Knights of the Teutonic Order · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Three peacock feathers.

A boy comes back from a war in Lithuania he barely understands, sees a girl, and swears he will bring her three crests torn from the helmets of Teutonic knights. It is a lover's arithmetic: a countable number, a thing you could carry in one hand. Hours later the promise gets settled in an open field at Grunwald by thousands of men, and by a hymn. Krzyżacy is the story of a small vow being swallowed by an enormous one, and the swallowing is where the film does its thinking.

Deleuze divides cinema at the Second World War. Before the break, the reigning form is the action-image in what he calls its large form: a situation bears down on people until someone acts decisively enough to change it. Situation, act, new situation. The middle term is load-bearing. Everything the film shows you of the world exists so that the act, when it finally comes, can be big enough to answer it. Ford builds his situation with unusual patience. The Teutonic Order is staged as an order in the monastic sense, ranked and robed and ceremonial, faces closed inside mail, its chambers at Szczytno lit in candle-browns and reds against black. Deleuze would call that an encompasser: the milieu that calls the act out of the characters. It isn't a set of villains. It's a system, and Ford lets you learn its manners before he lets anyone fight it.

That patience explains the film's strangest structural decision, and its best one. For two thirds of its length, nothing Zbyszko does works. He vows, and the vow gets him condemned. He is humiliated; the Order takes what he loves; the man who stands against it, Jurand of Spychów, is broken and mutilated by it, and Andrzej Szalawski plays that ruin heavily enough to tilt the whole film toward it. In Deleuze's vocabulary this is the imprint, situation and character stamping each other until you can read one off the other. Kalenik's Zbyszko is deliberately callow at the start, a boy whose vows outrun his judgement, and the long middle is the world correcting him at the cost of everyone he loves. A modern film would stop there. That is exactly where Deleuze says postwar cinema begins: the moment a character can only watch what is happening, with no adequate action available. Ford runs the deferral to that edge and then pays it. The years of injury are not a discovery that action has become impossible. They are a debt, and Grunwald is the payment.

Now the look. Jahoda uses the new anamorphic frame as a horizontal field for heraldry: banners, lances, rows of helmets laid across the width, figures set in depth so a crowd reads as an army instead of a foreground of extras. The camera stays mounted and reserved, and when it moves it tracks sideways along a line of men, which reinforces the frieze rather than breaking it. Both hosts become what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective rendered as one affective unit with a single temperature. Ford keeps two or three Teutonic villains sharply drawn so the white-and-black mass behind them can stay abstract.

Here is where the film gets genuinely interesting philosophically. Deleuze, following Bergson, says cinema's real novelty was the any-instant-whatever: motion sampled mechanically, twenty-four times a second, no instant more important than its neighbours. Painting before it worked in privileged instants, the posed climactic form. Ford aims the newest equipment in the Eastern Bloc, the country's first colour widescreen feature, hard-currency stock, army cavalry, at a privileged instant that already existed. Matejko's 1878 canvas of Grunwald is the most reproduced image in Polish painting, hunted by the Nazis and hidden by Poles at real risk. The churning press of bodies, the white mantles with black crosses, the Grand Master going down among lances. The film's job was never to show its audience something they had not seen. It was to set in motion a picture they already owned, and to arrive at it on cue. That is why the reserve of the first two hours isn't timidity. It's a runway.

Then the cutting changes. Long scenes and sustained two-shots give way to charges intercut with commanders, hooves, falling standards, the shrinking geometry of the Teutonic wedge. Writing about Eisenstein, Deleuze separates organic montage — growth, accumulation, the spiral — from pathetic montage, the collision that produces a leap into a new quality. Krzyżacy is built on exactly that pair: narrative time thickens through the years of injury, then collapses. And the leap is handed to sound. Serocki, a founder of the Warsaw Autumn festival and nobody's idea of a national-epic composer, writes brass and modal archaism for the picture, then steps aside at the climax and lets the orchestra yield to massed voices singing Bogurodzica. The register changes before the image does. A military event becomes a sacred one in your ears first.

The craft debts are specific. From Alexander Nevsky, the enemy as an anonymous helmeted wedge filmed in sustained lateral tracks, the long dread of the stasis before contact, and the score rather than dialogue pronouncing the verdict on the slaughter. From Ivan the Terrible, the frontal near-immobile grouping where silhouette and banner carry the composition, so that any shift into movement registers as an event. From Henry V, the antiquarian method of building armour and livery from period illumination, plus the charge cut in progressively shortening shots against a rising orchestral figure. From pre-war Polish cinema, Kościuszko pod Racławicami, the habit of treating a national canvas as a literal blocking diagram. And from Ford's own Border Street, a community watched through crosscut households until sacrifice consolidates it into one moral body. He had worked out his grammar on the Warsaw Ghetto. Here he moves it to a medieval manor and industrialises it.

The politics aren't hidden. In 1960 the GDR had recognised the Oder–Neisse line and West Germany had not, and a film in which a Polish–Lithuanian coalition annihilates a German crusading order on that ground was an argument about the map, made in the most popular form available. Roughly thirty-two million admissions. The more striking fact is where Ford was standing when he made it. Down the corridor of the same nationalised industry, Wajda and Munk were dismantling the iconography of heroic sacrifice, finding that the collective a death is supposed to consolidate may not be there at all. Ford, the industry's founder and elder statesman, spent its largest budget rebuilding that iconography in Eastmancolor. Deleuze's account of the postwar crisis of the action-image usually reads like something that happened to filmmakers. This is a case of it being refused on purpose, by a man who had watched it arrive.

What survived is a template and a composite. Jahoda carried what he learned here about making artificial worlds look solidly inhabited into The Saragossa Manuscript and The Doll. The industry learned it could mount the international-scale blockbuster and not only the small, difficult, black-and-white film. And what Poles now see when they think of Grunwald is part Matejko, part Ford, which is about the rarest thing a movie can do to a country.

Watch it for the withheld camera. Count how seldom it moves, and how the frieze holds even through grief. Then notice what happens in your chest when the cutting finally accelerates. That release is the large form working on you exactly as engineered. And keep an eye on Jagienka: Modrzyńska plays her active and earthbound against Danusia's near-total passivity, and the film is visibly more alive whenever she is in it, which raises a question the epic never puts to itself. The machine runs on the girl who cannot act. The life is in the one who can.