Thursday, April 02, 2009

Wajda's "Katyn" Is Criticized for Having the Audacity to Juxtapose the Nazis and the Soviets

Le Monde criticizes — in a weaselly manner ("Il faut savoir toutefois que, évoquant des sujets sensibles, Katyn encourt deux types de critiques") — Andrzej Wajda's Katyn for — for what? For the Polish movie's back-to-back justaposition of the Nazis and the Soviets as predators of the national territory!

Russians assassinate 12,000 people with a bullet in the neck — not to speak of their (innumerable) other crimes, inside as well as outside Russia — and one does not have the right to compare the Soviets to the Nazis?! A filmmaker does not have the right to conceive (what Piotr Smolar calls) "an anti-Soviet bomb" ?! Are they joking, or what?! The Yanks have been castigated — and how many times?! — for far less than that!

It would seen that Stéphane Courtois wrote his book for nothing.
Ce film peut aussi jouer son rôle sur la question de la mémoire, qui divise l'Europe : à l'Ouest, on garde une image positive du communisme pendant la guerre ; à l'Est, on a le sentiment d'avoir été abandonné et enfermé pendant quarante-cinq ans ; et dans une Russie hypernationaliste, le communisme redevient une période glorieuse.
Update: Adam Michnik a été "fortement surpris de lire la critique [que Le Monde] a faite de Katyn, le dernier film d'Andrzej Wajda" et de la "troublante ignorance" qu'on trouve dans ladite critique…

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