Ida is a visually stunning work of art. The 2013 Polish film (and winner of the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) about a young novice nun who discovers her family’s painful history is noticeably static, with much less dialogue than one might expect in a 21st-century film. At the beginning of the film the titular young heroine is referred to as Anna, but when she goes to meet her aunt before taking her vows she discovers that she was born Ida Lebenstein, a Jewish child who was saved due to her extremely young age and ability to pass as an ethnic Pole when her family was killed by their Christian neighbors.
Łukasz Żal and Ryszard Lenczewski, the film’s cinematographers, and Paweł Pawlikowski, its director, clearly know their art; nearly every frame echoes back to another film, photograph, or painting. That doesn’t mean, however, that the creators of Ida suffer from a lack of originality or ingenuity. The cinematography here is full of references and homages, not shot-for-shot recreations—and this, one could argue, requires a truer and deeper understanding of the source material than a remake would. These visual echoes give the film a haunting emotional character. As viewers we can’t help but engage with the film. Even if we can’t remember exactly what the artistic references are, we’ve seen them before; there’s something uncanny and slightly discomforting about many of the film’s scenes, a sense that everything is familiar and yet not quite the same.
Many of the interior shots, filmed with a fixed camera, evoke Dutch genre and architectural paintings of the 17th century. When Ida is eavesdropping on her aunt threatening Feliks Skiba, the man who killed Ida’s parents and Wanda’s son, we don’t see everything that is happening, as a significant portion of the screen is filled by the doorframe and wall. It gives us the sense that Ida is seeing something she is not really meant to see and gives the shot a voyeuristic quality similar to what we find in Johannes Vermeer’s The Love Letter. In that painting a seated woman, holding a letter, looks up at her maidservant, who seems to be teasing her about its contents. In The Love Letter the viewer sees what is happening through a doorway; in fact, the viewer is looking out of what seems to be a closet or storage room, which adds to the aforementioned voyeuristic quality. Something similar happens in Ida. In one shot Wanda, framed by the doorway, sits and speaks to someone just out of frame. Here the viewer and Ida have the same perspective; they are observers, not participants. Neither understands yet why Wanda is being so harsh with the Skibas, as Feliks’ actions during the war have not yet been revealed. Both can see that Wanda is in pain, but neither has yet learned about her son.
Below: “The Love Letter,” Johannes Vermeer, 1666
When Ida is speaking to the Mother Superior in the convent, the figures take up less than half of the frame. The remainder of the shot is taken up by a bookcase, whitewashed walls, and a short set of stairs leading to the doorway. Sunlight streaming through the window dwarfs the seated women. It looks like a painting by the 17th-century Dutch painter Emanuel de Witte, who was known for painting women in interior spaces. Many of his paintings have very little action; the visual interest and beauty of his paintings come from depicting light, shadow, texture, and space. We can see Żal and Lenczewski using the same concepts in the film. Viewers accustomed to color films might find black and white dull and uninteresting. Instead of being overwhelmed and distracted by color in Ida, however, the viewer notices seemingly minor details like the reflection in a window, flecks of paint peeling off a neglected wall, and the differences in the way light diffracts through glass, shines off metal, and dully glows off wood. It’s the polar opposite of the explosions and dramatic special effects we might see in, say, a Michael Bay movie.
Below: “A Woman Peeling Apples,” Pieter de Hooch, 1663
But why would a Polish cinematographer incorporate Dutch painting into his film? On the surface it seems nonsensical. Maybe, however, we should look at it as yet another example in the film of the pulls between East and West, communist and capitalist, that have defined so much of Poland’s recent past. Pawlikowski, Żal, and Lenczewski incorporate other references to this tension in Ida, most of which have an artistic bent. Wanda listens to music by Mozart, not the Soviet Union’s beloved Tchaikovsky. Government-approved music plays on the car radio, but the young people in the hotel play jazz. The Poland of Ida may politically lean towards the Soviet Union and the communist East, but its cultural heart seems to be pulling towards the West.
Someone once said to me that to see or even begin to understand the cinematography of a film you need to watch it over and over again. However with Ida that approach is completely unnecessary. The cinematography is the main reason to see the film. I would go so far as to say that the cinematography IS the film. There are so many visual references to past works of art in this work, but they won’t be openly acknowledged; the viewer needs to discover them and interact with them personally. Is Ida the right choice for a fun Saturday movie night? I would say no. But it is a work of art in its own right, and is worth watching.
Finally, the crowd of well-trained children and their trainers moved to take their seats. A wave of shushes swept through the room as the first chords sounded. The show plot was quite simple, as the recommended age for viewers was 0+. On a snowy winter day, a hunter comes to a forest. His repeated attempts at shooting are foiled by forest animals and their beautiful snow queen. He tries to shoot a bunny, played by a stocky man in a onesie, but the rifle flies out of the hunter’s hands and onto a little sled – a sled pulled by a bushy white cat running on its hind paws. Not a human in a costume, but an actual feline cat. As the hunter chases the sled, another cat jumps in the way and he trips.
