POLISH FILM ACADEMY

50 Years of Polish Film School, Warsaw 2008

The Depot of the Dead

Mariola Dopartowa

Based on a short story by cult writer Marek Hłasko, The Depot of the Dead by Czesław Petelski (1958) was an event from the borderland between the history of cinema and literature. The director and Hłasko wrote the script based on the rebellious writer’s first finished book as the country was beginning to tighten the screws loosened by Gomulka’s cultural thaw after the Polish October of 1956. Published in episodes under the title Next Stop – Paradise in the popular weekly “Panorama”, it showcased this talented writer, a legendary figure of the young generation who had burst upon the literary scene at the age of 18 and had won the official Publishers’ Award in January 1958. Later that year, the book was published in Paris, where Hłasko gave a few interviews that were quite critical of the People’s Republic of Poland. The consequences were obvious: the writer was no longer welcome in his homeland. The image of the young rebel created during the Gomulka thaw began to be systematically destroyed. However, the authorities were still clinging to the romantic stereotypes created at that time, so that the premiere of the movie was made possible – although without Hłasko’s name in the credits. Instead, the viewer would read the intriguing information: “script and direction – Czesław Petelski”. It would appear that the screenplay was written by life itself.

The plot of the movie is simple. Desperate truck drivers working in slave-like conditions at a remote mountain lumber depot in southeastern Poland are shaken out of their dreary routine by the arrival of a new supervisor, accompanied by his beautiful wife. The party activist's goal is to encourage the rebellious lumberjacks, a motley mix of brooding men from the dregs of society. He manages to trick the team and keep them at their hazardous jobs driving derelict trucks for a few more days – but they will pay for it with their lives. The presence of the woman (in effect a whore, typical for this phase of Hłasko’s works) only worsens the men’s desperation.

Viewed in the context of Petelski’s later output – with his wife, he produced a handful of vulgarly propagandistic movies – many critics have expressed surprise that he could make such an excellent film. Yet the second half of the 1950s was a time of transition in Polish culture, for correcting the picture of the war generation and focusing on the generation of 1956. As the obsessive propagation of fatalism and historic determinism became a priority of cultural politics, the search was on for skilled artists who could portray fate looming over human life. And fate is the most important hero of The Depot of the Dead. It lives in the hut of the main protagonists and suggests to them the worst possible scenarios – yet always the chance for a better, fulfilled life is within arm’s reach.

Locating the action in the Bieszczady Mountains, where units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA were still conducting large-scale post-war civilian displacements and cruel massacres, was no accident. Bieszczady was a barren, cursed land soaked with human misfortune, from which traces of happier past lives had vanished forever. In Petelski’s movie, this land gives back the evil it absorbed – with interest. It was a picture of a world dominated by fatalism, a vision of a man manipulated by evil forces. After the “cuk-realizm (sugary realism)” found in films of the 1940s and 1950s, the gloomy, pessimistic picture of socialist competition at work in particularly dangerous conditions at first seemed to be a revelation. Mining, felling timber, transportation, construction, and even the ordinary cultivation of soil (riddled with unexploded land mines) were dangerous to life. The dilapidated equipment, the abuse of alcohol by desperate workers with no hope of a better life, and the replacement of local supervisors by party hacks all took a heavy toll.

Yet Petelski’s movie was not meant to be a form of reportage, but rather a portrayal of “romantic” convicts, the people upon whom history and nature had passed a Kafkaesque sentence with no hope of a pardon. From the middle of the 1950s, in an effort to rebuild 19^th century traditions, a new brand of romantic heroes had been created: a race of mysterious, strong men, often into conflict with the law, the “odd men out.” The place for all these stylised “romantics” was where the true romantics from the 19^th century lay; even the most slow-witted student knew that the role of the romantic is to die prematurely.

Hłasko was unfairly accused of plagiarising the famous Henri-Georges Clouzot movie The Wages of Fear. Yet Next Stop – Paradise suggests this accusation should be addressed to Petelski, who significantly shifted the accents, placing them on images that suggested the legendary movie with which artists from the ’56 generation identified.

The key to understanding Hłasko’s work is in the fragments telling of the creation of a virtual concentration camp from which there was no escape. The story that became the base of the screenplay had the character of a parable. The author describes a world built on land soaked with blood, a world of people who are dead inside, incapable of being free, not believing that something good can happen to them and, furthermore, believing that they deserve their fate. We see the tragedy of the absurd sense of guilt carried by the victims of totalitarian violence at the hands of both Nazis and Soviets; we see the tragedy of these people, who are powerless to build a world of the living, to operate in it or to create any sense of community life in it. We observe a gallery of interesting, original characters, just like those who survived the worst experiences of war, yet also like helpless children playing cowboy with a stick for a gun. In such a world only death, and the sense of connectivity with the dead, is authentic and real. Why it all happened is one of the most important questions asked by the most outstanding artists of the ’56 generation. Petelski’s movie does not pose this question directly, but becomes an expression of the obsession with unreasoning fatalism.

The fatalism of young Hłasko might be just a certain phase of his turbulent but creative life; his natural development would force the writer to make an account of fatalism and then be done with it. In works from his exile period, the accent shifts significantly to issues that would become important for Polish art in the 1960s, as well as what constitutes a second message in his earlier works: the sense of non-authentic life, ubiquitous play. Hłasko shows the dramatic consequences of continuous de-realisation of the whole human world. It is one of the most dangerous consequences of a phenomenon described by Robert Piłat as “contamination with harm” of the victims of totalitarian violence in a deceitful world. What psychology today is able to analyse, was for Hłasko and his creative cohorts a collection of painful intuitions for which they tried to find adequate artistic form.

Today, understanding the proper message of this work – without using interpretations introduced by Polish communist critics as tools to destroy artists born in the 1920s and 1930s – is very important. This sentence could be delivered secretly, but it did not have to be executed, as the destruction of this generation of artists required the participation of society. Hłasko’s generational group understood too late that Kafka’s reality is a world in which the most important aspect of perfidious violence is the escape of the collectivised community into infantilism – pretending to be stupid and inexperienced. The victims take over to describe their own situation, using these “existential” pictures of modern Poland: criminals, degenerates and whores accompanying them are deservedly punished. The judgment of history gets them even before the proverbial end of the world; “something” (historic justice?) demands their death. Even if the God forgot them, and the party authorities wanted to help them, the post-war chaos would not cease until the “fatal” generation steps out of the historic scene.

That is the message of Petelski’s movie – and only a careful reading of Hłasko’s work allows the reader to spot the subtle differences. The most horrifying consequence of the sovietisation, with which Generation ‘56 could not cope, was in not perceiving these differences. Instead, Hłasko’s theme was seen through the eyes of Petelski, and his generation was treated as the perpetrators of the alleged demoralisation of the later March and December generations. Earlier, the generation of the late 1920s (the so-called “little brothers”) got pulled into an identical manipulation. In the Stalinist period, evaluation was completely ideological and the critics were accomplished in party slang. This was replaced during Gomułka’s rule with ordinary, existential gibberish soaked with fatalism, pretending to be Romantic tradition. “The truth of art” and “existence”, which complemented each other beautifully, became the most important factors.  The symbol of this truth was existential, Left-Bank Paris. Janusz Krasiński, an outstanding writer who for many years was manager of the prose department at the weekly “Kultura”, explained how during Gierek’s decade, the procedure for evaluating the technique and aesthetic values of a work of art was put into a scientific context: “The critics, activists and editors withdrew the politically incorrect works from the scene, screen, book or newspaper under the pretext that they were artistically immature. It was perfidy that could destroy not only the work, but also its author.” The 1970s brought a new face of Paris, this time wearing a university toga: scientific theories proposed to measure the “objective” value of the artistic work flourished. The literary and film works that were permitted after the Polish October came back in the form of erudite analyses which proved forcefully their timeless and absolutely objective value. From that moment on, the processes stressed here had no chance to appear in the “scientific” history of the cinema: they seemed to be critical impressions, failed attempts to build an anthropology of Polish films. For this reason, The Depot of the Dead, full of ideological schemes, seems to be one of the most remarkable achievements of Polish cinematography, even though it uses a “socrealistic” recipe to make the movie, replacing the rose-coloured spectacles with grim black ones.

Hłasko died in 1969 in Wiesbaden in unexplained circumstances at the age of 26. An expert in his works, Prof. Joanna Pyszny, notes that some of the obituaries, like Jan Lechoń’s, suggested suicide and “write of the recklessness with which the author abandoned and betrayed his country and admirers of his talent, of his lostness, longing and loneliness pushing to the dramatic suicidal step.” Others wrote that “choosing freedom, he chose falling into oblivion”, and that “he passed away after demoralising his great talent, completely defeated, certainly immensely lonely.” In brief, Hłasko joined to “the depot of dead authors”, which was waiting for everybody who turned from “the commonly accepted ways of building the socialistic homeland” and chose wild, dangerous territories. The communist moral was clear: you can run, but you can’t hide.

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