A haunting close to an auteur’s life
As last movies by great filmmakers go, Andrzej Wajda’s “Afterimage” feels vividly connected to the Polish auteur’s beginnings, yet also acts as a kind of haunting close that sums up a life.
Based on the ignominious final years of avantgarde stalwart and noted theoretician Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Boguslaw Linda), it depicts the toll communism’s tightening iron grip had on post-World War II Eastern Europe while simultaneously paying grim tribute to the battered pride of a committed artist.
Wajda, who died at 90 last year, burst onto the scene in the 1950s with a war trilogy about roiling youth (“A Generation,” “Kanal,” “Ashes & Diamonds”) that cemented his reputation as a vibrant chronicler with sly commentative undercurrents. The irony is that this reliably political filmmaker’s swan song subject is a painter who battled the very idea that art should reflect a commonly held reality or connect to the masses. Strzeminski’s early contemporaries were constructivists and cubists, and he founded Poland’s first modern art museum, which was also one of Europe’s first. To him, individualism in art was everything. It’s the threat that Strzeminski lived under that allows Wajda to link arms with a countryman of divergent aesthetics.
Wajda got a long life’s work out of chronicling the messy relationship between people and institutionalized repression, and he didn’t succumb to sentimentality with his last hurrah. — Robert Abele “Afterimage.” In Polish with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Royal, West L.A.; Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena.