LAND OF PROMISE (ZIEMIA OBIECANA)

Poland, 1975, 180 minutes, Colour.
Daniel Olbruschski, Andrzej Seweryn, Wojciech Psoniak.
Directed by Andrzej Wajda.

Land of Promise was adapted for the screen by Wajda from the 1898 novel Ziemia Obiecana (The Promised Land). Written by Wladyslaw Reymont, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1924, The Promised Land is written in the exaggerated, hyperbolic style of Dickens and Zola, and is an account of the rapid transformation of Lodz - a small town still using hand looms to manufacture cloth in the 1860s - into the ‘Manchester of Poland’ in the 1890s.

Reymont has also been called ‘a rich, realistic writer…whose characters were colourful, vivid, and true to life’, and Wajda tells the story of capitalism coming to Lodz through the novel’s three main characters: a Pole, a German, and a Jew. Almost all synopses of the film, and Wajda himself, describe the protagonists this way. This reduction of character to ‘national type’ is an indicator of the way the film makes use of stereotyping to portray Polish history in broad strokes. Yet to describe the protagonists in this fashion is to make a category mistake.

Avoiding this category mistake would require the description of the characters to be ‘a Protestant, a Catholic, and a Jew’, or alternately ‘a Polish Catholic, a German Protestant, and a Polish Jew’. I will expand on this later. However, notwithstanding this denial of nationality for the Jewish protagonist, these three characters serve as a convenient shorthand for Wajda’s depiction of Lodz’s ethnic heterogeneity.

By the time Reymont was writing his book in 1898, the Jewish community of Lodz, over a period of sixty years, had become the second largest Jewish community in Poland after Warsaw, and one of the largest in the world.

Thus, there is an intentional aptness to the ‘nationalities’ of the three dramatis personae of Wajda’s Land of Promise, and the proportions they represent in the exploitative cut-throat world of turn of the century Polish capitalism depicted in the film.

Karol Borowiecki (Daniel Olbrychski) is an urbane but ruthlessly ambitious young Polish nobleman, working as a managing engineer for a brutish German textile manufacturer called Buchholtz (Andrzej Szalawski). Maks Baum (Andrzej Seweryn) is a handsome, seemingly bland young German with a temperamental streak, whose father faces bankruptcy because he refuses to mechanise his factory out of old-fashioned scruples. Moryc Welt (Wojciech Psoniak) is a Polish- Jewish broker and middleman. He plays the buffoon, but is fervently devoted to both making money and maintaining his friendship with Karol, whom he admires unreservedly.

All three have been friends since university, and are dedicated to greed and hence to each other, because alone they cannot raise the capital they desperately need to build their own factory.

Director Krysztof Zanussi makes the point that at the time of Wajda’s translation of the book to the screen, Jewish culture and all references to Poland’s Jewish past had been totally erased by the Polish Communists. ‘They simply denied that there were ever any Jews in Poland. It was forgotten, forbidden, never spoken about. So when Wajda brought these characters back (in Land of Promise) it was a novelty for the public to learn that there were Jews amongst us. He was reminding us that we were a multicultural society.’

Wajda is not anti-Semitic in the sense that he consciously set out to denigrate Jews in his film. There is much evidence that his intentions were sincere, and that he was, alongside his mentor the Polish-Jewish? director Aleksander Ford, amongst the very first Polish directors to bring to public cognizance the terrible fate of Polish Jews. More than most Polish directors, he has sought both before and after Land of Promise to give Polish-Jews? their place in Polish history. His judgment in choosing Reymont’s The Promised Land as an appropriate vehicle for philo-semitism is open to question. (Jan Epstein)

1. The epic scale of the film? Polish history? The presentation of history, of Polish people, Polish characters? The universal interest and appeal? The work of Wajda, the scope of his work? The Oscar nomination for the film?

2. The re-creation of the period, the late 19th century? Lodz? Costumes and décor? The sweep of the action? Different levels of society? The workers, the industrial aspects? The rich? The musical score?

3. The status of Poland in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century? Old Poland, rural? The domination of surrounding countries? Germany, Lithuania, Russia? The industrial revolution in Poland? Change of work, workplaces, lifestyles? Ambitions? Capitalism? The background of Polish communism and socialism and the perspective on this story? The presence of the Jews in Poland, collaboration with the Poles, anti-Semitism and later anti-Semitism? The wars, revolutions? The anti-Semitism seen in the perspective of World War Two, the Holocaust, the history of Poland vis-à-vis the Jews?

4. The length of the film, its complexity? The interplay of characters, ambitions, ruthlessness? The effect and consequences?

5. The prologue, the aspects of gentility, Poland and wealth, hopes? The pleasant aspects, romantic? Setting a mood?

6. The changes in the cities, industries, the workers? Issues of money? The visual aspects of the industrial revolution? The factories, the methods? Updating of factories? The bosses and their treatment of people? Ruthlessness? The effect each of the central characters? Money, deals and betrayals?

7. The portrait of Karol? In himself, his character, family background, his father? His future set out? Ambitions, training, the university? His zeal? His intensity and ruthlessness? The interactions with his friends? His way of life? Growing dissipation? Coping? Betrayal?

8. Moryc? His ambitions? His work, betrayal?

9. Maks? His character, ambitions? The collaboration with the other friends? Their falling out?

10. The portrait of the upper class, the owners, their attitudes and stances?

11. The workers, the daughter, moral issues, being disowned, vengeance?

12. The criticism of the film as anti-Semitic? The history of Polish anti-Semitism? The role of the Jews in Poland in the 19th century, work, wealth, banking? Antagonism at the beginning of the 20th century? Accusations of their being Bolsheviks? Anti-Semitism? in Poland, in the Catholic church? The consequences for World War Two, the Holocaust? Vida and his looking back in the light of 20th century experience? Was the film anti-Semitic? Stereotypes? The Jewess and her being lax in morals? Caricatures?

13. The characters, how well delineated, caricatures or stereotypes?

14. The outlook at the end of the film? The title? How much was Poland a land of promise? The grim aspects of the film, the pessimistic tone? The transition in Poland from capitalism to communism? The aftermath of communism at the end of the 20th century