POLISH FILM ACADEMY

50 Years of Polish Film School, Warsaw 2008

How To Be Loved – Or Ophelia’s dead

Mariola Dopartowa

When someone tries to analyse a movie made by Wojciech Has, he should not separate it from the context of the creative life of its author. The director has made a variety of movies, some better and some worse. Taking into consideration his completed works, it can be said that although he had to struggle with authorities of the Polish People’s Republic, it was a blessing in disguise; in the history of Polish film, he may be the director who realised his potential to the fullest extent. He was not a favourite of communist cinematography; in contrast to the cosseted prize-winners, he had to fight for everything. Critics’ reviews rarely were all roses, and the real value of the movie was of secondary importance to them. In any case, bad reviews were not the point; the critics often refrained from writing about Has at all, and when they did, they had little to say.

Nevertheless, we must consider him a lucky man: he had enough passion and diligence to equip many moviemakers, and his painstaking and arduous work on his craft made him exceptionally happy. He produced his most important films as the Polish Film School was reaching the peak of its influence, but his works were largely independent of its political themes. His other enormous success was that he did not let the critics box him into a stereotype. His versatile and even surprisingly contrasting interests obviously did not protect him from being designated creator of the “Baroque film style”, but a careful viewer could de-mask such pinned-on labels. His movies remained vital and penetrating, as their values were not born under the pen of seasonal critics. Thirdly, his films fascinated some great critics and men of letters (e.g. Piotr Wojciechowski), so his artistic works have produced a widely varied bibliography. And lastly, in spite of the fact that his professional circle did not help him, some of his movies became internationally known; The Saragossa Manuscript remains a legend, made as the last vestiges of socialist realism were disappearing from Poland’s cultural landscape. Most importantly, Has did not lose his honour during the communist period; he simultaneously inspired both rising stars and eager students, while proving that honesty and non-stylised non-conformism was possible even in the Polish People’s Republic.

The movie How to Be Loved (1962), based on the story and screenplay of Kazimierz Brandys, is considered one of very few psychological movies made by artists belonging to the war generation. This group shunned psychological portrayals, believing they could lead a creative man astray, preventing him from keeping reality at a distance and making objectivity difficult. This is a characteristic feature of the Polish Film School in its examinations of the emotional casualties of war: we cannot find classical psychological portraits in their movies, except perhaps for The Real End of the Great War by Jerzy Kawalerowicz – although in that movie, psychology serves also as a transition towards existential vision. In his Mother Joan of the Angels, it becomes one of the traps in building a false identity. In Andrzej Munk’s movies, the psychological truth remains unavailable for viewers: we only can see its false appearance and its vivisection of the social mechanisms of functioning, while Andrzej Wajda and Tadeusz Konwicki focused on two variations of symbolism.

The standard interpretation is that in this adaptation of Brandys’ novel, Has emerges as a “sophisticated expert on woman’s psyche”. This suggests skills similar to those of, say, a dog breeder, who is full of admiration for his animals and their psychological similarity to humans. But a careful look at the film reveals something else: the impression that the combination of power and weakness in the main heroine is a character trait of Has himself. In other words, in his movies, women are simply strong. Has did not practice modern “Bovarism” and did not analyse the psychic of the individual heroine; neither did he show off his knowledge – or his presumptions – about the psychology of women’s behaviour.

Most of all, the director was fascinated by the social mechanisms that enabled his protagonists to pick themselves up in every circumstance and transform their weaknesses into strengths, even when they identified themselves with defeat. No common set of clichés lies behind these ideas. The movie shows the flotsam and jetsam of different generations: broken people, often hidden behind the mask of social success. It is this hidden theme that turns out to be the problem. They cannot see the sources of their power nor the way out of this vicious circle of fatalism: they are “dying of thirst at a fake spring,” as in the poem in the last scene of the movie.

When the film was released in 1963, viewers were pleasantly surprised to find that a movie about the occupation (and the audience was fed up with them) turned out to be in essence about “tragic love” instead. Regardless of whether the audience was actually hungry for skilfully made films – whether or not they were different – film historians should take audience expectations into account in interpreting them, keeping in mind what kinds of movies were absent from the cinemas at that time. At the beginning of the 1960s, a secret resolution of the Central Committee Secretariat on cinematography shrewdly blocked the development of artistic cinema by appealing to the conformity of the moviemakers and introducing subtle ways of encouraging them to avoid serious themes. This convinced the filmmakers that Gomułka’s thaw was definitely over. The description of the past suddenly changed into a listing of German crimes, faults and transgressions (from the Teutonic Knights through Wold War II to contemporary espionage), or to beating one’s chest over Polish national shortcomings.

Of course, the expectations ofthe circle of people who were encouraged to realise movies with modern themes – so-called life, the loss of idealism in an allegedly more prosperous society, love – were important. Some filmmakers connected with the Polish Film School tried a new kind of game with authorities: they referred to the war legacy through love stories, portraits of strong women, and stories about non-heroic everyday life during the occupation. They avoided concocted discussions about differences between heroism and “pseudo-heroism,” and showed ordinary people who had not been, were not and did not want to be heroes – and not only for the reason that is brutally expressed in Has’ movie: that a cemetery turns out to be the right place for heroes. They showed how in their actions and choices a “big history” was born, how the apparently meaningless struggle with everyday life and the degree of openness with other people widened or narrowed the degree of reality accessible for a man. For people who never based their actions on such trivial motives as love, it was the opening of a new door after the old one had slammed shut. For those who closed themselves in a circle of artistic myths, false heroic images, pretentious martyrdom and “eternal” measures instead of small ones accessible to the common man, the space was shrinking. The inevitable end of some past reality does not carry with it directions, road maps or “secret passages” leading to the present. The spirituality of a human who is not ready to leap into the unknown, or face the truth connected with it in false social images, provokes an equally false escape which is always, literally and metaphorically, a suicidal jump.

How to Be Loved becomes a metaphor for the expression “Is love possible?” after Auschwitz and Kołyma. The melodramatic story shows a build-up of false awareness, closed spaces, and of being cornered by the stories, feelings and experiences of others. The apartment of Felicja becomes the microcosm of all of war’s reality, with its chaos, lies, fears, violence, powerlessness, and desperate hunting for sense, for heroic myths, and for other people. This melodrama serves as a tool to reveal the deepest truths regarding the “occupational nights” that didn’t end with World War II or Stalinism. The maturation of the heroine is a process of brutal, constant disillusionment. Has asks: how did it happen that this process did not finish with a final immersion in nihilism, or with donning a cynical mask?

For a moment an interesting psychological plot appears: the hunger for love showed in the movie turns out to be a hunger for rationality, which clicks with a contemporary viewer. Indeed, the love obsession humiliates the heroine; when Rawicz abandons her, she trails him into dumpy dives. But at the same time it is also a kind of anaesthetic or even a straitjacket, which helps her survive the inevitable disintegration of her world. In the masterpieces of literature and cinematography of Poland’s southern neighbours, the occupation is depicted in such a way. In Poland, the use by the communist authorities of the romantic tradition for mental engineering and sociotechniques made attempts to reach viewers’ consciousness more difficult in the next decades. Yet it is hard to find the more significant example of the war generation legacy than adopting the perspective of a “civilian” – a man on a train or in the street – who is enveloped by overwhelming fear and takes “stupid” actions.

The German occupation appears here in retrospect, and the first flight of Felicja sets the stage for its presentation. On the plane, during her flight to Germany, her life passes like a film clip before her eyes. The heroine, a bit tipsy on cognac, kills time mixing memories with dreams, so we cannot be absolutely sure they are true to the tiniest detail. Everybody around her is kind – such a change from her own world! – but Felicja reacts badly; she does not feel comfortable there. On meeting a Polish scientist, a former RAF pilot, she discovers that judging people based on stereotypes of Western “emptiness” is wrong. The bacteriologist is a very interesting character: we can see here elements of the future The Codes, in which a young suicide victim’s father tries to explain the mystery of his son’s death.

That accidental meeting with an attractive man who, it would seem, has lived his life to the fullest and made his choices – although he is not sure whether they were right – shows the scale of destruction one innocent and apparently heroic decision brings to her life. The fact that something is wrong with Felicja’s life, although she seems to be a happy and independently successful radio actress, is suggested by her overindulgence in the cognac. Alcohol and suicides decimated her peers in the postwar and post-Stalinist years. The viewer wants to know why. As far as Felicja is concerned, it is easy to blame numerous traumas: the humiliating relation with a man who walks out on her and refuses to help her when she is in trouble and seeks “better” documents to protect Wiktor who is hiding at her apartment; the post-war consequences of her work; the group rape and her beloved’s reaction to it; her friends’ betrayals, and the ostentatious suicide of her lover in her apartment. But when we follow the plot carefully, we realise that these individual reasons do not constitute a simple, arithmetical sum; they do not broaden our knowledge of Felicja and her unfortunate love, the war itself, or the self-knowledge of the heroine. We do not know why Felicja assumes the victim position; why her self-esteem is so low; why she chooses supporting roles and stops enjoying life; why she is continually awaiting disaster, which is confirmed by her accounting of her life during the flight. The director does not adopt the point of view of omniscient narrator (in the novel we can find more psychological suggestion, but not in the screenplay). We are given a melodramatic crib sheet that, instead of explaining things, makes them even more confusing.

The fatalistic awareness of the heroine, acquired during her stay with Rawicz, foretells subsequent tribulations. However, the most dangerous consequence is that her wounds and traumas stay forever between Felicja’s awareness and that of other people and the surrounding world, which she cannot enter. In the retrospective scenes showing her work on a radio drama (which would make her famous) we can see clearly that occupational reality still lives in Felicja, pervades her thoughts and actions, becomes a prison for her awareness. On the one hand she understands the radio drama better and deeper; she is sensitive to its false tones and this wins her audience’s love and admiration from her colleagues. But she cannot transfer this knowledge to her own experiences. Thus, Felicja lives a kind of substitute life; her success is qualified, and she would never try to regain her place in the actors’ environment that she deserves. Her life is not full, because she does not want anything; she is afraid to be hurt. Felicja does not know that she imprisons (or even tries to punish) herself in the same apartment from which her beloved jumped out the window. 

We should remember that in the beginning, the retrospectives show a strong, brave woman, rejecting determinism, full of hope and truly free. The movie prompts the next question: what changed that girl into a pretentious, middle-class snob who drinks too much and holds on to her bitter memories via a radio drama, the equivalent of modern TV soap operas? The war generation tracked and demystified fatalism understood in this way and from 1944 on, Polish culture begun to drown in it. Fatalism became its doctrine that penetrated philosophy, social sciences, culture and art, broke the characters of the weak, cut off the wings of the strong and prevented a single man, community or culture from building subjectivity.

It shall remain a mystery how Has recognized the seeds of a cinema pearl in literary material that was more suitable for radio drama. His innovations are especially apparent in the audio track. Here the filmmakers were able to picture the consciousness of the heroine “imprisoned” in the radio drama, perceiving the reality through audio stimuli which brought the images to life. Especially worth notice is how her memory reproduces the rape scene (with its sensational bit part by Wiesław Gołas): it constitutes ready material for the ear, not requiring the help of the camera. The confrontation of past and present is unusual: it is the past that becomes concrete and sensual due to its saturation with sound. The acoustical landscape of the movie recalls the amazing Day of the Wacko: in addition to the monotonous hum of the planes, we can hear equally annoying absurd chatter, women “chirping” and foreign language conversations in the cacophony. It is a completely unprecedented artistic solution in Polish cinema that banishes present reality and proclaims: “This world is dead; we do not live truly.” The sense of this procedure is identical with the ending of the famous scene with lights in Ashes and Diamonds. It corresponds to the bitter laughter of Maciek in reply to Andrzej’s statement about real life.

Felicja has every chance to end up like Wiktor Rawicz. For her, the present does not exist; it is only the existential and psychological combination of a trauma and emptiness recalled by an equally de-realised past. The only way out is the solution suggested by some existentialists who were in fashion in the Polish People’s Republic. How to Be Loved takes up the subject of suicide in several different ways. The motif of a window is one; the window of the room from which Wiktor jumps becomes a prison and a hell for Felicja. It is she who is still standing at the window, sill wondering where her place is: in that gloomy middle-class room behind her, or down there in the back yard. She does not understand that this choice is illusory – that one of the most perfidious aspects of the mental engineering of the communists was making people believe that there are no other options. The window of the ascending plane is, for Felicja, the same window. The poem that flits through her mind at the end of the film clearly shows that the unexpected invitation has become a chance, a rescue. In response, Felicja leaves not only the sill, but also “the home of the dead” for the first time in her life. This vague hope is a poetical metaphor closely connected with the most valuable works of Generation ’56. Ophelia from a Hamlet performance, broken by the war, dies high in the skies. We see a slight chance that, before our eyes, Felicja may be reborn. What would her identity be? That is a question for the viewer – a question that is still relevant today.

The virtuosity of Barbara Krafftówna’s performance adds greatly to Has’ movie. It happens very rarely that a movie so strongly rooted in the realities of the past has not gone stale. Maybe the next secret of the war generation is revealed here: betting on specifically understood authenticity, searching for a form able to catch the eternal aspects of the world observed by the artists, and expressing the essence by playing with documentation and formal experiment. The movie, watched with fresh eyes, allows one to perceive aspects not noticed before and thus fascinates and skilfully bridges different historic periods: the 1940s and 1960s and our modern times.

Wróć do poprzedniej strony