Witness

By S.K.

In the fast-decaying 20th century, one art form has flourished like a carrion crow. It is witness literature, the testimony of men and women who have endured unspeakable torment and degradation, and emerged to tell an unbelieving world, "This is the way it was. I know. I was there."

That was the role of Malcolm X, the black man in the white nightmare; Elie Wiesel, the ghost of Auschwitz; and, to an unmatched degree, of Nobel Prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, survivor and permanent victim of Stalin's prison camps. In 1962, during Khrushchev's brief destalinization period, readers were suddenly introduced to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In a dark, spartan account, it told of the wretches who peopled the slave labor camps of Siberia, cleaved from society for uncommitted political sins, filled with what the author called "the fearlessness of those who have lost everything."

The film version's Ivan, played with austere dignity by Tom Courtenay, can scarcely remember his wife, let alone the life from which he has been severed for ten years. His sole ambition is that classic one of all prisoners: to get through the day. A half-bumpkin who believes that stars are pieces of the moon, he survives on an untutored existential faith. What animates him is what moved Camus' Sisyphus: the prisoner fails because failure is immanent in man; he endures because he must. Courtenay's fellow prisoners are for the most part a collection of shaven heads conveying dislocation and anonymity.

The very facelessness of the Scandinavian and English cast lessens the film's power to shock. Scenes are shot from a vast emotional distance, as if Director Casper Wrede flinched at the pain of showing pain. In the suffocating grayness of the film, the personal dimensions of suffering tend to vanish. The tribulations of the hero were almost unendurable for the reader; the viewer, like a tourist, can only survey degradation held at arm's length. But One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich does occasionally convey a tragic sense of life discarded by politics: in the high, empty gossip of the Muscovite prisoners; in the pathetic scramble for a few shreds of tobacco; in the epic wasteland of ice and snow. More illuminating than either the performances or the screenplay is Sven Nykvist's Arctic photography, shot in the glacial reaches of Norway. Long a cinematographer for Ingmar Bergman, Nykvist can achieve a tactile sense of dread; his expanses of snow are more than weather: they seem vast pages upon which no one dares to write.

So they were, until the testimony of the witness who will probably never see this imperfect but indelible tribute. Like Tolstoy, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is, despite the anguished diary, wholly Russian, a man who "cannot contemplate living anywhere but in my native land." Still, Solzhenitsyn has earned a scathing tribute from one pro-Soviet apologist and enemy: "He has already defected with his soul."

S.K.

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