The Dancing Hawk (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

It is 1977, during the period known in film history as the “Cinema of Moral Anxiety,” when filmmakers explored the political and spiritual malaise within Communist Poland. Two major Polish films are released that engage directly with the ultimate American film, Citizen Kane (1941). The most famous of the pair is Man of Marble, the film that brought director Andrzej Wajda back to international attention two decades after his war trilogy—A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958)—introduced contemporary Polish cinema to the world. In the intervening period, Wajda had made a string of masterpieces that had rarely traveled beyond Eastern Europe. Man of Marble and its even more timely 1981 sequel Man of Iron (also influenced by Kane) had a wide international release and were covered in the news as well as the culture pages of the world’s newspapers and magazines. It was seen as reflecting or even documenting the domestic unrest that would culminate in the Solidarity protest movement and the imposition of martial law in the early 1980s. Wajda’s public eminence would later be confirmed by his election to the Polish senate, his receipt of official honors throughout Europe, and the award of a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2000.

The second Polish film of 1977 to raise Kane was Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s The Dancing Hawk. Królikiewicz is effectively an unknown quantity in the West. He is not discussed in the major English-language histories of Polish cinema and, as far as I can tell, his films have not been released outside the festival circuit, in the U.K. and U.S. at any rate. Even within Poland, Królikiewicz is hardly a household name. In a supplement to Radiance’s 2025 Blu-ray release of his debut film Through and Through, Cineaste contributor Michał Oleszczyk claimed it as the greatest Polish film ever made. This may or may not be true—it is certainly an astonishing and overwhelming cinematic achievement—but the claim in no way represents a consensus, even among connoisseurs.

In political terms at least, Kane was always more likely to be appreciated within the Eastern Bloc than other products of the Hollywood studio system. Made by creatives associated with the liberal left, and in particular with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal cultural initiatives, Kane sustains a reputation as an anti-Hollywood Hollywood film, and as a critique of a capitalist system that despite its democratic rhetoric centers power on a plutocracy and serves to deform individual desire and to inhibit collective action.

Kane’s multitudes are demonstrated by the different ways in which both Wajda and Królikiewicz are influenced by their master text. In crude, pop-Freudian terms, one might propose that Wajda engages with the ego of Kane, while Królikiewicz explores its id. Man of Marble utilises the detective-story structure of Kane. Just as reporter Thompson interviews or researches associates of the recently deceased magnate Charles Foster Kane, so student filmmaker Agnieszka and her crew investigate the life and death of the famous Stakhanovite “shock worker” Mateusz Birkut whose quick rise and speedier fall embodied the personal cost of communist ideology in midcentury Poland. Man of Marble is a model of cinematic clarity—Agnieszka’s investigative goals and the results of her research exposing the human truth behind official lies are clearly laid out for the viewer. The film, despite its numerous flashbacks and its focus on the recent historical past, and despite its apparently frustrating climax, is full of an optimistic, linear dynamism, powered by the youthful drive of Agnieszka, played by first-time actor Krystyna Janda in one of the major performances of the cinema. Wajda’s long, propulsive tracking shots and Andrzej Korzyński’s music all contribute to the driving effect. In Man of Marble at least, Wajda believes in the “human spirit,” the importance of the individual even as she is menaced by political systems and history. Birkut may be destroyed by such systems and by history, but his individual power is asserted and, from the flames that consume him, his spirit is reborn phoenix-like in the form of his son Maciej (played by the same actor, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), who will become the hero of the even more assertive Man of Iron.

Nothing could be further from The Dancing Hawk. Królikiewicz was not only obsessed with Kane as a cinephile and filmmaker. He also taught the film extensively for decades and wrote a highly regarded monograph that awaits translation into English. Like Man of Marble, The Dancing Hawk is full of clever allusions to and reworkings of key motifs and scenes from Kane, but Królikiewicz goes far beyond mere homage or pastiche. Like Kane and Man of Marble, it too follows the life story of a male protagonist. If you wrote down the basic narrative of The Dancing Hawk, you would have the same kind of rise-and-fall narrative, one familiar throughout literature (the film is based on a novel by Julian Kawalec) and cinema. Peasant Michał Toporny is born into a Polish backwater. After excelling at university, dispensing with his peasant wife, and marrying into an elite family, Toporny rises through the ranks of the communist regime to become a senior civil servant. His second marriage breaks down, he loses his job, and he is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Rise and fall, greatness and failure. All against the backdrop of Polish history: the failure of independence to improve the lot of the peasant majority after World War I; the occupation of Poland by totalitarian forces during World War II; the Holocaust enacted on Polish soil; and the early years of communist rule fueled by a fear-inducing Stalinism, followed by a supposed thaw that results only in social inertia and the death of the human spirit.

Written down like that, the film seems clear enough and ready for a variety of treatments—a social realist bildungsroman, perhaps, or a satirical parable. It appears to be linear in its chronology, precise in its historical and geographical setting, developmental in the progress of its protagonist. But to characterize the film in this way is to falsify it. Królikiewicz removes all the crutches that allow the viewer to make sense of the complex narratives of Kane and Man of Marble. There is no overriding detective-story structure that allows the viewer to learn about its fictional world with its investigator. There are no master shots situating characters in recognizable locales, no contextual scenes explaining the relationships between the characters, no captions identifying the various historical periods.

Instead, the film hurls the viewer into a vortex of elemental, topsy-turvy images, and churning sounds, from which she never emerges. The first reel is a viscerally disorienting depiction of experience and consciousness in flux. It appears that the protagonist is being born—the protagonist who begins the film with a confident and wholly unwarranted statement of self (“I was born… I lived…”). This is not the narrative manner of even a complex work like Kane. A nearer analogue would be a modernist novel like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or its experimental eighteenth-century predecessors like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the birth of the protagonist is analogous to the birth of the artwork itself. The viewer or reader becomes a notional midwife, helping the text emerge through the labor of illegibility and difficulty.

Such an assault on the cinema audience is not unprecedented—Bergman, for example, attempts something similar with the famous opening reel of Persona (1966); Brady Corbet would imitate it in his overture to The Brutalist (2024). But whereas Sterne, Joyce (in Portrait at least), Bergman, Corbet, et al. temper their mystifications to allow some sort of comprehensive narrative and characterization to “settle” and orient the disoriented viewer, Królikiewicz continues to push the legibility of narrative and characterization to the brink until the very last shot. Repeated switches in viewpoint without warning or, in many cases, without attribution, and collapsed boundaries between reality, dream, fantasy, and memory, generate a protagonist who cannot control even the way he sees the world, never mind react to the way the world acts on him. It takes at least ten minutes for Toporny to even emerge as the protagonist, and viewers unfamiliar with actor Franciszek Trzeciak and his leading roles in Królikiewicz’s previous features Through and Through (1973) and Permanent Objections (1975) would be forgiven for taking even longer to recognize his centrality.

Whereas charming, handsome, and energetic Orson Welles dominates Kane in all its moods, and Radziwiłowicz makes for an appropriately manly and marmoreal Man of Marble, Trzeciak’s Toporny remains a recessive figure. He reminds me of Jean-Louis Trintignant’s conformist gone to seed, his only distinguishing features a balding forehead and a half-leery, half-sheepish grin. He struggles to dominate the scenes he is in, often lumbered with Zbigniew Rybczyński’s camera attached to his person, which far from resulting in a fleet embodiment of his subjective viewpoint, seems to turn Toporny into a hybrid monster of man and machine. Despite his apparent intellect, Toporny is often reduced to the level of an animal, whether on the family farm struggling with cows, hens, and hedgehogs, or grunting and yelping in libraries or at sophisticated dinner parties.

If Królikiewicz rejects the narrative clarity of Kane, he appropriates its murk and shadow. André Bazin praised Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography as democratic in creating a greater realism that allowed for greater audience participation. Other critics have noted that in fact, far from revealing external space around the characters, Toland’s images distorted it via lenses, lighting, composition, and optical effects, resulting in an expressionist projection of interior space. Królikiewicz takes these distortions to queasy extremes, but even here the expressionism is not an assertion of self. Toporny is more a clown than a tycoon, playing with his mirror reflection with such ineptitude that at one point he cannot keep pace with it, or crudely hitting out at a love rival at a banquet. Both Królikiewicz and Rybczyński would go on to make significant films engaging with both horror and science fiction, and there are intimations of both genres in The Dancing Hawk, especially in the fragmentation, proliferation, and off-screen dismembering of vulnerable bodies, in the oneiric sequences set in abandoned spaces, and in the vision of dull, conformist, panoptic Poland as an alien polity.

Citizen Kane, released in 1941, mirrored a real world of “strong men” rampaging through Europe, and American fascists hoping to do the same at home. Królikiewicz’s assaults on the authority of Toporny as a character, and on the authority of conventional narrative, also serve to attack political authority. All political systems, but especially that betrayal of socialism practiced in Poland, depend on a centralized system of hierarchical control. The Dancing Hawk is a relentless act of decentering—of the protagonist, the frame, the narrative, the film’s very coherence. It is interesting that in both Man of Marble and The Dancing Hawk, the emblem of a petty and corrupt system is played by Tadeusz Łomnicki—the idealistic director-turned-pornographer in Man of Marble, and Toporny’s vain, evasive, and scheming superior in The Dancing Hawk. Łomnicki was a key figure in Communist Poland as a film and stage actor, and as rector of the State Theatre School, but he remains best known for his leading role as a Stalinist resistant in Wajda’s debut A Generation (1955) and was known to be close to the regime. In both Man of Marble and The Dancing Hawk he represents the corruption of that generation as he shores up his own power and stifles energy and innovation elsewhere.

The Dancing Hawk is a hard enough sell without mentioning its deep roots in Polish culture and its welter of symbols and allusions to history, folklore, religion, and art. If ever a film cried out for a full commentary or video essay, it is The Dancing Hawk. Carmen Gray’s video essay and Piotr Kletowski’s booklet essay are informative but superficial and left this viewer little the wiser. My experience of The Dancing Hawk was like watching a film in a language I did not understand, without subtitles. I could recognize the film’s remarkable formal achievement while remaining uncertain about what it all added up to.

So, having outlined the film’s many barriers to comprehension, is The Dancing Hawk worth seeing? Definitely, as an example of a major cinematic voice still neglected by film history—but I would recommend starting with Through and Through which, though no less complex, is at least rooted in generic precedents, which give the hesitant viewer an access point.

What makes the Blu-ray under review an essential acquisition is the inclusion of two short films by Rybczyński among the supplements. As well as an indefatigably inventive cinematographer, Rybczyński was an indefatigably inventive animator—by contrast with Królikiewicz’s obscurity, he would go on to win an Oscar for Tango in 1983 (to be included in an upcoming Radiance anthology of Polish animation). Rybczyński’s films make witty use of contemporary graphic design, fine art, and experimental film. Soup (1974) and Oh! I Can’t Stop! (1975) included here were made in the half decade before The Dancing Hawk and can be contrasted with Królikiewicz’s film in their use of sound and POV, and in their depictions of heterosexual domestic anomie and the rural/urban divide. In short—get this disc. But caveat emptor!

Copyright © 2026 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 4