No End in Sight

Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period

Anna Krakus

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822986034
• Index: History

No End in Sight offers a critical analysis of Polish cinema and literature during the transformative late Socialist period of the 1970s and 1980s. Anna Krakus details how conceptions of time, permanence, and endings shaped major Polish artistic works. She further demonstrates how film and literature played a major role in shaping political consciousness during this highly-charged era. Despite being controlled by an authoritarian state and the doctrine of socialism, artists were able to portray the unsettled nature of the political and psychological climate of the period, and an undetermined future.

In analyzing films by Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowsi, Krzysztof Zanussi, Wojciech Has, and Tadeusz Konwicki alongside Konwicki's literary production, Anna Krakus identifies their shared penchant to defer or completely eschew narrative closure, whether in plot, theme, or style. Krakus calls this artistic tendency "aesthetic unfinalizability." As she reveals, aesthetic unfinalizability was far more than an occasional artistic preference or a passing trend; it was a radical counterpolitical act. The obsession with historical teleology saturated Polish public life during socialism to such a degree that instances of nonclosure or ambivalent endings emerged as polemical responses to official ideology.

CHAPTER 1

FINAL CUT

Poiesis and Production History

Books and films must end. As Frank Kermode says, “We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.”¹ An unfortunate consequence of this truism is that authors must finish their work and let go of it whether they want to or not. The statement that art is never finished, only abandoned (commonly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci) captures a general artistic unease toward letting go, perhaps because of a sense of perfectionism or maybe because of a fear of releasing one’s fictitious children out into the world too soon. The relationship between the artist and the inadvertent finale—the final cut that sometimes feels like a physical cut—is an interesting one at a time when aesthetic products in Poland were unending in form. While unfinalizability is primarily an aesthetic effect and does not refer to unfinished works, the relationship between artist and artwork in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s also reflects a personal hesitation to end and let go. By accounting for the apprehensions—from writer’s block to political interference—that created obstacles for the completion of films and novels, we can see how such factors may be reflected in the end product. Unfinalizability is exemplified here in situations where production circumstances, pressing deadlines, political force, or personal frustration put films and texts at risk of not being finished at all. Narrative irresolution is not merely a Polish phenomenon and is not necessarily political. For example, Tadeusz Konwicki—in the guise of his alter ego, a cynical writer also named Tadeusz Konwicki—journals both about writer’s block and about external political realities that complicate endings. Konwicki’s unfinalizable narratives reflect two different kinds of non-endings: the personal and the aesthetic-political. While the open-ended form of his novels illustrates an antiteleological narrative of resistance, Konwicki’s inner monologues about authorship offer commentary on the topic of his own poiesis.

Intertextual allusions, alter egos, and pseudobiographical references in their films offer metacommentary on the personal artistic processes of Krzysztof Kieślowski, Andrzej Wajda, and Krzysztof Zanussi. Fictional characters appear to speak for the filmmakers when reflecting upon struggles with endings and their dreams of second chances. Just as Konwicki narrates his hesitations, films about film also clarify the struggle to finish and reveal an insight into some filmmakers’ apprehensions about abandoning fiction. “How should I end this film?” asks Wajda in a diary note before he concludes a film about a filmmaker unable to complete a film of her own.

Throughout his entire career Zanussi creates characters who are never completely abandoned by their director, testifying to his own difficulties in letting go. Long after the era of aesthetic unfinalizability, which appeared as a mechanical response to politics, Zanussi’s Revisit (Rewizyta, 2009) concludes the open endings from that period. The film consists of interviews with protagonists from earlier productions. “What happened next?” asks Stefan, the lead in Zanussi’s And a Warm Heart (Serce na dłoni, 2008), who in Revisit speaks with the older characters on behalf of their mutual creator-director. Above anything else, Revisit offers a second chance for Zanussi himself to see his old friends again, to still his own curiosity about their lives, which could have played out in so many different ways after he left them in the editing room. Zanussi’s repeat returns to old characters, plots, and places also create in his viewers the question “and then what?” Their expectation of receiving an answer goes hand in hand with the elements of seriality in Zanussi’s films. Zanussi frequently revisits diegetic worlds that keep his films in a realm of au revoir, never adieu, with an implied promise of eventual closure.

Kieślowski’s works made in the decade between 1979 and 1989 stress the many alternative possibilities for endings—the potential twists and turns of both cinema and life. The remaking of two episodes from his television series The Decalogue into feature-length productions shows most clearly the power of editing and confirms filmmaker Ryszard Bugajski’s statement that the editing process is when the “film becomes a film.”² The slight change in tone in both of Kieślowski’s filmic remakes bears testament to the full artistic possibility in molding an ending. As all these directors show, it is the final cut, chosen from endless possibilities, that determines the film’s finale.

KIEŚLOWSKI’S ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS

Things could always have ended differently. This is a constant underlying premise in Kieślowski’s work, which masters alternative endings and second chances.³ He has revealed that he wanted to make seventeen different versions of The Double Life of Veronique (1991), one for each Paris movie theater in which it would be screened.⁴ He ended up settling for two: one European and one American version.⁵

In Blind Chance (Przypadek, 1981), Witek, a young medical student, runs after a train. The viewer is presented with three different scenarios and their effects on Witek’s life as a result of him making the train or two different reasons for not catching it. In one version he becomes a Party activist; in another he becomes an oppositionist. In a third, he leads a life separate from politics. As Annette Insdorf suggests, these are only three scenarios out of endless possibilities: “The fact that we see three versions rather than two means it is not a simple choice of one way of life versus another; rather it is open-ended, for where three versions exist, there can be four or more.”⁶ The film is widely considered the paramount example of alternative endings—a treatise on free will, chance, and the potentially serious consequences stemming from seemingly small events. The film illustrates that in life, small changes and chances are vital. This presupposition is also true about the choices a director makes in the cutting room; alternative endings emerge from seemingly small changes that can have big consequences, as Kieślowski’s films come to illustrate in 1988. The idea of editing and endings, however, is first explored filmically as early as Camera Buff, in which Kieślowski gives the power to frame, cut, and start over to one of his characters.

In Camera Buff, Filip buys himself an eight-millimeter film camera to record the birth of his daughter. He quickly finds true joy in filmmaking, and soon others appreciate his efforts as well: he becomes the official chronicler for the factory where he works and is awarded prizes at festivals for amateur filmmakers. As quickly as Filip finds his passion for film and develops his inherent talent, however, he is just as suddenly faced with censorship and restrictions that limit him from recording reality as it is. Instead, he is forced to represent his factory and town in ways more suitable to his bosses. In the end Filip has learned that his footage can be used against others in spite of his best intentions. He rips out his remaining stock, exposing it to the sun to ruin it, and turns the camera toward himself as he begins renarrating the film’s plot (“It was 4 a.m.,” he begins) and recounting the events acted out from the beginning of the film. Camera Buff ends abruptly, with Filip’s undoing of the old celluloid, but also circularly, as he then immediately starts over in his subsequent retelling of the plot.

This ending is also a comment on censorship and who holds the power to tell stories and to end them. Filip has been a victim of external, political, and personal censorship throughout the film, but in the end it is he who censors himself as he chooses to destroy his stock and tell his story anew, possibly in a more fitting light.⁷ When Filip reclaims the power to destroy and narrate, the film shifts from its previous allegorical commentary on decisions made in the censors’ distant office to comment on the power that exists in the cutting room, which belongs to the director.

Kieślowski, of course, was familiar with external political influence and restrictions of the kind that Filip learns of in Camera Buff, he himself having worked as a documentary filmmaker in the 1960s and 1970s, unapologetically capturing state bureaucracy, workers, factories, and mines. And yet, Kieślowski insists that Camera Buff is not a film about the reality of filmmaking in Poland at all, that the film does not reflect the real, successful relationship between film and life.⁸ Moreover, Kieślowski denies that Filip is any kind of alter ego: “I was never fascinated with a camera like that. Later on I made films because that was my profession, and I was too lazy or too stupid to change profession at the right moment,” Kieślowski stated in a 1993 interview.⁹ Certainly Kieślowski was more sophisticated than Filip, and most likely less naive; however, the two share the same eye. Objective shots that appear to be Kieślowski’s vision repeatedly turn out to be Filip’s footage made with his camera within the narrative. Even if Filip is not Kieślowski’s fictitious twin, their visual point of view is the same. In this regard one must ignore the director’s denial, since Filip and Kieślowski act aesthetically as one.

Blind Chance and Camera Buff were made a couple of years apart.¹⁰ Blind Chance shows alternative endings in life, and Camera Buff explores alternative tellings of stories and endings to films. While Kieślowski denies any relation to Filip, he readily admits that he was inspired by this protagonist some years later; the power offered to Filip to begin anew is one that Kieślowski extends to himself and that informed his practice when he created two different endings in two of his own productions. Kieślowski even refers to Filip directly in an interview when discussing the alternative ending he made in A Short Film about Love (Krótki film o miłości, 1988).

In the ten-episode television series The Decalogue, Kieślowski creates a microcosm of Polish society. Individual episodes that are loosely inspired by the biblical Ten Commandments introduce the lives of the inhabitants of a Warsaw apartment complex. Two episodes of The Decalogue were turned into longer features: Decalogue 5 and Decalogue 6 became A Short Film about Killing and A Short Film about Love, respectively. The Decalogue television series and the two longer features that emerged from it illustrate what happens when Kieślowski himself takes the opportunity to retell a story. Kieślowski does not dramatically destroy footage as Filip does in order to start over. Instead, when he is given the opportunity to add some time to these two films he grabs it and gives the films new endings, illustrating the magnitude of the effects of small changes in the cutting room. Kieślowski’s cinematographer, Sławomir Idziak, even claims that Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue (Trois couleurs: Bleu, 1993) developed from one genre to another only in the cutting room.¹¹ Perhaps less drastically, Decalogue 6 ends on a rather final note whereas the ending of A Short Film about Love is open for interpretation. Because he uses a different version of the guiding anti–death penalty thesis in Decalogue 5, the argument in A Short Film about Killing shifts from the political discussion in the televised version to an emotional expose in the feature-length production.

DECALOGUE 5—A SHORT FILM ABOUT KILLING

In A Short Film about Killing a young man, Jacek, kills a cab driver and is consequently sentenced to death. He is defended in court by a young anti–death penalty attorney, Piotr, who loses the case, and Jacek is hanged. The film with its excruciatingly long and violent scenes of murder, including the state-sanctioned killing of Jacek, is often attributed the honor of causing the abolishment of capital punishment in Poland.¹² Yet Kieślowski has stated, “I think this film isn’t really about capital punishment but about killing in general. It is wrong no matter why you kill, no matter whom you kill, and no matter who does the killing.”¹³ Then again, Kieślowski also claimed that the film was not really political, in spite of its depiction of the miseries of Polish life, nor was the television series The Decalogue religious, in spite of being based on the Ten Commandments. Regardless of Kieślowski’s statements, this is a film about politics, about the dejected individuals who live in the state, and about the individuals whom the state kills. A Short Film about Killing and its precursor, Decalogue 5, both broach the topic of capital punishment separately. When seen together, they can be said to offer a holistic approach to an anti–death penalty argument. More important, Kieślowski’s small adjustments to plot and ending illustrate the power of the edit and perhaps a desire on Kieślowski’s part to undo closure.

Austin Sarat has spoken about the differences between thinking the death penalty, intellectually formulating a principle against capital punishment, and feeling it, emotionally objecting.¹⁴ Decalogue 5 and its transformation into A Short Film about Killing illustrate precisely these two approaches to the death penalty. Whereas A Short Film about Killing causes its viewers to “feel” the wrongs of killing by playing on the emotions of the spectator (see Chapter 2), Decalogue 5 primarily stays in the realm of thinking the death penalty, engaging more directly with Marxist anti–capital punishment theory. Overt discussion of politics is not needed in the longer version to make an anti–death penalty argument, thanks to the inclusion of an additional thirty minutes of imagery that speaks louder than any political argument; while the shorter, televised version is more directly about capital punishment, the longer film lives up better to Kieślowski’s vision of a general “anti-killing” film. The extra footage allows for a widened humanistic focus, with simultaneously wider possibilities for interpretations of the ending.

Both films go beyond the “innocence argument” typically launched by opponents of capital punishment, which emphasizes the risk of killing innocent people. In Decalogue 5 and in A Short Film about Killing, Jacek is guilty—we have seen it for ourselves—but his hanging is still morally wrong. This is illustrated, for instance, by the twofold appearance of the so-called angel who turns up in all Decalogue episodes at crucial moments when the fates of certain characters are being determined. In A Short Film about Killing we see him right before both murders. First, the angel takes the form of a land surveyor; he looks disapprovingly at Jacek, who rides past him in the cab in which he will soon commit his crime. Later, the angel carries a ladder in the prison where the state is also making a morally corrupt choice. More strikingly, in both the film and the television episode, the two murders are shown as being equally gruesome; in Decalogue 5, both murders are even equal in length, lasting five minutes each. In this way they undo the supposed opposition between killing outside of the law and killing within it. The longer film makes both murders slightly longer than they were in the televised version: the killing of the taxi driver is a full seven minutes and Jacek’s death is just over five minutes, which reduces to some degree the equalizing cinematographic effect. Yet, the two deaths are still similarly violent; the greater difference between the two films lies in the way the anti–death penalty argument is made: in one case it is shown and felt, in the other it is overtly stated and thought.

Decalogue 5 opens with a voice-over, the inner monologue of the young attorney Piotr, who is waiting to take his exams to become a lawyer. He is channeling Marxist theory about punishment, which states that punishment is nothing other than society’s defense against crimes that it has itself given rise to, that capitalism creates criminals and then handles them with increased violence. Marx asks sarcastically, “is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?”¹⁵ Marx argues not only that capital punishment does not live up to its promise of deterrence, it actually has a counterdeterrent effect—its brutality inspires further crime. Piotr ponders these Marxist ideas about the morality of punishment as well as the liberal Kantian values with which Marx engages and which he argues against: “the law should not mimic nature, it ought to improve upon it.” Piotr continues, “Law is a human construct meant to regulate our relations. Who we are and how we live is a result of the laws, those we comply with and those that we break.” In a Kantian tone he ponders, “Man is free. His freedom is limited only by the right to freedom of others.” This thought is followed by the Marxist question of the (literal) hour: “Punishment? Punishment is vengeance. Especially when its aim is to inflict harm but is not deterring from further crime. In whose name does the Law take vengeance? Is it really in the name of the innocent? Do the truly innocent constitute the law?”

Piotr’s thoughts, heard over the opening credits, offer him, his voice, and his position immediate authority. This introduction serves to tell the viewer what the film will be about: the wrongs of state-sanctioned murder. A Short Film about Killing lacks an equivalent monologue, only briefly offering Piotr the opportunity to argue about the death penalty when, during hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Aesthetic Unfinalizability: Narrative Irresolution at a Time of Great Conclusions
• Interlude. Wajda’s Secret Box
• Chapter 1. Final Cut: Poiesis and Production History
• Chapter 2. Life Keeps Ending: Immortality and Resurrections
• Interlude. Rebuilding the Capital
• Chapter 3. “But It Is Our Country”: Building a Nation
• Interlude. A Sweatshop Romance
• Chapter 4. It’s about Time: Plots about Aimless Movement
• Postlude. After Forever: Polish Cinema after “The End”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index