POLISH FILM ACADEMY

50 Years of Polish Film School, Warsaw 2008

Nobody's Calling

Rafał Marszałek

Kutz's film titled ”Nobody's Calling” was completely underappreciated when it was created in 1960. By an administrative decision it was not distributed abroad for  about twenty five years and it rarely appeared at Polish film shows, which made it forgotten for a long time. Now it is coming back, almost as a legend, and is slowly becoming a cult film. It is clearly too late to bring its splendour back. However, it seems worthwhile to recover and remind its meaning.

Time has shown that the initial controversy around ”Nobody's Calling” originated from its associations with  ”Ashes and Diamond” by Wajda. The reference was clear but misleading. To film ”Nobody's Calling”, his autobiographical novel (and probably to safeguard it against the censorship), the scriptwriter Jozef Hen moved its setting from the Soviet Russia to the post-war Poland. In the film's prologue the main character's past seems almost identical with the past of Maciek Chełmicki (from ”Ashes and Diamonds”). The war is just a few months over. Bożek (Henryk Boukołowski) is walking on the roof of a crowded resettlement train heading towards the western lands of Poland, known at the time as ”the recovered land”. His journey is in fact an escape. Bożek is running away from his life in political conspiracy, from his brothers in arms, and from a commitment he has not been able to meet. ”I didn't fire at the Reds, I couldn't. Maybe I should have? I am finished with the war, but they are there.” The film's creators make the character hide from the fancied pusuit in a town, now and then make him remember his anxiety and fear and make him run away again from the town. However, it is an undeveloped plot, as the critics fairly noticed. The confused viewer should be foretold that in spite of their expectations, nothing will happen in this area. Nobody's calling about the wartime past. Kutz's story is about something else.

”Nobody's Calling” is a story about love initiation – a special initiation because determined by the circumstances and complicated through the way the feelings are expressed. For the director it was a ”project on isolated love”. Bożek meets Lucyna (Zofia Marcinkowska) amongst the post-war remnants. He is searching for a hiding place in this Lower Silesian town and she is trying to build her future, however makeshift it may be. How to do that? The scene in which the characters are fixing up an abandoned ruin is obviously ironic. Particularly because they are not ready to play the role of a couple. Instead, they are playing a game in which they are afraid to reveal anything, communicating through the language of understatements, evasions and false pledges. While the girl deludes the boy, the boy eludes the girl – in both psychological and actual sense. In makes the ambience oddly  saturated with longing for fulfillment. The motives of unpredictability, evanescence and being lost, which the today viewer is well familiar with, were at the time a novelty. However, Kutz wanted to show something elementary – how diffucult it is for war castaways to find the right gestures and shapes for their feelings.

Kutz and Wójcik's film was a precursor of a new artistic trend, absent in Poland before that, which even later appeared only vaguely and occasionally, until Skolimowski's debut. ”Nobody's Calling” had a reference to the French idea of ”nouvelle vague”, being at the same time set within the Polish context. Primarily, it was supposed to show the author's personal vision of world.

Kutz recalls setting down to ”Nobody's calling” with the idea to dispute the label of ”simple people's praiser”, which he was given after his debut with ”Cross of Valour”, although the  label was rather suitable and not ill-meant. He was determined to ”do something no one has ever done before” and give the story a unique aura, which coincided with the cameraman's (Jerzy Wójcik) similar desire. They never expressed their ambitions openly, but you can clearly see them in the way the film was shaped. Was it a real or an alleged pride of youth.

Secondly, the adapted short story was constructed in opposition to the traditional, realistic, linear formula. Kutz reminds that in the late 1950s, in order to escape from cliches, he and his peers made references to two different trends: the Italian neo-realism and the American ”black film”, combining action with social drama. Assimilating the guidelines of neo-realism enabled them to overcome social realism. Watching American films in an almost conspiratory manner in the small classrooms of the national film school in Lódź provided them with invaluable workshop experience.

”Nobody's  Calling” reflects both these trends through its brief and visual instead of verbal description of people and things, through crowd scenes inserted in everyday life and vivid episodes focusing on background characters (played by Barbara Krafftówna, Halina Mikołajska and Aleksander Fogiel). Kazimierz Kutz's fans will notice individual traits of his talent in it: gift for observation, sense of genre, and sense of humour, which so sparingly appears in Polish films.

”Nobody's Calling” style is most prominent in its way of telling the story. Kutz announced that he would make an anti-feature film with anecdote in the background. And so it happened. The love anxiety which the characters experience is shown through movement. Their motions do not have the usual purposes. Bożek and Lucyna hover incessantly in each other's proximity, they grope as if in the dark looking for each other on a bright day. The time of their subsequent encounters is stopped for no outside reason; ”the way the characters move is far from natural, and so are their gestures and steps measured in a slow rhythm” (S. Ozimek). This unusual or even artificial behaviour – judged according to the common criteria – is completed by the language used. It is not only its emotional tone. The peculiarity of the lines can be sensed at once. They are usually repeated now and again in various versions. They were not intended as source of information, but otherwise – they serve to camouflage the real feelings. There is no discourse then but in a way different from the main character's inner monologue, which describes and comments on the situation of Bożek. There are elements of game, fanfaronade, mutual provocation. For example, you can find them in the conversation about ”achieving success in life”, which is naively planned by Bożek (Lucyna says, ”if I were you, I'd be more persistant”. Bożek, ”persistant in what?”. ”In being a rogue.” ”It requires effort, so it doesn't pay off”). These uncertain self-contradictory behaviour and gestures are as meaningless as the words.

Thirdly, the concept of open narration and drama was indispensably connected with the composition of pictures. They were designed in a fresh and innovative way by Jerzy Wójcik, who was well aware of the risks involved. The space is reduced to minimum, almost ascetic. ”This is the space (...) reduced to  walls, which form the background for the continuous dialogue of gestures, looks and words, the whole story, the epic of the most intimate human feelings. White walls, stained walls,  shabby walls, walls covered with water patches – the characters are stuck against them, they are hermetic, intelligent, violent, lirycal and they are somewhere inside,” remarked Aleksander Jackiewicz.

It was a conscious idea, corelated with the love story Kutz wanted to tell.

”Time and space is not an abstract notion,” believes Wójcik. ”They have their geometry, dynamics and structure.”  This artist considers each element of the composition to bear a mark of a superior order: ”Composition is something more than just a sum of its elements.”

The choice is often intuitive. In his book ”The Labirynth of Light” Wójcik recalls a wide shot of a meadow bathed in rain  with the camera kept at the height of several dozen centimeters when the water sprayed in the air landed on the grass blades forming drops, whose weight made them flow down the stems and gather around the blades. ”There was no thinking in it. As though the camera itself wanted to follow the drops down, adjusting the lens's length.” Another example recalled by the cameraman years later is the scene where the characters  are standing in the rain, close to the wall, seemingly close to each other ”but separate”. A house and a road are painted on the wall and everything is in the rain. The presence of rain signals looming death but is also an echo saying that the water might have given birth.”

Wójcik's artistic vision charmed some and irritated others. The difference between economy and overrefining is purely subjective. As Wójcik points out, the simplicity of expression is particularly important for him, which is why he ”draws attention to the human face, the human and the matter, which is changing in front of our eyes.” The clash between the human and the matter; the shrunken, almost claustrophobic though apparently wide open world of Bożek and Lucyna, stretched among the ruins, lazy stream and narrow small-town street; the characters' faces and hands against those tarnished, lichen-covered walls – they are all present in a wide range of varieties in later, not only Polish films, Antonioni's famous ”Red Desert” (1964), among them. It is highly improbable that Carlo Di Palma, the film's cameraman, came somehow across Wójcik's pictures before filming his. Natural affinities, just like borrowings, are not uncommon in the world of art.

Anyway, the Polish audience was not at the time ready to receive the poetics of the new wave. What is more, the critics were similarly unprepared. They grieved over ”the dangers of modernity”, yearning after the social context of the story, which was mercilessly rejected by the director (Ernest Bryll). They claimed (Krzysztof Teodor Teoplitz) that ”Nobody's Calling” is ”a film contaminated with artism” and a sign of ”madness which highly talented people suffer from” because Kutz brought the rules of film narration almost on the verge of asceticism and Wójcik disobeyed the logical requirements of the story through the ambitions to make his artistic visions independent. Even the most sensitive viewers had a problem with accepting that. The opinion of Roman Zimand is worth noting: ”This is one of the weirdest films I have ever seen in my life. It is perfect as far as artistic expression is concerned, reaching even the highest level. But at the same time, believe me, I could not say what the subject of the film is.” The way ”Nobody's Calling” was received is an important episode itself in the history of the Polish film industry.

Habent sua fata homini. ”Nobody's Calling” opened a creative perspective for Jerzy Wójcik only. Boukołowski's debut as an actor was only seemingly promising, but it failed to help him gain significatnt roles. His young film partner Zofia Marcinkowska soon commited suicide. The incident with ”Nobody's Calling” determined Kazimierz Kutz's fate. All his creative efforts were given an ”experimental” label, which in the language used at the time meant a serious warning. As Stanisław Grzelecki stated in his article, ”film is a mass piece of art. This fact defines – whether we like it or not – certain obligations for the creators, especially in the Polish circumstances where films can only be made thanks to social resources.” Stefan Morawski's warning was even more serious, referring to ”Nobody's Calling” as a   p r i v a t e   work, i.e., ”treating the film art as a laboratory full of any kind of ideas, which will have to be accepted by the viewer.”

The film monoculture did not accept other works than those complying with the social duties and easily comprehensible. With its anti-plot concept and subtle yet difficult to verbalise atmosphere, with its stylistic meanders, ”Nobody's Calling” did not want to and could not fulfill such duties. Kutz found himself at the crossroads. Threatened with the loss of his independent position and return to assisting, in his next few films he avoided any risks and contented himself with small things. Only after many years did he regain his personal tone – in the ”Taste of the Black Earth” and ”Pearl in the Crown”. Almost nobody notices that the composition of this famous Silesian diptic bears traces of the concept found in ”Nodoby's Calling”. Kutz's artistic experience from the past has not been wasted.

About the film (selection of articles)

1. A. Jackiewicz, Gdyby Maciek nie zabił Szczuki [If Maciek Hadn't killed Szczuka], ”Film”, 1960, no 47

2. S. Morawski, Nowoczesność czy snobizm? [Modernity or snobism?], ”Film”, 1960, no 49

3. Hiv. (Roman Zimand), Let's move on... ”Arguments”, 1960, no 47

4. K.T.Toeplitz, O braku i nadmiarze artyzmu [On the lack and excess of artism], ”Świat” 1960, no 46

4. S. Ozimek, Film fabularny, [w:] Historia filmu polskiego [Feature film, [in:] The history of Polish Film] ( edited by J. Toeplitz), vol. IV, Warsaw 1980

5. K. Kutz, Rozmowa z... [Interview with...]

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