Andrzej Wajda’s final film, Afterimage, fits snugly within a canon devoted to the tumultuous history of Poland as seen through the eyes of significant figures. Here, that figure is Władysław Strzemiński (Bogusław Linda), an avant-garde painter and art professor introduced rolling down a hill to greet a new student. Robbed of an arm and a leg in World War I, Strzemiński is nonetheless so enthusiastic and passionate an instructor that he can bound ahead of the youth at the Higher School of Plastic Arts and he regularly spellbinds them with his evocative lectures. The film’s title stems from one of his philosophical terms for art, which he sees less as the imprint of reality than of a timestamp of subjective memory; an attempt to recreate what one noticed, not everything that was there.
Naturally, this abstract theory runs afoul of emerging restrictions in postwar communist Poland, a conflict that Wajda amusingly literalizes in a shot of Strzemiński sitting down to paint, only for his canvas to turn red as his window is covered over by a colossal poster of Stalin. Perturbed by his blocked light, the painter casually cuts a hole in the portion of the poster that covers his window, earning him an immediate arrest and deposition at the Education Office. Strzemiński, so sprightly in the presence of his students, about-faces in front of authority, responding to inquiries about his lack of party loyalty with calmly stated but firm rejections of the new political imperative to promote ideology through art. Wajda calls attention to the suffocating impact of that view of culture throughout; the police station where the painter is detained barely has enough furniture to seat the cops who work there, and the interior sports no decor on the pallid seafoam walls. Color seems to be leached out of the air by the dour tone of drab interior paint and looming propaganda, color that occasionally floods the screen in the rare cutaways to Strzemiński’s creations. Chief among these is a museum exhibit where his brightly colored paintings and his wife’s oblong, baffling sculptures are pored over by fascinated schoolchildren like fossils of a long-buried age, not so much made as uncovered by archaeologists.
In short order, Strzemiński finds himself being culturally erased, his works pulled from gallery walls if not outright destroyed, and political pressure forces his union and even his students to turn on him. In one of the film’s most quietly distressing scenes, the artist attempts to collect an advance for a proposed public mural from the cultural commission, only for the secretary to tear up his member ID – her hand and voice shaking as she does so – in a fit of rehearsed doublespeak and sends him away without a penny. Wajda captures the complete suffocation of the artist by denying much of his art. Following those initial demonstrations of Strzemiński’s work we only get to see occasional moments of him lost in his painting, the rest of his time dominated by the desperate attempt to get paid. Though the man does still create here and there for the good of his soul, Wajda flatly dismisses the notion that an artist can work without pay, showing how the lack of compensation drains inspiration in favor of pure survival.
Party officials and various administrators attempt to persuade the painter to see reason, and the communists in particular urge him to conform in order to battle back against capitalistic excess. Unspoken in these pleas is the irony that the aims of the Communist Party and capitalism on the subject of art are both fatally reductive. The party wishes art to be functional and to promote ideology, while capitalism wants art that turns a profit. Neither category suits Strzemiński, leaving him without allies as he plies his wares. Because of that, however, the lack of the man’s art starts to drag down the film, offering not even an interior escape from the painter’s political torture. As thematically appropriate as it is, this structure nonetheless saps the film of its energy well before the end of its 95-minute running time.
The greatest countermeasure to this intentional slog lies in the performances of Linda and Bronislawa Zamachowska as Strzemiński’s young daughter, Nika. Linda never loses the fire of Strzemiński’s defiance underneath the painter’s weary shell, bristling with an energy that struggles for an outlet. Yet the actor is outdone by Zamachowska, who plays Nika with an intelligence and awareness completely stripped of the usual pangs of precocity. Intuiting immediately what her father’s work will bring down upon the house, Nika works her hardest to reassure her family. But she also begins to take measures to look after herself, going so far as to pack her things to stay at a girls’ home close to school. If her father understandably turns to bitterness as a result of the outrages visited upon him, Nika bears her suffering the way most did under such regimes, with silence and fortitude. In a film that catalogs how little power art has against the determination of the state, it is Nika’s resilience more than Strzemiński’s that speaks to its enduring power.
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