The main thing is to be able to give something from
oneself. Sometimes, conditions are hard. One has to risk it. That’s the main
thing.
Władysław Gomułka was First Secretary of the Polish United
Workers' Party and leader of Poland from 1956 to 1970. Initially popular for
his reforms during what became known as the Polish "thaw", he drifted
towards more authoritarian rule in the 1960s supporting religious persecution
of both the Catholic Church and the Jewish religion. As the economy struggled,
he picked on these internal enemies and, in ways familiar from the 1920s to
now, tried to distract through culture war. Many jews left Poland and he also
clamped down on freedom of expression which inevitably brought the "new
wave" of Polish creators into conflict.
Jerzy Skolimowski was one of those who ran headlong into Gomułka’s
range with his film, Hands Up! (Rece do gory), originally filmed in 1967
and which failed to meet the censor’s requirements. In his recent interview at
the BFI he discussed how he was sent his passport by the authorities as the
clearest hint of what he should do after submitting a story heavily criticising
his country’s decadent elite, smart British cars for favours, and daring the
make a joke of Stalin, his protagonists hoisting a poster which gave the former
Soviet leader four eyes. Say it ain’t so, Joe…
 |
| Hands up! |
Over a decade later, Gomułka gone and a second Polish thaw
underway with the anti-communist movement Solidarity (Solidarność), (which had
over nine million members by the time martial law temporarily cut short this
new dawn) Skolimowski was able to return to his home and complete the film
adding a free-running twenty minute portion that explains the film’s context as
well as adding footage of Beirut where he was playing a part in a German production,
Circle of Deceit.
I left my friends in Poland. In their small studios
through their paintings, they could express themselves to a greater
extent than I could in my films.
The director compares his filmmaking against the bravery of
his artist friends who stayed behind and contested the regime through their art
and he focuses on some of these canvases. Then we switch to London and a
private viewing of Skolimowski’s paintings attended by some famous friends
including Jane Asher (in Skolimowski’s Deep End), Alan Bates (in Skolimowski’s
The Shout) playing the artist, and David Essex who turns to camera and
makes a comment about a painting of a woman in distress, “A Victim...”, with a
twinkle that may be intended by Jerzy to berate him for his decisions and
authenticity.
As ever, the director lets us join the dots and this is an introduction full of brooding menace, including the harrowing, modern operatic music from Krzysztof Penderecki and droning synthesisers from Józef Skrzek that sets our collective teeth on edge as the director walks through the real and imaginary warzone. We’re back in Warsaw 1967 and the mirror cracks to reveal Skolimowski, head wrapped in bandages, reading out a diatribe about officialdom to an audience in evening wear, raising their hands and dancing along to some excellent swaggering jazz from Krzysztof Komeda, the theme of which is repeated by one of the characters. We need a soundrack album!
The focus shifts to five friends, taking part in this
strange reunion, ten years after they graduated from medical school; an
unhappily married couple Alfa (Joanna Szczerbic, married to the director at
this time) and Romeo (Adam Hanuszkiewicz), Opel Record (Tadeusz Lomnicki) and Wartburg
(Bogumil Kobiela). Skolimowski plays Andrzej
Leszczyc, aka Zastawa; they all call each other by the cars they drive as a
comment on materialism but the main targets here are the values of Polish
society in general and its government in particular.
The results as Michael Brooke says in his video essay in the extras, are part psycho-drama and part sixties happening, an existential happening at that with Wartburg being targeted for some betrayal and covered in plaster of Paris as the five escape in a carriage of a freight train, deciding on how to punish him and taking chunks out of each other as friends in their disappointed early thirties may do. It has much in common with Beckett and the theatre of the absurd and the Czech Tom Stoppard, who dipped into that movement, is the same age as Jerzy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dying in 1966.
Dialogue-driven with some flashbacks it’s an intense watch and deliberately provides more questions than answers. A pivotal memory for all is their shared experience with setting up the Stalin poster, which ends up with four eyes, all the better to see you with? Is this an allegory for their failure to be good communists or actuality? On screen, as in life it was just too much for Poland at the time.
Skolimowski was only 26 when his first film was released and
had already been a poet and a moderately successful boxer before co-scripting Andrzej
Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers (1960). He enrolled in the Łódź Film School
and famously planned out Identification Marks as a compilation of his
student projects; for a man whose work seems so instinctive, he’s clearly very
well organised. As Brooke says, Jerzy’s
film language appears to come out of his poetry – it’s even quoted at the start
of the film – not to mention his “jazz” sensibilities. There’s a huge
difference between improvisation and “jamming” and Jerzy always controls the
line even as each turn feels freshly come to mind.
This was the first film of four featuring Andrzej Leszczyc, Skolimowski’s
on screen cypher, and here as in the other films in which he features, he’s searching
for direction whilst kicking against expectations. Any resemblance to a
Belmondo-esque rebel without a cause is probably coincidental - Skolimowski later
claimed not to have seen Truffaut and Godard at this point - but this was
certainly a new kind of anti-hero in Polish cinema and not for nothing was the
director seen as a one-man Polish new wave, evidence of parallel evolution all
certainly based on the same foundations.
 |
| Jerzy Skolimowski and Elżbieta Czyżewska in the mirror |
Leszczyc is more awkward than aggressive though and the film
follows the student from dawn to dusk as he begins a day that will define his
life for the next two years. Leszczyc has spent four years studying Ichthyology,
a branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish but has now decided to join
the army leaving the underwater world behind and everything else. The film
starts with the strike of a match and the gloomy hallway of Leszczyc’s apartment
block as he sets off through the stragglers of the previous night’s revels. The
film is full of natural visual elan with the director being as unafraid of using
the dark as the light, just as Miles Davis used the spaces between notes... He
walks past workmen and a brazier and his shadow is thrown in huge relief against
the wall, it feels expressionistic, and certainly Orson would have approved.
The day passes in a jumble, there is no strict clockwatching from Jerzy, just a sequence of scenarios that leave the audience to their own conclusions. Leszczyc is seen with his classmates and then bewildering a military selection board who expect him to be just another intellectual draft-dodger when he tells them he wants the army to give him some direction. The head of the board tries to pull rank in terms of righteous experience but he’s wasting his time, the subject of his disapproval regrets not the waste of state resource on his education, he’s only looking to impress himself.
 |
| Street shadows and morning light |
This sentiment may also be an issue with Leszczyc’s partner,
played by Elżbieta Czyżewska, his actual partner during the filming the only
other performer next to him who would be available over the film’s long
gestation In their tiny flat, the couple argue and there’s a familiarity that has
definitely led to contempt, part of the reason our hero wants to escape. Czyżewska
also plays Barbara, a woman he meets later in the day and who represents a
romantic future that might tear him away from his military duties… there’s
always another path to follow. And that’s the point, Leszczyc talks the talk
but identification marks are indeed not there, as the quote at the top shows,
interviewed by a television reporter on the street he gives him exactly what he
wants, he’d like to pilot a spaceship or a truck and visit unknown cities to find
something new… he’s not yet formed, waiting for experience to define him but
before that he needs to address the here and now. This film shows the start of
that process just as it moves him further away.
Composed with just 29 long shots, the film indicated the fluid
cinema to come and a style still in evidence with Essential Killing and EO,
long takes, minimal dialogue and a poetic visual sense, evoking a response
from our pattern recognition as we hurl ourselves forward too trying to find
the meaning smuggled within.
Both films are presented for the first time on UK Blu-ray
and come with the usual set of quality special features:
 |
| Jerzy in London 1981... always on the move |
·
Newly recorded audio commentaries on both films
by critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk (2023)
·
The Boxing Ichthyologist (2023, 32 mins):
writer Michael Brooke introduces us to the early Polish films of Jerzy
Skolimowski in this newly commissioned video essay.
·
Archive interview with Jerzy Skolimowski (1983,
audio only, 43 mins): the director discusses his early work in an interview
recorded at the BFI’s National Film Theatre
·
Stills galleries.
· First pressing include a superb, illustrated booklet with new essays by Ewa Mazierska and David Thompson; 10 films that left their mark on Skolimowski; credits and notes on the special features.
You can order the set direct from the BFI and it’s the
perfect introduction to the broader work and motivations of one of the most
interesting film makers of the era. As Michael Brooke says, let’s hope the EO
is not the last we hear from Jerzy for he’s still on the hunt for different
ways of expression and still attempting to satisfactorily express his restless
vision with words, pictures and actions not to mention the spaces unfilled amidst
the empty silence.
Pattern recognition...
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