Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist by Ewa Mazierska

Author:Ewa Mazierska [Mazierska, Ewa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Water

He did not picture life's ocean, as do poets, all astir with stormy waves. No, he saw it in his mind's eye as smooth, without a ripple, motionless and translucent right down to the dark sea bed. He saw himself sitting in a small unsteady boat, staring at the dark silt of the sea bottom, where he could just discern shapeless monsters, like enormous fish. These were life's hazards – the illnesses, the griefs, madness, poverty, blindness…

(Ivan Turgenev, Spring Torrents)

Water is a frequent setting in Skolimowski's films and his films are ‘awash’ with water metaphors. His characters live on or near water (The Lightship, The Shout), travel on water (Ferdydurke), work with water (Deep End), study water life (Leszczyc in Identification Marks: None) and like to bathe in it (Little Hamlet, Barrier, Deep End). Moreover, the protagonist of the ‘Leszczyc tetralogy’ has a name associated with water, as ‘leszcz’ in Polish means ‘bream’. Yet unlike Polański, Skolimowski is not associated with the mise-en-scène of water, most likely because Polański began his career with a distinctive take on water, while Skolimowski elaborated it for a longer time. Large areas of water feature more prominently in his later films, while in his early productions water rather drips than floods. Take his early Little Hamlet, in which the Polish Ophelia has a bath in a humble bathtub and most likely drowns there. By contrast, in Polański's cinema vast areas of water already appear in his early shorts and his feature debut, Knife in the Water.

Both Polański and Skolimowski represent water as a liminal space – a passage to a different reality. However, in Skolimowski's films water not so much signifies moving to the realm of fantasy (pure fantasy rarely appears in his films), as a transition between different stages of life, including the passage between childhood and maturity, and life and death. The only possible exception is in Ferdydurke, where at the end of the film Józio embarks on a boat, escaping everything which he encountered during his peregrinations as a schoolboy. This trip signifies Józio finally leaving the realm of childhood and becoming a man, as well as his parting from Poland. These associations are suggested by the name of the boat, ‘Trans-Atlantyk’, which is also the title of a famous, semi-autobiographical novel by Witold Gombrowicz, who left Poland on a ship of this name and landed in Argentina. Leaving Poland, for Gombrowicz and Skolimowski, not only means parting from the geographical location but also from the historical and cultural entity – the prewar Poland of decadent aristocracy and disappearing ‘simple peasants’. However, even if we regard the boat in Ferdydurke as a vehicle of a metaphysical journey, this journey lacks the suggestiveness of the two men from Polański's Dwaj ludzie z szafą (Two Men and a Wardrobe, 1958) disappearing in the water. Moreover, the viewer must have some minimal literary knowledge to grasp the meaning of Józio's final trip.

There is no sea or any other large areas of water in Skolimowski's feature debut, Identification Marks: None, but the sea is often talked of by the characters.

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