“Landscap es After Battle” is an unjustly neglected after-war film that contains some breathtakingly beautiful and poetic scenes—especially the nearly silent opening.  

The joy of the just liberated prisoners turns into chaos as they break windows, burn all their clothes, and hail the arrival of the American brothers. They also bury one of the enemies alive.  Unfortunately, some of the Poles come to realize that the jail had just been replaced with a more benign prison. 

The film was directed by one of the most distinguished film makers that Poland has ever produced, Andrzej Wajda. It was originally released in 1970, and it will come to the Gene Siskel Center as part of the Andrzej Wajda: Man of Cinema series.  It will play on Friday, February 20 at 5 pm, and Thursday, February 24 at 6 pm.  

The film was based on a trio of stories by a concentration camp survivor named Tadeusz Borowski. The script never seems fake or contrived although the love story is somewhat predictable. 

The film stars Dan Olbrychski as a bookish intellectual who was a prisoner who was freed just in time to escape execution by the Nazis. As a defense mechanism, he stays away from direct experience or strong emotion, and he finds solace in reading and writing poetry.  

He is fond of paradox, and he even tells Nina, the woman that likes him, “You are very brave with the courage of fear.”  The charming Nina tries to inspire him to write a poem celebrating her beauty, and she says, “I am not exactly a muse, but I have freckles to make up for it.”  He tells her that he can’t write about freckles. Later Nina’s attempts to goad him into action have tragic consequences. 

“Landscape After Battle” is one of the better films to deal with the fallout in Europe after WWII. The opening alone is worth the price of admission. It is one of the most memorable purely cinematic sequences in Polish cinema. In that sequence, Wajda almost equals Chaplin.