szyfry (d. wojciech j. has, w. andrzej kijowski)

The Code, which would be its English title, is constructed around the visit of Tadeusz back to Krakow to find out what happened to his son, who disappeared in the Second World War, presumed dead. The film oscillates between long dialogue scenes and visually poetic flashback scenes from the war. Tadeusz finds himself embroiled in family problems with his other son, Maciek. Whilst the narrative at times felt confusing, it’s intriguing to see another Polish director seeking to come to terms with the legacy of the Second World War and the holocaust. Has approaches this in a manner which feels tangential: it’s part of Tadeusz’ story, without being in any way central to it. It feels more like, as he seeks to unearth the truth, other truths emerge. One curious aspect of the film is the way in which Tadeusz, who has lived in England for many years, seems free to come and go as he pleases. The iron curtain appears to be wide open. 

pasazerka (w&d andrzej munk, d. witold lesiewicz, w. zofia posmysz)

Munk died in a road accident whilst making this unfinished film, at the age of 40. The narrative develops around Liza a female former SS guard at Auschwitz, returning to Europe aboard a cruise ship from the Americas. A passenger boards who she recognises: Marta, a prisoner who she had 'adopted' as her assistant at the camp, before being transferred to Berlin. She has assumed that Marta was dead, and that the secrets Marta holds about her past had gone with her. Their relationship is also affected by the love that Marta had for a fellow prisoner. Theirs was a love which transcended their dreadful circumstances and Liza was both fascinated and jealous.

The complexity of this relationship is posited against the backdrop of the horrors of Auschwitz. Munk, (of jewish descent, who managed to escape during the war), filmed in Auschwitz itself. The realism is overwhelming, as is the horror. At one point, a stream of children file, smiling, oblivious, into a hut. One girl even stops to pet the guard's Alsatian. Meanwhile, on the roof, a soldier dons a gas mask and drops Zyklon B into cavities. The cruelty is pervasive, sometimes foregrounded, but even when not, it is always occurring, at the edge of the screen. Added to which, the mud, the darkness, the sickness, the hopelessness, is laid out by Munk, through the eyes of the guard. Glazer chose to stay on the other side of the wall. Munk takes us inside Auschwitz, with its barbarism and its string quartets.

The film is unfinished, with his contemporaries supplying a voiceover and including stills from the material on the cruise ship which couldn't be coherently edited together. This blog exists in part to document films that have slipped under the radar, names that should be revered but are not. I have the luck to live near Cinemateca, where it's possible to stumble over films that one would otherwise never get to see. The Passenger is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and perhaps the first and last time that a fictional movie about the holocaust has ever got as close to capturing something of its reality. 

dekalog, five (w&d krysztof kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

Of course I watched this thinking I had seen it before. I hadn’t. I’d seen a Short Film About Killing. This is the shorter version, the sketch, if you like. But this shouldn’t in any way detract. The shorter version is astonishing. Perhaps more so than the longer. Kieslowski employs a sparse dialogue. Images are distorted. A vignette blurs the edges of the frame. For a while we have no idea who is the protagonist. The stressed out lawyer or the unpleasant taxi driver or the youth. Then we realise it’s the youth. The killer, who will be killed. The narrative is already chopped in three, and then, as the pieces come together, the whole thing coalesces into a terrible, mortal whole. The ultimate effect, compressed into 55 minutes, is devastating, Needless death begets needless death. You can see why the director chose this tale to expand. But you can also see why it wasn’t entirely necessary. 

dekalog, four (w&d krysztof kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the fourth chapter of Kieslowski’s Dekalog is the lack of astonishing things. There are no big dramatic moments. There’s one long dramatic scene, which culminates in a decision (or two decisions), but no-one fights, no-one fucks, no-one even screams. All those things which are taken for granted as being necessary to make captivating drama are missing. In spite of this, the short film has you sitting on the edge of your seat. There a tension which is almost nebulous, but instilled in every frame. The shadow of incest, which might have become the focus, is dispelled. This is a simple tale about the meaning of love, rendered with minimal effort. 

green border (w&d agnieszka holland, w. gabriela lazarkiewicz-sieczko, maciej pisuk)

Green Border is at once arresting, epic and yet strangely empty. The experience of watching it is visceral: a collection of Syrians and Afghanis are seeking to enter fortress Europe via the Belarus-Poland border, a great wooded area which offers no shelter and is soon revealed to be a trap, as the Polish and Belarus border guards take turns in forcing the immigrants back and forth across the border. They find themselves stuck in a terrible limbo, which is only alleviated by the kind actions of a bunch of activists who head into the forest and offer medical and legal assistance, in so far as they can. The film switches focus at this point, remaining with the Polish activists, as well as recounting the story of a border guard who discovers his humanity. However, this switch seems to dislocate the movie to an extent. The perils faced by the Polish activists, whilst extreme in their own way, cannot compare to what the refugees have had to face and are facing. The activists’ stories feel like a lighter touch, steering us away from the crueller realities the first half of the film has engaged with. Green Border becomes more palatable, it moves away from the obscene. The refugee characters are left half-drawn, or dead. We do not have to suffer with them anymore and we are grateful to the filmmakers for this, but at the same time, it feels as though we have been let off the hook. In many ways Green Border captures the complexities and paradoxes of seeking to make political work within the cinema market place. The demarcated limits of how much empathy is permitted are clearly on display. For all the Europeans’ noble intentions, they almost inevitably sell their own stories, and that of their supposed subjects, short. Meanwhile, those on the wrong side of the fence have to fight for funding from wealthier nations, funding which comes with its own marketplace imperatives as to what will be palatable to the wider target audience the film is supposed to reach. 

kobieta z… (woman of…) (w&d małgorzata szumowska, michał englert)

Kobieta Z taps into the wave of trans films that reflect the post-Foucaultian changes in global society, or at least western global society. Aniela Wesoly starts the film as Andrzej and the film follows the journey of their transformation over the course of forty years. Boldly, the film resists making Aniela an attractive woman, pushing the journey of transformation into middle age. Andrzej is a dreamy young man, confident in his sexuality, making the conversion all the more impactful. Deep down they feel themselves to be a woman in a man’s body and they remain true to this belief, no matter what it costs them. Which is almost everything: their social status, their livelihood, their loving marriage, their looks. There is an upside to all this at the end, when their sacrifices appear to be rewarded with another kind of happiness. But the journey is long and bleak and follows the journey of their country from tightly buttoned communism to something far more liberal. The edit style is pacy and sinuous. Scenes are rarely given time to settle, and when they do, the film pulls out of them as soon as possible. This curtails the possible melodrama which Aniela’s story is liable to, as family and friends react to their transformation. What the filmmakers seem to aim for is an epic vision of Aniela’s struggle, one where we too will come up against the relentless antagonism of the forces ranged against them. 

the king of warsaw (szczepan twardoch, tr. sean gasper bye)

There is a large shadow which hangs over Twardoch’s novel, set in Warsaw in 1937. That shadow is, por supuesto, the imminence of war, the arrival of the Nazis, the construction of the ghetto and the holocaust. The protagonist of the novel, Jakub Szapiro, is Jewish, as are his family, his neighbourhood, his friends and partners and criminal associates. He doesn’t know, although the reader does, that this whole world is on the point of implosion, and all the petty disputes and conflicts which he is caught up in, with his enemies, partners, wife, family and lovers, will soon be rendered obsolete. This shadow creates its own dramatic tension, which the narrative emphasises by including flash-forwards to Jakub living a sad lonely life in Tel Aviv, decades later. The novel itself is something of a rip-roaring read, full of violence, sex, criminals and betrayal and feels ripe for the Netflix adaptation that subsequently occurred. There is a subsidiary layer which has to do with the history of Poland itself. Jakub’s contacts go to the very top, and his dealings with the far right and its political machinations has echoes of Poland’s recent history. 

the lightship (d jerzy skolimowski, w siegfried lenz, william mai, david taylor)

The film was introduced by Fernando Peña, who noted that Skolimowski was a screenwriter on Polanski’s Knife in the Water. The Lightship is another film set on a boat, with the unities of place time and action locked in. This solid dramatic framework is the platform for a grandstanding performance by Robert Duvall, whose arch criminal is generously allowed to steal the show by Klaus Maria Brandauer’s more understated captain, the Yin to the other’s Yan. The plot as such is rudimentary: Duvall arrives with a couple of cartoonish crooks on Brandauer’s lightship, which inevitably leads to conflict and tragedy. The taut direction makes the most of the claustrophobic intricacy of the ship, and as Peña observed the director’s craft is apparent. The film never drags and it permits a young Duvall to show off his prodigious talents: sometimes all we want from a movie is to watch great actors/ actresses strutting their stuff.

(Once again one cannot help but marvel at the remarkable roll call of Polish directors who emerged under the Communist regime.) 

the third part of the night (w&d andrzej zuławski, w. mirosław zuławski)

Żuławski’s first film is a bewildering but brilliant mash-up. Set in wartime Poland, it combines the quest for a cure for typhus, which involves putting infected fleas in matchboxes to bite the skin of volunteers, with the Gestapo hunt for Michal, the charismatic lead. Żuławski’s camera darts around like a cat on a hot tin roof whilst the plot moves forward like one of the film’s jumping fleas, frequently hiding in remote corners before leaping into the light. Zuławski narrative uses leaps in time to wilfully disorientate and confuse the viewer. Michal’s wife and child are murdered by the invaders at the start of the film, and Michal’s dead son haunts him as he helps a woman who looks just like his dead wife give birth. The idea of the double permeates the film, lending it an existential flavour to go with the bio-thriller elements. It’s a film that feels at once modern and baffling, the work of a mad scientist, a visionary or an idiot. But what can also be said, without doubt, is that it’s a film that’s aggressively original. The same could of course be said for much of Polish cinema that emerged out of the communist era: a cinema perhaps compelled by censorship to say things in cryptic tongues, to hide meaning in suitcases or coffins, to use the camera to disorientate as much as it clarifies, throwing the dogs off the scent, allowing its secret messages to slip through the net. 

the manuscript found in saragossa (jan potocki, tr. ian maclean)

This is one of those books which when you encounter a fellow reader of it, there will be an exchange of knowing nods based on the notion that you have both participated in a unique literary experience. There are other books which have something in common with Potocki’s text, (The Decameron, Quixote, 1001 Nights), but they will be few and far between.

Saragossa is an accumulation of stories, banked up on top of each other. Ostensibly the tale of a Walloon officer who finds himself stranded in a Spanish mountain range, it spirals out like a cobweb as every character he meets has their story to tell. These in turn contains stories within stories. Structurally, the book is a rubik’s cube, with characters from one strand popping up in another strand and the narrative becoming so dense that even the characters themselves start to complain about the impossibility of following everything.

However, just as radical as the book’s structure is its content. The characters the protagonist, Alphonse van Worden, meets, are as multicultural a collection as anything one might hope to meet in contemporary Spain. Some of the mountain bandits are Muslims, who have hidden out for centuries, since the Moors were defeated in the fifteenth century. Others are Jewish. Others still are visitors from the New World, returning from Latin America. The scope of the novel stretches from North Africa to Mexico. The breadth of the its religious scope is equally broad, with the novel describing Islamic, Jewish, Christian and Gnostic thought. Somewhere in the heart of the caves that stretch into the mountains are secrets which the writer might know but will never dare to utter. As such, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa might be the broadest church book ever written: I can think of no other text that engages with such a cultural multitude.

This itself feels astonishing, as is the whole book. The masterly aspect of the writing comes from the way it flirts with tedium, as we embark on yet another narrative, but somehow succeeds in converting every strand into something unique and engaging. It is, without doubt, one of the more remarkable novels I have ever had the privilege of reading. 

never gonna snow again (w&d malgorzata szumowska, michal englert)

Never gonna Snow Again is a film full of ingredients. A psychic masseur from Ukraine. A gated community on the edge of Warsaw. Peopled by the dissociated upper middle class. A teacher dying of cancer. A woman in love with her bulldogs. A frustrated mum. A racist ex UN peacekeeper. Kids home-cooking MDMA tablets. A little bit of everything that makes the modern world go around. The film is beautifully shot, with every frame composed and lit with real flair. The only hitch is that the narrative itself doesn’t really make the most of all these ingredients. The film strolls around the gated community, following Zenia, the masseur, as he soothes souls and muscles, and charms the locals to no particular end. There is a suggestion at the film’s conclusion that this is all about immigration, with Poland now part of the promised EU land which Zenia uses his gifts to infiltrate. But unlike Ramussen’s Flee, which treads similar territory, the film backs away from any kind of emotional involvement. Zenia remains a blank canvas of a figure, who literally vanishes one day, never to return. The overall effect is of a film brimful of ideas which never quite amount to as much as they might have done. Watching it on the day Godard’s death was announced, it was hard not to think about how the aesthetisisation of cinema sometimes works against any more polemical or discursive ambitions it might aspire to, something Godard was well aware of and fought against. 

the secret agent (joseph conrad)

There’s a history attached to this novel. The first week or so at university, we were given Conrad’s novel to read and write an essay on. I spent those days holed up in my room, avoiding the Freshers escapades, suffering from migraine, reading the book and writing about it. When the seminar arrived, no-one else wanted to read their essay, so I volunteered. My thesis, I remember, was that the real secret agent in the novel was humour. The essay went down well, it might have been the only good essay I ever wrote, because I later ceased being a model student with migraines and became the chaotic student I have remained for the rest of my life. That seminar group was, in its way, something that would radically affect my whole life and way of seeing the world, for better or for worse, and The Secret Agent was a big part of that process.

It has been in the background ever since, over the course of thirty plus years. As is the way with books you read in your youth, I have retained a clear but erroneous memory of it. I realise it was erroneous as, for some reason to do, I suspect, with ageing, I recently chose to revisit the novel. It is not as funny as I might have remembered it to be (suggesting my thesis was wide of the mark). It is a strange, unwieldy book, which shifts point of view almost chapter by chapter, which rambles, whose central dramatic moment happens offstage (something I had not remembered). Characters come in and out of the text with no-one establishing centre stage. Just as a dismembered body is at the heart of the narrative, so this is a dismembered story, with the writer choosing to scatter its parts across Edwardian London.

On another level, the novel, which deals with Russian interference in British politics, feels astonishingly prescient. Terrorism, state terrorism and the shady characters who make up that world, have been leitmotifs of the twenty first century. In a world where centralised geopolitical power is waning, Britain is susceptible to the Machiavellian wiles of opponents it doesn’t even realise it possesses until it is too late. Little men representing an ideology that holds no real interest instigate actions which threaten the fabric of society. Conrad’s vision is cynical and prescient.

Still, I struggled with the novel. I wanted it to return me to a place I had known once upon a time, an Anthony I had been once upon a time. But the novel resisted, insisted on disabusing me of any intimacy with the previous version of it and myself that had existed. The reading of a novel is like the living of a life. Our perception of the novel is contingent on our surroundings, our sense of self at the time we read it. The secret agent isn’t humour. It’s time. The most dangerous, destabilising agent of all. 

sexmission (w&d juliusz machulski, w. pavel hajný, jolanta hartwig)

Poland 1984. The country had recently emerged from Martial Law, under the rule of General Jaruzelski. In the shipyards of Gdansk, Lech Walesa was leading a social movement that would change the world. Great Polish directors like Wajda, Kieslowski, Agnieszka Holland, were more or less at the peak of their powers. And Juliusz Machulski released Sexmission, a satire so crude Jonathan Swift would have been proud. Two scientists, Maks and Albert, are cryogenically stored and wake up in the year 2044 to find that men have been abolished and women rule the world. Everyone lives underground because of a nuclear accident. Maks and Albert have emerged into this brave new world, and Maks, played by Jerzy Stuhr, the protagonist of Kieslowski’s Camera Buff, is determined to convince the women that they have been missing out on something. This leads to farcical scenes with the men eventually threatened with being ‘naturalised’, ie having their gender changed, before they finally escape. When they do, they discover that the world outside is far from what they, or any of the women living below, had been lead to believe. The point of the film is in this final sequence, which one imagines was conceived during Marital Law itself, as the film was released in 1984, and Martial Law only ended in 1983. The world outside (the world beyond the Communist block) is nothing like you have been lead to believe, the film boldly declares, dressed up as a sex romp to keep the old guard amused. Reminiscent to some extent of Brazil, and presumably made on a far smaller budget, IMDB informs that it is one of the most successful Polish movies ever made, and shows that subversive, political films don’t have to be po-faced. 

three colours white (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I went to watch 3 Colours White as something of a corrective to Blue, which blew me away. It feels as though the same, perhaps, was the case for the director, the second film in his trilogy acting as a counterpoint to the first. The tone is abruptly different, both more light-hearted, and more cynical. It’s an unhappy love story, telling the story of Polish hairdresser Karol’s quest for revenge, after being abandoned by Dominique, his French wife. The narrative is far simpler than Blue, with a clearer trajectory for the protagonist, who has to find a way to lure Dominique to Poland in order to achieve his objective. There is clearly a strong commentary about the ethics of a new capitalist Poland at play, as Karol both embraces capitalism, in a sequence which is almost comically slapdash, going from down-and-out hairdresser to wealthy entrepreneur in the space of fifteen screen minutes, but also embraces the cold-bloodedness of capitalism, setting Dominique up for her fall with a clear-headedness which is unexpectedly ruthless.

three colours blue (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I don’t know how many times I have seen this film, and it’s worth noting that the print was very poor quality, but last night it connected with me in that way that happens when a work of art feels so direct that it’s as though it is speaking to you personally.

The film was moving (emocionante - Spanish has a word which better captures the sensation), both emotionally and intellectually. As regular readers will know, this is not something that happens all that often. In part because of my incipient Englishness, which makes me wary of triggered emotional reactions, in part because my instincts are probably on the whole intellectual rather than emotional (if that division has any kind of validity). I am also wary of what might be called ‘Great Artist Syndrome’, which is the disease which means people go weak at the knees when in the presence of a supposedly great artist, losing all critical faculties.

So I have tried to analyse why this particular film, which tells the story of a young woman’s recovery from the tragedy of losing her child and her husband in a car crash, was so affecting.

Juliet Binoche in a Portobello Cafe

Given the premise, opening the film from an emotionally charged standpoint as we witness the actual crash, the director was steering the viewer into highly emotive territory. Binoche’s performance is, thereafter, the triumph of reason over emotion. Where we are guided to react to moments of emotional distress with our own outpouring of matching distress, Binoche’s character, Julie, (her name so similar to the protagonist’s) reacts with unfettered intellectual rigour. There’s an early scene where the old housekeeper weeps, saying she is weeping the tears that Julie will not. In classical narrative terms, the script would be steering the character towards a moment of catharsis, when the emotion would finally be expunged and Julie would weep those tears which she refuses to or cannot at the start. This doesn’t happen. Kieslowski/ Binoche/ the Script never offer the character this cathartic moment. The more the script held off from permitting the character this moment, the more emotionally charged the film became. I remember once spotting Binoche in a Portobello Cafe, looking utterly and completely herself. This might sound like a stupid thing to say, but I think it reflects the way she as an actress succeeds in fusing outer and inner appearance on screen: we never for a moment question a performance which is a sublime example of screen acting, in spite of the fact she the script refuses to let her do what we expect or anticipate a dramatic character to do in this situation. She at once defies us and convinces us, a balancing act that never wavers

The Act of Killing the Act of Kindness

The director Joshua Oppenheimer made a very powerful film called The Act of Killing, which is a slightly leftfield way of introducing the idea that Blue could have been retitled An Act of Kindness. In modern narrative models, the protagonist is supposed to be decisive, to take action. So often, the action of action leads towards violence, even cruelty. This is because violent acts are considered dramatically more engaging, from Homer and Beowulf until the present day. Julie is a character who is hiding. She is in retreat from the world. When asked by an estate agent she’s going to rent a flat from what she does, she says “Nothing”. Instead of going out and fighting against fate and anyone who backs fate up, she retreats. Hiding, in our world. is usually associated with cowardliness. (In others it is associated with saintliness.) But we never feel Julie is a coward, in part because of the ferocious strength Binoche’s performance manifests. Instead, she is someone who is resisting conventional models of grief. This culminates in an action which is one of both forgiveness and inordinate kindness. In dramatic terms it is a small action, one which requires no physical exertion, one which doesn’t demonstrably alter her own well-being. It is at once the most innocuous of dramatic twists and the most radical and it is in its small way reflective of a director who appears to be turning his back on thousands of years of narrative (and social) conformity.

The Lost Dream of Europe

Julie’s husband is a composer who has a commission to write a symphony to celebrate European Unification. He dies with the symphony unfinished. Julie and her lover, Olivier, eventually complete it. If there is anything that signifies Julie’s final recuperation from the tragedy it is that she comes to accept the legacy of her husband’s music (which she collaborated in the writing of) and agrees to help in the completion of the score. There is in this narrative angle an intimation that Julie’s process of healing runs parallel to a European process of healing, which for Kieslowski and his generation goes back to the wars of the twentieth century and subsequent ideological conflict. The progressive, pacifist element of the European project is celebrated in Julie and her husband and her lover’s shared project, and the film’s music itself. It goes without saying that there is, from an English-British perspective, something heartbreaking about witnessing this, (from our point of view), lost dream of European Union. It only serves to consolidate the known fact that what has happened to our nation has been a triumph of the philistines, and those bellicose instincts which Kieslowski’s film so roundly and subtly subverts.

The Bravery of a director who Empowers Sound above Image

Finally, in a note that is connected to the above, there is the issue of the music itself and the way the director prioritises it within his structural use of the elements at his disposal as a filmmaker. The music is employed in an entirely intrusive manner. It rears up at moments, out of context, like another character stamping on stage. Kieslowski worked with Zbigniew Preisner, the composer, on numerous occasions. He clearly had complete faith in Preisner to construct a music which would not only possess a dramatic potency which would counterpoint Julie’s passivity, but would also be, in so many ways, the star of the show. Music has a transcendent power which the word and its cinematic sister, the image, can never quite match. It communicates with the listener in a visceral manner, uncluttered by the noise of ideas and the rationality. The use of music is where Kieslowski front ends the emotional charge of his film, in so doing defying the audience, like his protagonist, to resist its power. And we cannot. The music overwhelms us. 

a short film about love (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

 Kieslowski became the celebrated European auteur towards the end of his short life. He died at the age of 54. His final Three Colours Trilogy is what he is most celebrated for now, but he had already had a prolific career before he “burst onto the scene”, as they say. A Short Film About Love is an extended version of one of his Dekalog series, where he made ten films set on a Warsaw housing estate. These ten films were originally an hour long, and two of them, ‘Love’ and ‘Killing’, were then given feature length versions. Wikipedia notes that all twelve were made in the same year, but when there was a plan to do the same for ‘Jealousy’, “exhaustion eventually prevented him from making what would have been his thirteenth film in less than a year."

There is something disarmingly simple about Kieślowski’s storytelling. He does not appear to make films about great themes, although there are themes that run through his films. Instead he creates fables about people, locating the universal in the individual. These days, in an atomised capitalist world, it is very hard to get a film financed unless it has a marketable theme and ‘target audience’. The target audience for A Short Film about Love, which clearly riffs to an extent off Rear Window, can only be described as frustrated post-adolescent lovers and confused adults, which is quite a broad audience base. The film tells the tale of a young man, Tomek, who spies on a woman who lives in the opposite block, and, believing himself to be in love, engineers a way of letting her know. The woman, Magda, understandably finds it hard to take Tomek seriously, but then finds herself surprised to discover how his infatuation affects and changes her.

Watching the film, one is struck by the way in which Kieślowski’s better known masterpieces were a product of the freedom he had enjoyed to learn his trade, that trade being to both be a filmmaker and also a poet of the human consciousness. His focus is on the way our weaknesses can become our strengths, and vice versa. How courage so often manifests itself, for the common person, in the most unlikely, even cowardly fashion. How heroism and anti-heroism in the real world are rarely what they might claim to be in the movies. Cinema needs more Kieślowskis, more poets of the every day, artists capable of transforming the banal into the transcendent. 

nb It is worth noting the remarkable quality of Kieślowski’s actors, who lend their humanity to these complex characters. It’s gratifying to note that both Olaf Lubaszenko (Tomek) and Grazyna Szapolowska (Magda) are still working, according to IMDB. The beautiful secondary performance of Stefania Iwinska as the godmother should also be celebrated. 

sole (w&d carlo sironi; w. giulia moriggi, antonio manca)

Sole is an unspectacularly brave piece of filmmaking. Its braveness comes from its commitment to being unspectacular, The action at times appears to progress at a glacial pace. Yet what is occurring is that the pieces are being meticulously assembled so that as that plot simmers it will eventually come to a searing, devastating boil. An extended shot of the protagonist, Ermanno, playing the slot machines isn’t there by chance. It’s a seed in the narrative. 

The story is on on the one hand proto-modern European, and on the other as old as time itself. A young woman, Lena, dolefully played by Sandra Drzymalska, is pregnant. We never learn who the father might have been. In return for €10K, she agrees to give up the baby to the uncle and wife of Ermanno, (Claudio Segaluscio), a sullen youth whose blank face gives nothing away. The two live in a rented apartment for the final months of the pregnancy. Both are orphans. Ermanno’s father killed himself by jumping out of a window. Emotionally stunted, the two, bit by bit, begin to discover love and meaning from the other, without expecting it. When the child is born prematurely, they became, for a few short weeks, a family, albeit one that is doomed.

The financial exchanges that underpin the movie speak of an atomised modernity, where money is thicker than blood. They tell of the choices people are coerced to make in a globalised world, where the ties of family, barrio and culture have been cut. The ending of the film parachutes one back to being 21, to being condemned to discover the cruelty of the world, to feel the cold wind blowing in your face and realising you are going to have to learn to live with that cold wind for the rest of your life. It is an ending of astonishing power, because this is a sensation we have all had to confront at one point or another. It is for this reason that love exists: to teach us that there is hope in the world, and hope brings despair in its wake. 

Carlo Sironi manages the ingredients of his film with impeccable control. The remarkable acting of the two leads; the muted palette of the art design and the score, by the Polish composer Teoniki Rozynek, which is as fine a piece of music for camera as you are ever likely to encounter. 

camera buff (w&d krzysztof kieslowski)

Camera Buff  is one of Kieslowski’s earliest features. A cursory glance at IMDB however reveals that he had more than a decade of experience making documentaries by the time he came to make Camera Buff. Given this, it would seem there is more than a slight element of autobiography to the film, which narrates the story of Filip, a seemingly innocuous husband and worker with a young son who is given a camera which changes his life. Filip is commissioned by the factory boss to make a short documentary about an anniversary celebration, a documentary which ends up winning third prize in a festival and launching him on an erratic and perilous career as a filmmaker. Filip becomes increasingly obsessed by the camera’s perspective, seeing the world through its viewfinder, something that leads to him becoming distanced from his wife, as well as compelling him to capture aspects of the world which the state would rather weren’t acknowledged. It’s a film about film, with plenty of wry humour (“Why did you include a shot of a pigeon in the documentary?”) and a slightly acerbic take on the industry. It’s also a great portrayal of the extent of freedom in communist Poland. 

drive your plough over the bones of the dead (olga tokarczuk, tr. antonia lloyd-jones)

Tokarczuk’s novel has a strain running through it which feels completely of-the-moment. The revenge of nature. In a quiet corner of Poland, near the Czech border, a small community is afflicted by a series of murders. The narrator, Janina, a woman who wears her eccentricity firmly on her sleeve, claims that the victims, all of them male hunters, have been killed by deer, who are seeking vengeance for the killing of the hunters. Janina is a wonderfully idiosyncratic soul, who could be a visionary or could be a nutcase. Her justified anger at the whole process of hunting, something she sees as murder, is complemented by a fervent belief in astrology. In her earlier life she has been a structural engineer who helped build a bridge in Syria. Tokarczuk’s text is as playful as her narrator. It takes great pleasure in Janina’s digressions and flights of fancy. It is peopled by eccentrics and oddballs, (including one character who in the english translation is named Oddball) and a Blake translating policeman. The novel is composed of 17 chapters which narrate a story which takes place over the course of a year. It is, in effect, a murder mystery, however the strongest underlying theme is the tension between humans and nature, a theme that seems more and more urgent with every passing day. 

shosha (isaac bashevis singer)

We went to Krochmalna Street, the street in Warsaw that Singer’s narrator, Aaron Greindinger, was raised on and the street Shosha, the woman he fell in love with as a child, still lived on when Aaron returned many years later, so that he fell in love with her all over again, in spite of the fact that they now had so little in common. It’s not clear to the narrator or the reader how much this second infatuation is with Shosha or with a romanticised vision of his own childhood, described so briefly in the opening pages of the novel. Walking down the street as it now stands makes the protagonist's act of nostalgia seem even more nostalgic, for the street full of Jewish life which Singer or Aaron would have known is no more. In its place is a long road with several stunted tower blocks. In one corner of the street there was a small stall under a tarpaulin, selling vegetables and pickles, maybe the only ghostly hint of the smells and the bustle which Singer so vividly describes. The Jewish quarter is no more. Almost all of Warsaw was destroyed in the war, and though much has been rebuilt, the Jewish quarter wasn’t. A whole world vanished. People, buildings, synagogues, customs. Nevertheless, it can still be visited in the pages of Singer’s novel. Literature transcends even genocide. The novel was published in 1978, so the world the novelist conjures was already an act of memory. The novelist would have been aware, when he wrote the book, of the alchemical nature of his craft. These characters might have died in the war; on the road, as supposedly happened to Shosha; in the camps; or in the ghetto, but in the writer’s happy-go-lucky prose they live on. As does Krochmalna Street. Because the truth is that I visited it twice when I was in Warsaw. Once when I walked down the street which is still called by that name in googlemaps, and a second time as I strode through the words of Singer’s novel. And of those two visits, the one that seemed most real, or most alive to me, was the latter.