Czwowiek na torze

While Andrzej Wajda was shooting `Kanal,' a film that beats the viewer over the head with its obvious point but gives us no reason to care for any of the characters as they trudge through the sewers of Warsaw, the less famous Andrzej Munk was making more subtle, individualistic and intelligently-engrossing films such as `Man on the Tracks' and `Eroica.' In `Man on the Tracks,' an older train engineer from the pre-war generation is mysteriously run over by a train and is subsequently remembered by several other characters through flashbacks. While the engineer represents a Poland that has vanished under Communist rule, the film also works as a wonderful character study, and Kazimierz Opalinski is excellent in the role of the engineer who stubbornly refuses to give in to a new Poland that he detests.

This is one of the obscure movies which most of cinephile would be happy to find out and watch. There are similarities with "RASHOMON", not exactly in the sense of "The Rashomon Effect" (A situation in which contradictory interpretations of an event are presented by those involved. The phenomenon of the unreliability of eyewitnesses). In this movie, there are also interpretations but these interpretations are helping the viewer to get closer to the truth. They're like layers, and as they succeed one another, the closer the viewer finds out about what really happened.

It's a brilliant movie, given its time era, maybe even revolutionary. I liked the fact that there are no heroes and villains here but human beings with their flaws, moving in a morally gray area, as it happens usually in the real world.

MAN ON THE TRACKS is a very good drama (thriller), with great acting and a strong ending. It was moving but there was no emotional blackmail here, this movie respect enough the viewer to avoid the easy roads. It's not some kind of masterpiece that will stay with you forever, but it's a movie that deserve to find an audience even today.

As means of transport, trains have a certain mystical quality attached to them. This has a lot to do with the fact that whenever trains fail or succeed in carrying out their tasks of moving passengers from one place to another, it is not only them which fail or succeed as machines as the blame is attributed to a whole range of persons whose jobs are related to trains. It is precisely keeping this thing in mind that Polish director Andrzej Munk set out to direct "Czlowiek Na Torze", a film about the lives of Polish railway workers. His film questions the role of a dead railway worker who went much too far in the course of his job before after having been being fired by the authorities. This film was made possible with the help of Polish Railway employees who are shown to wisely tackle differences at work place. The film begins with a nicely shot sequence of a train driven by a steam engine. It is worth mentioning that the camera has been placed so meticulously that one could see the actual train chugging marvelously on the tracks. The film is replete with nicely shot scenes of this kind which capture each moment of what it is being in a situation related to trains.

This film opens with a gorgeous black and white shot of a train at night journeying to some destination until it is forced to stop because it has hit a man on the tracks. From this point, our story proceeds to unravel the mystery with an ingenious method of telling the story backwards. Different characters who had a relationship with the dead man during his life take part in the investigation of his death and they relate their involvement with the dead man.

A fascinating character study and mystery all at the same time. The cinematography is excellent, as good as it gets in black and white. The script is ingenious and the acting is uniformly superb. I am sorry that some enterprising movie company has not seen fit to offer this wonderful film on video. Munk was clearly a great story teller and it is a shame he did not live long enough to create many more great films. This is a masterpiece.

Director Andrzej Munk graduated from documentaries to become one of the founding fathers of the 'Polish Film School'. This group was influenced by the neorealists but was obviously under stricter censorship than its Italian counterparts. One of his documentaries is entitled 'A Railwayman's Word' and it seems a perfectly natural progression from that to this, his first feature, called 'Man on the Track'. One of the outstanding characteristics of his documentaries is the imaginative use of 'natural sounds' and there is certainly no shortage of these here! The leading character Orzecowski happens to be a railway engineer but he essentially represents the eternal struggle between the individual and the collective. Munk and writer Jerzy Stawinski have cleverly made him a proud and stiff-necked man to whom it is difficult to warm. He has had forty years on the railways and is convinced that the much younger Zapora is conspiring to take his place. He is forced to retire by his exasperated superiors and is killed one night on the tracks by a train the driver of which happens to be Zapora. Has he committed suicide, been murdered or perhaps lost his life whilst attempting an act of sabotage......? Actor Kazimierz Opalinski does a grand job here in letting us see beneath his tough, unsympathetic exterior and this makes his final act of heroism even more moving. The films effectiveness is heightened by its dark-toned cinematography. Munk went from strength to strength and achieved international acclaim with 'Eroica' before his ultimely death at the age of forty which left his film 'The Passenger' unfinished.