Landscape After Battle

Wajda's strange, turbulent, bracing film sees him returning to his old stomping ground of World War II, but the style is far more expressionist and fragmentary, the political analysis more complex, than in his famous trilogy. The landscape in question is a former concentration camp which, after the liberation, houses Polish 'displaced persons', including the disillusioned poet Tadeusz - presumably named after the author of the film's source material, Tadeusz Borowski, who committed suicide after surviving Auschwitz. Wajda's Tadeusz (played with precision by Olbrychski) seems to have a happier time of it: his belief in humanity is rekindled by an affair with a Jewish girl escaping from Poland. But there's still no easy sentimentality here, no easy solution to the problems of national and human identity. Wajda uses his darting camera to extract endless cruel ironies from the grim setting, and even presents the final credits in an odd, unsettling manner - they're daubed up on the side of railway wagons.