Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kanal
1957 · Andrzej Wajda · Kanal on Sightlines
Deep in Kanal there is a grate. Behind its bars is daylight and the open water of the Vistula. After hours of wading blind through the sewers, this is what the way out looks like: the river is right there and anyone can see it, and nobody can pass through.
The film has prepared us for that image from the start. In the opening minutes a narrator tells us to watch these people closely, because these are the last hours of their lives. Andrzej Wajda gives away the ending before the drama begins. It is the boldest decision in the film, and it changes what watching means. We stop asking whether anyone gets out and start watching how each of them doesn't. Every scene after that carries a double charge: we watch it as it happens, and we watch it as an elegy.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, gives us a useful way to see what Wajda does with this. Deleuze argued that classical cinema runs on what he called the movement-image. A character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves things. The war film is its purest form, because soldiers are people whose job is to turn what they see into what they do. Watch the first stretch of Kanal with that in mind. Jerzy Lipman's camera moves with an almost documentary fluidity through the rubble of the failing Uprising. The company is introduced in continuous motion, receiving orders and carrying them out. The links between seeing and doing still hold, even though the city around them is already lost.
Then Lieutenant Zadra orders them down, and the links snap. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: characters can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive. In the sewer, perceiving barely happens at all. Lipman lights the tunnels so that faces swim up out of black and sink back into it. Every junction is a choice, any choice might be fatal, and nowhere gives you a view of where you are. The script came from Jerzy Stefan Stawiński, who went through these sewers himself in 1944, and you can feel his knowledge in the arguments over which channel leads where. Those arguments matter because people are still trying to act. The darkness has made acting a guess.
Deleuze has a name for the kind of place this becomes: the any-space-whatever. It is a space that has stopped working as a setting for action and broken into pieces that no longer add up to a map. He first found such spaces in the ruined cities of postwar European film. Wajda goes one better and takes his characters under the ruins. The sewer is a labyrinth of tunnels that fade into the dark. Halina Nawrocka's editing breaks it up the same way. Once underground the company splits apart: Zadra's group, the wounded Korab led by the messenger Daisy, and the composer wandering alone. The film cuts between them as they lose touch, until we too stop knowing who is where or who is still alive.
That cross-cutting has a family tree. D.W. Griffith's Intolerance established the parallel montage that races several strands toward a foretold catastrophe. In the American tradition Deleuze describes, that kind of montage usually closes on a rescue. Nawrocka uses the same grammar and takes the rescue away. Here the strands pull apart and stay apart. Each cut back to a group shows what it has lost since we last saw it.
The light has a lineage of its own. Fritz Lang's M gave postwar cinema its low-key chiaroscuro and its manhunt through an underworld. Deleuze reads that German tradition as a struggle between light and shadow in which the world itself seems charged and alive. Carol Reed's The Third Man put that look in an actual sewer and tied it to a single instrument, the zither. Wajda borrows both debts openly. What he changes is the scale. Reed's sewer chase is the climax of a thriller about one hunted man. Wajda's is the entire second half of a film about a hunted collective. His version of the instrument is the ocarina played by the shell-shocked composer, played with unforgettable strangeness by Władysław Sheybal. It is the descendant of the tune Lang's murderer whistles in M: a sound that announces death. Its music drifts through the tunnels with no source you can reach, and the others follow it or run from it.
This is where Deleuze's sharpest tool comes in. He describes the pure optical and sound situation as a moment when a character, and we along with them, can only look or listen because no action is possible. Through the ocarina, Kanal gives us pure sound. In two recurring images it gives us pure sight. One is the manhole, a pale disc of daylight overhead that is out of reach. The other is the barred grate over the river. These are the film's central inventions. Each puts freedom inside the frame and makes it impossible to reach. The characters become watchers of the world they are dying to get back to.
This lens doesn't make Wajda's film more complicated. It shows what the film is about. André Bazin championed Italian neorealism, the films of Rome, Open City, Bicycle Thieves and La Terra Trema, for their faith in real places and ordinary defeat. Deleuze went further and argued that neorealism is where the time-image is born: the moment cinema's characters stop acting and start seeing. Kanal takes its gravity and restraint from that tradition, and its above-ground prologue is staged in authentic-looking ruin. Then it does something stranger. It turns the shift from acting to seeing into its plot. The descent into the sewer is a descent from one way of filming people into another.
History is part of the meaning too. The Home Army answered to the London government-in-exile, and the Red Army waited across the Vistula while Warsaw was destroyed. Putting those insurgents on screen as tragic heroes only became possible after the thaw of 1956, and in 1957 it was a pointed act. Seen that way, the river behind the grate holds more than water. Kanal shared the Special Jury Prize at Cannes that year, carried Polish cinema to the world, and handed its unfinished grief forward to Ashes and Diamonds.
So watch it again, the way the narrator asks. Notice how much of the screen is black, and how each patch of light is a place no one can reach. Then ask what that opening instruction really is. Is it a monument to these people, or a charge against everyone who stood on the far bank and only watched?
Concepts in play
- Crisis of the action-image — After the mobile, action-driven opening above ground, the descent leaves the insurgents unable to orient themselves or act effectively. Any choice of direction might be fatal, they argue over which channel leads where.
- Any-space-whatever (disconnection) — The sewer is staged as a labyrinth of branching junctions and tunnels fading into darkness, with no vantage point that gives orientation. The editing cross-cuts between groups that have lost contact until neither they nor the viewer knows who is where.
- Pure optical and sound situations — The barred grate onto the Vistula, through which freedom can be seen but not reached. The manhole as a disc of unreachable daylight. The composer's ocarina drifting through the tunnels as a disembodied sound that others follow or flee.
- Organic (American) parallel montage, inverted — Nawrocka cross-cuts between Zadra's group, Korab and Daisy, and the lone composer, using the Intolerance grammar of strands racing toward a foretold catastrophe, but the strands pull apart and no rescue arrives.
- Expressionism (light–shadow gradient) — Lipman's extreme low-key chiaroscuro: faces rising out of black and dissolving into it, silhouettes against the faint glow of an exit, stray light on the water. This is the debt to M's underworld lighting.
- Relative out-of-field — The manhole recurs as a disc of daylight that implies the world above, adjacent and out of reach.