The Gdynia Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

The characteristic theme of Polish cinema has been its own history, and with the telling of that history. A cliché claims that history is written by the victors, but Poland, a geopolitical nonentity for more than a century, managed to will itself into existence through the stories it told about itself to inflame the patriotism of its youth. Unfortunately, this use of history for didactic and patriotic purposes meant that history was often distorted into myth, with anything inconvenient or unheroic left out, by design or by state decree.

Poland celebrated the centenary of its independence last year, which may explain the glut of patriotic films at this year’s Gdynia Festival of Polish Films. According to Piłsudski, it was one man who single-handedly liberated Poland, with a mix of personal charisma, guerrilla terror, and historical opportunism. This story of student-activist-turned-socialist-turned-paramilitary-turned-statesman Józef Piłsudski (Borys Szyc) and his comrades is familiar to every Polish schoolchild; no concessions are made to non-Polish viewers. Piłsudski is heavy on allegory—the film begins with the hero incarcerated in a Tsarist asylum. His escape and transformation from doped savage to man of action is structured to mirror that of the Polish nation. By cutting off at 1918, the film omits Piłsudski’s growing autocracy, which would ultimately lead to his coup against a “weak” democracy. It also omits his more laudable promotion of an ethnically diverse Poland, which is not one of the current government’s policies. The excellent posters for Piłsudski promised poster-like stylizations, but one has only to look at films dealing with similar subjects in the same period—Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins or Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere about the young Mussolini—to see how conservative and artistically timid Michal Rosa’s film is. To its credit, the film does end on a subversive joke. Piłsudski declares Polish independence as his child is being born; the baby shits on the statesman as he holds her for the first time. This may be an indication that things won’t be quite so easy in the new Poland. 

Dariusz Gajewski’s The Legions follows the same narrative formula—Poland figured as a masochistic deserter who rises to man of destiny. It is even worse. Funded by the government with help from other state agencies and institutions, this is the kind of didactic history the government evidently prefers. A strong female lead is the film’s one concession to progress, her anachronistic bob the one stylish thing about the film, although even the level of sexual desire presented in Piłsudski is out, of course, in a moralizing film aimed at impressionable schoolkids. The Legions was conceived as a blockbuster, and interrupts amusingly naff explanatory dialogues with action set pieces boosted by mediocre CGI. Agnieszka Holland would be horrified to be placed in this company, but her plodding English-language, Golden Lion award winning Mr. Jones, about a modest journalist who opposes empires and sacrifices his life to tell The Truth, is cut from the same “Great Man” cloth as Piłsudski and The Legions.

A very different history lesson was provided by Michal Wegrzyn’s Proceder, which I saw right after Piłsudski. Heavily influenced by the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile and 1930s Warner Bros. social dramas, it follows the rise and fall of petty criminal and rapper Tomasz Chada (Piotr Witkowski). Despite being a violent criminal, alcoholic junkie, and emotionally unreliable, Chada is a far more engaging hero than the square-jawed Piłsudski. The film fuses two genres—the gangster film and the “star is born” musical. Tragically, Chada cannot disentangle the two. Every time his music seems on the up, criminality and his own nature drag him down; but it is also his own nature and criminal milieu that defines the music. Among the film’s virtues is its vivid picture of Polish life in the last two decades, a history that foregrounds the baby shit that sullied Piłsudski’s idealism: black marketeering, police torture, civic corruption, and a disaffected youth subculture that curdles into middle age due to a lack of opportunities. The film’s obvious models—Goodfellas, Fincher, Assayas—are subverted by farce. There is one magnificent sequence worthy of Mike Leigh: Chada’s prospective father-in-law is an ex-army officer who despises him and reports him to the police. This betrayal backfires when they suspect the father of hiding the runaway rapper and conduct a heavy-handed search of his property, to the tipsy amusement of his disaffected wife.

If Piłsudski and The Legions represent the cinema Poland’s conservative leaders want citizens to watch, Solid Gold is one they definitely don’t. A scandal, widely reported in the local media, flared up when Jacek Bromski, president of the Polish Filmmakers Association (PFA), withdrew his film from the competition. Solid Gold was made by state television; the ruling party demanded that changes be made to a film that depicted a notorious pyramid scheme and made references to other recent cases of government corruption. The festival didn’t cover itself in glory by siding with the producers against the director, though throughout the festival it was clear that there was strain between the competing “visions” of organizers the Polish Film Institute and PFA, and the festival’s political paymasters. When someone relented and the film was eventually shown on the penultimate night of the festival, Solid Gold turned out to be a deeply misogynistic and highly watchable police procedural, given some Heat-style frisson by the casting of two Polish legends in the lead roles, Janusz Gajos and Andrzej Seweryn, who do not meet until the climax. That the reactionary Solid Gold is indicative of official Polish film culture as a whole, with its nepotism and structural lack of diversity, is suggested by the festival catalogue, which opens with ten forewords by old white men, including Bromski.

You would be forgiven for thinking from films like Piłsudski and The Legions that the Poles were a blustering, sentimental, self-delusive people. The Poles of my acquaintance tend to be sardonic and blackly humorous, as derisive of all ideological cant as they are of those in authority. This is the welcome attitude that informs Marcin Krzysztalowicz’s Pan T., a portrait of a blacklisted writer in Warsaw. The year is 1953, deep in the Stalinist period of communist rule in Poland. Filmed in the rich black and white of a Frank Miller comic strip, Pan T. disdains the colorful aesthetic of socialist realist musicals being made in Poland during the period, and is perhaps closer to the absurdist fantasies of Czech director and screenwriter Pavel Juracek, with the latter’s Kafkaesque nightmare animated by sequences of pure slapstick. Pan T. undermines all the clichés of the heroic “dissident” narrative—rather than high-mindedly standing for freedom and human dignity, our hero (Pawel Wilczak) dreams of pissing on or sharing a toke in the men’s room with the reviled secretary of the Polish Communist Party Bolesław Bierut, portrayed here by Jerzy Bonczak as an absent-minded, myopic, dull functionary rather than a Stalinist monster. True to the times, and pace the historical epics elsewhere in the festival, Pan T. is not shown mooning about the Romantic Polish Past—exemplified by the poem Pan Tadeusz, the national epic by Adam Mickiewicz, filmed to great popular success by Wajda—but relishing American popular culture. He reads cheap Westerns, listens to American music, and keeps a photograph of the Chelsea Hotel above his bed. The local audience was crying with laughter throughout.

The Coldest Game engages with the tropes of film noir and the Hitchcockian spy thriller to tell the absurd story of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was averted. Director Lukasz Kosmicki also lampoons both last year’s Golden Lion winner—Paweł Pawlikowski’s overrated and earnest Cold War, one of the few internationally successful Polish films of recent decades (the sequences featuring a similar folk group engaging in cultural diplomacy are a hoot)—and Hollywood’s own jingoistic take on the same event, Thirteen Days. The Coldest Game doesn’t celebrate monumental heroes, but history’s losers—Bill Pullman’s shambling alcoholic mathematician chess genius Joshua Mansky, abducted by the CIA to cover an involved espionage MacGuffin, and Alfred (Robert Wieckiewicz), shrewd Polish director of the People’s Palace, where a chess match will take place between the USSR and the USA. Whereas Mr. Jones insists on a single truth that can be traced by following unproblematic facts, The Coldest Game shows “truth” and history in the process of being manufactured and distorted according to ideology and realpolitik.

To propose The Black Mercedes as the festival’s masterpiece will surprise those colleagues who dismissed it, along with the bulk of the films shown, as too much like “television.” I am not quite sure what this put-down means in the age of Netflix and Amazon as film studios—cinema in general has been looking televisual for a while now. As Raúl Ruiz demonstrated with works such as Mysteries of Lisbon, there are positive aspects to a ‘televisual’ aesthetic. There is television’s serial structure, its dizzying accumulation of character and narrative incident, reminiscent of the silent serials of Feuillade. Its very familiarity allows the critical director to manipulate audience expectation and prejudice. Like many TV period dramas, the relatively low budget of The Black Mercedes means that its historical reconstruction is selective, leading to an intensity of focus on the particular object or outfit selected, as well as a greater awareness of what is off screen. The fact that today’s Warsaw is itself a historical reconstruction after it was razed during World War II adds to the film’s thematic piquancy.

Such an approach is appropriate to a period murder mystery, the latest of many directed by veteran Janusz Majewski, initially under a communist regime where it was necessary to play games with narrative and meaning. The Jewish wife of an eminent barrister is stabbed to death in her own kitchen in German-occupied Warsaw. The crime falls under the authority of the collaborationist Polish Blue Police, and the unsmiling, imperturbable Inspector Król (Andrzej Zielinski). Is there any possibility of official justice in this period of official injustice? The Black Mercedes could be an episode of TV’s Foyle’s War or Misdomer Murders—a detective interviews an array of eccentric suspects, including the murdered woman’s young paramour, an aristocratic voyeur, and a thieving street-sweeper—whose partial or misleading accounts are told in long flashbacks that feel like discrete episodes of a television program. The title refers to the transportation of Count Maximilian von Fleckenstein, an SS-Sturmbannführer who befriends barrister Karol Holzer (Artur Zmijewski)—his very name a reminder of “pure” Poland’s complex ethnic histories—and pays his wife secret visits.

The film’s brilliance begins with a prologue in which a paperboy mysteriously shoots a woman on a departing train; a flashback to a university exam on the eve of war; an extraordinary credits sequence wherein the Nazi invasion of Poland, agonized over at length in epic films such as Wajda’s Lotna, is crystallized in an image of burning books and a complex sound montage. The film’s deliberate, TV-style artificiality—its disjunction between gorgeous natural light and straw characters in preposterous situations—is sustained to the extraordinary climax. 

The Black Mercedes confronts two aspects of the Polish national character as promoted by the current administration, aspects unwittingly but amply displayed in other films throughout the festival. Firstly, a national self-pity in which Polish greatness is persistently undermined by treacherous “outsiders,” traditionally Germans or Russians, but more recently including women, homosexuals, “elite” politicians, and migrants. Max’s disabled, cross-dressing, bisexual, aristocratic Nazi is therefore a hilariously overdetermined villain, a concentration of “otherness” onto which the film’s Poles can project their fear and anger.

The second, related characteristic is Poland’s refusal to confront its complicity in a genocide that was enacted on its land. The port city of Gdynia, like the rest of Poland, is littered with war memorials, but few of them refer to the Jewish experience. Marek Haltof’s widely read primer Polish National Cinema (see review in the Fall 2019 issue of Cineaste) unwittingly but disturbingly differentiates between “Poles” and “Jews,” as if one couldn’t be both. This kind of prejudice leads to idiocies such as the proposed “Polocaust” Museum to mourn all the Poles, as opposed to Jews, killed in World War II—a project promoted by Jarosław Sellin, local representative, Deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage, and de facto patron of the Gdynia festival. Majewski exposes this mindset in a jaw-dropping sequence where Max takes Karol—a lawyer who buys up Jewish real estate, ostensibly to transfer the proceeds to Swiss bank accounts most of the vendors will never access—to a cabaret in the Warsaw ghetto, where elderly Jews weep with happy sentimentality at the performance of a prewar torch singer. Majewski, who has recorded the fate of Polish Jews in more sober films such as the documentary short Roza (1962), is using irony here as a vicious satirical weapon. Together with the bravura, curvilinear sequence shots, the insolent narrative ease, the deadpan acting style on the brink of corpsing, and the satirical eye aimed firmly at the present, The Black Mercedes also evokes Majewski’s contemporary, another specialist in ironic period dramas, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mercifully, it didn’t win a single award.

For more information on the Gdynia Film Festival, visit here.

Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1