A Short Film About Killing (1988)

I was sad, and had been for a while, about international catastrophe, and about entropy, and about the rising tide of British racism, and the fact that the public and the media are not unsympathetic to this terrible thing, and because I had recently watched 'Nicholas and Alexandra' (1971), which is not a very happy film, though I think it worth watching.  So I decided to lighten my day by viewing a movie.  I had two hours in the middle of a working Friday, and the films I had set aside for The Penciltonian were all too long for that.  I needed something shorter, so I watched 'A Short Film About Killing', which is deeply unhappy but seemed to help.

It's a film by Krzysztof Kieślowski, who made the probably-more-famous Three Colours Trilogy, and whose 'Dekalog' I watched a few years ago, after hearing comparisons between it and 'Heimat' (1984).  'Dekalog' is a series of ten one-hour films for television, based loosely around the Ten Commandments, which left me with the impression that Poland (or at least, Soviet Poland) was a cold, cold, miserable place, always snowy and without hope, and that the main occupations there were dying and being cold while travelling short distances.  They were extremely well-made, and compellingly watchable, and two of the most striking were expanded into slightly longer versions for cinema release.  'A Short Film About Killing' is one of those two.  It may sound bleak, but the other, 'A Short Film About Love' wasn't radically more cheering.

This is a film about a young man, Jacek, who kills a stranger, a taxi-driver selected apparently at random.  Not because of some feeling of Nietzschean superiority, as we saw in 'Rope' (1948), but, perhaps, because he's sad, and sees no prospects for himself, or for other reasons undisclosed or barely hinted at.  Perhaps he thought it would be easy.  It isn't easy - he tries to strangle him with a rope, but it turns into a horrible ordeal, horrible for everybody involved, and horrible to watch.  We've watched the Jacek going about the city, and he doesn't seem unpleasant or unreasonable, he just seems disaffected with life - and we've also followed the taxi-driver, who has spent his day declining to pick up customers.  He picks up the wrong one in the end.  And we've been watching Piotr, a sensitive young lawyer with nice hair, who passionately opposes the death penalty, and who, a year later, has to defend Jacek.

Here, as in the hour-long version from the 'Dekalog', we cut straight from the murder to the end of the trial.  This isn't like a lot of murder stories.  There's no investigation of clues, no sense of how Jacek was caught.  We see the murder, then we see the last seconds of the trial, and then we lead up to the other killing, the execution.  It's a philosophical, devastating piece.  Perfectly, horribly directed, though it seems somehow inappropriate to praise the art when the message is so grim and so important.  Something has been done to the lenses or the grading to make the world around Jacek dauntingly dark and murky, as if wherever he moves he's walking into the dark.  He's distressed towards the end of the film, but at the start he's almost emotionless, except once, when he catapaults a spoonful of coffee at a cafe window to amuse some children.  He smiles at this, the only time he smiles in the whole film.  A clip of his brief, uncharacteristic smile was used in the opening titles to 'Dekalog', and once I knew its context, its use seemed terribly, terribly unfair and cruel.

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I think you should watch this film, but I understand why you don't.

Miś (1980)

A cat, dressed as a rabbit

I was urged to watch 'Miś', and informed only that it was a Polish comedy, and a cult film.  I've been keen to see some Polish comedy, as everything I've seen from that nation has made it out to be entirely miserable and wretched, and I thought something with a lower body-count than 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (1977) or 'Dekalog' (1989) would give me a brighter perspective.  That it was a cult film, I found marginally less encouraging, as that occasionally means it's a treat, but sometimes denotes something nobody could like accidentally.

I'm reluctant to use the English language title, 'Teddy Bear', as I can't believe it's a very accurate translation.  The giant straw animal, which has no effect on characters or plot, may be a bear but resembles no teddy I've ever seen, and I suspect it hails from a different tradition entirely.  The movie regards a man called Ryszard racing his ex-wife Irena to Britain and withdraw a small fortune the pair lodged in an English bank.  At the start she damages his passport, making swift passage through the iron curtain almost impossible, and the body of the film shows his elaborate but almost feasible plan to get to Britain, a scheme which requires him to find his exact double, and cause that double to lose his hair.

Distressingly, the subtitles were all in yellow comic sans.

The film was interesting, rather than enjoyable, which isn't ideal for a comedy .  Actually, I'm afraid it's interesting, rather than interesting, as it didn't keep my attention as well as I'd hoped.  Since amazon reviewer Richard J. Brzostek describes it as 'a hilarious comedy', I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, though, as it's possible I just don't get it; it's a satire on a political situation of which I'm almost entirely ignorant.  There are several scenes either presenting ridiculous exaggerations of aspects of life in communist Poland, or else giving a rye, unexaggerated look at exactly what happened in those days - and I couldn't tell which of these was being presented.

Either way, this is a Poland of austerity, cunning, and government excess, the latter to present a propagandist suggestion of prosperity, hence the giant toy bear.  In this picture of Poland, meat is so hard to come by that people have to go to the theatre to see a joint, and restaurants chain their cutlery to the table, but in such a way that only one person can use a spoon at once, as when one person pulls to make the chain longer, their partner's chain gets shorter.  I've been told this latter point was a real feature in some Polish cafes, but I'm not sure I believe it.

A teddy-bear?

The film does one thing that I like very much: I've long enjoyed foreign films' portrayals of Britain, which offer a surprisingly rare chance to see what stereotypes the world has of us.  Here, the British seem very calm and placid, in stark contrast to the manic Ryszard; bank clerks in London are prone to going on strike, but do so very politely and very meticulously, sitting quietly in their booths until the exact second their strike is due to end, before carrying on with their business.  Also, the British speak English, but with Polish accents.  For anyone else curious to see British stereotypes in European films, I'd recommend 'Laissez-Passer' (2002), a fine French movie set in the film industry of occupied Paris in the 40s, which surprised me with a sudden trip to England and a trio of petulant interrogators who won't stop making unwanted tea.  Ah, but now I'm talking about the wrong film, so shall stop here.


P.S. Wikipedia claims this film was out in 1980, but IMDB says 1981.  I've gone with the earlier date, as it suits my purposes.  I have two pretty exciting possibilities for 1981, but my backup for 1980 is famously awful.

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This isn't the version of the DVD I saw, so the quality, not least of the subtitles, may be higher

Na Srebrnym Globie (1977)

I've been rather inconsistent on the issue of whether or not to translate film titles to English.  My reasoning so far seems to be 'which title is more famous?', as calling 'Das Boot' (1981) 'The Boat' would seem absurd, whereas everyone seems to have heard of 'Downfall' (2004) but few would know what I was talking about if I called it 'Die Untergang'.  When it comes to obscurer films, such as 'Na Srebrnym Globie' (That's 'On the Silver Globe', in Polish) I'm inclined to go with the title I like more, even (or perhaps especially) if I can neither spell nor pronounce it.

The silver globe of the title is as unnamed planet, but every shot seems to be tinted chilly blue rather than silver.  This is a grim Polish sci-fi film (and, since my only other experience of Polish film is 1988's Dekalog, I have it in mind that all Polish cinema is very grim indeed).  This film was handed to me with a warning.  Two warnings, in fact - firstly that the film was pretty unpleasasant (I worried little, for the blog already had a tag for 'horrible films' which needed filling out), and secondly that it was incomplete.  Only four fifths of Na Srebrnym Globie' were ever filmed, as the Polish minister for culture ordered production to cease prematurely.  The unfilmed portions are represented here by passages of curt and uncharismatic narration over wild and inappropriate footage of modern Polish streets and traffic, the underground system, and one lengthy shot of pedestrians riding an escalator.

The Old Man regards a corpse

So it happens like this: a space-ship crash-lands on a planet and the astronauts saunter about variously dying and making intense philosophical monologues; I wondered for a while whether this rambling was improvisation, but since the film is based on a novel I assume a script was involved somewhere.  One of them gives birth to a child who grows up at an amazing rate.  If I've understood it rightly (and I found the whole thing rather confusing, so the rest of my summary may be way off the director's intention), anyone born on the planet ages at a tremendous pace, meaning that an entire tribe of humans grows up and passes through several generations, while the sole surviving astronaut, Jerzy, gets gradually older, eventually becoming 'the Old Man', a miserable codger hailed as a demi-god.

The astronauts have brought a film-camera with them, and the majority of the film's first half is seen through the lens of this camera, with the old man speaking directly to it and using it to record all that he sees.  This lends the film a unusually experimental, 'realistic' style (I've become wary of using the word 'realistic' with regards to films, as it means too little and too much), and leaves it seeming both grounded and avant-garde.  At the film's mid-point the old man returns to his rocket and sends the footage he's gathered back to Earth.  Then he dies, I think.

That may be a blue-skinned orgy in the background, by the by

In the second half of the film, an astronaut called Marek comes to visit.  Since he comes from Earth (a name which passed into legend during the Old Man's time) he's hailed as the Messiah.  Andrzej Seweryn chooses to pitch his performance AT THE TOP OF HIS VOICE almost from the time he enters the story, so it's hard to tell whether he's getting more histrionic as he witnesses the many horrible and distressing things that happen throughout the rest of the film.  The film's DVD cover makes no secret of the fact that he gets crucified at the end, though by that point the film had confused me so much that I couldn't tell you why.

Since so much of the film is absent, and so bleak, bewaffling and disturbing, I found it very hard to engage on any emotional level with the characters.  This, coupled with the duration (two and a half hours, and it would be longer if all of it had been shot) made it hard to give the film my full attention.  It's not as if there was a shortage of incident or colour (though the latter, as I say, was almost wholly blue).  The people of the planet find themselves at war with the indigenous Szerns, strange bird-faced angel statues, who look like something I might have cooked up during my alarming-mask-making-phase.  The civilisation grows, their hats and collars expand until they're larger than their wearers, characters call themselves actors and replace the originals, the 'actor' doubling Marek becoming a second Marek.  With no explanation I could find, there are suddenly flashy cars and ruined streets and radios playing something like rock and roll, as if society has evolved another 500 years between scenes, giving the impression that someone is cheating in a particularly stark and bewildering game of Civilization.  Checking with Opai (the lender of the film) it seems this sudden advance is probably a move to the continent of the Szerns, whose progress happens to have mirrored 20th Century Earth.  I may join Opai in watching this film exactly once, and never again.

An unhappy ending, for some reason

If I hadn't been told when this film was made, I would have struggled to guess.  The quality of the colour, lighting and film are (perhaps deliberately, perhaps not) pretty wretched - the action becomes so dark as to be almost invisible whenever a cloud pops in front of the sun - that I might have expected some time in sixties; but the design of the tribe's clothing feels like it belongs in a nineties sci-fi, and some of their pleasingly unusual array looks like it belongs in early noughties club-wear.

As it happens, the film in fact belongs in 1977, the year of 'Star Wars'.  The two really have nothing in common aside from this, and their existence in the same decade is a little surprising.  But while 'Star Wars' was a very enjoyable swashbuckler using only the aesthetics of science fiction, 'Na Srebrnym Globie' is SF right down to its heart, for good or ill.  It's the less good of the two films, that seems fairly clear, though an awful lot of that is down to the incompleteness of this Polish tragedy, and the necessarily unsatisfactory moves to fill in the gaps.

I'm disinclined to condemn it for its being not very enjoyable, as this might well be a bold and deliberate move towards making something mature, intelligent and complicated.  It doesn't really work, or didn't for me, and if you're not intrigued by what little I've said, I'd really give it a miss if I were you.  If you're like me though - up for any gruelling viewing challenge for its own sake - you may find it strangely irresistible, and then be bored and confused and fascinated and then bored again, which is the wrong sort of emotional rollercoaster, really.

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Have I convinced you that you have to see this film?  No?  Well, these bits are mainly decorative, really.