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

Ludzie z pustego obszaru
1957, black and white, 15 mins

• Directors: Kazimierz Karabasz, Władysław Ślesicki
• Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
• Editor: Helena Białkowska
• Sound: Halina Paszkowska
• Music: Zbigniew Jeżewski
• Text/Narrator: Tadeusz Łomnicki
• Production Manager: Adam Wieluński
• Production Company: WFD

One of the most immediately striking aspects of Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki’s second collaboration is that they’ve clearly devoted a lot of thought to the nature and purpose of what they were attempting. Whereas many of the films made in the first year of the ‘black series’ (1955-56) attacked specific situations and/or institutions, often aggressively and/or sarcastically (for instance, Look Out, Hooligans!/Uwaga chuligani!, 1955; Warsaw ‘56/Warszawa 1956; The Lublin Old Town/Lubelska starówka, both 1956), People From An Empty Zone is far subtler in its anatomising of what the commentary admits has gone beyond a mere phenomenon to create a very real social problem.

The problem in question is the boredom and disaffected detachment of the younger generation, the first to lack an adult or teenage memory of World War II. These characters would soon become familiar in such films as Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960), Roman Polański’s Knife in the Water (Noż w wodzie, 1962) and especially the mid-1960s Polish films of Jerzy Skolimowski (who also scripted the Wajda and Polański titles), but in 1957 Karabasz and Ślesicki were exploring new territory for postwar Polish cinema, which had traditionally preferred its youngsters to match various socialist archetypes that had very little connection with reality on the ground.

The film begins with a series of shots taken around Warsaw’s Praga district. A moving camera (there’s no attempt to disguise that it’s shooting from a car, and no need: this is exactly what passing drivers would see) observes various groups of young men hanging out in small groups. The commentary says it’s easy to single them out, as they have a certain posture, the same bored, expressionless faces - yet there’s nothing especially menacing about them either. The narrator is as intrigued as we are: who are these people, and why do they spend most of their time on the street?

Off camera, an assignation is arranged, and the film crew meets them at one of their standard meeting points, just below a military statue (there are several cutaways to statues like this, as if they’re rebuking their descendants). But they’re not especially forthcoming, saying (also off camera) that many of them still go to school and that some are thinking about jobs. They consider themselves to be independent adults, but complain about lack of money and the difficulty of finding suitable accommodation. As to why they have so much time on their hands, it’s because learning is difficult and unnecessary and work is not always profitable, so why do either? Zośka goes home from a day on a sweet-wrapping production line to an almost identical aural backdrop as her mother operates her sewing machine: the point is made by the cut.

Instead of the carefully staged and structured set-pieces that make up the films of their contemporaries, Karabasz and Ślesicki continue down the road they’d already started to explore in their earlier film, offering only brief wisps of narrative content. A woman’s handbag is found in the river, and then a corpse, presumably its owner. Accident, suicide or murder? We’re not told. A visibly drunk woman laughs, revealing that several front teeth are missing: was she a victim of violence, did she slip and fall, or did she miscalculate when trying to open a bottle with her teeth? Again, not a clue. Boys swap erotic photographs in an abandoned boat that’s been left to rust on land by the Praga port before going to spy on an actual tryst in the undergrowth (this echoes a similar sequence in Karabasz and Ślesicki’s earlier Where The Devil Says Goodnight/Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc). “Things happen that nobody wants to talk about, and the militia comes as a last resort,” says the narrator: these people keep themselves to themselves, their faces constantly watching, their expressions betraying nothing.

Just past the halfway mark Karabasz and Ślesicki start asking the expected sociological questions: did they leave their parents too early, did they have bad experiences at school (repeating a year, for instance), or did they simply pick the wrong job, souring their views on work as a whole? It’s clear that part of their disillusionment with the world stems from their realisation that all they’d been told about the value of school and work was a pack of lies: they learned little and got less stimulation, and didn’t even notice the supposedly pivotal transition to adulthood. They dream of escape, but rarely do anything about it except go to the cinema for the temporary variety. The only time they show signs of life is during a wild rock’n'roll-fuelled party, heavily lubricated by alcohol (”They want to kill the boredom and emptiness in one go”) - but this, of course, is the thing that ’society’ objects to, as a montage of scandalised headlines reveals.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the film’s hesitancy when it comes to reaching firm moral judgements is the fact that it has no onscreen title, and the phrase “people from an empty zone” is only uttered near the very end of the film, given only a slight emphasis in the middle of a sentence. (Presumably audiences of the time wouldn’t necessarily have been aware of, or registered, the title of the supporting documentary short when they saw it in cinemas). As for identifying the causes of this “empty zone” and suitable panaceas, Karabasz and Ślesicki leave it up to the politicians: their job is to show, not prescribe.

The end result is a film that’s quite different in tone from most of the other core ‘black series’ titles: it still has elements of social criticism, but it also looks forward to the far less didactic films that Karabasz and Ślesicki would go on to make, both together and individually. It also marks another stage in the creative partnership between the directors and cinematographer Stanisław Niedbalski, whose deceptively casual, largely hand-held work was already becoming a crucial element: it’s the tiny, seemingly trivial cutaways, enhanced by Helena Białkowska’s well-judged editing, that give People from an Empty Zone a curious potency that remains to this day.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: The Black Series double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). On a par with most of the other transfers on this disc, the source print is occasionally a bit battered, but it’s all perfectly watchable. The subtitles are conscientious enough to translate onscreen text as well as narration, so I can forgive numerous typos.

Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc
1956, black and white, 11 mins

• Director/script: Kazimierz Karabasz, Władysław Ślesicki
• Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
• Sound: Halina Paszkowska
• Narration: Tadeusz Łomnicki
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

The first professional film by then recent film-school graduates Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki, Where the Devil Says Goodnight is considered one of the key films of the ‘black series’ of documentaries that opened a debate about Poland’s social problems in the mid-1950s. However, it’s quite different in tone and content from the in-your-face shock-tactic approach of Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski in Look Out, Hooligans! (Uwaga chuligani!, 1955) and The Children Accuse (Dzieci oskarżają, 1956). While they thrust the viewer into the thick of the action from the start, Karabasz and Ślesicki prefer to open with a slow pan across what initially appears to be a rural landscape, gradually revealing the buildings of Targówek, the film’s location - “the forgotten district of Warsaw”, according to the commentary (read by Tadeusz Łomnicki, the lead in Wajda’s A Generation the previous year).

In 1949, construction began on Targówek’s House of Culture, despite an unresolved controversy of what it was actually for, and whether it should be a greater priority than providing decent flats for the locals. Years pass, more plans are drawn up, walls are constructed and demolished - and by 1956, eight years after the foundations were first dug, the House of Culture is just as much of a building site as ever, offering just a tiny, cramped gym as a minuscule part of the original prospectus.

Amateur dramatics rehearsals are conducted in the same space as table tennis games and even pigeon fancying, not to mention meetings of the social committee to allocate who does what when - and as they deliberate, the original drawings appear on screen to show what they were promised. The “cultural revolution” in Targówek amounts to a travelling cinema that visits once a month. “Who is responsible for this?” asks the commentary, and is given no answer, as hooligans similar to the ones in Hoffman and Skórzewski’s film menace a young woman in the dimly-lit night-time streets.

However, Karabasz later admitted that he and Ślesicki were only marginally interested in the question of cultural provision in Targówek: it was just a convenient excuse to get permission to shoot there. Their film’s real value lies in its seemingly unvarnished presentation of the lives of those forced to live in Targówek: the marketplace as the centre for local gossip, the boys huddled together for a smoke in the Jewish cemetery (or, as popular local slang would have it, the Cholera Cemetery, presumably after the disease that carried off most of its inhabitants), the people filling their buckets with water from a communal tap, teenagers of both sexes meeting each other for trysts by the railway tracks (some more mutually consenting than others), a man helping his paralytically drunk friend down the street… into another bar.

In contrast to the slam-bang editing of Hoffman and Skórzewski the takes are longer and more measured, the setups less contrived, the sense of lives as they are actually lived far stronger, for all the signs of postproduction manipulation. A case in point: the gossiping housewives sequence was clearly shot at a different time to the recording of the unsynchronised soundtrack - but this deserves credit for attempting what in terms of Polish cinema seems to have been an unusually experimental approach to onscreen narration (albeit one familiar in British documentaries of two decades earlier: Paul Rotha attempted something similar in his 1935 film Shipyard when he superimposed the shipbuilders’ sometimes subversive thoughts over footage of them at work). The only music is a folksong, which Mikołaj Jazdon’s note in the booklet accompanying PWA’s DVD edition identifies as ‘Jam złodziej czarodziej’ (’I am a Crook and a Conjurer’).

In terms of the film’s underlying message, Karabasz and Ślesicki eschew direct finger-pointing - “we” are apparently to blame for deceiving the people of Targówek, not any specific planning body. If one hadn’t been told, one would never have guessed that this film was shot in Warsaw: the wooden shacks and mudbath roads seem to come from somewhere much more rural. If contemporary reactions are any guide, the message got through: the film’s initial audiences and critics were genuinely shocked to be exposed to the reality behind years of utopian rhetoric of a kind that undoubtedly accompanied the original announcement about Targówek’s House of Culture.

The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: The Black Series double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). PWA’s source print is a little battered, but the transfer is fine. One minor complaint about the subtitles is that they leave the phrase meaning ‘Cholera Cemetery’ in the original Polish, though in mitigation they make a fair stab at translating the lyrics of the opening solo song, at least when it’s not interrupted by narration. There are also a few typos, one of which charmingly renders ‘hooligans’ as the original Slavic ‘chooligans’.

Węzeł
1961, black and white, 10 mins

• Director: Kazimierz Karabasz
• Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
• Sound: Halina Paszkowska
• Editing: Lidia Zonn
• Collaboration: Jerzy Szawłowski
• Narrator: Tadeusz Bukowski
• Production Co-ordinator: Ryszard Żerański
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

In terms of conception and execution, Railway Junction is clearly part of the group that also includes the previous year’s The Musicians and People on the Road. Once again, there’s an abiding concern with presenting the lives of working people, though this time there’s no distracting element of musical or acrobatic glamour: these men not only work night shifts at a railway junction but, as the bookending commentary highlights at the start, a freight junction at Tarnowskie Góry that ordinary commuters will never see in action.

The opening shots would grace anything in British Transport Films’ acclaimed output - there’s something ineffably magnificent about low-angle shots of steam trains belching white clouds of smoke across the screen. But most of the film is set behind the scenes as the railway marshallers and dispatchers get to work, with much of the running time taken up with a montage of men and mouthpieces as they bark elaborate instructions over the phone and tannoy.

Just as The Musicians had made use of important lighting innovations, so Railway Junction makes similar advances in sound. According to Mikołaj Jazdon’s notes accompanying PWA’s DVD release, this film was a major breakthrough for Karabasz and his team, because he had access to much smaller and lighter recording equipment, with the result that, in the director’s words, “it became incomparably easier to capture the daily speech and portray people’s individual mannerisms, temperatures and personalities, locked in words, pauses, hesitations, failures, etc.” It’s clear by comparing this film with its predecessors that not only is there much more directly synchronised sound, but it’s also processed and edited in a much more ambitious and creative way.

Although the film is ostensibly less tuneful than its two predecessors, Karabasz nonetheless contrives to create something that sounds convincingly like a musical piece out of the sounds of the dispatch desk, the rhythmical picture and sound editing (courtesy of Lidia Zonn, the director’s wife) becoming strangely hypnotic. We’re never shown the outcome of these increasingly complex requests, or have more than the faintest idea of what they actually mean, but that’s not these men’s concern: their job is to make sure that things run smoothly in that particular time and place. It’s a snapshot of experienced professionals on the job, and it would be unseemly to interfere with their work.

The source print of the transfer included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Kazimierz Karabasz (Region 0 PAL) is occasionally a bit battered but this doesn’t affect appreciation at all. Unlike The Musicians and People on the Road, the titles immediately preceding this one on the DVD, the subtitles are in sync and seem to do an adequate job given the challenge of transcribing rapidly-cut, sometimes overlapping sentences. As for online commentary, Culture.pl’s overview of Karabasz’ career mentions Railway Junction in passing.

Ludzie w drodze
1960, black and white, 10 mins

• Director: Kazimierz Karabasz
• Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
• Sound: Halina Paszkowska
• Editing: Lidia Zonn
• Music: Jerzy Wojciechowski
• Production Co-ordinator: Ryszard Żerański
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

A companion-piece to Kazimierz Karabasz’ The Musicians, and made at roughly the same time, People on the Road takes a similar approach to circus folk. Both films look at what happens between performances - in The Musicians’ case, it’s a band rehearsal, while People on the Road takes us from the dismantling of the circus paraphernalia to the start of a new show in a different town. In both cases, there is no commentary and very little dialogue, none of it important (so the poorly-synced subtitles in the only current DVD edition are less of a problem than they might otherwise be) - both the camera and viewer are observers rather than critics.

The opening montage echoes that of The Musicians, in that it shows people at the end of a working day, the soundtrack consisting entirely of clanking, hammering and the thrum of internal combustion engines as everything from the large metal ‘Cyrk’ sign to the marquee to the seating is carefully disassembled and laid out piece by piece in the circus trucks. When they’ve finished, and a motley procession drives past the camera, we hear a mournful harmonica solo that will play throughout most of the remainder of the film. The performers of the Cyrk Miś (literally ‘Bear Circus’) - men, women, children, monkeys, cats and other species - either sleep en route, or lie in the juddering trucks under the flickering lights, watching the animals playing with each other or the toys dangling from the roofs.

The next day, work starts early in the middle of a large field. A trainer climbs into the cage with three muzzled bears. The men band together to erect the marquee, pushing the supporting poles into place. Makeshift kitchens and bathrooms are constructed in the open air. A monkey licks the juices off a slice of lemon. The horses are tethered on a long enough leash to allow them to run around. High-wire and trapeze artists, acrobats and unicyclists, gingerly rehearse their acts. Around all this, family life maintains a semblance of normality: mothers wash clothes and hang them on the line as children play, or pop into the marquee to gawp at the performers, getting a sneak preview before the audience proper arrives. Crowds gather, and wait in anticipation. And then the start of the performance is announced, the audience applauds, the music strikes up… and the film ends.

As that précis suggests, this is a film that thrives and indeed relies on small but inexplicably telling details - in much the same way that The Musicians did, but on a larger scale. The absence of any meaningful dialogue or narration means that all we know about these people is what their gestures tell us, but these are often highly evocative - a fleeting sidelong glance between two performers reveals a whole lexicon of information. PWA’s booklet quotes Karabasz: “What we learned, which until then had been an important but abstract postulate, was the need for discretion. We also began to understand the seemingly obvious value of patience when observing human behaviour”. Accordingly, Karabasz and his regular cinematographer Stanisław Niedbalski often shot through telephoto lenses, to avoid distracting the performers - the resulting flattening of perspective occasionally creating the alarming impression that the trapeze artist is about to collide with the unicyclist.

Three sequences run longer than average. In the first, an acrobat dresses himself, smoking a cigarette throughout, while balancing on his head - which he does with such quiet serenity and seeming obliviousness of the world around him that it’s easy to share Karabasz’ rapt fascination. The second extended sequence involves a montage of children’s faces as they wait for the performance to begin: it’s a study in anticipation and growing excitement as they peer over rails to try to get the best vantage point. And finally, there’s the elaborate sequence of pre-performance preparation, as make-up is applied, costumes adjusted and limbs stretched and flexed: we’ve already had a private view, but now they have to face a paying public, and the anxiety on the faces of some of these seasoned professionals is palpable. With barely a word of dialogue (and none of it important), Karabasz gives us a vivid glimpse of the lives of these people, and by the end we understand better why they choose to live such a nomadic and eccentric existence.

The transfer on PWA’s DVD Polish School of the Documentary: Kazimierz Karabasz (Region 0 PAL) is generally fine in terms of picture and sound, but marred - as with their presentation of The Musicians - by subtitles that appear several seconds too late. However, the film is perfectly comprehensible if they’re switched off altogether, which may be the best bet. Culture.pl’s overview of Karabasz’ career mentions People on the Road briefly.

Muzykanci
1960, black and white, 9 mins

• Director: Kazimierz Karabasz
• Production Manager: Andrzej Liwnicz
• Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
• Sound: Halina Paszkowska
• Sound Editing: Lidia Zonn
• Music: The Warsaw Orchestra of Tramway Workers
• Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)

When Sight & Sound magazine ran the fifth of its decennial critics’ Top Ten polls of what was alleged to be the best films ever made, they extended the invitation to filmmakers for the first time. As one of the leading arthouse cinema lights at the time (1992) Krzystof Kieślowski’s list came under especial scrutiny, not least because nestling amongst the expected favourites (Bresson, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Welles, Ken Loach) was an obscure nine-minute non-fiction short by Kazimierz Karabasz, one of Kieślowski’s teachers at the Łódź Film School and an acknowledged major influence on his whole filmic philosophy.

Watching The Musicians with no prior knowledge of the historical and cultural context, it’s initially difficult to see what the fuss was about (in addition to Kieślowski’s praise, it’s long been regarded as one of the milestones of the Polish documentary movement). It’s certainly a very engaging piece, in which a group of factory workers band together (literally) in the form of an after-hours wind and brass orchestra, but that’s practically the entire narrative content. Fans of Czech cinema will notice affinities between this troupe and the various ensembles in mid-1960s films by Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer (whose Intimate Lighting was also on Kieślowski’s list), not least the fact that they’re made up entirely of middle-aged to elderly men. But there is no commentary, and very little spoken content, so we’re told next to nothing about why they spend their leisure hours making music.

Then again, we don’t need to be, as the sheer joy of what they’re doing is obvious from the film itself. The high-contrast opening shots in the tram workshop have a hint of archetypal Socialist Realism about them, but they’re too brief to make any didactic point: they merely establish that these men are not professional musicians and are all performing voluntarily. According to Mikołaj Jazdon’s notes in the PWA set, the elaborately-moustachioed conductor has “a melodic Vilnius accent”, and his native country has a longstanding tradition of amateur music-making.

But the film’s importance rests not so much in its subject as in its style and technique. Cinematographer Stanisław Niedbalski, who had worked regularly with Karabasz since the latter’s professional debut, dispensed with conventional side lighting in favour of lighting from above, which gave the camera much more freedom in terms of positioning and movement, as there was much less chance of accidentally including one of the lights. Aside from the aesthetic benefits (many of the men are bald, and so catch the light beautifully), it also meant that Karabasz and Niedbalski were in a better position to capture the kind of fleeting moments that abound in ensemble situations like this.

Stylistically, the film begins with mostly static, carefully framed shots, initially of the men in the workshop. These are accompanied exclusively by the sound of industrial noises, broken by the whistle denoting the end of their shift, after which a single onscreen title sets the scene: “This is a film about people who have given up many an evening. At one time the ‘Brassers’ were a vast army of amateur zealots. Today, they are the last Mohicans”. We then see the same men setting up their instruments and music stands in the rehearsal space. The background sound changes to a blend of inaudible conversation, overlaid with a melodic clarinet phrase. Music is handed out, pored over and discussed. Brass instruments join the woodwind, and the cacophony gets increasingly loud until the conductor dons his glasses and taps his stand for silence. The film is already nearly half over, a fact that in itself emphasises that Karabasz is not interested in imposing an artificial narrative structure on his material: he’s already drawn eloquent parallels between the men in the workshop and the rehearsal room and the similar dedication they apply to each task.

The rehearsal proper begins with a French horn duet, and is almost immediately interrupted by the conductor. After a few tweaks to the volume and synchronisation, they start again, getting only a few bars further before the conductor complains that they’re out of tune. More adjustments, with tuba player Zygmunt’s staccato phrasing coming in for particular attention. Finally, the musicians get to play uninterrupted, and Niedbalski’s camera discovers a new-found freedom, gliding from player to player, pausing to dwell on close-ups of pursed lips over mouthpieces and fingers over keys. As the tempo increases, the camera stops moving and the cutting speeds up. But just as the music is about to reach a climax, Karabasz cuts to a slow pan around the deserted tram workshop, the music becoming muffled and distant. This unexpectedly low-key ending, at precisely the point where one would normally expect some kind of triumphalism (or at the very least an affirmative commentary making some kind of social or political point), underscores the film’s key theme: these men aren’t playing music for fame or fortune, they’re doing it for love. What more needs to be said?

Befitting its reputation, The Musicians has been released on several different DVDs, including (at least) the French, British, American and Australian editions of The Double Life of Véronique. Visually, the transfers included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: Kazimierz Karabasz (Region 0 PAL) and Artificial Eye’s The Double Life of Véronique (Region 2 PAL) are probably sourced from the same print (minor damage appears to match) but not from the same transfer, as the PWA picture is slightly cropped at the left-hand side, while the Artificial Eye is slightly cropped at the right. However, the PWA transfer is badly marred by English subtitles that are several seconds out of sync, while the Artificial Eye’s subtitles are perfectly timed. I haven’t seen Criterion’s The Double Life of Véronique (Region 1 NTSC), but given that the package is virtually identical to Artificial Eye’s offering, it’s probably safe to assume that both originated from MK2 in Paris and are therefore functionally identical. (The subtitle issue, though annoying, is not crippling - the film has very little spoken content, and hardly any that’s especially important). As for online commentary, Culture.pl’s overview of Karabasz’ career briefly discusses The Musicians.

Jak co dzień…
1955, black and white, 12 mins

• Director: Kazimierz Karabasz
• Writer: Kazimierz Karabasz
• Camera: Zbigniew Karpowicz
• Assistants: Władysław Ślesicki, Nikola Todorow, Karol Dąbrowski
• Production Company: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa (Łódź Film School)

Made as a Łódź Film School project, Day In Day Out, Kazimierz Karabasz’ lyrical portrait of the daily morning journey of Warsaw’s suburban commuters, has hardly dated at all: my fellow Londoners will find themselves nodding in recognition on numerous occasions, even if hanging onto the sides of moving carriages is frowned on these days (at least in Europe).

The film begins with a montage of scenes in the suburbs just after sunrise, with only a few people already active. But this trickle turns to a flood as the camera approaches the station - little more than a platform-free building. A steam train pulls out so slowly at first that one man jumps off and runs to a carriage further back to get a better grip. Meanwhile, other commuters prefer to cycle or cram themselves onto what look like former army trucks or treacherous-looking buses. (”Time for some morning exercise”, chuckles the commentator as a few run after it). The accompanying music, whose jaunty rhythms recall Rossini’s William Tell Overture, is in fact the third movement from Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony.

The vehicle of choice (90% of commuters, apparently) seems to be the electric train, for good reason: it’s by far the fastest and most efficient system of transport, needing only sixty seconds at each stop. At this point, the focus of the film changes from the commuter to the workers behind the scenes, with Karabasz emphasising how much work is required to ensure this sometimes misleading appearance of seamless efficiency. As the commentary puts it: if you’re minded to complain about a 10-minute delay, you have these people to thank for ensuring that it was that brief. Delightfully old-fashioned mechanical phones allow communication up and down the line, vital in case anything goes wrong. “As a passenger you have no idea what a rascal you are travelling on”, says the commentator, before highlighting the 603 train as being particularly troublesome.

I haven’t seen Where The Devil Says Goodnight (Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, 1956), Karabasz’s first professional documentary (UPDATE: I have now), but it’s worth noting that it was included in one of the NFT’s Free Cinema programmes (the fourth, dedicated to Polish cinema, screened from 3-6 September 1958). On the evidence of the earlier film, there’s a clear affinity between what both Karabasz and his British counterparts were doing in creating genuinely poetic treatments of material that might be banal or didactic in other hands.

Mikołaj Jazdon comments in the booklet accompanying PWA’s DVD release that “it is astounding that not a trace of the all-prevailing Socialist Realism can be found in his theme, approach, commentary or filming methods”, and it also stands apart from trends in many mainstream British documentaries of the time. I recently watched a brace of National Coal Board newsreels from the late 1940s and 1950s whose raw material is sometimes not dissimilar to Karabasz’s, but the commentator is determined to shoehorn everything into an explicitly pro-NCB propagandist line - and Karabasz could easily have turned his film in to a paean of praise for the Polish railway system merely by changing one or two sentences. That he didn’t gives some hint of the direction his career would take, though later films drop the commentary altogether.

Included on Polish Audiovisual Publishers’ two-disc survey Polish School of the Documentary: Kazimierz Karabasz (Region 0 PAL), the print is in surprisingly good condition considering its age and status as a film-school project, and the subtitles seem comprehensive enough. They’re also in sync, which sadly isn’t always the case on this release. Culture.pl offers a good English-language overview of Karabasz’ career, though the piece doesn’t mention this film.