Katyn - Third Time Impressions

Did I mention I’ve been sick these past two days? Lying in my flat sweating in the dark, moaning and grumbling to myself, watching films like Made in Britain, Scum, No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, If and, this morning the 2007 film, Polish film Katyn.

This is the third time I’ve watched this film and three things struck me vividly this time.

The first is just how, as a narrative, it really fails to explain what the hell is going on half the time. Like the Tom Cruise film Valkryie if you don’t happen to have an interest in World War 2 history you’d have a hell of a time working out who was what and why they were doing that with them. Or, to put it another way, maybe I’m so used to be being baby-fed by Hollywood executives’ insistence on “explanation dialogue” that I can’t take a story without it. Either way, moments of confusion abound and it limits its appeal as a film to a non-Polish audience.

The second is just what a raw piece of anti-Soviet Russia film making it is. As it reflects a terrible crime and the following lengthy occupation of this country by Russia, I’ve no problem with that.  But it struck me that the Russian decision to screen it on domestic channels last year as even more demonstrative.

Russia is an extraordinary country when you think about it. We talk about Belarus being the last dictatorship in Europe when Russia is a sham democracy if ever there was one. The death and imprisonment of opposition journalists and political figures; the cult of a masculine, distinctly Russian leader which bears more than a whiff of times gone by;  economic and military grandstanding in power politics and invasions by a cosseted, unreplacable power elite. So as I watched Katyn this morning I was surprised by my surprise -  as it were – I mean, at just how negative the portrayal was and the corresponding depth of the gesture to play it to a Russian home audience. If I was a 'proud' Russian I might have thrown the TV out of the window. 

In Britain we don’t have to feel ashamed about our narrative of the past. Well, we don’t think we do. So we sing “Two World Wars and One World Cup” quite happily at German football fans. The Second World War is much more complicated than that in this region.

Which brings me on to my third point.

I’ve lived in Poland for just under a year now. I’ve read more about its history, sat over a beer and talked with people of many different ages across the country. Hardly any of them won’t have a story to tell that involves their parents or grandparents that doesn’t have at least a streak of Poland’s violent past somewhere. Stories of heroism, pain, suffering and loss. Names that you’ve seen only in the pages of books are alive in people’s heads as the places their Grandfather  or Grandmother was shot or imprisoned or forcibly evacuated to. It’s the past. But it’s their past.

The phrase “pamiętaMY” is not just boastful rhetoric or drunken “and the RAF from England shot one down...” football banter. It’s real and it’s raw. Clearly, some of that national emotion has seeped into my consciousness because in the final, brutal scenes of executions in those cold, lonely woods I found myself shedding quite a few tears. So much hatred and waste and for what? Plus ca change...


Ps... don't forget to scroll down... I've been busy today and there's naked babcias and smug cyclists to check out!