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Polish cinema turned a corner
in the late Nineties. Its first notable breakthrough
was Krzysztof Krauze’s The Debt (99).
Set in contemporary Warsaw, this fresh and well-written
story of two budding entrepreneurs who fall victim
to an evil creditor, features a cast of hitherto unknown
actors, which worked to its advantage because audiences
were growing tired of the same old faces playing the
same old types. Krauze’s film, one of the first
to attempt to show contemporary Poland as it is, was
based on real-life events and depicted people with
whom the thirtysomething middle-class audience could
easily identify, in settings that captured the ambiance
of transition-era Warsaw. The film’s success
suggested a way forward for Polish cinema—a
cinema of ordinary people.
A prime example of this new emphasis on authenticity
and carefully defined social context is Robert Glinski’s
Hi, Tereska (01). Set in the milieu of “blockers,”
residents of apartment blocks that now stand as monuments
to communist pragmatism, Glinski’s film is a
contemplation of the origins of violence and evil.
Tereska is a shocking story of moral disintegration
framed as a coming-of-age story: an innocent yet ambitious
young girl is gradually seduced into a lifestyle of
lying, theft, and casual sex, is raped by a local
youth, struggles with poverty and violence, and finally
escapes her family only to be rejected by her friends.
In a final act of despair she takes revenge on a cruel
world by committing murder. Even though a conspicuous
sense of determinism pervades the film, Glinski is
careful not to simplify the depiction of Tereska’s
milieu. He doesnít simply put the blame on Tereska’s
parents, who are living hand-to-mouth themselves,
nor on negligent teachers, ruthless peers, or even
the “system.” Rejecting the schematics
of good and bad, innocent and guilty, Glinski refuses
to judge his characters, and the end result is an
impression of documented reality—the film is
shot in black-and-white, with a hand-held camera,
and employs documentary images of the neighborhood
and its inhabitants. Neither of the two young leads
are professional actresses—Glinski found them
in a reform school, hence the authenticity of their
performances. Within this realist framework, Tereska’s
crime in the final scene doesn’t represent a
sign of incomprehensible evil so much as an inevitable
cry of despair and disgust at the world.
Piotr Trzaskalski’s Edi (03), an equally
straightforward and crude look at lower-class urban
misery, offers a more hopeful outlook. Its protagonistís
story is one of self-sacrifice and humanity, retained
despite his hard-knock life. Humanism was once an
important part of Polish filmmakers’ credo,
and it’s interesting to note the return of the
motif of sacrifice in both Edi, and Krzysztof
Krauze’s My Nikifor(04), an account
of the last years of naÔve painter Nikifor “Krynicki”
(his last name remains unknown). The old and sick
folk artist (interpreted astoundingly by actress Krystyna
Feldman) one day invades the studio of Wlosinski,
a young painter who lives in Krynica, a small mountain
spa in southern Poland. The intruder refuses to leave
and Wlosinskiís initial aversion is gradually replaced
by sympathy—and fascination—until eventually
the young painter opts to renounce his own creative
ambitions, his family, and his health, and devotes
himself to caring for his older, TB-stricken colleague.
Indigent Nikifor lives off drawings sold on the street
to spa visitors. Heís a genius without knowing it;
but the word “genius” doesn’t exist
in his vocabulary. He’s more than simply naïve—there
is an innocence and purity that verges on divinity.
Wlosinski’s sacrifice is nothing but human.
Krauze renders this (true) story with a subtlety and
conviction that’s deeply moving.
This new wave of Polish realism has been accompanied
by a resurgence of strong social observation and critiques
of national vices, often in the form of sharply witty
satires like Marek Koterski’s Day of the
Wacko (02), Piotr Szulkin’s adaptation
of Ubu King (03), and Wojciech Smarzowski’s
The Wedding (04). The Wedding cleverly
shuffles stereotypes of life in the Polish provinces
with themes of greed and corruption. It should be
noted that the title of the film refers both to a
play from the beginning of the previous century as
well as Andrzej Wajda’s 1973 film of the same
name. Intended as a satire on Polish flaws, it suggests
that the director has arrived at a new assessment
of his nation vis-à-vis capitalist reality.
Indeed the Polish provinces have made a distinct comeback
as a setting and a certain state of mind. After Jan
Jakub Kolski’s rural tales from the Nineties,
made in the vein of magic realism, came Andrzej Jakimowski’s
poetic Squint Your Eyes (03), Ryszard Brylski’s
crafty, minimalist White Soup (03), and Pawel
Wojcieszek’s fresh Down Colorful Hill (04).
Shot entirely in digital video, Hill is an
excellent example of certain recent tendencies, most
notably the emergence of young, independent cinema
in Poland. Pawel Wojcieszek, a filmmaker with no film-school
diploma, received the award for best director at the
2004 Polish Film Festival. After two years in prison,
a 23-year-old man comes home to reclaim his father’s
farm and the girlfriend he abandoned, and to start
a new life. He finds both farm and girl in the hands
of his older brother, and here the drama begins, leading
to neither a happy ending nor tragedy but rather to
the realization of defeat and loss, which doesn’t
end in despair.
Young people trying to find their way in a new and
confusing reality are also at the core of Dariusz
Gajewski’s Warsaw (03). In 2003 the
jury of the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia proclaimed
this debut the picture of the year. Regardless of
whether the film was indeed the best, the controversial
decision was clearly symptomatic: a new generation
had finally arrived. Warsaw is a mosaic composed of
several seemingly unrelated narratives featuring newcomers
to the capital who become lost—both mentally
and physically—in the city’s maze, and
while attempting to find a missing piece in the puzzle
of their lives. The stories are unified by a single
winter day and a strange car accident that occurs
at its conclusion. Klara comes to find her boyfriend,
Pawel to find a job. Wiktoria is just passing through
on her way to Andalusia—her dreamland of love
and passion. There’s a man looking for his daughter
who disappeared after she came to study in the capital,
and a veteran of the 1944 Warsaw uprising searching
for the remains of the city he used to know. Everyone
eventually finds something, but not necessarily what
they expected, be it love, hope, or truth. Gajewski
depicts the city as a melting pot of history and fast-paced
modernity; of rich and poor, of ugliness and strange
beauty visible only through a newcomerís eyes; of
a land of dreams that may equally come true or fail.
Warsaw may seem alien and cold, even surreal—as
typified by the appearance of a giraffe in the middle
of the city—but it is ultimately what the characters
make of it. At the end when Klara sees the giraffe,
she’s surprised, but quickly accepts its presence,
as the city is already a magical place for her.
The triumph of a low-budget movie by a young unknown
made a statement that was received with relief by
independent filmmakers. Gajewski had been one of several
new directors chosen by Polish Television to contribute
to the Generation 2000 project, an interesting undertaking
in which young filmmakers were given aid to produce
more avant-garde projects. This seemed to confirm
that the Polish film establishment had finally accepted
the new generation into their ranks. And so the 2003
and 2004 Polish Film Festivals represented a sea of
change, with more first-time directors than ever before.
In 2004 the first prize in Gdynia went to Malgorzata
Piekorz’s The Welts (04), a loose adaptation
of young Silesian writer Wojciech Kuczok’s novel
(he also wrote the script). Many complained that My
Nikifor, aesthetically more mature, had been
overlooked, but the jury seemed unanimous. Piekorz’s
film, in many ways inferior to Krauze’s, especially
in terms of its limp script, was a safe choice—it
is both new (it was Piekorz’s debut) and traditional
in terms of storytelling, cinematography, and the
story’s moral (Piekorz is a graduate of the
Katowice film school and a Krzysztof Zanussi protégé).
In this way, the jury made a compromise by attempting
to placate the conflict between the old and the new.
This conflict dates back to the Nineties, when young
filmmakers accused the “barons” of Polish
cinema (Wajda, Zanussi) of obstructing their projects
by blocking funding from the Cinematography Committee.
It’s not clear whether this is why young filmmakers
were silent in the Nineties or whether, as Wajda pointed
out, there simply wasn’t anything serious coming
from that side of Polish filmmaking fence. Either
way, no debut films surfaced at film festivals or
achieved theatrical distribution. Since the young
had yet to find their voice, and the old couldnít
communicate with the audience anymore, Polish cinema
found itself in a stalemate. Wajda once again tried
to come to terms with the WWII past in The Ring
with a Crowned Eagle (93) and Holy Week
(95), but received little response from the audience.
Only when he made the epic Pan Tadeusz (99)
did Poles reward him with significant attendance.
Beautifully shot, the film reconstructs the era of
the Napoleonic wars, when Polish nobility impatiently
waited for a chance to join the emperor on his way
East to fight the Russians. Wajda is known for his
film adaptations but both Pan Tadeusz and
his recent Revenge (02) leave the impression
that he no longer has anything important to say about
contemporary Poland. His movies are hermetically sealed
in Polish tradition, and thus leave foreign audiences
in the dark. Although he successfully documented the
country’s political changes in the early Eighties
in Man of Iron, it is definitely not Wajda
who will tell the story of Poland’s transformation
after 1989. Poland still awaits filmmakers who can
come to terms with this era of transition. For the
time being, it’s natural that cinema’s
focus has shifted from celluloid heroes to ordinary
people, bringing to the fore thirtysomething directors
who still remember the People’s Poland but constantly
refuse to look to the past while finally catching
up with the present.
© 2005 by Eliza Subotowicz
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