Destination - Nowa Huta!

Before he made his more famous narrative films, Polish director Andrzej Munk was an ace propagandist for the Communists. Destination - Nowa Huta! is his 1951 documentary about the building of Nowa Huta (English: New Steel Mill), a showpiece communist industrial centre near Krakow whose low economic value was far outdone by its potential as fodder for propaganda.


We begin with the peasants, sad and isolated in their idiotic way of life (Marx' words, not mine!). Here, Munk tells us, even childhood joys are alien. As Communist scholarship has established beyond a doubt and with ample statistics, standing around and feeding chickens was the most fun and fulfilling activity open to Polish peasantry prior to 1944.


So, thank God for the Communists! Err, I mean thank Goodness. I mean, look how happy this child is, able to stretch his arms to the sky and participate in the creation of a glorious new Polish city!


And this one: exercising with his peers, strengthening muscles so that, one day, he, too, can become a Stakhanovite brick layer, just like his father. Why, it's almost like a joyous scene of the Hitlerjugend from one of Leni Riefenstahl's films! Err, I mean, they're like Boy Scouts, American Boy Scouts. Err...

And the Russians are still at it! Before the latest Russian elections, members of a Russian youth group called Nashi (English: Ours) stalked and heckled the anti-Putin chess champion Garry Kasparov, often pelting him with $3 bills to show that he's an American agent.


We also can't forget babies. Because babies just love socialism, construction sites, and ideological indoctrination.


Unlike the stationary, old peasant women, these two Now Huta workers—a man and a woman, because the Communists were equal opportunity exploiters—are mobile, young, and proud. It's from images like the bottom one that Andrzej Wajda would later construct Birkut the bricklayer, the main character in his 1976 film Man of Marble: a criticism rather than a glorification of the Communist system.


A group of young men looking ahead; an apparatchik sermonizing; the group of young men clapping. Editing creates geography, creates narrative. Were the young men clapping because of the speech? The cinema says so. How very Soviet of Munk.


A sheet of Nowa Huta plans. If the writing looks funny, the narrator explains:

"Soviet engineers are the designers of the mighty steelworks."

Ah, yes. The Russians, those eternal guardians of European Slavdom. From untermenschen to untermenschen for the Poles, 1939-1989.


More from the narrator:

"In the difficult days to come, our Soviet friends will help increase our production hundredfold."

"The gigantic accomplishment of the 6-year plan will stand as an enduring monument to the friendship of Soviet nations and Poland."

Time is ironic: the main square at Nowa Huta, then the proud patch of earth on which stood a statue of Lenin, was renamed in 2004 to Ronald Reagan Central Square!


Here's a shot from the film showing an architect's model of that central square.


And here's an aerial photo of the real thing. Neat, eh?


More Stalinjugend: playing volleyball in the background, reading a book in the foreground. Which book?


Daleko od Moskwy. In English: Far from Moscow. A tortuously long and tortuously boring novel by Soviet writer Vasili Azhayev. It was considered a model work of the socialist realist style, and forced upon readers throughout the Soviet Union and its empire.


Moving away from the film as propaganda, we find that it's also quite accomplished visually. Here's one of my favourite shots: a trumpeter above Krakow. He's playing the Hejnal Mariacki, a Polish tune played every hour in Krakow and very much associated with the city's culture. There's an interesting legend attached to the whole thing, too.

According to the old story, which usually takes place in the 13th century, a lone trumpeter once spotted a horde of Tatars approaching Krakow and, to warn the city, began playing the Hejnal. As a result, the city gates were closed and the city saved. The eagle-eyed trumpeter, however, was struck dead by a Tatar arrow before he could finish. Hence, the Hejnal now has a very abrupt ending.

There's also, perhaps, a subversive element to all of this: is Munk painting the Soviets as the barbarians at the gate?


Some of the ugly and identical housing complexes of Nowa Huta, caught at dusk. There's a real eeriness about it.


Shades of Fritz Lang's Metropolis? Probably only in my own creative interpretation. But we'd have to switch Maria from a socialist to a capitalist, and stick an Ave before her name! I'm sure Munk just meant to show Nowa Huta and the new Communist order as a well-oiled, well-organized machine.

The last shot sure shows how well the Soviets treated the environment.


Part of a pan across a Nowa Huta street. Lenin Avenue, maybe, because the Russians were never good at being subtle. The looming loudspeaker, rendered in fine texture, is an unintentional symbol of the power of propaganda.


One of the film's last shots. The soft, streaming lights lend an aura of the fantastic. An appropriate end to this Communisto-industrial fairy tale.

As for Munk, he was expelled from the Polish Communist Party (PZPR) in 1952, a year after he made this 12-minute short, and only four years after becoming a member. He died in a car accident in 1961.