Lesson of the Dead Language

Alfred Kiekeritz (O. Łukaszewicz), a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, is sent to a small Galician town near the end of World War I due to his advancing tuberculosis. Although he officially serves as the local commander, his days are spent in a shabby Jewish boarding house, awaiting the inevitable end. Every person he meets and every object he encounters takes on symbolic meaning for him. Surrounded by grotesque characters—from the guard Moszko (J. Machulski) to the forester Szwanda (G. Lutkiewicz)—Alfred remains a refined man, an aesthete and an art collector. Even the crossing guard, who is in love with him, falls short of the ideal of Diana of Ephesus, whose miniature he carries with him. The film is an intimate study of death and transience: an observation of a fading world, illness, and a passing era, in which every moment becomes both an experience of beauty and an inevitable end.