Afterimage

Andrzej Wajda’s Afterimage was released in 2016, just after he died at 90. It’s a moving valedictory. 

This is in effect Wajda’s last will and testament. He bequeaths the legacy of the independent artist who pursues a personal vision and style in the face of reactionary and political dictates. 

Wajda is arguably Poland’s most important director, with his searing anatomies of Polish history and politics. He made A Generation in 1955(!) —  followed by Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds two and three years later. Leap ahead 60 years and he still has that fire in his belly.

His last hero is the modernist painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who worked with Chagall and Malevich and introduced abstraction and modernity to Polish art. Strzeminski lost an arm and a leg in the first world war. As he limps and fumbles through the film he becomes an emblem of director Wajda himself — an old man, weakened by age and debility, but persisting in the art of his vision.

The depressing narrative traces Strzeminski’s steady loss of authority, respectability and comfort. Such is the price of an artist’s independence and integrity. The Stalinist government punishes him for ignoring their prescription of Social Realism. This artist refuses to serve the state so the state punishes him to the end. He loses his job, his students, his marriage, his status, his living. Without the artist ID card he can’t buy paint, leave alone hold down even a job as an illustrator, far beneath his abilities. But this artist holds true to his vision. 

A huge red banner of Stalin cuts off the artist’s light. So he slashes it open — incurring his arrest and the ultimatum either to conform or to disappear. 

The title refers to the artist’s lecture on the physiological basis of vision. The eye retains an afterimage of what it has viewed. It is never an exact duplication of the physical reality — such as Social Realism purports to be — but inflected by the artist’s character and emotions. Hence the importance of this artist’s memory of blue, his lost wife’s eyes, the white flowers he dyes blue to bring to her snowy grave. 

An artist’s canon is another form of Afterimage, the vision that survives him. Hence the film’s upbeat conclusion, where the bright colours of this abstractionist’s work erupt over the end titles, superseding the dismal colours which record his affliction. That last bright palette validates the artist’s suffering and loss. 

The film also records the human cost of tyranny. This artist’s students and friends remain faithful to him as ling as they can — at a cost. They have to give him up to establish their own careers. Aiding him leaves them vulnerable to arrest or even “disappearance” — as befalls the student who loves him and types out his theories on art.  
     If the film addresses Wajda’s imminent departure, it is also a rallying call against the creeping spread of right wing governments in Europe and America, Defending the individual vision against a proscriptive government is clearly an urgent statement for our time.