Stop acting so pious! There’s a war going on, kid,” he blusters, while Julien registers his own inescapably shared guilt.
Earlier, the film skirts the lusher incestuous territory of Murmur of the Heart, in the relationship between Julien and his mother—once again passionate, sexually charged, but also (unlike in the earlier film) exposed as faintly ludicrous in its hothouse romanticism. Already in the opening separation scene, set (where else?) in a railway station, Malle slyly subverts the tone, as the pair luxuriate in melodramatic cliché, with Julien’s Byronic angst (“I don’t give a damn about Dad, and I hate you”) capped by his mother’s Fidelio: “You think I like this? I’d like to dress up as a boy and come with you.” The image this evokes, of the shapely Mme Quentin squeezing her hips into schoolboy shorts, at once erotic and ridiculous, self-­indulgently unreal, sets up one side of the ironic counterpoint that underpins the movie. On the one hand, we have Julien’s smugly moneyed background, where politics are sampled à la mode. (“Is he still for Pétain? No one is anymore,” protests Mme Quentin, with the pique of one accused of favoring last season’s hemline.) Against this stands the stark actuality of the terror endured by Bon­net, for whom no luxury of choice exists—parents vanished or arrested, probably dead, and every passing German soldier a source of anguish.
The film’s moral center resides—unexpectedly enough for the director of Viva Maria! (1965), though it’s worth recalling that Malle was once Robert Bresson’s assistant—in a priest, the school’s director, Père Jean (Philippe Morier-Genoud, conveying fierce compassion beneath an aspect of bony austerity). His are the two crucial decisions: first, to harbor Bonnet and two other Jewish boys under false names; and second, to sack Joseph while not expelling, out of consideration for their parents, his accomplices among the pupils—a discrimination whose inequity causes him evident pain, and leads to tragedy. A figure of awkward integrity, he preaches to the assembled affluent parents a diatribe against the callousness of the rich, and laconically dis­misses Julien’s professed interest in the priesthood: “I don’t think you have any calling for the priesthood. It’s a sorry job, anyway.”
Two vividly contrasted scenes—one dark, one light—evoke the murky moral crosscurrents of the period. A game of treasure hunt leaves Julien and Bonnet lost together in the forest, with night falling and gaunt rocks looming like primeval wood spirits. “Are there wolves in these woods?” inquires Bonnet nervously. But here in the twilight, the dangers are illusory. All that appears is a solitary wild boar, trotting hastily off into the bushes. Even the German soldiers whom they encounter, menacingly silhouetted in steel helmets, prove a lot less than monstrous, wrapping the boys solicitously in a blanket and wistfully trying to establish common ground (“We Bavarians are Catholics”).
A few days later, in the genteel ambience of a restaurant, where Mme Quentin has taken Julien, his elder brother, François, and Bonnet to lunch, the real monsters manifest themselves. A group of French fascist militiamen, dangerous buffoons in fat, floppy berets, arrive to harass a dignified old Jew, demanding his instant ejection. Commotion, pro and con, among the clientele; one plump, overdressed woman shouts, “Send the Jews to Moscow!” The contretemps ends when a Wehrmacht officer, under whose admiring glances Mme Quentin has been preening, objects to having his lunch disturbed and drives the militia ignominiously from the room. “He was showing off for you,” François observes to his mother. “Are we Jewish?” Julien inquires ingenuously. “If they heard you!” she exclaims; then, catching herself: “Mind you, I have nothing against Jews. Except for that Léon Blum. They can hang him.”
This incident is doubly refracted to us: through Bonnet’s apprehensive gaze and also through Julien’s intrigued scrutiny both of the events and of his friend’s reactions, as it gradually impinges on him what it means to be another person, and a Jewish person at that. In Malle’s sympathetic portrayal, Julien rings wholly true as a creature poised on the brink of adulthood, agitated by contrary impulses—touchy, curious, veering unpredictably from cruelty to kindness, savoring the erotic passages in The Arabian Nights yet still prone to bed-wetting. Gaspard Manesse (a nonprofessional, like all the younger cast members) inhabits his role with total conviction. Around him, Malle skillfully re-creates the rhythms and petty details of boarding school life of the period: the unappetizing food, the welcome break of an air raid, stilt battles on the playground, the history teacher (a World War I veteran) marking Allied advances with flags on a map. And a film show, of Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, rapturously received by staff and pupils alike. One sequence of it acquires unwonted poignancy: as the steerage passengers, stock ghetto types in beards and head scarves, are roped off on deck like cattle, misgivings temper the laughter on a few watching faces.
Just occasionally, the film verges on stereotype; as in Lacombe, Lucien, Jewishness automatically equals cultural superiority. Bonnet must excel not only academically but also musically, delighting the pretty young piano teacher with his sensitive Schubert. This can be forgiven, though, for the moment of joyous complicity when, alone with Julien during an air raid, while everyone else has retreated to the shelter, he leads his friend in an exuberant burst of four-handed boogie-woogie.
Given such moments, Au revoir les enfants—for all its tragic subject matter and its elegiac finale—is anything but depressing. In the last scene, as the three Jewish boys and Père Jean are led away to their deaths, Bonnet glances back, and Julien (or, rather, the young Louis Malle) raises his hand in timid salute. In that small, affirmative gesture can be read a promise, which this film, with its emotional commitment, its richness of incidental detail, and the warmth and lucidity of its regard, forty years later duly fulfilled.
Philip Kemp is a freelance writer and film historian, and a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, Total Film, and The International Film Guide. This essay was adapted from a review that appeared in the autumn 1988 issue of Sight & Sound.

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1781-au-revoir-les-enfants-pere-jacques-and-the-petit-college-davon

PETIT COLLEGE D'AVON PERE JACQUES Père Jacques, legally named Lucien Bunel

THE BIOGRAPHY OF Père Jacques, legally named Lucien Bunel

The site of Louis Malle’s film Au revoir les enfants was the Petit-Collège d’Avon, a residential prep school located on the grounds of the Carmelite monastery abutting the park of the fabled French palace of Fontainebleau. Malle attended this school during World War II and was deeply influenced both by its founder and headmaster, Père Jacques, and by the events of those days, which, forty years later, he poignantly explored on film.
Those events took place in Nazi-occupied France. By the fall of 1940, one year after the German invasion of Poland, the Nazis dominated almost all of continental Europe, includ­ing France, which had been overwhelmingly defeated by Hitler’s forces. Everywhere in occupied Europe, Jews were subject, sooner or later, to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and eventually targeted for extermination. As the Nazi vise tightened in France, two key trends emerged: many Jews sought to escape detection by hiding or fleeing, and, gradually, a small network of Christian rescuers grew and came to the aid of the persecuted Jews.
In France, geography aided those Jews seeking to hide, since there were countless small villages and scattered farms, especially in the southern half of the country. For those in flight, France provided potential, but often perilous, routes to Spain and Switzerland, officially neutral neighboring countries, where the dream of safety still survived. The Christian rescuers in France worked clandestinely to provide hiding places, forged documents, escape routes, and, above all, hope to the persecuted Jews. Those Christian rescuers contributed to the fact that 75 percent of French Jews survived the war, a far higher proportion than in Belgium or the Netherlands. Still, of the 300,000 Jews in France, 75,000 perished.
In Au revoir les enfants, Malle was not aiming to produce a documentary film about the Holocaust in France. Rather, he was striving to evoke his experience during the darkest days of the Nazi occupation, especially the day on which his Jewish schoolmates and Père Jacques were arrested and taken away, never to return.
Père Jacques, legally named Lucien Bunel, was the third of seven children in a close, devoutly Catholic, working-class family. He was born in 1900, in Barentin, a Norman mill town in the Seine Valley, near Rouen. From his boyhood years, Bunel developed four enduring characteristics: a deep religious faith, a tireless work ethic, an active love of learning, and a staunch sense of social justice. In 1912, he left home to enter the seminary in Rouen, and for the next thirteen years, until his ordination to the priesthood, he devoted himself to his studies and contemplative prayer. He excelled in French literature and foreign languages. Socially, he emerged as a youth leader of exceptional merit, particularly as director of the summer programs for the needy youngsters of his home parish. During these years, the impact of distant events first directly impinged on him. His brother André was killed in World War I. His own two years of compulsory military service brusquely introduced him to the harsher realities of modern life.
Because of his outstanding performance in the seminary, Bunel was eventually selected to serve, first as a proctor and subsequently as a teacher of religion and English, at St. Joseph’s Institute, a distinguished Cath­olic prep school for boys in Le Havre. Very quickly, the young Father Bunel won the admiration of his colleagues and students for his total dedication and innovative teaching methods, taking an interest in each pupil’s personal progress and unpretentiously practicing the moral ideals he preached in the chapel and explored in the classroom. Still, Father Bunel longed for a stricter, more contemplative life. This quest led him, in 1931, to enter the Carmelite monastery in Lille. The Carmelites had a long, rich tradition of spirituality, but they were not a teaching order. Not long after Father Bunel entered, however, the Carmelite leadership determined that the future of their order required the establishment of a premier Catholic preparatory school for boys, some of whom would potentially join the order in the years ahead.
Père Jacques, as Father Bunel was now called, was, of course, superbly suited to undertake the establishment of such a school. He was enthusiastically selected for the position of founding headmaster. He toiled tirelessly to make the school first a reality and then a model of educational excellence. The Petit-Collège d’Avon first opened its doors for the fall term of 1934 and quickly became one of the most highly regarded Catholic schools in France. Its student body included sons of several of the most prominent Catholic families in France, boys like Louis Malle and his brother.
From its planning to its staffing, every dimension of the organization and operation of the school reflected the guiding spirit of Père Jacques. The idyllic early days of the school ended, however, in September 1938. For Père Jacques, the Czech crisis meant a call-up to military service, and the Munich Accords, far from guaranteeing peace, represented the betrayal by France of its faithful friend Czechoslovakia. He prophetically asked at the time: “How many French citizens no longer appreciate that death is preferable to dishonor?”
With the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939, Père Jacques was called up once again for military service. With the fall of France, in June 1940, he became a German prisoner of war, after his entire artillery battery was captured near Lunéville, in eastern France. Eventually, he was released and returned to Avon, in time to prepare for the delayed reopening of the Petit-Collège, in January 1941. France was now markedly different. The country was not only defeated militarily but also demoralized and divided. The Germans occupied the northern half of the country (including Paris and Avon). A nominally autonomous, but increasingly collaborationist, French regime ruled in the southern half, often called the Free Zone, or simply Vichy.
Gradually, the essential depravity of the Nazi and Vichy authorities was revealed. For conscientious Christians like Père Jacques, the government’s anti-Semitic policies were particularly repugnant. Père Jacques considered Jews theologically to be God’s chosen people and humanly to be his brothers and sisters. He was outraged when he saw his friend Lucien Weil, a distinguished botanist and fellow member of the local Resistance network, wearing the yellow star, as all Jews were required to do. After Professor Weil was deprived of his teaching post at the Lycée Carnot, in Fontainebleau, Père Jacques welcomed him to teach science at the Petit-Collège when school reopened in the fall of 1942.
By this time, there had emerged in France a small but crucially important spiritual resistance movement called Christian Witness (Témoignage chrétien). Through its underground publications, that movement awakened the consciences of countless Christians to the fundamental immorality of Nazism and to the urgency of helping persecuted Jews. In the spirit of this movement, Père Jacques was contacted and implored to shelter three Jewish boys who were in grave danger of deportation and death.
Au revoir les enfants re-creates the experiences of those three Jewish students at the Petit-Collège d’Avon. The film concludes with the arrest of the boys and Père Jacques. The three Jewish students were deported directly to Auschwitz, where they were executed upon arrival, along with their science teacher, Professor Weil—who had been deported on the same train—and his family.
Père Jacques was eventually condemned to the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria. Within the camp, he quickly won the respect and admiration of his fellow prisoners, even the Communists. More than anything else, his selfless care for the sick and the dying, to whom he routinely gave half of his meager ration of food, touched his fellow French-speaking prisoners. They unanimously chose Père Jacques to represent them in their interactions with the liberating forces and the home countries of those who survived when their release finally approached, in May 1945.
By then, Père Jacques weighed only seventy-five pounds and showed undeniable signs of terminal pneumonia. Still, he refused special transport back to France and pledged to remain until the last French prisoner was repatriated. Four weeks later, he died in Linz, Austria. His remains were returned to France, where he was buried in the monastery garden of the Petit-Collège, on June 26, 1945. At his burial, Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, the future Grand Rabbi of France, eulogized Père Jacques with these words: “Thus we have seen cruelty pushed to its extreme horror and benevolence carried to its highest degree of nobility and beauty.” Francis J. Murphy, a specialist in the history of modern France, taught at Boston College for more than thirty years. Among his many publications are several articles and two books concerning Père Jacques, including a biography, Père Jacques: Resplendent in Victory. He died in 2006.

the 400 blows

http://www.criterion.com/films/151-the-400-blows

SYNOPSIS: François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s life-long cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows sensitively re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own difficult childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, petty crime, and a friendship that would last a lifetime. The film marks Truffaut’s passage from leading critic of the French New Wave to his emergence as one of Europe’s most brilliant auteurs.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Antoine Doinel
Jean-Pierre Léaud
Madame Doinel
Claire Maurier
Monsieur Doinel
Albert Remy
Teacher (“Little Quiz”)
Guy Decomble
Monsieur Bigey
Georges Flamant
René Bigey
Patrick Auffay
Credits
Director
François Truffaut
Screenplay
Marcel Moussy and François Truffaut
Cinematography
Henri Decaë
Producer
François Truffaut and Georges Charlot
Music
Jean Constantine
Editing
Marie Josèphe Yoyotte, Cécile Decugis and Michèle de Possel
Disc Features
New digital transfer of The 400 Blows, enhanced for widescreen televisions
New digital transfer of Antoine and Colette (BOX-SET VERSION ONLY)
Two audio commentaries: one by cinema professor Brian Stonehill and another by François Truffaut’s lifelong friend Robert Lachenay
Rare audition footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud, Patrick Auffay, and Richard Kanayan
Newsreel footage of Jean-Pierre Léaud in Cannes for the showing of The 400 Blows
Excerpt from a French TV program with Truffaut discussing his youth, critical writings, and the origins of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows and Antoine and Colette
Television interview with Truffaut about the global reception of The 400 Blows and his own critical impression of the film
Theatrical trailer for The 400 Blows
New and improved English subtitle translations
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Antoine and Colette
By Kent Jones April 28, 2003
On January 19, 1950, the seventeen- (going on eighteen-) year-old François Truffaut attended a 4 P.M. screening at the Cinémathèque française. He met a girl named Liliane Read more »
The 400 Blows
By Annette InsdorfApril 08, 2003
François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups), was more than a semi-autobiographical film; it was also an elaboration of what the French New Wave directors Read more »
Features
“The Face of the French Cinema Has Changed”
By Jean-Luc GodardApril 21, 2009
Fifty years ago today . . . Godard wrote this New Wave battle cry for the April 22, 1959, issue of the French journal Arts, on the news of François Read more »
Interviews
Into the Archives: A Conversationwith Emmanuel Laurent
May 19, 2010
Plenty of ink has been expended over the years on the turbulent friendship between Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which helped Read more »
Dispatches
Bazin Season
By Colin MacCabeDecember 21, 2008
André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s Read more »
Clippings
Truffaut: A Look Back
August 18, 2010
UPDATE 14OCT2010: It seems that we at Criterion, or at least our subtitles, have gotten caught up in a bit of a controversy with regard to the article that we linked to Read more »
Off the Shelf
May 06, 2010
For its June issue, Sight & Sound has conducted a poll of fifty-one leading critics and writers, asking them to select the best, “most inspirational” books about film ever Read more »
Beaucoup de Truffaut
April 07, 2010
The smart folks at the niftily designed film website Not Coming to a Theater Near You are in the midst of a monthlong feature titled Love on the Run: The Films of François Read more »
SIGHT & SOUND RIDES THE WAVE
April 26, 2009
The British film magazine Sight & Sound dedicates its May issue to the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave, which it dates to the first screening of François Read more »

The 400 Blows By Annette Insdorf
François Truffaut’s first feature, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups), was more than a semi-autobiographical film; it was also an elaboration of what the French New Wave directors would embrace as the caméra-stylo (camera-as-pen) whose écriture (writing style) could express the filmmaker as personally as a novelist’s pen. It is one of the supreme examples of “cinema in the first person singular.” In telling the story of the young outcast Antoine Doinel, Truffaut was moving both backward and forward in time—recalling his own experience while forging a filmic language that would grow more sophisticated throughout the ‘60s.The 400 Blows (whose French title comes from the idiom, faire les quatre cents coups—“to raise hell”) is rooted in Truffaut’s childhood. Born in Paris in 1932, he spent his first years with a wet nurse and then his grandmother, as his parents had little to do with him. When his grandmother died, he returned home at the age of eight. An only child whose mother insisted that he make himself silent and invisible, he took refuge in reading and later in the cinema.Like Antoine, Truffaut found a substitute home in the movie theater: He would either sneak in through the exit doors and lavatory windows, or steal money to pay for a seat. In The 400 Blows, Antoine and René reenact the delinquency and cinemania of the young Truffaut and Robert Lachenay (who was an assistant on The 400 Blows). Their touching friendship is captured in René’s unsuccessful attempt to visit Antoine at reform school. And like Antoine, Truffaut ran away from home at the age of eleven, after inventing an outrageous excuse for his hooky-playing. Instead of Antoine’s lie about his mother’s death, Truffaut told the teacher that his father had been arrested by the Germans. The recent revelation that Truffaut’s biological father—whom he never knew—was a Jewish dentist renders this excuse especially poignant. His mother was only seventeen when Truffaut was born; at eighteen, she met Roland Truffaut, whom she married in 1933, and he recognized the boy as his own. Antoine’s uneasy relationship to his adoptive father reflects that of the director. After young François himself committed minor robberies, the senior Truffaut turned him over to the police.It is not surprising that one of the dominant, although subtle, motifs throughout Truffaut’s work is paternity (nor that his entire career is marked by filial devotion to mentors like Renoir and Hitchcock). In The 400 Blows, the class in English pronunciation revolves around a question that can be articulated only with difficulty: “Where is the father?”—a phrase that resonates both within the film (Antoine has never known his real father) and in the director’s life.Antoine Doinel became a composite of two compelling individuals, Truffaut and the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. Out of sixty boys who responded to an ad, the director chose the 14-year-old Léaud because “he deeply wanted that role . . . an anti-social loner on the brink of rebellion.” He encouraged the boy to use his own words rather than sticking to the script. The result fulfilled Truffaut’s avowed aim, “not to depict adolescence from the usual viewpoint of sentimental nostalgia, but . . . to show it as the painful experience that it is.”Anticipating Truffaut’s later preoccupation with the emotional nuances of libidinal love, The 400 Blows is also a tale of sexual awakening: We see Antoine at his mother’s vanity table, toying with her perfume and eyelash curler; later he is fascinated by her legs as she removes her stockings. The stormy relationship of Antoine’s parents—a constant drama of infidelity, resentment, and reconciliation—foreshadows the romantic and marital tribulations of Antoine himself throughout the Doinel cycle, and offers compelling clues to decode the male protagonists of Truffaut’s films in general.The last shot has been justly celebrated for its ambiguity. This brief but haunting release from the harrowing experiences that fill the movie brings Truffaut’s surrogate self in direct contact with his audience—an intimacy he was to pursue throughout his career. Truffaut’s zoom in to freeze-frame (more arresting in 1959, before this technique became a stock-in-trade of television commercials) provides a mirror image of an earlier shot in the police station. When Antoine is arrested for stealing a typewriter, he is fingerprinted and photographed for the files. The mug shot is in fact a freeze-frame that conveys the definitive and permanent way in which he has been caught.That The 400 Blows is a record—even an exorcism—of personal experience is first alluded to in Antoine’s scribbling of self-justifying doggerel on the wall while being punished. On a larger scale, we can see the film as Truffaut’s poetic mark on the wall, or his attempt to even the score; by the last scene, the sea washes away Antoine’s footprints as the film “cleans the slate”—although that final image remains indelible.

The 400 Blows
François Truffaut

Germany Year Zero

http://www.criterion.com/films/297-germany-year-zero

SYNOPSIS: The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black-market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher. Germany Year Zero (Deutschland im Jahre Null) is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
Edmund Koehler
Edmund Meschke
The father
Ernst Pittschau
Eva
Ingetraud Hinze
Karl-Heinz
Franz-Martin Krüger
The teacher
Erich Gühne
Credits
Director
Roberto Rossellini
Producer
Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay
Roberto Rossellini
with the collaboration of
Max Colpet
Cinematography
Robert Juillard
Sets
Piero Filippone
Editing
Eraldo Da Roma
Music
Renzo Rossellini
Sound
Kurt Doubrawsky
Assistant directors
Max Colpet and Carlo Lizzani
Disc Features
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
Video introduction by Roberto Rossellini from 1963
The Italian release opening credits and voice-over prologue
Roberto Rossellini, a 2001 documentary by Carlo Lizzani, assistant director on Germany Year Zero, tracing Rossellini’s career through archival footage and interviews with family members and collaborators, with tributes by filmmakers François Truffaut and Martin Scorsese
Letters from the Front: Carlo Lizzani on “Germany Year Zero,” a podium discussion with Lizzani from the 1987 Tutto Rossellini conference
New video interview with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà
Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre padrone) discussing the profound influence Rossellini’s films have had on them
Roberto and Roswitha, a new illustrated essay by film scholar Thomas Meder on Rossellini’s relationship with his mistress Roswitha Schmidt
New and improved English subtitle translations

Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative—a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and nameless victims. But this was, of course, a conviction that carried plenty of aesthetic and intellectual, as well as spiritual, consequences, including some that we’re still mulling over today.
Deliberately or not, Germany Year Zero concludes Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy by posing a kind of philosophical conundrum, a fact already signaled by its title, which he borrowed, with permission, from a book by French sociologist Edgar Morin. It was a title that stumped even Joseph Burstyn and Arthur Mayer, the American producers of Rome Open City and Paisan, and the fact that Rossellini, characteristically trusting his instincts, refused to say what he meant by it eventually encouraged them to back out of the project, which was largely financed by the French government. But even when Rossellini later tried to formulate what drove him to make the film—in its dedication to the memory of his son Romano (who died in 1946, at the age of nine, after emergency surgery for an inflamed appendix), or in a statement prefacing its international versions—he tended to contradict himself.

This movie, filmed in Berlin in the summer of 1947,” he declared in that statement, is “an objective and faithful portrait,” not “an accusation or even a defense of the German people.” Yet objectivity was clearly (and thankfully) the last thing Rossellini had in mind. Even the doom-ridden modernist score by his brother Renzo participates in the sense of unfolding disbelief and horror by suggesting some of the mood of science fiction. And the directive later in the preface to care about these Germans rather than call for any further retribution is actually more consistent with Rossellini’s aims than any “objective assessment” could be. This was a brave and principled stance for him to take at the time, and it still places Germany Year Zero well in advance of most films about war made even today.
The film stars Edmund Meschke, an eleven-year-old acrobat from a circus family, whom many have said Rossellini cast largely because of his close resemblance to Romano. Playing a motherless boy named Edmund Koehler, who struggles to help support his desperate family (including an ailing father and older sister and brother), Meschke is the film’s affective center and focus, clearly making it the most personal film in Rossellini’s War Trilogy. It’s a story concluding both horribly and logically with Edmund’s suicide after he fatally poisons his father—an act that proceeds no less logically from statements by both his former teacher (espousing the survival of the fittest) and his father himself (about wishing he were dead).
Significantly, Edmund’s family is split between his anti-Nazi father and his pro-Nazi older brother—perhaps no less significantly (and machocentrically), his sister’s politics are simply ignored—but one never feels that Rossellini is limiting his sympathy to ideological allies. At worst, he may overload the motivations for Edmund to poison his father and the melodramatic villainy of two predatory pederasts, but these might ultimately be considered more flaws in his dramaturgy than humanistic failures. They count for little alongside the film’s more acute and far more numerous everyday observations about postwar Berlin.

But paradoxically, Rossellini himself was not much of an auteurist. He said that he made the film for its final stretch: “Everything that goes before held no interest for me.” The whole film “was conceived specifically for the scene with the child wandering on his own through the ruins . . . I only [felt] sure of myself at this decisive moment.” (All of these quotes come from Tag Gallagher’s essential biography, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini.) It is especially in this closing section—anticipating Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) in its depiction of a child oscillating between the contradictory reflexes and demands of childhood and adulthood, where suicide itself becomes the culmination of a child’s game—that Rossellini’s film achieves its devastating lucidity, and one is hardly surprised to learn from Gallagher that some of Rossellini’s specific memories of Romano (such as his playing with a piece of rubble as if it were a gun) are integrated into Edmund’s behavior, which also includes some desultory stabs at hopscotch and similar kinds of play.
Yet it’s worth adding that even some portions of this climactic sequence—such as Edmund passing the fountain and church and playing with his feet—were shot in Rossellini’s absence, by Carlo Lizzani, his (credited) assistant director and (uncredited) cowriter, while Rossellini was back in Rome coping with various marital complications brought about by his adulter­ous relationship with Anna Magnani. According to Lizzani, Rossellini “was of the opinion that the framing could be done this way or that, but if one shot enough and if the idea was clear, the material would be good in any case.” And according to a recent conversation with film scholar Adriano Aprà, who interviewed Lizzani on the subject, an enormous amount of material was in fact shot while Rossellini was away—enough to allow him plenty of choices in the editing after he returned. But selection clearly plays as important a role in defining an auteur as any sort of pure “creation,” especially when some form of documentary truth is what’s ultimately at stake. A gesture of despair that emotionally fuses personal grief with an intense empathy for the dispossessed, Germany Year Zero is finally something closer to a cry of pain than a carefully worked-out and conceptualized statement, and this is what grants it a lasting authenticity.

Jonathan Rosenbaum was a film critic at the Chicago Reader from 1987 through 2007 and now has a website at jonathanrosenbaum.com. His most recent books include Dead Man, Movie Wars, Abbas Kiarostami (with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa), Movie Mutations (coedited with Adrian Martin), Essential Cinema, and Discovering Orson Welles.

A Generation

Foreign flms esepcially the Polish films have matured and aged through their expressionistic devices especially in otherw with the expressions of the vlatility of war and coming of age through the medium of inserting surrealistic dream sequences.
By Ewa Mazierska
Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film, A Generation, made in 1954, marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s. It is also the first chapter in what has come to be known as the director’s “war trilogy,” a series of films—continuing with Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds—tracing the history of Poland during World War Two. These films stand together as sharing not just a historical subject but a historical moment of creation, between 1954 and 1958—a volatile time when the nation was struggling to shed the legacy of Stalinist oppression. They also have in common a visual style and thematic preoccupations unique to this period of Wajda’s work, shot expressionistically in black-and-white and heavy with symbolism rooted in Polish Romanticism.
Wajda would continue to tackle the topic of the Second World War throughout his career, but his interests and approaches changed significantly over the almost half century that spanned A Generation and The Condemnation of Franciszek Klos (2000), his last film on the subject. In his earlier works, he tended to focus on Polish patriotism and heroism, and he was not afraid to display deep empathy for his noble characters. Later, however, his protagonists become more morally ambiguous, and we observe a growing distance between the film author and his characters. Klos, for example, is a Polish policeman who collaborates with the Nazis by betraying Jews and Polish underground fighters simply to earn his living. There is also a political and even geographical shift in the reality represented. Wajda’s early films on the subject of war, most importantly the “trilogy,” concentrated on the most dramatic and crucial events of the years 1939–45—the Ghetto Uprising (A Generation), the Warsaw Uprising (Kanal), the end of the war (Ashes and Diamonds)—taking place principally in Warsaw. By contrast, The Condemnation of Franciszek Klos depicts “ordinary” life in provincial Poland under Nazi rule. The style changes, too, from expressionistic to realistic.
WARTIME POLAND
Wajda’s abiding interest in World War Two stems, of course, from the fact that it is by far the most tragic period in twentieth-century Polish history, when the country became the central battleground between the competing interests of its powerful neighbors, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Following the August 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, in which the two powers agreed to divide East-Central Europe between themselves, Poland was partitioned along the lines of the rivers Narev, Vistula, and San. The Poles initially fought these plans, in a short but bloody war against the Nazis in September 1939, but after losing that battle were subject to German occupation, which lasted until the country’s “liberation” in 1945. This was a time of extreme hardship, when Jewish and other Polish properties and enterprises were confiscated and most Polish cultural and educational institutions were abolished or suspended. There was also a shortage of almost all basic goods, and at the same time trade in them was illegal under the sanction of imprisonment, deportation, and even death. Death was also imposed on anyone who harbored Jews or helped them in any other way. And even those who showed no disloyalty to the occupiers were not safe: the Germans organized raids arresting people at random and punishing the inhabitants of whole tenement blocks and villages for the acts of a few. As a result, a large number of Poles ended up in concentration camps or as slave laborers on German farms. Despite the severe sanctions, however, in many parts of the country underground political and cultural life flourished, including armed forces, universities, and publications. A Generation is a testimony to the dual lives that many Poles led: by day working in German-controlled factories or going to official schools, by night organizing acts of sabotage, helping Jews, and learning Polish history.
In parallel to the Nazi attack from the west, Poland suffered Soviet aggression and colonization from the east, starting in the middle of September 1939. A symbol of the ruthlessness of this onslaught was the Russian extermination in 1940 of fifteen thousand Polish officers (four-and-a-half-thousand were later to be found in a mass grave in Katyn, Byelorussia), which virtually wiped out the whole Polish officer class. Among those killed was Jakub Wajda, Andrzej Wajda’s father, a captain in the 72nd Infantry Regiment. (Until the collapse of Communism in Poland and the Soviet Union, the official line held that this hideous act was perpetrated by the Germans.) More than a million other Poles perished in Soviet gulags during this time.
The political situation changed in 1941 when the Soviet Union joined the anti-Nazi coalition. From this moment, Polish and Russian objectives were, at least on the surface, the same: to defeat the German army. Toward this end, a Polish army was formed on Russian territory. However, due to the lack of Soviet material support, the army left Russian territory and fought the Nazis alongside the Western allies in Italy.
Most Poles involved with the resistance movement against the Nazis joined the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), an underground organization that considered the Polish government-in-exile in London (which was a continuation of the Polish prewar government) to be the only legitimate Polish authority. The Home Army wanted any future Poland to be independent from the Soviet Union. At its peak in 1944, it had 380,000 members, many of them women and teenagers. The Home Army played a crucial role in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the goal of which was to liberate Warsaw from the weakened Nazi occupiers. But it did not succeed, partly due to the strong resistance of the German army, which consolidated its forces in Warsaw, and partly due to its isolation. The Russian army, approaching Warsaw from the east, decided not to intervene, so as not to help an organization whose ultimate objective was opposed to its own. There was also very little assistance from the Western allies. This geographic and political isolation is depicted in Kanal, whose title works on both a literal and metaphorical level. It refers to the escape route through the city sewers and to the doomed fate of the Polish fighters.
After the war, the members of the Home Army and organizations affiliated with it were considered the main enemy of socialist Poland; many were imprisoned for years and many died in the fight against the new Communist authorities. Their situation after the war is the subject of Ashes and Diamonds, as well as Wajda’s The Ring with a Crowned Eagle (1993), which can be regarded as the last chapter of the Polish School—or at least the strand that Wajda created.
A relatively small proportion of anti-Nazi conspirators (about fifty thousand people) joined left-wing military organizations, such as the People’s Guard, transformed in 1944 into the People’s Army. Despite the fact that a majority of the nation opposed becoming a satellite of the Soviet Union, after the war Stalin imposed a Communist government on Poland, known as the PKWN (Polish Committee of National Liberation). Thus Poland joined the group of European socialist countries and formed close political, military, and economic links with its eastern neighbor. This was as much the result of the Soviet victory over Germany as of Western indifference toward Poland’s future. As early as the 1943 Tehran Conference, the leaders of the United States and Great Britain accepted Stalin’s idea of having political control over postwar Poland, and even moving its borders to the west, which resulted in Poland losing part of its eastern territory, often regarded as the cradle of its culture. The unfortunate political outcome of the war was compounded by the enormous human loss: on the whole, about six million Poles died during the war, including practically the entire Jewish population of about three million.
One of the consequences of Poland’s incorporation into the Soviet bloc was the introduction of political censorship. Although it existed almost until the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s, its effect varied. It was felt most profoundly between the end of the war and the middle of the 1950s, when artists, especially those using state funds, were strongly encouraged to follow the rules of socialist realism—meaning producing works with no political or moral ambiguity that would illuminate Communist achievements, denounce enemies of the state, and educate viewers in the spirit of socialism.
Although socialist realism did not overtly preclude making films about the Second World War, for Polish filmmakers this subject proved very difficult to tackle in a way that would be acceptable to both Polish audiences and the political authorities. The main reason was the disparity between the basic historical truth about the war and socialist propaganda. For example, it was universally known that the fiasco of the Warsaw Uprising was largely due to the lack of Soviet help. Similarly, from the perspective of the vast majority of Poles, the members of the Home Army were heroes who fought to free Poland; yet from the perspective of the Communist authorities, they were guerrillas and saboteurs who tried to prevent proletarian rule in Poland.
Another thorny issue was that of the Polish-Jewish relationship during the war. Different groups had opposing views on whether Poles did as much as they could and should have to help their Jewish neighbors. The members of left-leaning underground organizations, such as the People’s Army, wanted to take all the credit for helping the Jews. Among Jews who survived the Holocaust, on the other hand, the prevalent opinion was that Poles could have done much more to save Jewish lives. There was also controversy about the stance of the Polish Catholic church with regard to the Jewish question. While many individual priests harbored Jews, it could be argued that the Church as a whole was rather indifferent to their extermination.
The middle of the 1950s brought many positive changes to Polish politics and social life. A so-called political thaw followed the deaths of Stalin in 1953 and the leader of the Polish Communist party, Wladyslaw Bierut, in 1956, and the bloody events of June 1956, when scores of pro-democracy demonstrators were killed by government troops during street riots in Poznan. These events paved the way for Wladyslaw Gomulka, who envisaged a more independent, less totalitarian Poland, to become the new party leader in October 1956. Although he was no more than a moderate, his pledge to follow a “Polish road to socialism” was almost universally interpreted as the beginning of a new chapter in Polish history.
For filmmakers, the thaw meant a lessening of film censorship and an acceptance of new subjects—particularly involving the Second World War—and styles. Moreover, the organization of film production was transformed through decentralization and a reduction in bureaucracy, and, as a consequence, film production expanded, allowing new directors, scriptwriters, and actors to join the industry.
The creators of the Polish School—a movement that emerged in the middle of the 1950s—were the main beneficiaries of these changes. These directors, including Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Wojciech Has, were all trained after the war, mostly at the Polish National Film School, in Lodz, which opened in 1948. They rejected the simplistic world vision offered by socialist realism and wanted their films to appeal to the viewer through images, rather than the verbal tirades of elevated individuals. In addition, the leading figures of the movement, particularly Wajda and Munk, wanted their films to be rooted in Polish prewar culture, especially in Polish Romantic literature, the most revered Polish literary tradition.
A GENERATION
A Generation is justly regarded as a transitional work between socialist realism and this new Polish School. It can also be seen as a veritable catalog of Wajda’s future thematic interests, narrative solutions, and stylistic idiosyncrasies and thus as a key to understanding his entire oeuvre. The very title of the film deserves special attention, as it perfectly captures the socialist realist requirement of telling the stories of masses of people bound by a common fate and class consciousness—the proletariat—and Wajda’s own ambition, rooted in the ethos of Polish Romanticism, of speaking on behalf of the whole tormented nation.
Set in 1943, the film casts as the main characters two young factory workers, Stach Mazur (Tadeusz Lomnicki) and Jasio Krone (Tadeusz Janczar), who belong to the so-called Generation of Columbuses, a term borrowed from the book by Roman Bratny, Columbuses Born in 1920, published in 1957. Bratny wrote that for these people, the Second World War was a crucial experience and that they lost the most because of it: their youth, innocence, even life itself. A Generation depicts their ideological maturation, understood in terms of joining an anti-Nazi conspiracy and the Communist movement. Stach, who is the main character and the narrator of the film, is an uncomplicated, even naive, young man. He is guided into adulthood by an older foreman, Mr. Sekula, who advises him less on how to be a good craftsman than on how to understand capitalism in Marxist terms, emphasizing exploitation of workers. As a highly political and paternalistic figure, Mr. Sekula is reminiscent of the high-minded and generous party secretaries who helped younger people reach privileged positions on the professional ladder in such typical socialist realist Polish films from the 1950s as Leonard Buczkowski’s Adventure in Marienstadt (1954).
Jasio Krone, on the other hand, has little in common with the heroes of socialist realism. In his long white coat, evoking 1950s Western intellectuals, he comes across as mysterious and complicated. Jasio describes himself as a Communist but does not want to join the organization. He is the first one in the group to shoot and kill a German, but later he shows an existential distaste for killing, saying it “turns my stomach,” and insists on being treated as a civilian. Despite that, he agrees to help the Jews during the Ghetto Uprising. Moreover, his suicide when cornered by the Nazis is at odds with the optimistic world of socialist realism. He is closer to Polish Romanticism and a forerunner of Wajda’s later characters from his Polish School period, especially Maciek Chelmicki in Ashes and Diamonds. Although Stach’s role was greater than that of Jasio, the impression is that the latter character was more significant to the director. This was noted by some critics, including Boleslaw Michalek, who wrote: “It is a fair guess that the inner world to which Wajda personally felt most attuned was that of Jasio Krone—edgy, troubled, bewildered, switching from one extreme to the other.”
Another important character in the film is Dorota, a young female Communist who inspires Stach to join the anti-Nazi organization. A highly energetic, idealistic, and pretty woman—played by Urszula Modrzynska, who was previously cast as a young Communist in Maria Kaniewska’s Not Far from Warsaw (1954)—she can be regarded as a familiar stereotype. Yet, again, her tragic ending separates her from the heroines of socialist realism. Through Dorota, Wajda includes in his film the motif of love, which is desired by the characters but rendered impossible because of the political circumstances and the characters’ sense of duty toward their motherland. This type of woman, who is young but more stoic and mature than men of her age, will become an enduring feature of Wajda’s universe. In particular, Dorota can be seen as a “sister” of Daisy in Kanal and Krystyna in Ashes and Diamonds.
As with the construction of some of the characters, the visual style of A Generation suggests its connection with a different cinematic paradigm than that of socialist realism: expressionism, especially its later embodiment in films such as Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). A Generation conveys the impression that Warsaw under Nazi occupation was hell, at least for the Polish fighters (an idea developed further in Kanal). A large part of the film’s action takes place at night or in dark, cavernous places. The streets are often enclosed by the ghetto walls or gates, dividing the Polish and Jewish parts of Warsaw; courtyards, sewers—where the fighters hide—and interiors feel extremely claustrophobic. There is so little light in the sheds, cellars, tunnels, bunkers, cafés, and flats where the conspirators meet that their faces are hardly discernible. The motif of coal, stolen at the beginning of the film from the German train, adds to the impression of Warsaw as an inferno. Eventually, at the time of the Ghetto Uprising, part of Warsaw is literally ablaze. Two other important visual elements, probably borrowed from film noir, are the iron bars, through which people gaze, and the circular staircase, suggesting the impossibility of escaping one’s dire fate. Wajda also uses elements of mise-en-scène to add dark humor and irony to his narrative, and as a premonition of things to come—for example, when we see an image of Stach, who has just parted with Dorota, inside a large empty heart with the inscription, “I shall wait for you,” a kitschy item from a peddler-photographer designed for young couples.
In this his debut film, Wajda refers not only to the Polish anti-Nazi conspiracy as a means of liberating Poland but to the more difficult issue of the Polish attitude to the Jewish Holocaust, a theme to which he will return in films such as Samson (1961) and Holy Week (1995). In common with these later renderings, the director admits that some Poles welcomed, even enjoyed Nazi extermination of their Jewish neighbors. In one scene, a man named Ziarno, who works in the same factory as Stach and Jasio, jokes to his unamused co-workers, “The Yids have actually started fighting!” We also see a fairground erected next to the ghetto wall—which is also the motif of a famous poem by Czeslaw Milosz, “Campo di Fiori,” in which the poet compares the burning of Giordano Bruno on Rome’s Campo di Fiori with the burning of Jews during the uprising in 1943. Milosz makes the point that the impact of these two horrendous acts on their witnesses was small—life went on as before.
We can assume that the Germans built the fairground to draw Polish attention away from the burning ghetto and to make Poles associate the suffering of Jews with fun. At the same time, the image of the fairground suggests that some Poles were hostile to the Jews and welcomed their cleansing. However, images, actions, and conversation conveying Polish anti-Semitism are more than balanced by scenes representing Polish help for Jews and Polish martyrdom. In particular, two of three main characters, Jasio and Dorota, pay with their lives for their efforts to rescue Jews.
Music in A Generation both illustrates and provides a counterpoint to the action, and is as variable as Stach’s moods, ranging from optimistic to ominous, from symphonic orchestra to single piano. One critic described it as an “echo of the human heart,” strengthening the subjectivity of Wajda’s film. The composer, Andrzej Markowski, also uses popular songs from the war period and national uprisings, and even a German love song in an episode when Stach and Dorota are close to confessing their love for each other. In due course, Wajda (who always modestly claimed that he did not know much about film music and blindly trusted his composers) became renowned for his innovative approach to music scores.
A Generation was not only a film about a generation of young people, it was also made by young people. Wajda was twenty-seven at the time of shooting, and almost all of his main collaborators, including the actors Lomnicki, Modrzynska, Janczar, and Roman Polanski, as well as composer Markowski, were under thirty. For most of them, A Generation was their first major film. Given this, and the censorship of the times, it’s an astonishingly mature and self-assured work. In his next two films, Wajda would develop many of the thematic and visual motifs he introduced in A Generation, taking full advantage of the growing freedom Polish artists were beginning to experience to tell even darker, more pessimistic tales of the war—as if assuming the role of advocate for all those to whom these events brought only misery and defeat. Ewa Mazierska is a reader in contemporary cinema in the Department of Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. Her publications include numerous articles in Polish and English about contemporary Polish and world cinema and several books, including Trapped in the Present and Other Postmodern States: The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai and From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema (co-author Laura Rascaroli).