Powódź
Poland, 1947, black and white, 13 mins
Although barely known outside Poland, Jerzy Bossak (1910-89) was one of the key figures in the development of Polish cinema, especially in the immediate postwar period when the industry was getting back on its feet after a near-total shutdown during World War II. In the 1930s, he had been a member of the Society for the Promotion of Film Art (Stowarzyszenie Miłośników Filmy Artystycznego, or START), a club roughly analogous to the London Film Society of the time, dedicated to the recognition of film as a serious art form. From 1946, he continued to promote these ideals as editor of the magazine Film, was one of the first teachers at the Łódź Film School on its foundation in 1948, and would later become head of Poland’s documentary unit (WFD) while also running Kamera, one of the main Polish state-funded film units – while somehow finding time to become one of Poland’s pioneering documentary-makers.
Co-directed with Wacław Kaźmierczak, The Flood (1947) is one of the most important of Bossak’s early documentaries, not least for its international recognition in the form of a Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Documentary – a significant fillip for a still-shattered industry. It stands up very well over sixty years on, not least thanks to the decision to dispense with a commentary in favour of the universal language of images and music (the composer, sadly, is uncredited on the print under review). The flood in question occurred in March 1947, when the Vistula (Wisła) river that roughly bisects Poland down the middle burst its banks, with the results depicted in the film.
Although the film’s subject is obvious from the title (and 1947 audiences would presumably have made an instant connection with the Vistula incident as well), the film begins with a series of oddly beautiful trompe l’oeil shots of what looks like a tree growing out of a snow-shrouded landscape, swept by Arctic winds, an impression reinforced by close-ups of icicles dangling from the branches, and snow melting off a tiled roof, the water at this stage little more than harmless droplets. The sense of the picturesque is maintained even when the film cuts to what appears to be a gently flowing stream, but it rapidly becomes a raging torrent, and by the time we see a dam giving way, it’s clear that this is no ordinary heralding of spring. (The music, too, has given way from soft and lyrical to loud and brassy, occasionally overlaid by sound effects).
We see people, frantically engaged in what appears to be repairs to a small wooden bridge – until we realise that they’re actually taking it apart and transporting its planks and logs to safety before they’re swept away. Men armed with long metal poles try to break up sheets of ice that are floating alarmingly quickly along the rapids (though the chunks they miss end up providing a temporary raft for other species that are just as keen to escape the onrush). When these prove inadequate, soldiers lob grenades into the ice, the resulting explosions almost indistinguishable from the natural ones caused by multiple collisions of water, ice and man-made structures. But it’s too little, too late, and when the middle section of a larger bridge collapses, it’s clear that the waters have the upper hand.
As if to emphasise this, Bossak and Kaźmierczak then cut to aerial shots which underline the extent of the flooding, with entire villages submerged up to their upper storeys and surrounded by the same crumbling ice sheets. This footage has an endearingly makeshift quality to it: worlds apart from today’s stabilised helicopter shots, the cameraman is sitting in the rear seat of an old-fashioned biplane. But this lo-tech approach humanises it: this isn’t a dispassionate God’s eye view, it’s coming from all too mortal individual in a plane that wouldn’t last too long if forced to land in mid-shoot.
Towards the end of the aerial sequence we see people rowing boats or paddling makeshift boats to help those stranded on the roofs or waving frantically from upper windows. Families gather what belongings they can salvage, and small children climb on the backs of those strong enough to carry them. Food and other essential supplies (including large hay bales, presumably for flood defences) are loaded onto a plane altogether more formidable than the one used by the cameraman earlier. We return to the aerial shots, but this time the implied message has changed from “isn’t this ghastly?” to “help is coming!”, and we see mutually supportive communities banding together on patches of dry land, their livestock tethered to nearby trees.
A young girl helps with the chores, while an older woman dabs at her eyes with her headscarf. A plane flies overhead and drops provisions by parachute. Children look on longingly as a huge urn is turned into a gigantic soup tureen. Gradually, they trudge across the now mud-caked landscape to their homes (or what remains of them). And finally, in the only sequence that directly anticipates the soon-universal doctrine of socialist realism, a man admires his plough, glinting in the sunlight, attaches it to his horse, and starts work on the fields. If Spike Lee’s four-hour Hurricane Katrina requiem When The Levees Broke (2006) had dispensed with its interviews and analysis and was reduced purely to its evocative Terence Blanchard-scored shots of the waterborne devastation, it might have looked something like this.
We should be grateful that Bossak and Kaźmierczak made their film when they did – very soon afterwards, they would probably have been forced to impose a crunchingly unsubtle narration explaining how these heroic workers and peasants are defying the elements and banding together in support of People’s Poland. The Flood is more than eloquent enough without this kind of hand-holding, and the lack of any spoken content accentuates its timelessness. Not long after Polish cinema had essentially restarted from scratch, it was one of the earliest signs that its filmmakers still had talent to burn.
- Directors: Jerzy Bossak, Wacław Kaźmierczak
- Camera: Karol Szczeciński, Władysław Forbert
- Production Company: Film Polski