Interrogation (Preview)
Reviewed by Michał Oleszczyk

Produced by Tadeusz Drewno for Zespół Filmowy “X”; written and directed by Ryszard Bugajski; cinematography by Jacek Petrycki; edited by Katarzyna Maciejko; production design by Janusz Sosnowski; costume design by Jolanta Generalczyk; starring Krystyna Janda, Adam Ferency, Janusz Gajos, Anna Romantowska, Agnieszka Holland, and Olgierd Łukaszewicz. Blu-ray, color, 117 min., Polish dialogue with English subtitles, 1982 (not released until 1989). A Second Run DVD release.

Very few films can match the level of political controversy that accompanied the production and prevented the timely release of Ryszard Bugajski’s scorching Interrogation. Shot in Poland in 1981 by the “X” film unit (a state-controlled production entity enjoying relatively free reign under the artistic direction of Andrzej Wajda), the film tackled several subjects that had been strictly forbidden by communist censorship. And yet, to fully appreciate the film’s impact, one must consider its predecessor, Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977), which prepared the ground for Bugajski in more ways than one (not least by establishing Krystyna Janda as a key star of Polish cinema).

The Stalinist period of Polish postwar history (1945–56) had been taboo in Polish culture for more than two decades when Wajda openly tackled it in Man of Marble, another “X”-produced film and so audacious it needed to include a soupçon of political compromise (usually lost on Western viewers but registered at home). Thus, the grim tale of the demise of Mateusz Birkut, the titular Stakhanovite worker—first deified and then persecuted by the Stalinist regime—was purposefully counterbalanced by a jarring fig-leaf sequence of narratively redundant aerial footage celebrating the glory of the construction of factories during the Seventies under First Secretary Edward Gierek. Furthermore, while bravely tackling the history of Stalinist oppression, Wajda’s film contained no outright scenes of torture, operating instead through suggestion and counting on its viewers’ (admittedly well-trained) ability to read between the lines. No such compromise exists in the unrelentingly brutal Interrogation, which to this day rivals Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978) and Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) as the single most harrowing depiction of prison ordeal ever put on film.

The four years that separate Man of Marble and Interrogation saw momentous political changes that made Bugajski’s film possible. Following the formation of KOR (the Workers’ Defense Committee) by the socially minded strata of Polish intelligentsia in 1976, the Solidarity movement erupted upon the political stage and triumphed in the Gdańsk shipyards in August 1980, forcing Polish authorities to sign agreements that promised significant democratization of the (loftily named, albeit Soviet-controlled) People’s Republic of Poland. During the so-called “Solidarity Carnival,” when political passions ran high, a brief window of creative freedom was opened—namely, “those eighteen months of anarchy when we were free to do anything we wanted,” as Krystyna Janda explained in an interview in these pages (see “Woman of Marble: An Interview with Krystyna Janda” by Michael Szporer, Cineaste, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, Summer 1991).

That ecstatic interval of loosened censorship ended with the brutal imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981, but it still bore some (belatedly released) artistic fruit—namely, a series of films that openly questioned not only the communist system itself but also dared to touch upon the hitherto repressed history of state-controlled terror. Of these, Janusz Zaorski’s Mother of Kings (1982, released 1987) had the most sweeping historical narrative, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance (1981, released 1987) was the most philosophically minded (see my review in Cineaste, Vol. XLI, No. 1, Winter 2015), while Interrogation, released in Poland only after the regime’s demise in 1989, proved the most incendiary.

In fact, the film was conceived, designed, and produced as a slap in the face, one insulting to the authorities but rousing to its audience, whose access to historical truth had been denied for too long. As such, the slap was acutely felt: first by the authorities, who banned the film and even suggested destruction of its negative, and then by audiences, who eagerly absorbed the shock—mostly through bootlegged VHS tapes that circulated widely throughout the years leading to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. (Since this was a pre-home video era in Poland, screenings were mostly held in select private homes, as well as in Catholic parishes). Meanwhile, in a turn worthy of its own Argo-type dramatization, a videotape of the film was smuggled to the West by the American cultural attaché in Warsaw, Jim Hutcheson, and Interrogation started to develop its notoriety, culminating in its Cannes Film Festival international premiere in May 1990, where the Bernardo Bertolucci-led jury awarded that year’s Best Actress Award to Krystyna Janda.

Bugajski’s original screenplay (with some additional input by Janusz Dymek) centered on Antonina Dziwisz (Krystyna Janda, twenty-nine at the time), a carefree cabaret singer who in 1951 gets arrested and sent to a Stalinist jail on a trumped-up charge of a sexual dalliance with a supposed Western spy. Antonina (or Tonia) suffers horrors of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of prison guards and two main interrogators. One, Major “Bath” (Janusz Gajos), is openly sadistic (as Tonia painfully learns, he owes his nickname to torture with a high-pressure hose). The other, Tadeusz (Adam Ferency), himself a survivor of a Nazi death camp, starts out as an ideological fanatic but ends up falling in love with Tonia and even (in a much-maligned melodramatic turn) fathering her child before killing himself once he realizes his collaboration with the regime has destroyed his humanity. Tadeusz was closely based on the writer Tadeusz Borowski, a concentration camp survivor and author of This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1947), himself a suicide in 1951 at the age of twenty-eight, at the height of Polish Stalinism…

To read the complete article, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Winter 2023 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Michał Oleszczyk is a script consultant and teaches film at the University of Warsaw.

 Copyright © 2023 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 1