Wajda: Niewinni Czarodzieje (Innocent Sorcerers) (1960)

Part of what made Andrzej Wadja’s war trilogy so powerful was the way in which it dissociated ideology from individual perception and cognition. By Ashes and Diamonds, it was almost as if Wajda had found a cinematic language for capturing the mass migration of ideologies across faces, crowds and even inanimate spaces. Innocent Sorcerers was his second film after Ashes and Diamonds and, to its credit, it doesn’t try and perfect what had already been perfected. Instead, Wajda turns his eye in the opposite direction, focusing on a new generation of disaffected Polish youth, who refuse to engage with history or politics if they can avoid it. Of course, that refusal just makes them an even more ambitious canvas for Wajda’s camera, which is faced, for the first time, with a total lack of net ideological movement. As it moves through twenty-four hours in the lives of these wandering, New Wave vagrants, you gradually realise that their languorous apathy simply results from the pressure of too many competing demands, especially the equally applied pressures of an older and newer socialist Poland. Nothing moves, but movement is everywhere, which can make it feels less formally innovative than the trilogy, but somehow more luxuriant and leisurely in its formalism at the same time, as Wajda comes about as close as a perfectionist can to something resembling improvisation. At its most mercurial moments, it’s as if these fleeting impressions of a generation are only really available to ideology in the same way that, say, jazz improvisers are available to musical structure, which denatures and deforms as it moves through them, possessing them even as they feel they’ve possessed it, fragmenting them even as they feel they’ve gathered it under their countercultural individualism. In that sense, it perhaps pairs Wajda’s camera with what it was anticipating all along – a post-ideological society, a society in which ideology’s liberated from our capacity to even recognise it as such. And that’s quite a backhanded tribute to this new Poland, a series of choices and gestures that somehow keep on returning to the same choices and gestures, slaves to the amniotic ambience with which Wajda surrounds them.