188 KANAŁ
of the country. Stalin, of course, had other ideas. Avid to annex Poland after Hitler’s
defeat, he betrayed the Polish re sis tance by ordering his armies to halt on the east-
ern banks of the Vistula River and not advance into the city to aid the Poles. This
allowed the Germans time to regroup and destroy the Polish re sis tance, which
fought for 63 days with light arms and little outside support (1 August–2 October
1944). It is estimated that the AK suffered some 22,000 casualties (16,000 killed
and 6,000 wounded) and 150,000 to 200,000 civilians died. Arthur Koestler
called the Soviet refusal to support the uprising “one of the major infamies of this
war which will rank for the future historian on the same ethical level with [the
Nazi extermination of] Lidice” (Koestler, p. 374). After the war Warsaw native
Jerzy Stefan Stawiński (1921–2010)— who served as an AK com pany commander
during the Uprising— published “Kanał” (Polish for channel or sewer) in the Pol-
ish literary journal Twórczość [Creativity]: a story based on his own, bitter experi-
ences during the doomed strug gle that he soon turned into a film script. After Stalin
died in 1953, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, relaxed censorship and other forms
of po liti cal repression. “Khrushchev’s Thaw” spilled over to Poland and the other
Soviet client states, making a film on the Warsaw Uprising po liti cally feasible. Even
though “Kanał” refrained from indicting Rus sian complicity in the defeat of the
Uprising, Poland’s Soviet- dominated po liti cal leadership did not want it made. In
the words of the film’s eventual director, Andrzej Wajda, “The authorities must have
realized that society would be against the movie, and would regard it as the com-
munist voice on the subject of the Warsaw uprising... It preferred not to make any
film on the subject of the Warsaw Uprising, even one with a point of view they
could accept as their own” (quoted by James Steffen, n.d.). Submitted to the govern-
ment for vetting, the script was also deemed insufficiently heroic. Eventually the
film was made because Tadeusz Konwicki, a member of the screenplay commission
and an official of Kadr, a new film studio, lobbied behind the scenes on its behalf.Production
Kanał was made by P. P. Film Polski at Kadr Studios and on location in Warsaw in- Some of the above- ground scenes were shot in the studio, but most were
filmed on location at ruins that had not yet been demolished after the war. Scenes
that comprise the film’s first 45 minutes were shot at Cecilia Sniegocka Street and
in an adjacent park in the Solec district, a mile northeast of Mokotów, and the
10- minute closing sequence was shot beneath Kamienne Schodki [Street of Stone
Steps] and on Miadowa and Długa Streets in Warsaw’s Old Town. For the scenes
in the sewers, Wajda and his crew constructed an elaborate replica of the sewers,
and Wajda’s director of photography, Jerzy Lipman, provided the evocatively eerie
noir- like chiaroscuro lighting for those episodes.
Plot Summary
During the final days of the Warsaw Uprising (late September 1944), Lt. Zadra
(Wieńczysław Gliński) leads a beleaguered platoon of 43 AK soldiers and Warsaw
civilians in retreat to south- central Warsaw. The composer Michał (Vladek