The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film 1916--1989 by Kamila Kuc

Author:Kamila Kuc
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, HIS010010, History/Europe/Eastern
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2014-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 13 Hands Up (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1967/1981)

It is true, however, that the checks and blows of socialist officialdom have their capitalist counterpart in the scuppered projects that litter these filmmakers’ Western careers, even that of the ‘bankable’ and household-famous Polański: the artistic potential of such unrealised works as a Polański’s Master and Margarita or a Borowczyk’s Sade biopic makes their non-existence agonising (by contrast, On the Silver Globe does at least exist in some form, and Żuławski’s insertion of present-day vérité footage into the released version, patching over the lacunae of the sabotaged shoot, ironically makes it an even more fragmentary, dislocated and ‘avant-garde’ work than originally intended). As for the crassest commercial corners into which the Western marketplace might force a filmmaker, it is doubtful that Borowczyk would have succumbed to the nadir of Emmanuelle 5 (1987) had he remained in Poland. Then again, he would probably not have made his great anti-totalitarian fantasy Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love, 1968). Moreover, Polish Communist cinema was itself awash with ‘safe’ and substandard commercial fare by the time Martial Law ended.3

Yet I do not wish to characterise Polish émigré cinema’s excursions into genre or even exploitation cinema as the inherent corruption of an exemplary artistic purity. Commercial assignments and genre exercises may have yielded uninspired work, from the clumsy comedy of Skolimowski’s The Adventures of Gerard (1970) to Polański’s soporific horror-noir The Ninth Gate (1999), yet at their most successful such engagements have entailed the imaginative and subversive rewriting of familiar genres and ensured wider exposure for the troubling preoccupations of Surrealism and the Absurd. More importantly, as I intend to demonstrate, Polish émigré filmmakers’ syntheses of nominally high and low cultures have served to emphasise the shared concerns of avant-garde and popular cinema, a destabilisation of cultural boundaries that in itself reflects vanguard developments in Western art cinema during the 1960s and 1970s. Such syntheses also act to foreground the mix of subtlety and vulgarity, of the extroverted and obscure, that was present in these filmmakers’ works from the start. But this encounter with the West was far from simply a collision with the commercial, for these filmmakers partook no less of a post-war West European avant-garde and modernist scene whose resurgent energies broadly coincided with their own early, trailblazing years. It is with an overview of these less contentious inputs that I shall proceed, before entering the ‘perilous’ waters of sleaze and sensation.

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