Anti-fascist cinema: Ida (2013)
First in a series on films with anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian stories and themes
With the Oscars over with, it seems time to wake up and see where we are. With this essay, I begin a series looking at anti-fascist cinema.
Ida (2013)
Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski
Written by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz
This Polish film, which in 2014 won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film (as the award was known then), is about a young novice in a Polish convent in the early 1960s. An orphan of World War II, she was taken to the convent as a baby and has never known anything else; her name, as far as she knows, is Anna. The convent’s head tells the girl, who is about 18, that a family member has been located, an aunt whom the girl must visit, the Mother Superior says — with a look that says she knows more than she is willing to say — before she can take her vows.
Clad in her novice’s habit, the girl travels to the Warsaw apartment of her aunt Wanda. Richly played by the actor Agata Kuleza, Wanda is a sullen, slatternly district judge; she was once a celebrated state prosecutor during the Stalinist postwar years, but now has been demoted to handling trivial cases, though she retains a personal car and apartment. As a man she slept with the previous night gathers his things and departs, Wanda pulls on a silk robe, lights a cigarette, and serves tea to the wide-eyed nun. “So,” she says ironically, “What are you — a Jewish nun?”
Their family was Jewish, Wanda tells her. During the war, while Wanda fought with the Polish resistance, the girl and her parents, along with Wanda’s own son, were at first sheltered, then betrayed by a farmer in a remote village, murdered, and secretly buried in an unmarked grave — except for the girl, whose real name is Ida. Out of pity for her, and also because she would like to see justice done, Wanda offers to take the girl to the village and find the grave.
What follows is an austere road movie. Puttering along in a Soviet-era sedan, the two travel through a stark, vacated countryside. The black-and-white cinematography seems appropriate to the emptiness. As David Denby wrote in the New Yorker:
Between 1939 and 1945, Poland lost a fifth of its population, including three million Jews. In the two years after the war, Communists took over the government under the eyes of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D. Many Poles who were prominent in resisting the Nazis were accused of preposterous crimes; the independent-minded were shot or hanged. In the movie, none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse, the mood of ordinary conversations constrained by the sure knowledge that many who survived have committed acts of betrayal or indulged willful ignorance.1
A European audience would understand all of these contextual clues: the personal car, the comfortable, spacious apartment that would have been assigned only to important Communist Party members, and Wanda’s fearless, commanding presence with those they encounter. At one point, drunk, Wanda drives the car into a ditch; she threatens the local cop who throws her in jail for a night, “I can destroy you!” The implication is made clear later: Wanda explains to Ida that she was a prosecutor during the Stalinist era and was responsible for eliminating several enemies of the state. (Her character is based in part2 on a real figure, Helena Wolinska-Brus.)
So “Ida” is not only a recollection of the Nazi pogrom against the Jews; it invites the audience to see that the Communist regime that followed it was also a totalitarian system in which the state, led by a cult leader who was above the law, manipulated the justice system for its own ends. (Which regime killed more people is still a matter of historical debate. But for today’s readers who are ready for a comprehensive introduction, the Wikipedia article “Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism” is absolutely fantastic — and I’d say you’d better download it now before the new fascists edit and ruin it.3)
As I said, none of this is explicit. It’s all context, and readers of my Baby Boomer generation, for whom cultural references to the then-recent World War II years that our parents lived through were ubiquitous4, would have understood it. I’m not so sure that today’s audiences, for whom the years 1930-1950 are nearly as distant as the Civil War was to my generation, possesses the historical knowledge to catch clues as subtle as these.
Of course, the usefulness of such familiarity with history goes far beyond being able to recognize cultural references in movies. Quoting Santayana5, we hope to learn the lessons of the past in order to avoid repeating them. As children we baby boomers were raised to fear Soviet (and later Chinese) totalitarianism not just as threats to “our freedoms” but as a system that was cruelly oppressive to its own citizens. This was true enough, but it also reinforced the notion of American exceptionalism. One of the biggest contrasts between America and Communist countries was our supposed moral superiority: we didn’t torture. When (at various times, but incontrovertibly by the time of the Iraq War) we learned that we did, it was a bitter pill to swallow.
Nostalgia and disillusionment characterize the two poles of American society right now. MAGA followers cherish a mythic 1950s America’s enforced racism and misogyny, and believe that Trump can bring it back; anti-fascists have always believed in the power of the bright light of investigation and fact. The cynicism that threatens to lull us into passivity and inaction is not because we uncover more and more evidence that Trumpism is dangerously fascistic, but because the movement seems to march right through the bright light of truth that we used to rely on as if it doesn’t exist. Our survival, and the defeat (once again) of fascism, will depend on us first defeating this cynicism in ourselves.
“Ida: A Film Masterpiece" by David Denby. New Yorker, May 27, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ida-a-film-masterpiece
“Review: Ida,” by Graham Fuller. Film Comment, May-June 2014. https://www.filmcomment.com/article/review-ida-pawel-pawlikowski/
“Elon Musk repeats 2023 offer to Wikipedia, ’rename it to D****pedia and get paid’; netizens react” by Karishma Pranav Bhavsar. Mint, Feb. 19, 2025. https://www.livemint.com/news/elon-musk-repeats-2023-offer-to-wikipedia-rename-it-to-d-pedia-and-get-paid-netizens-react-11739929532998.html
The assumption throughout the years 1946-70 was that Hollywood’s audience would have direct knowledge of the WWII years and by the mid-50s was ready to look at the war nostalgically. Just to give three examples: The sentimental musical “White Christmas” (1954) begins with a wartime scene in which Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye’s characters perform a musical number to entertain their brigade, then undergo a bombardment; the main part of the film views their military service nostalgically as they produce a musical extravaganza to honor their former commander. Several years later, “Ocean’s 11” (1961) similarly reunites former comrades-in-arms, this time not merely for some musical fun but to knock over several Las Vegas casinos using the skills they learned in the Army. A few years later, the war itself was distant enough to be treated as straight comedy, as in “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” (1966) in which American GIs cavort with locals in Italy.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — George Santayana.