Abstract
Andrzej Wajda’s The Birch Wood was read through the prism of Karl Jaspers’ reflections on death as a borderline experience. The film shows a model case of the experience of death as a “borderline situation” in its two variants: the death of a loved one (in Bolesław’s case – the loss of his wife) and the inevitability of one’s own death (the last stage of Stanisław’s tuberculosis). These are cases of facing the fundamental, existential mystery of death. The dialectic of death – the death of the Other (to which no one, even the close ones, has access) and one’s own death (revealing its “face” to a specific self) translates into variants of human loneliness and different existential situations (sentenced to death and infected with death). This experience is complemented by the situation of little Ola struggling with the trauma of loss. It is an allegorical commentary on the feeling of being trapped in the universe of death. In the interpretation, the emphasis was placed on those factors that differentiate the messages of Iwaszkiewicz’s story and the film.