Polish documentaries in Los Angeles

Last September I received a lovely invitation to review the documentary submissions to the 15^th Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles, held for a week in October.   It was a group of solid films, funded by a variety of public state and regional organizations, such as Polish Television, the National Audiovisual Institute, including other Polish and European funds.  These documentaries show the healthy state of documentary filmmaking, made possible by programs promoting quality, and relying on a rich tradition of cultivating documentary cinema.  I am very thankful to Vladek Juszkiewicz, the founder and director of the festival, for this opportunity to savor the moving humanism of Polish cinema. (My first film viewing experiences in Buenos Aires in the seventies were deeply shaped by the films of Wajda and Zanussi).

As John Grierson, the father of documentary, observed many years ago, good documentaries both educate and entertain. And I found that to be the case of the films I had the pleasure to review.

Children Calling is an observational piece on a helpline for children and teenagers, staffed with sympathetic listeners, who provide common sense but not professional advice.  It is done in a strict verité style, with an emphasis on close-ups and extreme close-ups of the young women answering the phones.  The viewer hears snippets of life stories  – some quite dramatic – over a year. The passing of seasons is nicely recorded, and adequately conveys the flow of time. The film is framed by shots of home-made toys, and at regular intervals, the antics of a dog.

   The 30 minute-length matches adequately the scope of the film: to catch without any editorial comment, voice-over or preliminary text, the everyday activities of a small institution, peopled by caring individuals.  The joys and limitations of the cinéma vérité style are well exemplified in this professionally executed short film.

Albert Cinema (2013) by Agniezka Zwiefka, also chooses a mostly cinéma verité approach to tackle its subject matter: to record the making of an amateur film by a motley group of homeless men living in a shelter. 

   Eschewing a narrator or any explanation about these characters, except for what they reveal to the camera, the film slowly builds a very moving portrait of broken lives held together by dreams and hopes.  The protagonist of this group effort is a rugged man, a former alcoholic hippie, eloquent in front of an unflinching camera/confessional, who finds redemption and a renewed relationship with his estranged son, after premiering the film.

   There is a nice fit between the length of the film (to fit an hour-long television slot) and the leisurely pace in which the story unfolds, expertly edited to build a climax and a resolution.

In A Diary of a Journey (2013), directed by Piotr Stasik, cinéma vérité is again the style of choice to record the summer-long journey through the Polish countryside of a classically trained photographer, now in his seventies, who takes a young high-school student as his apprentice. 

   The charm of this documentary is two-fold: the geographical journey in search of interesting faces, seeped in the everyday of rural life, and also the mentoring process involving an old artist with an adventuresome life and a young man getting ready to live. 

   Like Children Calling and Albert Cinema, there is no narrator explaining the context or who these characters are – just a few shots of 1960s fashion photographs introduce the older professional as an established figure – and what pushes them to take this trip.  The beauty of the rural landscape is lovingly captured, as are the tough and warm inhabitants of the small places they visit.

   A portrait of the artist as an old man and a record of a satisfying artistic experience, A Diary of a Journey is skillfully edited to make the mundane details of traveling an exhilarating experience (a fender-bender, a swim, cooking), culminating in a moving revelation of a man assessing his life when most of it has already been lived.

Joanna (2013), director by Aneta Kopacz, is another remarkable observational portrait, in this case that of a young mother and wife dying of cancer.  Doing it in a strict verité style was a bold choice, one that both benefited the narrative structure and facilitated the non-intrusive relationship between the camera and the titular protagonist. It also avoided the pitfalls of melodrama in the building of a story that ends in death and sorrow.

   In a feat of editing bravura, Joanna ends up being a contemplative take on youth and death, motherhood and marriage, love, nature and the tangible world.  Tweaking the chronology and trusting the viewer to figure out the emotional direction of the story, Joanna culminates in a celebration of love conquering death, by showing the protagonist’s young son learning to ride his bike with the help of his mother.  The humanity of the portrait, movingly built over the 50 minutes of a television slot, is accomplished with grace and technical skill.

   (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this notable documentary was produced by the Wajda Studio).

A Dream of Warsaw (2014), direted by Krzysztof Magowski, is an accomplished example of the modern music documentary, like the ones pioneered by Martin Scorsese (Shine a Light, No Direction Home). If it must be fascinating for a Polish audience to see the multilayered relationship between a well-known rock singer and his times – the 60s to the 90s – unfold through archival materials and interviews, much more so to an international audience who is not familiar with the iconic figure of Czeslaw Niemen.  What bursts on the screen is the view of a parallel world, one behind the Iron Curtain until the collapse of Communism

, with a musical figure as iconic as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, tangled up with politics since his beginnings as the popular singer who became the king of Polish rock

Thoroughly researched and skillfully edited, with talking heads, including family members and pop music experts serving as de facto narrators, this documentary is a solid example of the classic expository approach: the thorough examination of a topic.  Just the archival work to dig photos, newsreels, publicity materials, interviews, film clips and a verité documentary about Niemen, not just in Poland but in Europe and the US, makes this a worthy piece of filmmaking.

   Like Citizen Kane, the documentary is built around a question: Who was Czeslaw Niemen?  Through multiple perspectives, the viewer is treated to an examination of the  many facets displayed by the singer/composer over a long career, spanning crucial decades of Polish history and politics.  It makes for a fascinating portrait, where the threads of the private and the public, the personal and the political are inextricably woven. 

 

Cabaret of Death (2014), directd by Andrzej Celinski, is a multi-layered film dealing with a straightforward subject: the cabaret acts staged by German and Polish Jewish performers in the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps during WWII.  It has been the topic of various documentaries, most effectively Ilona Ziok’s Kurt Gerron’s Karussell (1999) about the Weimar era German actor and director imprisoned in Therensienstadt.

  Walking on a well-trodden path, this feature length documentary stakes, however, a bold claim in a territory often dismissed by purists of the genre: reenactments of anecdotes and commentaries offered by witnesses and experts, who vividly illustrate the difficulties, perils and joys of staging theatrical sketches in extreme situations. But unlike the titillating self-contained formula perfected by the History Channel, the film keeps the various dramatizations at the service of what I believe is the film’s ultimate objective: a historical essay about the persistence of a cultural legacy in the face of ethnic catastrophe. By bookending the loosely connected stories of these cabaret performers – including Gerron’s - with the graceful opening shot of a holy fool (I wish I knew the Yiddish word) on the slabs of the Shoah memorial in Berlin and his final appearance walking through a verdant Jewish cemetery, Cabaret of Death goes beyond the expository approach to become a work of mourning.  In that sense, I also believe, it becomes part of the difficult conversation among Poles of different traditions – like the recent Ida so intelligently does as a fiction film.

   Cabaret of death is not only an excellent contribution to the historical documentary but also a solid example of how film technique can be used to teach and entertain. 

These fine works attest to the variety and quality of a film genre that matters to cultural organizations in Poland, thus ensuring the healthy state of a type of cinema born with the invention of the Lumière’s cinématographe.

The best documentary award of this 15^th edition went to A Diary of Journey, with its young director Pitr Stasik on hand to receive the prize during the gala opening of the festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.