Kinoblog

(This is the text of a presentation I gave at the BFI this afternoon, on the early history of the Polish documentary movement 1947-60 - I’ve deleted some scene-setting preamble that was only relevant to that particular audience, but otherwise this is pretty much verbatim.)

One thing that becomes very clear very quickly when one starts to delve into the subject is that the history of the Polish documentary is incredibly rich and complex - in fact, much like the history of British film, one could argue that its non-fiction work is just as distinguished as its fiction, if not more so, and the only reason it’s been practically invisible to non-Poles is down to distribution and access issues rather than lack of quality.

There have been sporadic attempts over the years to promote Polish documentaries to British audiences, starting with the fourth Free Cinema programme - ‘Polish Voices’ was an all-Polish programme, and its fiftieth anniversary falls in September. In 1967, Lindsay Anderson was invited to visit the WFD documentary studio in Warsaw, where he became the first foreign director to make a film for them - ‘The Singing Lesson’. Sadly, I haven’t had a chance to see this: the Archive has two 35mm prints, but both have master status. More recently, the international success of the later films of Krzysztof Kieślowski has sparked a modicum of interest in his early work - from the late 1960s to the early 1980s he worked almost exclusively in documentary, and a few key titles have turned up as extras on the DVDs of his better known films. There have also been sporadic festival screenings and even more occasional seasons, including one that’s running at the Imperial War Museum this very month. So the Polish documentary movement hasn’t been entirely invisible over here, but I think it’s probably fair to say that until very recently it’s been largely inaccessible to those not prepared to have a rummage through various Polish archives.

So, where to start? And, more to the point, where to stop? Well, I was struck by a comment that Kieślowski once made when he said that the period from about 1959 to 1968 was the golden age of Polish documentary filmmaking, where both industry conditions and relative freedom of both subject matter and filmic approach combined to create a perfect working environment. As you’ll see from the title of this talk, that’s not actually the period I’ve chosen to cover - instead, I’ve picked 1947-60. This is partly because, Maria von Trapp style, I thought the very beginning was a very good place to start, but also because I was interested in what led up to the creation of Kieślowski alleged utopia - especially given that only a few years earlier documentary-makers were anything but free.

Poland had had a reasonably thriving film industry in the run-up to the Nazi and Soviet invasions of September 1939 but, much like the BBC’s fledgling television service, it was more or less shut down for the duration of World War II, and aside from a handful of Soviet-backed propaganda films there was practically no filmmaking activity there until 1945. Since Poland would lose a truly staggering 22% of its population, accompanied by what seemed at the time to be the total and permanent destruction of a state that had only been in existence since 1918, it’s easy to see why filmmaking was considered an unaffordable luxury. Cinemas continued to function, but they generally showed pre-war Polish films and Nazi propaganda, the latter leading to the Polish resistance calling for a boycott of cinemas and a stink-bombing campaign, accompanied by a slogan that translates as “Only pigs go to the cinema”.

Unsurprisingly, by the end of the war, most of the pre-war Polish filmmakers had either emigrated or been killed, and because it was clear even then that a communist government was all but inevitable, most of the emigres chose not to return: Polish film historian Marek Haltof claims that just one established pre-war director returned to make films under the communist regime. Even more relevantly, one of the first acts of what became the Polish People’s Republic was to erase as many links with prewar Poland as possible. In other words, 1945 was effectively Year Zero for the Polish film industry.

With this in mind, combined with the lack of resources available in a ruined country, it is truly remarkable that Polish documentary filmmaking got off the ground so quickly to the point when a Polish film won the Palme d’Or for Best Documentary in 1947. This was The Flood, directed by Jerzy Bossak and Wacław Kaźmierczak, and was a completely wordless look at the devastation wrought when the Vistula river burst its banks. Here’s the opening sequence:

CLIP - The Flood

I’m going to show you clips from two other films from 1947, to give you some idea of the range being attempted. First is The Coal Mine, directed by Natalia Brzozowska, one of the tiny handful of women working in Polish cinema at the time. Like The Flood, it has no spoken content, but while Bossak and Kaźmierczak had some genuinely extraordinary images of destruction and devastation to film, Brzozowska’s material is much more run-of-the-mill - so she beefs it up with strongly rhythmic compositions and editing that hark back to 1920s Soviet montage while also anticipating the work of Geoffrey Jones over here.

CLIP - The Coal Mine

And the next clip is from Brzozowa Street, directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, the future director of the altogether more fantastical The Saragossa Manuscript, and Stanisław Różewicz, which takes us behind the scenes of the Warsaw Old Town and sees people scraping a living in bombed-out buildings:

CLIP - Brzozowa Street

This promising beginning didn’t last. Although elements of all three films, particularly the last one, seemed to be pointing towards a cinema of genuine social concern, the problem with such a cinema is that by definition it has to have something to be concerned about. And, by equally logical extension, that means that it has to admit that there are failings somewhere in the system. Although communists were in a minority in the Polish government in 1945, their influence was disproportionately large thanks to Soviet support. In 1946, so-called ‘rightist’ parties were banned, and between 1947 and 49 the communists took control. As far as the film industry was concerned, this meant both centralised control - it had been nationalised as early as November 1945 - and total subservience to the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism, which had dominated Soviet culture since 1934.

The Polish version of Socialist Realism was first outlined in a December 1947 speech by Bolesław Bierut, the then President of Poland. It was formally approved exactly a year later when the two main socialist parties merged to form the dominant Polish United Workers’ Party, and in November 1949 a filmmakers’ congress with some two hundred participants condemned much of what had been made in the four years after the war, and agreed to the compulsory imposition of Socialist Realism more or less across the board. Incidentally, The Coal Mine was one of the victims: it was banned for alleged ‘formalism’, a charge already familiar to many Soviet artists - it was famously levelled against Dmitri Shostakovich in 1936 in an article entitled ‘Chaos instead of music’ that was said to have been penned by Stalin himself.

As you can probably imagine, this created some pretty fundamental problems for documentary filmmakers, as the one thing Socialist Realism was not was especially realistic - there’s a famous quip by the great Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó when someone asked him if he’d had any problems switching from documentary to fiction after ten years, and he laconically replied that since he started out making documentaries under Stalinism, he was effectively making fiction from the start. Socialist Realism demanded total and uncritical adherence to the Communist party line, an emphasis on class and the struggle between old and new, the rewriting of history from a Marxist perspective, and the complete elimination of anything perceived to be reactionary and bourgeois.

Not too surprisingly, this produced films like Destination Nowa Huta!, made in 1951 to extol the virtues of a town being constructed specifically for steelworkers. It has lots of bare-chested Polish construction workers coming together with the aid of equipment generously donated by the Soviet Union, to build a workers’ paradise near Krakow, while triumphant music and a stentorian narration declaim lines like “Brighter days are no longer pie in the sky - each working day and each thrust of the shovel brings them closer!”.

CLIP - Destination Nowa Huta!

So, as we can see, “realism” in this context didn’t refer to what was actually apparent, but to what an idealised People’s Poland should look like, and anything that conflicted with this utopian vision simply wasn’t allowed to appear on screen. Another film extolling a major construction project, Return to the Old Town from 1954, had a different dilemma - on the one hand, the reconstruction of Warsaw’s Old Town was undoubtedly an incredible feat of logistics and effort, and clearly a perfect subject for a Socialist Realist treatment. On the other hand, various architects, archaeologists and historians were rebuilding it as a near-perfect replica of how it had appeared before its destruction by the Nazis, and any film account would have to acknowledge its long history in some way. So here’s what happened:

CLIP – Return to the Old Town

So there wasn’t enough time to mention more than a handful of key historical events, but they somehow managed to find room for Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish-born founder of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police that would eventually become the NKVD and the KGB.

I deliberately picked those two titles because they were made by genuinely talented directors, who were just as forced to compromise as were the hacks. Andrzej Munk, who made Destination Nowa Huta!, would go on to become one of the most distinguished of Poland’s postwar documentary and feature film directors, and might even have become one of the all-time greats had he not died in a car crash in 1961, at the age of just 39. And Return to the Old Town was made by Jerzy Bossak, who made The Flood and could probably be regarded as the most distinguished exponent of Polish documentary at the time.

But Return to the Old Town was made in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death. Although an official cultural thaw was still some time off, a handful of younger filmmakers began to make hesitant moves towards genuinely realistic, genuinely critical documentary filmmaking. One of the earliest examples is Are You Among Them?, by recent film-school graduates Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski, and here’s a sample:

CLIP - Are You Among Them?

When I first saw this, I naively assumed that it was a straightforward Polish equivalent of one of those finger-wagging COI public information films that we all know and love - but in fact it’s more important than that. We’re still in the era of socialist realism, but nonetheless here is a yob spitting on the pavement, and a woman neglecting her duties as wife and mother to natter away to her friends, with disastrous consequences. Though the finger of blame is firmly pointed at them, as opposed to the government, and their “crimes” are due to carelessness rather than actual malice, the film nonetheless hints that all is not well in the supposed socialist paradise of People’s Poland.

But it does so in a calculatedly jokey, almost apologetic fashion, a tentative toe in the water compared with Hoffman and Skórzewski’s next film, made in 1955. The only thing that Look Out, Hooligans! has in common with Destination Nowa Huta! is the exclamation mark in the title. While the earlier film is all clear skies and sunlit construction sites with happy workers making a collective effort for People’s Poland, Look Out, Hooligans! is dark and crepuscular, mostly set at night. And in terms of presentation it couldn’t be more different, looking more like a violent exploitation vehicle from the decadent capitalist West than anything from behind the iron curtain. Look at the first minute and a half:

CLIP - Look Out, Hooligans!

This is now recognised as being the first film in what became known as the “black series”, a documentary movement that comprehensively broke with the past. Like most such revolutions, it was fairly short-lived, fizzling out around three years later, by which time there had been a cultural thaw across the board - but it injected new blood and new life into the Polish documentary. Instead of idealised Utopian visions, the “black films” looked at hooliganism, prostitution, alcoholism, child neglect, unemployment, and, most controversially, the gap between rhetoric and reality in such areas as housing and healthcare planning.

It’s probably time I showed you a complete film, and this is a particularly good example, as it crams most of the key elements of the “black series” into just seven minutes. The title is the deceptively innocuous Warsaw 1956, and it’s co-directed by our old friend Jerzy Bossak, this time with Jarosław Brzozowski - I should mention that by this stage Bossak had become a bit of a mentor to the younger “black series” directors and had got into trouble with the authorities, at one point even having to work under a pseudonym. In fact, the film that you’re about to see was initially scheduled to be shown at Cannes, then abruptly withdrawn when the authorities decided to watch it beforehand. You’ll also notice that it explicitly returns to the territory of Brzozowa Street nearly a decade earlier, and I suspect this was deliberate.

COMPLETE FILM - Warsaw ‘56.

So at the beginning, we have the narrator - who is in fact the same one as on Destination Nowa Huta!, Andrzej Lapicki - constructing what appears to be a familiar party-line view of Warsaw and its new houses, squares and playgrounds, accompanied by cheerfully upbeat accordion music. So far, so generic - but then the narrator offers to do something different. As he puts it, rather disingenuously, “the chronicler watches more carefully, and sees what he earlier tried not to see” - which of course translates as “the filmmaker shows what he was earlier prevented from showing”. And we then get this bizarre cross between Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey’s Housing Problems and a particularly sadistic child-in-peril thriller, and I think it’s very safe to say that even the dimmest viewer would have got the point.

In addition to shock tactics, the makers of the black documentaries had another trick up their collective sleeve. Like Monty Python’s Dinsdale Piranha, they used sarcasm. Have a look at this:

CLIP - The Lublin Old Town

Just as Warsaw 1956 seemed to quote Brzozowa Street, so The Lublin Old Town is clearly a parody of Return to the Old Town, using the same dogmatic socialist realist clichés on the soundtrack, though their function here is very different.

Now, all this is fascinating stuff, and it’s easy to appreciate and sympathise with the sheer glee with which filmmakers exploited their hard-won freedom - but shocks and sarcasm have their limits, and diminishing returns could well have set in if the black series had continued indefinitely. In fact, the movement was largely over by 1958, by which time the Polish documentary had made another, much more decisive and far-reaching transition.

Kazimierz Karabasz is not a name that’s widely discussed outside Poland, which is a pity as he’s arguably the single most important figure in the history of the Polish documentary, which in terms of achievement ranks him alongside John Grierson, Edgar Anstey and Humphrey Jennings - and he actually combines elements of all three as theorist, teacher and filmmaker. Professor Karabasz, to give him his academic title, taught at the Lodz Film School for decades, and his proteges include such crucial figures as Marcel Łoziński and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Now in his late seventies, he’s still active as a filmmaker and elder statesman of the Polish documentary movement, and he was lucky enough to graduate in 1955, thus largely escaping the socialist realist apprenticeship suffered by his slightly older peers.

Alongside Hoffman and Skorzewski, Karabasz and his early filmmaking partner Władysław Ślesicki made the most important films of the ‘black series’, though they took a very different approach from the shock-merchants and one which laid the ground for future development. The title of Where the Devil Says Goodnight sounds as though it’s going to be just as hard-hitting and sensationalised as the other ‘black series’ films, but it’s actually a quiet, contemplative piece about a run-down suburb of Warsaw, Targówek, and the progress - or lack of it - of the House of Culture that was announced with much fanfare in 1949, even though the locals said they’d have preferred better housing. Seven years on, the place is still a building site, offering only a tiny, cramped gym, where amateur dramatics rehearsals occupy the same space as ping-pong players, while the promised “cultural revolution” in Targówek amounts to a travelling cinema that visits once a month. That makes it sound like another polemical film, but in fact it’s much subtler - Karabasz later admitted that the House of Culture issue was merely an excuse to get permission to shoot in Targówek, and the film’s lasting value lies in the unvarnished presentation of the lives of the people who live there. Here’s an example:

CLIP - Where the Devil Says Goodnight

What’s interesting here is that the film is neither a Utopian socialist realist fantasy, nor a piece of polemical propaganda - the commentary is at considerable pains not to offer any suggestions or solutions to Targówek’s problems. This is even more true of Karabasz and Ślesicki’s follow-up, People from an Empty Zone, which is so self-effacing that the title is spoken, not printed, and doesn’t appear until the very end.

These films are arguably much closer to John Grierson’s definition of a documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality”, and indeed Karabasz cited Grierson’s writings as a key inspiration, alongside the films of the Italian neorealists. At the time, he was unable to actually see much in the way of British documentary filmmaking, but he did catch a programme that was screened in Warsaw in 1956 or 57: I’m still trying to find out exactly what was shown, but I managed to find an interview with Karabasz dating from 1961 in which he said that “The English documentary school and especially its classics remain a source of lasting admiration for myself and my colleagues”, and he singled out Lindsay Anderson’s Every Day Except Christmas and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon for particular praise. Karabasz and Grierson even had a brief correspondence in the early 1960s. Karabasz was also a fan of the Free Cinema movement, which he believed offered a good example for Polish documentary cinema as it recovered from the Stalinist period, and When the Devil Says Goodnight was itself shown in the NFT’s ‘Polish Voices’, the fourth Free Cinema programme, alongside two other black series documentaries and more surreal fantasies by Roman Polanski, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.

The mere fact that artists as avant-garde as those three were being exhibited as part of a showcase of Polish cinema shows how rapidly things had changed. The turning point was the so-called Polish October of 1956, when a reformist government led by Władysław Gomułka took power in the wake of workers’ protests in Poznan. Since both Stalin and his main Polish champion, Bolesław Bierut, had both been dead for some time, there was little opposition to this, and the result was an across-the-board liberalisation of Polish society and culture. Its effect on cinema was dramatic: up to then, filmmakers had been hugely compromised, but within the next few years major masterpieces such as Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Munk’s Eroica and Passenger and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, the last of which was nominated for an Oscar, would establish the international reputation of Polish cinema.

At the same time, though the impact tended to be more domestic, there was a similar liberalisation of Polish documentary – by the late 1950s filmmakers were tackling subjects that had been completely off limits only a few years earlier, such as the Polish jazz scene, or the work of a satirical theatre company. Personal expression was, if not warmly encouraged, at least tolerated, and younger filmmakers like Karabasz took full advantage, largely expunging narrators and their imposed ideological interpretation of events, preferring to let their images speak for themselves. Although a few subjects were still off limits, such as a flat-out denunciation of communism or an attack on the policies of the Soviet Union, this was the start of the golden era that Kieślowski extolled – where filmmakers had the magical combination of unprecedented artistic freedom and a system that would fund their work without taking commercial considerations into account.

To give you an example of how far Polish documentaries came in the five years since the very first black series films, I’m going to end this talk with a complete screening of Kazimierz Karabasz’ The Musicians, a film that is to Polish documentary what Night Mail or A Diary for Timothy are to its British counterpart: both a benchmark and an inspiration. It’s also had a modicum of international recognition thanks to the support of two of Karabasz’ most distinguished pupils. When invited to vote in Sight & Sound’s 1992 poll of the best films ever made, Krzysztof Kieślowski polemically included The Musicians alongside the likes of Citizen Kane and La Strada.

Karabasz’ other protégé, Marcel Łoziński, who also went on to become one of Poland’s greatest documentary-makers, also singled out The Musicians when asked to pick his favourite documentary by the Danish magazine Dox. He said “There are films in which there appears to be nothing, yet it turns out there is everything. There are films, in which it seems there is everything, and yet there is nothing. And very rarely, one encounters films in which there is everything, and it truly means everything. I first watched The Musicians when I was 20 - and I experienced a strange feeling that I had seen something that was not on the screen at all. I could see those people from the tram-drivers’ orchestra in their homes and I could clearly see their wives; I could hear what they were talking about, what they were worried about, what they were laughing at. I could see their flats, windowless kitchens and feathery beds; I could see what pictures were hanging on their walls, see their grandchildren doing their homework and see their Sunday dinners. I could even hear the noise of their neighbours. After that I watched The Musicians numerous times - and the feeling remained. I could always see and hear much more than there really was on the screen. Because on the screen it was merely an orchestra rehearsal and some faces - nothing more. But it was that ‘nothing’ that meant everything to me. And it is still the same today.”

COMPLETE FILM: The Musicians

It’s dated yesterday, but I don’t think it ever made it into the printed version of the Guardian, which is why I didn’t spot it until now. Anyway, here’s an excellent interview with Jiří Menzel as his latest film I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007) finally gets a belated and brief British cinema run.

Sight & Sound’s special issue, ‘Cinema of the New Europe’, was published this week. The coverdate is June 08, though the Andrzej Klimowski-designed cover makes it instantly recognisable from a fair distance.

As the title implies, it’s an Eastern European special edition, including the following articles:

• ‘Out of the Past’ by Shane Danielsen - how filmmakers in the region have flourished by adapting to changing political and economic realities;
• ‘Danube Blues’ by Demetrios Mathieu - recent developments in Hungarian cinema;
• An interview with Jiří Menzel by Sheila Johnston;
• An interview with Andrzej Wajda by yours truly and Kamila Kuc;
• ‘On the Road Again’ by Adina Bradeanu - how documentary makers are engaging with their countries’ communist pasts;
• ‘Eastern Promise’ by Nick Roddick - how the Romanian film industry is following up its sudden critical acclaim;
• ‘Home and Away’ by Richard Combs - a celebration of the work of Jerzy Skolimowski, focusing particularly on recent films;
• ‘The Outsider’ by me - a beginner’s guide to Skolimowski, biased towards his pre-1980s career

…plus the usual raft of news, features and reviews, including my take on Sergei Bodrov’s hugely entertaining surprise Oscar nominee Mongol.

Going by precedent, one or two of these pieces will probably appear on the magazine’s website in due course.

Apologies for the apparent lack of activity over the past few days: I’ve spent them preparing the various multimedia elements of my talk Andrzej Wajda: An Introduction, which I’ll be presenting at the BFI Southbank tonight at 6.15 - and, as ever, these things take much longer than expected!

Polish Radio recently interviewed me about the Wajda season, though they only ended up using a short snippet on Katyn. The recording is here - I’m the one without a Polish accent.

Once the immediate Wajda pressure is off, I’ll post more pieces on individual films, and I’ll also be looking at Jiří Menzel’s collaborations with the novelist Bohumil Hrabal as the latest, I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), finally gets a (minuscule) British cinema release.

And I can also thoroughly recommend the Imperial War Museum’s ongoing season of Polish films, which I mentioned a few days ago - I paid a visit myself on Friday and saw Krzysztof Zanussi’s In Full Gallop (Cwał, 1995) on the big screen for absolutely nothing. Sadly, the number of people in the auditorium didn’t even stretch to double figures, which just goes to show how little value people place on things when you give them away.

As I may have hinted on a few occasions in the past, I’m a bit of a fan of the Czech composer Zdeněk Liška (1922-1983) - which is why I was delighted to get an e-mail from Joe Walker, possibly Liška’s most obsessive fan, informing me that he’s recorded an hour-long celebration of the man and his work and uploaded it to the Totally Radio site.

You can find it here - there are various listening options, not all of which involve spending money.

To my shame, I’ve only just spotted this - but the Imperial War Museum in London is partway through a film season entitled Polish Paths to Freedom, a series of free screenings of films depicting aspects of Polish history from the start of World War II to the present.

Here’s what’s coming up in May:

Thursday 1 - Friday 2 May
11.00am: One. Two..Three..No. 11 (1953); Roving Report - People of Poland (1959); HMS Tiger Visits Gdynia During a Baltic Cruise (1959)
12 noon: The Struggles for Poland: Sweepers of Squares (d. Paul Robinson, 1988)
2.00pm: In Full Gallop (Cwał, d. Krzysztof Zanussi, 1995)

Sunday 4 May
11.00am/2.00pm: One Day in People’s Poland (Jeden dzień w PRL, d. Maciej J. Drygas, 2005); There and Back (Tam i z powrotem, d. Grzegorz Skurski, 1978); The Story of a Man Who Worked 552% Above His Quota (Opowieść o człowieku, który wykonał 552% normy, d. Wojciech Wiszniewski, 1973)
(the 2pm screening is introduced by Maciej J. Drygas)

Tuesday 6 May
11.00am/2.00pm: One Day in People’s Poland; There and Back; The Story of a Man Who Worked 552% Above His Quota

Sunday 11 May
11.00am/2.00pm: Don’t Cry (Nie płacz, d. Grzegorz Królikiewicz, 1972); March Caresses (Marcowe migdały, d. Radosław Piwowarski, 1989)

Monday 12 - Tuesday 13 May
11.00am/2.00pm: Don’t Cry; March Caresses

Wednesday 14 - Saturday 17 May
11.00am/2.00pm: Requiem For 500,000 (Requiem dla 500 tysięcy, d. Jerzy Bossak/Wacław Kaźmierczak. 1962); Poland (1968); Rachel at Gdansk Train Station (Rachela na Dworcu Gdańskim, d. Ewą Szprynger, 2006)
(2pm screening on May 17 is introduced by editor Poldek Sobel)

Sunday 18 - Wednesday 21 May
11.00am: The Struggles for Poland: The Workers State (d. Dai Vaughan, 1988)
2.00pm: Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, d. Andrzej Wajda, 1976)
(2pm screening on May 18 is introduced by Professor Anita Prazmowska)

More information about the films here.

In what’s turning out to be a bumper month for Central and Eastern European film festivals in London, tomorrow sees the launch of the first Macedonian Film Festival, which will be based at the Prince Charles cinema off Leicester Square until May 5th.

Their website, with full programme details, is here, and the opening screening is Milcho Manchevski’s Shadows (Senki), at 8.30pm on Tuesday 29th April.

Last Sunday saw the Barbican’s London premiere (and only the second UK screening) of Jiří Menzel’s I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), his sixth adaptation of the work of the great Czech writer and eccentric Bohumil Hrabal following his contribution to the anthology Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, 1965) and the features Closely Observed Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1966), Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969), Cutting It Short (Postřižiny, 1980) and Snowdrop Festival (Slavnosti sněženek, 1983).

What made the event particularly memorable (aside from the joy of being able to see the film in a packed cinema with an audience that was clearly heavily Czech, judging from the way they laughed at the spoken dialogue rather than the subtitles) was that Menzel himself was there to introduce it and discuss both it and his career after the screening with the critic and Czech cinema expert Peter Hames. Sadly, the curse of the Sunday evening rail timetable meant that I had to leave before the end, but here’s a précis of what I managed to catch.

Hames opened the discussion with a brief summary of Menzel’s career, which the director upstaged by wiggling his eyebrows at the audience, thus setting a gleefully irreverent tone that continued throughout. (Menzel clearly understood much more English than he was comfortable admitting to officially, and he and his interpreter had become something of a comedy double-act by the end).

Menzel began by discussing the writer Bohumil Hrabal and his various travails with the authorities: he was very much a cult figure at a time when the Czech authorities were relaxing the imposition of Socialist Realism. Menzel and his friends initially made a film (Pearls of the Deep) that consisted of a number of Hrabal adaptations, and Hrabal was sufficiently impressed not only to let Menzel adapt his novel Closely Observed Trains for the screen, but to agree to work on the script with the young neophyte (who wasn’t even thirty at the time).

Hrabal is often described as being essentially untranslatable, his work often consisting of seemingly random anecdotes and streams of consciousness - but Menzel pointed out that although this might be true linguistically, he’s actually much easier to adapt for film as his writing is so visual. Although the script for Closely Observed Trains was revised six times before Hrabal and Menzel were satisfied with it, that’s scarcely a problem (”Like a good spirit, it has to be distilled.”)

Hrabal died in 1997, but had several conversations with Menzel on the subject of I Served the King of England. Menzel initially turned down the project, as he thought it was too complex. Then, shortly before Hrabal’s death, he relented and wrote a first draft of the script, of which Hrabal was… constructively critical. He was nicer about the second draft, though Menzel doubted whether he’d actually read it. Menzel said that it was ultimately good for the film that he couldn’t get it off the ground for several years (he didn’t specify why, but the project was tied up in legal red tape over a dispute over the rights).

Someone asked him whether he had any plans to film Hrabal’s masterpiece Too Loud a Solitude, but Menzel said he didn’t dare: he thought the material was too strong. Hames pointed out that he’d actually toned down quite a lot of the darker material in I Served the King of England, but Menzel defended this by pointing out that the scene in the novel where Lise is decapitated would be easier to process in verbal form than it would be in visual form, where the image would be so powerful that it would unbalance everything else. (He added that it would also make the film “too contemporary”, to audience laughter).

In response to a question about whether the film was a comedy, Menzel said yes. Although it might seem that the protagonist Jan Dítě is hard to sympathise with after he turns a blind eye to the Nazi threat, this was part of Menzel’s overall portrait of what he sees as the Czech character, and its infinite capacity for blending in. Dítě is a typical Czech figure, and he’s made likeable in order to establish some point of identification. (”Dítě has to be good, even if his deeds aren’t”). He said that writing the script took a year and a half, but shooting was generally delightful as he was working with an excellent team. However, the worst bit was reading the largely negative reviews in the Czech press (”Czech critics are cleverer than the rest of us”).

The discussion about the film was interleaved with various other subjects: Menzel reminisced briefly about his time at FAMU when he studied alongside many of the leading lights of the Czech New Wave, but in response to a question about whether he was consciously evoking Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966) in the film’s frequent food scenes, Menzel said a stronger role model was Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973).

Asked about how Eastern European films differ today from those made under socialism, Menzel said that it’s harder to make films today because filmmakers previously had very specific artistic aims, often dictated by external forces (technological or political restrictions). Today, you can do literally anything, and this can be limiting. Also, it was easier to get funding under socialism once the project had been approved.

Asked about the differences between adapting Hrabal and the equally distinguished novelist Vladislav Vančura (author of Capricious Summer/Rozmarné léto, which Menzel filmed in 1967), Menzel quipped that Vančura was much easier to work with, as he was dead and couldn’t defend himself.

Acknowledging that all his films can be described as comedies, Menzel explained that humour has a long tradition in Czech literature, and most classical books have some element of humour (”so it’s in my blood”). Czech humour is very close to Jewish humour, in that the Czechs often see themselves as serfs running rings around their masters, unlike Hungarians or Russians who saw themselves very much in the latter role. Unsurprisingly, Menzel is a big fan of silent comedy, and he fondly cited Chaplin and the way his films are “narrated by the image”.

And that, sadly, was all that I had time for - but I Served the King of England is opening in London on May 9th, and I’m hoping to have written about at least some of Menzel’s earlier Hrabal adaptations in more detail by then. Surprisingly, all five are out on DVD with English subtitles (a complete list of current Menzel DVDs can be found here), and while the Czech DVD of the new film isn’t English-friendly, it will doubtless appear on a British or American label at some point this year.

Ucieczka z kina ‘Wolność’
Poland, 1990, colour, 87 mins

• Director/Script: Wojciech Marczewski
• Photography: Jerzy Zieliński
• Production Design: Andrzej Kowalczyk
• Costume Design: Ewa Krauze
• Editor: Elżbieta Kurkowska
• Sound: Mariusz Kuczyński, Joanna Napieralska
• Music: Zygmunt Konieczny
• Production Manager: Andrzej Sołtysik
• Cast: Janusz Gajos (censor Rabkiewicz), Zbigniew Zamachowski (assistant censor), Teresa Marczewska (Małgorzata), Piotr Fronczewski (Party Secretary), Władysław Kowalski (Professor), Michał Bajor (Film Critic), Jan Peszek (Raskolnikow), Jerzy Bińczycki (cinema manager), Artur Barciś (Krzysio, the projectionist), Maciej Kozłowski (American actor), Henryk Bista (comrade Janik), Ewa Wencel (censor’s secretary), Krzysztof Wakuliński (Jerzy, assistant professor, Zofia Tomaszewska-Grąziewicz (‘Liberty’ cinema cashier), Aleksander Bednarz (Edward), Krystyna Tkacz (nurse), Zygmunt Bielawski (doctor, psychiatric hospital), Ewa Wiśniewska (censor’s ex-wife), Monika Bolly (Marta Rabkiewicz, censor’s daughter), Jerzy Gudejko (doctor), Eugenia Herman (teacher in charge of school party), Włodzimierz Musiał (militia officer), Eugeniusz Korczarowski, Tadeusz Falana, Stanisław Jaroszyński, Ryszard Mróz, Maria Wawszczyk, Szymon Herman, Jan Hencz (official delegation)

Premiered on 15 October 1990, just over a year after the election of Poland’s first non-communist government in over four decades, Wojciech Marczewski’s Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema offers a bizarre but rather engaging combination of anti-communist satire and film-versus-reality metaphysical trickery in the manner of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924) or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).

Set at some unspecified point in the late 1980s (between the release of Allen’s film and the fall of communism), the film revolves around the travails of the rumpled, careworn Rabkiewicz (Janusz Gajos), a provincial censor who clearly hates his job - it literally gives him a headache - but was presumably unable to find a sufficiently appealing alternative. He may well see himself as a frustrated artist, if his self-justifying speech explaining the creativity of censorship is any guide: those pesky artists won’t say “down with Communism!” outright, so he has to interpret their work. He’s also surrounded by knaves and fools, notably his candyfloss-addicted deputy (Zbigniew Zamachowski), whose self-caused difficulties Rabkiewicz is often called upon to resolve.

However, Rabkiewicz’s real problems begin with what looks like a banal romantic melodrama by the name of Daybreak (Jutrzenka), that’s playing in the ‘Liberty’ cinema opposite his office. Judging from the extracts that we see, there’s nothing apparently exceptionable about it (or anything exceptional: it looks like a very dull melodramatic weepie) until one of the actors, playing an elderly music professor, abandons the script to confess that “he couldn’t give a fuck” about his protégée’s chances in the Chopin competition. Though this goes down a storm with the hitherto bored school party that makes up much of the ‘Liberty’s audience, the manager realises that the film isn’t finishing on time, because the actors are mounting a full-scale mutiny against the banality of what they’re forced to perform in. (”I was brought up on Sophocles, where life and death have dimension and gravity”).

Unable to come up with a plausible explanation for this, but legally incapable of shutting down a film that’s been officially passed as suitable for screening (Marczewski has a lot of fun mocking bureaucratic red tape), Rabkiewicz concocts an elaborate plan that will involve keeping the cinema open but empty, subsidising the management for its losses. (This part seems to satirise the common Eastern bloc practice whereby troublesome films would get given a deliberately limited release, usually out in the sticks well away from the equally troublesome target audience). But this is expensive, so Rabkiewicz’s superiors pay him and the cinema a visit to assess the situation. They also bring along a film critic to judge the merit of what’s on screen - which by then has turned into an endless whingefest as the more activist actors are challenged by those who just want to finish the job and go home.

The critic pronounces his judgement: the problem with Daybreak is that it’s a Polish film, and therefore it’s cliché-ridden, ponderous and full of longueurs. Cinema should have sweep and imagination, whereas this is dull and provincial. To illustrate how the Americans do it properly, he runs a reel of The Purple Rose of Cairo - but an accident in the projection box causes both films to get mixed up, with its pith-helmeted lead ending up in ‘Daybreak’, which continues to unspool. (Unsurprisingly, Jeff Daniels did not reprise his role here, but his replacement does a surprisingly adequate job - helped by Marczewski shooting him from behind and from a distance to hide the deception).

Truth be told, this explicit citation of Purple Rose (and implied nod to Buster Keaton) sets the film a comedic standard that it ultimately can’t measure up to, very funny though it often is. But the anti-censorship elements are entirely Marczewski’s, and in this respect the film becomes a fascinating and oddly moving time capsule of an era in which Polish filmmakers were slowly emerging blinking into post-communist light.

There’s a particularly delightful running gag in which people burst into snatches of Mozart (not opera, as some commentators have claimed, but the Requiem - which seems more appropriately symbolic), seemingly just for the hell of it, anticipating the flash-mob phenomenon by nearly two decades. There’s also a more sombre scene, set on a rooftop, in which Rabkiewicz (who has found a way of entering ‘Daybreak’ in order to escape his colleagues) is confronted by actors whose careers were ruined by his often arbitrary decisions to censor their work - and it’s at moments like these that Marczewski can’t help but betray his anger at a system that stifled so much talent, often out of entirely misplaced paranoia.

There’s a sly nod to Dostoyevsky here in the presence of a shadowy figure credited as ‘Raskolnikov’ at the end - one of many literary references in the film, which seems to be striking a blow for intelligent, cultured cinema of a type that, ironically, would be more seriously threatened by naked capitalism than it ever was under communism. On its original release, Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema must have seemed wonderfully optimistic and Utopian - almost a petition for Polish cinema to get its cultural act together (Robert Altman would send a similar message to Hollywood via The Player two years later). The fact that no-one listened and that post-1989 Polish cinema has generally been far less distinguished than its output from 1969-89 makes the film a more sobering experience today than must have been the case back in 1990.

Which may explain why Marczewski’s film rapidly faded into undeserved obscurity: if a truthful message has implications that are hard to take on board, Rabkiewicz and his ilk would doubtless advise that it should be suppressed, and neglect is just as effective a method as outright censorship (more effective, in fact, as people are much less likely to notice). And the subsequent fate of the film underscores the fact that censorship continued to function in Poland after 1989 - but in much subtler and more insidious ways.

Last night I attended the keenly-awaited Censorship as a Creative Force Screentalk discussion at London’s Barbican Arts Centre, in which Jiří Menzel, István Szabó and Agnieszka Holland (an eleventh-hour replacement for Andrzej Wajda) discussed their experience of censorship under the various totalitarian régimes under which they had to spend much of their creative careers.

It was a fascinating evening that covered a lot of ground, and it was a particularly inspired idea to open with a screening of Wojciech Marczewski’s undeservedly obscure 1990 feature Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema (Ucieczka z kina ‘Wolność’), as this riff on Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo in the context of late-1980s Polish communist censorship was very funny, very pertinent, and much appreciated by the audience.

Then the critic Peter Hames took the stage to introduce his distinguished guests - including Andrzej Wajda. Although not physically present, Wajda had sent a ten-minute video address that made a perfect scene-setter, not least when technical problems at the start caused half the image to be obscured by a thick black bar (an irony noted by many, including Holland).

Wajda opened with the point that Communist countries were notorious for their toilet paper shortages, but claimed that this was actually a by-product of their governments deliberately restricting the production of paper of any kind. In other words, they didn’t censor specific words so much as the medium on which they were printed.

The same principle applied to film stock, which was strictly rationed and recorded - which caused difficulties for Wajda’s former protégé Roman Polański when he made his short film Mammals (Ssaki, 1963). Like most resourceful and cash-strapped young filmmakers, he made it with short ends - offcuts of film saved from other productions - but problems arose when he wanted to submit it to a film festival. Film Polski required him to produce receipts for the film stock - and because he couldn’t, the film didn’t officially exist.

Wajda then described the typical censorship process, which involved several stages. First of all, the film’s subject had to be approved, and then the script once it was written. In some countries, a so-called ‘editor’ would be present on the set making sure that what was shot matched what was written, which led to an anecdote about a debate in Moscow as to whether shooting scripts counted as works of literature - if they did, they couldn’t be altered by the director. However, this didn’t happen in Poland, to Wajda’s relief.

The finished film was then examined by officials in a closed screening known as a ‘Kolaudacja’, and if there were problems the Head of the Cinematography Committee would request changes. They also decided what kind of distribution the film should get: general or specialised, international or domestic, and in some cases whether to put them forward for major awards such as Oscars. Clearly, this ostensibly routine decision could also be used to punish filmmakers who were perceived to have overstepped the mark.

Surprisingly, Wajda only once had direct dealings with a censor (he recalled the man had a number, not a name) - after the ‘kolaudacja’ screening of Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958) he was ordered to remove the final scene in which Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) meets his death on a rubbish tip. Wajda persuaded him that the scene meant that “whoever raises his hand against People’s Poland ends up on the rubbish heap of history”, and the scene stayed - and audiences interpreted it the way Wajda originally intended.

This led to Wajda’s fundamental point: that because censors were more comfortable with words, this meant that filmmakers relied heavily on images, and the more ambiguous the better. The same was true of Kanal (1957) - everyone watching the film at the time knew that the Soviet Army was on the opposite bank of the Vistula, so merely showing the river was sufficient: the censors couldn’t cut it.

Agnieszka Holland then talked about the experience of working on Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1976), which finally went into production some 13-14 years after the script was written - she was initially asked to read it because she was one of the youngest people in Wajda’s film unit (Zespół Filmowy X), and the minister of culture was worried that it might have dated. Ministers of culture generally got replaced every nine months or so, which was handy as filmmakers could always invoke their predecessor’s approval of their project if necessary.

István Szabó recalled an incident at Cannes in which he replied “yes” to a journalist’s question regarding whether there was censorship in Hungary. A Hungarian friend said that he must have lost his mind - and, sure enough, two weeks later he was ordered to attend the film office. The official had French newspapers on his desk, signalling the subject in advance, but instead of giving Szabó a carpeting, he congratulated him and said that Hungarian filmmakers should be outspoken, so that foreigners will know that they come from a liberal country. This, needless to say, was also part of the censorship process.

Jiří Menzel said that the system in Czechoslovakia was similar to that in Poland and Hungary: no censorship office as such, but people knew what was or wasn’t possible. It was a sequence of tightening-up and loosening of restrictions, seen at its most extreme form in 1968, when censorship was abolished, only to be reinstated with a vengeance after the Soviet tanks invaded that August. His 1969 film Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti) illustrated this process: Bohumil Hrabal couldn’t publish in the 1950s, but was more acceptable in the 1960s, when he wrote stories satirising the stupidity of the Stalinist regime. In 1968, Menzel felt he could get away with adapting them into a film, which was completed before the new Czech government could crack down on it - but in the event they shelved it for twenty years.

In response to a question about whether censorship was necessary for creativity, Agnieszka Holland said that it was a complicated issue. Fundamentally, there is no place where censorship doesn’t exist, though in the West it’s economic rather than political. But she made the point that audiences in the Eastern bloc were generally more sophisticated, because they had to be, and barely-watchable third-generation VHSes of films like Wajda’s Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza, 1981) were scrutinised as though they were holy writ. Now, films are available in perfect copies, but they’re moronic romantic comedies - so censorship is still operating. István Szabó discussed the evolution of Miklós Jancsó’s highly stylised film language as a means of getting round the censors, and thinks that this is a point in favour of censorship, in that it encourages artists to be more creative.

This led to the most contentious issue of the evening, when Szabó reminisced about meeting a Cuban doctor-turned-film distributor, who had just seen a Hungarian film that he adored (Szabó didn’t identify it, but his description of the atmosphere of decadence and the lovingly-shot treatment of food suggests it may well have been Zoltán Huszárik’s Szindbad, 1971). However, he thought it was quite unsuitable for screening to Cubans, because there was too much indulgence - not least in the fact that the lead character often left food uneaten. Szabó sympathised with this, but Holland strongly disagreed, sayng that Cubans were hungry because of the regime, not the film, and they should be grown-up enough to be allowed to confront the truth, however brutal. Her audiences are her partners, not her children. (This led to a somewhat heated exchange about the differences - if any - between Nazism and Communism).

After a question about John Osborne’s surprise credit on Colonel Redl (in a nutshell, the rights to A Patriot For Me were cleared after Szabó realised that his script bore a passing resemblance, but Osborne was never directly involved - incidentally, copyright issues can also result in the censorship of films, though this wasn’t spelled out), the discussion turned to whether humour could be a subversive weapon. Szabó expressed his admiration for Menzel’s films, and Menzel said that everything serious must have a trace of humour, but a good comedy should be about serious things (something recognised by Shakespeare and Chaplin). However, if you talk about serious things too seriously, unintentional humour is often the result. Szabó said that a key difference between Hungarians and Czech is that the former take themselves more seriously (Holland claimed that Poles are in between).

Finally, in response to a question about whether censorship would always be an issue. Holland felt that as long as religion and similar ideologies existed, censorship would prevail. The Middle Ages were less bothered about it, because they didn’t know they were being lied to. In Communist Poland, they did, and resented it, so the tension was enormous. But after 1989 Holland understood that humanity couldn’t handle freedom either - they needed the illusion of some kind of order. And for that reason, censorship of some kind will always continue.

And on this rather pessimistic (albeit justified) note, that was that. My congratulations to the Barbican, the Czech Centre, the Hungarian Cultural Centre and the Polish Cultural Institute for pulling it all together (not least in seamlessly resolving the last-minute changes) - and Peter Hames and Menzel’s interpreter did their jobs to near-invisible perfection. It was well worth the trip.