Screening of Kanal | Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series
Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of KANAL (Kanał)
Poland, 1957. 91 minutes
Directed by Andrzej Wajda. 35mm print. Print Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. Janus Films/Polart.
on Saturday, December 9, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L01
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles
The earliest film made about the Warsaw Uprising, KANAL is doubtless the best-known of the partisan films to be shown during the fall segment of our series. The second film (following A GENERATION (1955) and ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958)) of Wajda’s war trilogy, this stunningly shot work raises still-burning questions about the relationship between private and political life during wartime, and about how the Uprising has been narrated as a historical event. Presented by Krystyna Iłłakowicz, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University
Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program
About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.