In Memoriam
The Polish
filmmaker Piotr Szulkin passed away last year. At the time no words were shared
on the pages of this blog. When the news hit I was taking a break from criticism;
busy trying to write a play, which turned into a novel, which turned into
nothing. I hoped others might pick up the baton and share some condolences in
the name of this singular and distinctive talent, but little, if anything, was
said.
Szulkin was
a filmmaker I first encountered in 2012. From a UK perspective his work is
incredibly obscure. None of his films, as far as I'm aware, have been made commercially
available with English subtitles. Of his six feature-length films I've seen
only three; but I could recognise in each of them a unique approach to visual storytelling;
an unconventional appropriation of populist genre tropes (specifically
science-fiction) alongside more recognisable art-house conventions; as well as
a strong political subtext, which gave the work a lasting relevance. On one
level Szulkin's films were essentially post-modernist B-movies preoccupied with
pulp fiction-level subject-matter, such as doppelgängers, Martian hordes,
interplanetary prison-ships and post-apocalyptic survival. His imagery was
steeped in the neon-futurism of his most prolific decade, the 1980s, defined as
it was by the film Blade Runner (1982), and finding an obvious affinity with other
works from the same period, such as The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981), Liquid
Sky (1982), The Hunger (1983), The Last Battle (also 1983), Brazil (1985) and
Diesel (also 1985); that aesthetic fetish for dramatic back-lighting, smoky
interiors and saturated colour. However his films were also deeply esoteric, blackly
funny and charged with an atmosphere of the grotesque.
Piotr
Szulkin on the set of his final film, King Ubu (2003), photographed by Rafał
Guz:
The first
film of Szulkin's I ever saw was also his best; O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of
Civilization (1985). At the time I wanted to include the film on my list of the
year's greatest discoveries, but I couldn't find the words to express how
powerful, eccentric and thought-provoking the film was without straining for
the usual superlatives. I still can't. O-Bi, O-Ba is a work as strange and
enigmatic as its title suggests; a stark, claustrophobic, post-apocalyptic
allegory that has shades of fellow Polish filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski's
similarly blue-tinted science-fiction psychodrama On the Silver Globe (1989),
but with a subterranean survival narrative that predicts later efforts, such as
Twelve Monkeys (1995) and The Island (2005). In many ways Terry Gilliam in
particular seems a close point of reference here, with both Twelve Monkeys and
the aforementioned Brazil feeling like first-cousins to Szulkin's films, with the
same emphasis on characters struggling against a dystopian/Orwellian system,
and the same retro-futurist aesthetic of old cars, crumbling buildings, filing
cabinets and video monitors. Gilliam's more recent film, the flawed but
visually interesting The Zero Theorem (2013), is especially redolent of
Szulkin, with the shaven-headed Christoph Waltz bringing to mind the look of
actor Marek Walczewski as he appeared in both Golem (1980) and O-Bi, O-Ba.
Following my
initial viewing of O-Bi, O-Ba, I saw Szulkin's first two theatrical features, the
just-mentioned Golem and The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981). The first film
uses the myth of the golem as defined by Jewish legend as a metaphor for
persecution, both personal and political. The central character, Pernat, stumbles
through a "Kafkaesque" nightmare of mistaken identities, police
interrogations and the constant threat of suspicion. In the process, he becomes
a kind of on-screen personification of individualism; struggling to maintain a
sense of personal identity against an environment of conformity, suppression
and assimilation. The world of the film is one of ruin and decay, poverty and
desperation, where the sickly sepia-tinted photography, hypnotic tone and sleepwalking
performances set a visual precedent for Lars von Trier's first theatrical
feature, The Element of Crime (1984), as well as Aleksandr Sokurov's similarly
allegorical The Second Circle (1990).
In his next
work, Szulkin created a film that felt like a precursor to the pulp sci-fi of
John Carpenter's similarly political, similarly post-modernist action movie,
They Live (1988). In The War of the Worlds: Next Century, a Martian invasion occurs
against an Orwellian backdrop of government control, conformity and the loss of
personal freedom. The film contains a strong subtext about surveillance culture
and how the television can be used as a tool for propaganda, social distraction
and manipulation, which plays beautifully to the final sequences, in which the
manipulation of the image, and its ability to present a false perception of
events, is powerfully revealed. It's a strange and often cynical film with a
message that seems to suggest that rebellion is futile; our role in life - as
far as the government is able to control and distort the narrative - has
already been cast.
Golem [Piotr
Szulkin, 1980]
The War of
the Worlds: Next Century [Piotr Szulkin, 1981]:
O-Bi, O-Ba:
The End of Civilization [Piotr Szulkin, 1985]:
Screenshots
courtesy of FilmGrab [https://film-grab.com/category/piotr-szulkin/]
Unfortunately
I'm less familiar with the subsequent films, Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986),
Femina (1991) and his final credit, King Ubu (2003). Nonetheless, on the
strength and originality of the three films listed here, I think it's a shame,
if not a tragedy, that the work of Piotr Szulkin isn't better known or more
widely available. At a time when most films appear to have been produced by
committee, modelled on a pre-existing template and manufactured to satisfy the expectations
of genre classification or the USP of a respective "brand", the
singularly strange and defiantly eccentric expressions of films like Golem and
O-Bi, O-Ba in particular - with their stylised imagery, bizarre characters and
heightened atmospherics - feel all the more remarkable.
Attempting
to research more about Szulkin for the purpose of this post, I came across the
following quote attributed to him on IMDb. It made me respect the filmmaker all
the more. The quote states: "You can divide directors into three essential
categories: Those who whisper to their actors, those who talk to them, and
those who scream at them. You can tell which method a director uses from the
results he gets. Those who scream should not make films, period. I'm one of
those who whisper." The legacy of the Szulkin's work is just that, a
whisper, but a whisper that speaks with more truth, more poetry and more
personality than the loudest scream.
