The monument and the sewer: memory and death in Wajda’s Kanal (1957)

Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal/Kanal (1957) was expected by many audience members to finally portray the ‘true’ history of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, a history that had been distorted by Poland’s Communist government. Their condemnation of the resistance movement, the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, meant that many of the memorial practices that were needed to commemorate the deaths of AK members were not permitted. This article argues that the virtual sphere of cinema could enact particular commemorative practices. As writer Jerzy Stefan Stawinski noted, Kanal was expected to provide a ‘bronze monument’ to the Uprising insurgents. The film’s commemorative gestures, however, are enacted alongside other, conflicting, processes. The film may have aspects of the ‘bronze monument’, but also a literal and figural underside, a sewer whose (il)logic of abjection, waste, death, meaninglessness, and trauma pervades the film. My analysis of the film’s internal conflicts partly draws upon the film’s original reception in the Polish press, focusing upon the vocabularies and discourses that were available to writers attempting to describe Kanal’s status as monument, its privileging of truth and witnessing, as well as its visceral force, and its refusal of closure and consolation.