POLISH FILM ACADEMY

50 Years of Polish Film School, Warsaw 2008

“Bad Luck” or The Scissors by Andrzej Munk

Mariola Dopartowa

Has Andrzej Munk been given his rightful place in the conscioussness of contemporary Poles and in Polish culture? His contribution to and influence on the development of Polish cinematography cannot be overstimated, he has provided inspiation to many of his students and fellow directors. It is obvoius that the influence Munk enjoyed resulted not only from his numerous talents, also at teaching, great individuality and technical mastery. As every author who likes to go his own way, Munk was given a stereotypical label of the so-called true artist, a born rebel, a mysterious loner clinging to people and inaccessible to them at the same time. The omnipresence of these stereotypes gave rise to an equally empty anti-stereotype: an image of a shrewd businessman who uses his contacts and connections with high-ranking officials, a self-conscious hysteric and an alleged servant of the system, destroyer of Polish heroic tradition.

Born in 1921, Munk seems to have taken the path leading back to the very source of the consciousness of artistic war generation. Hence, such fruitful yet not always easy co-operation with the screenwriter, Jerzy Stefan Stawiński. His artistic attitude involved the rejection of sentimentalism and affectation; detachment from his own work and himself, from schematic tradition and superficial innovative ideas, from pointless celebration of absurdity or avant-garde aesthetics; he demonstrated his love of experimenting and a characteristic way of understanding artist’s work. The artistic relationship is also reflected in Munk’s interest in behaviourism, documentalism and the rejection of purely psychological interpretations of the reasons behind the actions taken by a decent man, a victim of a genocidal system, who resorts to collaboration and becomes co-responsible for its development and strengthening, which – surprisingly – does not seem to be very difficult for him.

The irony of “Eroica” and “Bad Luck”, embarassingly interpreted by communist censors as “anti-romantic mockery”, was in fact auto-irony similar to the artistic strategy used by Gajcy or Borowski. It far exceeded the conventional boundaries of coarse joking and nihilistic style so abundant in Poland after 1956. The myth of Munk as a mocker and polemicist with the much younger Wajda and author of a new concept of history and man which opposed the “romantic Polish School” ideas emerged only because the political thaw of 1956 had not made it through the blurring of truth about the war generation and it even resulted in the forming of its ideologically correct mock-up version known as the ’56 generation. Piszczyk represents a certain generation of people who were born at the end of the second decade of the 20^th century and, at the same time, he personifies a general variant of historical experience. The character is indeed worlds apart from the affected style of the thaw period which praised “Polish romantic fate” but it was not Munk’s idea to promote any kind of “anti-romanticism” in this way, he just deliberated over the emergence and consolidation of the post-Stalinist stereotype of romanticism. Moreover, the director remained much more interested in the romantic quest for truth than any of the artists who are referred to as the great romantics of the Polish cinema. Munk believed that the existence of this stereotype guaranteed his artistic freedom, he might have even thought that he would be able to use the good climate for artistic films and, as Aleksander Ledóchowski put it, to challenge the devil.

Since mid 1950s, Munk’s interest focused on one of the most serious problems faced by his generation and constituting part of Polish tradition. The problem refers to this fine, often imperceptible, line between freedom and enslavement, a line which is found inside the man himself. That tiny internal gesture determines the way we behave in all possible historical or social circumstances, whether we choose the difficult truth or deceitful illusion. The war background presents people as neither really good nor bad but either free or enslaved by something they do not usually understand when making spontaneous or well-thought out decisions. We refer to herein to the enslaving power of stereotypes, prejudices, resentments, cognitive illusions, conformism, going into ruptures over literary role models. For the most fervent romantics and modernists internal freedom is the basic, inalienable right and privilege of every person and the first step towards developing real individual, social, and national identity – instead of its mock-up ideological version based on literature and film. Munk believed that resentfulness, perceiving oneself as a victim, as well as reinforcing false myths of heroism deprives Polish people of the chance to transform their traumatic experiences and sacrifices into a foundation of maturity. It also prevents them from overcoming their childlish fears and phobias, they become conformist slaves of all authorities who promise to defend them against a former wrongdoer or delude them with the promise of compensation for sustained harm and who provoke them to look for a scapegoat in particularly difficult moments.

From an aesthetic point of view, the main character of “Bad Luck”, Zenon Piszczyk, can be compared with the character of Chaplin’s “Modern Times” – some common features including work at the munitions factory, accidental, tragicomical participation in a street demonstration, or the tailor’s workshop of Piszczyk’s father with his compulsive habit of moving the scissors. The latter image in particular makes us fully aware of the fact that Zenon’s obsession comes from the world of his own phobias and inhibitions, he is just a taylor’s son who has forgotten his roots. The outside world is strange and incomprehensible, and the character deprived of his identity wants to gain subjectivity by imitating others and performing their social roles. It soon turns out that this strategy does not (as he believed) require him to perform constant and sharp mimicry but to participate in a bewilderingly fast-paced game with ever changing rules. In the end, the only place which Piszczyk feels best adapted to live in and which he will not want to leave at any cost – turns out to be prison because the rules applied behind bars are the clearest and most understandable ones. This poor substitute of collective rituals (including connections with prison authority officials) gives Piszczyk a feeling of security which he had been looking for in vain performing one new role after another. Moreover, the wall separating him from the so-called normal reality is of secondary importance as it turns out that Piszczyk has found his lost Arcadia by providing active support to prison bureaucracy.

The misfortunes Piszczyk is dogged by are not just used to mark sudden turning points within the plot (like in Chaplin’s films) but to uncover the mechanisms behind the development and taking over of consciousness by fatalism – which was totally rejected by the war generation. Fatalism seems to be an inevitable consequence of replacing one’s identity with conformist mimicry and playing social games in order to win prestige and benefits whenever it proves possible. Life which is not rooted in any real values, without traditionally understood virtues changes human reality into a shapeless, ominous mixture of events and film or literary images, “unwanted consequences” of accidentally taken actions, escapes and pursuits. Ideology may seem to be the only way out but Munk’s film mercilesly exposes the actual situation proving that ideology makes our lives even more dangerous and absurd. With the hands of its unrooted citizens it builds bureaucratic institutions which gives them a false illusion of having their own place, performing a socially important role or even a mission.

The character of Piszczyk, a little chap involved in a dialogue with the “Great History”, belongs to the epic tradition which displaced chivalric epic and its romance variations at the beginning of the modern era by parodying and transforming both conventions. What we refer to herein is the story and the Quixotic type of character who ranks highest on all “best ever” lists of novels and characters. It is not surprising then that this type of character was equally important for Munk’s generation and for slightly younger artists born – like Roman Polański – in the first half of the 1930s. Don Quixote has maintained his status in all artistic interpretations. The reality which determined the range of his needs, aspirations, conceptions about the world is gone now and the one which is approaching does not determine such range but is just parodies the longing to be a true knight, ideal lover, great hero, liberator and defender of the aggrieved.

The observation of Chaplin’s characters, who imitate literary and film images of wealthy men, heroes, defenders of their lady-loves, orphans, widows, stray dogs and all suffering and lonely creatures, suggests that they are very much like the characters deprived of their right of self-fulfillment in the roles which are archetypical in European culture. Such characters had been present in European literature for five centuries, sometimes idealised and sometimes portrayed as dangerous anarchist mob. Needless to say that popular cinema not only reproduced numerous copies of such characters but also started to use them in order to create an illusion of the new range of needs, they became the new role models of characters who have found happiness leading the life of a carefree tramp.

Munk is not interested in Piszczyk as a Chaplin-type character. He focuses on the way in which character himself uses his knowledge of Chaplin’s films and their popularity during the thaw period to construct his own story. Let us be reminded that in 1955 a special screening of “The Great Dictator” was organised by the Federation of Film Clubs and Discussion Groups which symbolically marked the inauguration of the anti-Stalinist period in the Polish People’s Republic. Chaplin became trendy, he was even integrated into an image of the fight for social justice, peace, and hapiness of the people and served as a means of shifting interpretative points. The way in which Chaplin’s little man confronted with great politics, economy, history was used to popularise the belief in fatalism and determinism was totally inconsistent with the tradition Munk referred to and with his intentions.

In “Bad Luck” the director uses retrospective narration: the present time makes the past meaningful, it explains past events, combines them into cause and effect sequences, and brings it out of the abyss of what is shameful and concealed. The story is after all a kind of report on his previous life, an excessively honest, detailed, intimate confession made by a man who has been a prisoner many times before. He is not only used to making this humiliating testimony, he also understands what the listeners and court reporters expect of him. Munk’s film is an amusing travesty of the most important ideas of existentialism which can often be treated as a key to explaining the sense of the 1939-1956 period. Piszczyk’s story becomes the 20th century confession made by “a child of the times”, determined by fate and history, lonely, alienated, without any hope for the future. The story has echoes of sentimental romances and comedy of errors whose conclusion always consists of a fatalistic comment matched with the grotesque interpretation of existentialism. Zenon – the fatalist bears significant resemblance to the characters of the 18th century prose and so does the episodic plot structure. We keep meeting new characters whom we are never going to see again, they are not portrayed as real full-blooded characters but serve as symbols referring us to popular conceptions. The strict father-taylor reminds us of numerous oppressive father characters whose influence cast a shadow over the main character’s childhood and youth. This motive was used by Schulz or Kafka but it was also present in popular literature and film whose fascination with psychoanalysis was growing stronger. Piszczyk’s customer becomes a personification of a pretentious femme-fatale, there are also Gombrowicz’s schoolgirls, silly face competition,  and many other motives used by the author of “Ferdydurke” whose imagination was fueled by the literary inspirations referred to herein. Narrative doubts expressed by the 18th century novelists who were trying to find an adequate method of selecting and sequencing events (the cause and effect rule was formulated only by the 19th century realism), questions concerning the details which should be revealed to the reader and really important elements of the fragmentary reality – replace Piszczyk’s questions and doubts about which fragments of his own biography comply with the tragically-fatalistic interpretation of fate and with the model of Chaplin’s character.

Piszczyk is dangerously skilled in interpreting his own actions, the interpretation fitting with any times and any reality, he easily absolves himself from all devious and vile deeds and uses other people not as an alibi for his failures and misfortunes but as ready-made schemata which allow him to refine the false story of his life and make it sound credible. The story feeds on the remnants of the heroic legend, sentimental and heroic myths, Stalinist tales about enemies of the people, dreadful bourgeois, gloomy legend of the Polish National Democratic Party, modernist myth of the tyrant-father, and scraps of Chandler’s plots, it turns culture into a huge garbage dump in which the truth is buried. We share Piszczyk’s perception of himself as a victim but this ageless and identity-less character is, in fact, able to get out of all trouble and survive any turmoil. At some point, Piszczyk becomes the star of the prison; the people whose stories he would just “borrow” for a while were never to leave the place. Second part of the film should start with a scene in which Polish Newsreel team arrives at the prison and interviews Zenon who tells the story of his life one more time and, for a moment, at least, becomes a star.

Interpretative coherence of Piszczyk’s story and the timeframe set by the historical moment in which numerous victims of Stalinist repressions were being released from prisons complement each other as far as composition is concerned. This is how a simple story of a loser becomes a philosophical parable about Zenon-the fatalist – with an important additional question about his master – analogical to the one asked in the famous novel by Diderot. It was one of the very few Polish films which so penetratingly revealed the 20th century Kafkian truth about the non-existence of such “master” as a superior authority, about the creation of terrifying political systems within which the emergence of a concept rooted in certain tradition and the subsequent quest for the “master” allowed the establishment, consolidation and development of the system as well as constant upward and downward movement of the most unrooted individuals. Piszczyk seems to have found another temporary superior – the prison governor this time – just one more person onto whom Piszczyk will later on shift responsibility for this episode of his life.

“Bad Luck” is perhaps on of the most perfidious deconstructions of the post-war system of enslavement and the consciousness of the so-called man in the street. It does not only come down to showing that a man who believes he is a victim, actually becomes a slave. Piszczyk is most of all a natural born conformist and, as Tomasz Merton aptly pointed out, totalitarianism is nothing but conformism organised into a social system. The character has always been trying to live up to other people’s expectations which he recognises instantly. He must be always be safely situated between two opposing manifestations, between the world of confabulators and heroes, prisoners and prison officials, criminals and lawyers, so that he does not “in principle” have to lie when he decides to opt for this or that party. He admits to being in between at the moment of general confusion and political reshuffling of power. Constantly manoeuvring between the truth and lies (he himself keeps refering to some fragments of his biography which he omitted later on) – he makes us wonder what else has been omitted in another variant (inspired by the political thaw) of his biographical story.

We realise that Piszczyk’s biography is full of blank pages. Why, for example, was he allowed to leave the munitions factory by the Germans if he was just a clumsy oaf with no connections who (as presented elswhere in the same story) is not suited to do any kind of work for the III Reich? The question concerning purely social and personal, instead of philosophical and psychological, context of Piszczyk’s hysterical fear of leaving the prison is equally interesting. Existential absurdity of life lets us come to terms with such questions and we get deluded with the story; just like the character himself, we divide his life into stages which resemble geological epochs and we do not feel the need to perceive them as a coherent whole. The film allows its viewers to enjoy the feeling of superiority over this cowardly loser therefore revealing their desire to become Piszczyk's “master”.

Along with Munk’s growing fascination with the issue touched upon in “Bad Luck”, i.e. the issue of real and precise reasons why it is so easy to create and rule a totalitarian community, his problems with the authorities were becoming more and more serious. He was fascinated with the materials which suggested that the concentration camp in Auschwitz was supposed to become one of the most modern enterprises, realisation of modernist dreams of progress, ideal management therefore of all those things which formed Piszczyk’s prison Arcadia. The authorities needed an artistic anti-German film to be shown at festivals so as to complete the vision presented in “Knights of the Black Cross” by Aleksander Ford which was not fully comprehensible for the Western culture. Munk did not want to and could not finish the film in a way that would have satisfied everyone: himself, the authorities, jury members at international festivals, the Poles and the Germans with whom he wanted to make his next film dealing with the reasons for artist’s cooperation with the Nazis.

Munk’s death in a car crash could be cynically commented upon using Stalin’s words about the disappearance of the problem together with the person, especially as the tendentiously edited film provided with an embarassing commentary satisfied everyone. Critics were able to announce that it was an unfinished masterpiece of the artist who died a sudden death; Munk received posthumous awards; the authorities got the anti-German camp melodrama combined with modern camerawork and intrusive psychological commentary; the Poles – another “romantic” myth of premature death of a genius. Even the Germans, who had already got used to being labelled the Nazi beasts, could have been glad that the conventionalised portrayal of camp life, so tiring for the viewers, kept blurring the truth about the reasons and consequences of being duped by dreams of modern, civilised slavery.

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