Shadow, a 1956 drama directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz and now available on DVD from Polart Distribution and Facets Video, has one of the most dynamic opening scenes in memory. Driving down a nondescript country road, a young man and woman glance at a train barreling along the nearby railroad tracks, and suddenly they see a man hanging precariously from one of the cars, in imminent danger of dropping – or jumping? – to his death. At the top of their lungs they holler for him to hang on, but the next moment he falls and tumbles helplessly down the embankment below the tracks. The witnesses leap from their car and race to him as quickly as they can, but he is already dead. In a stunning shot, they look down to see his face and discover to their horror that he doesn't have one; his features are smashed into a shapeless mass of flesh, cartilage, and bone. When the authorities arrive and look for identification papers, they find everything about the corpse to be as mysterious as its obliterated face. Who was this? Where was he traveling? Above all, what explains his awful fate?

Instead of giving definitive answers in the following scenes, the picture moves in a new direction. A medical examiner at the morgue starts reminiscing about a somewhat similar enigma that he himself was involved in years ago. This introduces a flashback that turns out to be the first of three long memory-scenes, each containing its own story of mystery, betrayal, and the slippery nature of identity – one set during World War II, another right after the war, and the third in the present day. What unites these narratives, and also links them to the frame-tale about the railway death, is the recurring presence of both a betrayer and a victim whose political and ideological ties are impossible to pin down apart from their antagonism to the prevailing power structure of the moment. Eventually it appears that the film's actual protagonist is someone we haven't seen and might never see – an obscure, elusive figure known only by the effects of machinations planned and orchestrated so far behind the scenes that their true origins and purposes may never come into the light of day, for the characters or for us.

Kawalerowicz's flair for metaphysical conundrums is evident from the powerful 1961 melodrama Joan of the Angels, his most famous picture and probably his best. Shadow, known as Cien in its native Poland, has been compared most often with Akira Kurosawa's legendary Rashômon (1950), in which the investigation of a violent crime draws different descriptions and conclusions from everyone connected with it, thereby demonstrating how shifting, ambiguous, and ultimately unknowable "reality" ultimately is. Shadow has also been likened to Missing, the excellent 1982 drama by Costa-Gavras about an American man searching for his son after the 1973 military coup in Chile; but the grainy images and relentless film-noir tone of Shadow give off a more profoundly pessimistic atmosphere. Its dark, unsettling aura is also conveyed through touches of expressionism, which critic Maria Kornatowska says are "not built on an ideological foundation" but are employed only for the sake of "shape and mood." It seems to me, however, that the film's fragmented structure and consistently grim temperament are inseparable from its acutely suspicious attitude toward ideological stances of any kind.

Shadow was Kawalerowicz's fourth film, released on Mayday 1956, just weeks before protests by workers touched off events that brought a reformist government to power in the thaw known as Polish October, ending Stalinist rule and (temporarily) liberalizing the country's sociopolitical climate. Along with younger filmmakers (e.g., Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski) who emerged from the Łódź film academy after the thaw, Kawalerowicz was part of the Polish School that broke with Stalinist aesthetics (i.e., socialist realism) and adopted practices learned from the Italian neorealists. Like many of his contemporaries, Kawalerowicz favored a pungent visual style with keen attention to detail, but he was a versatile filmmaker capable of working in a variety of genres. He was also a capable administrator, twice appointed (in 1955 and 1972) to run the acclaimed KADR production unit, as a biography on the DVD notes.

Kawalerowicz is reputed to have fought off bureaucrats who wanted him to put KADR resources into productions meant only to promote the communist-party line. In a sign that his career was nonetheless entangled with reactionary elements in Polish politics, however, he took the deplorable step of signing tendentious reports put forth by the communist regime in 1983, denouncing filmmakers who supported the progressive Solidarity movement and endorsing the shutdown of production units headed by Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, who had been his longtime colleagues. Although this took place more than 25 years after Shadow reached the screen, that film's ideological vagueness looks in retrospect like an early clue to slippery elements in Kawalerowicz's own artistic personality; and even in 1956 he appears to have been enough of a Soviet-style communist to anger liberals by structuring Shadow around the favored Stalinist theme of a world teeming with secret agents and hidden enemies. Polart puts its own spin on this, saying the film "seems rather to insist on how heroism and villainy are so often matters of point of view and timing." That statement can be construed as probing and sophisticated, or as waffling and even nihilistic. This indefiniteness is appropriate to the film.

Shadow is the first feature written by the noted author and occasional director Aleksander Scibor-Rylski, who based the screenplay on some of his own stories. (Much later he wrote Wajda's monumental Man of Marble and Man of Iron, released in 1977 and 1981.) The restless camerawork is by Jerzy Lipman, who was also near the start of a long-lived career, and Zygmunt Kestowicz and Adolf Chronicki head the cast. Likening it to Wajda's early classics Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), critic Michael Atkinson praises the complex screenwriting of Shadow as well as the "catapulting, pitch-dark visualizations [that] don't go out of their way to make us feel safe and omniscient." That accurately captures the movie's Kafkaesque feel, but it downplays the sheer murkiness that presides over the plot once the electrifying first scene has ended. In its story and ideas, Shadow is as shadowy as they come – a cryptic film best suited for moviegoers who like groping their way through darkness that never dissipates.

For more information about Shadow, visit Facets Multimedia. To order Shadow, go to TCM Shopping.

by David Sterritt