Studies in Eastern European Cinema

ISSN: 2040-350X (Print) 2040-3518 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reec20

Andrzej Żuławski (1940–2016)

Michael Goddard

To cite this article: Michael Goddard (2016) Andrzej Żuławski (1940–2016), Studies in Eastern
European Cinema, 7:3, 314-317, DOI: 10.1080/2040350X.2016.1216776

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1216776

Published online: 10 Aug 2016.

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STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA, 2016
VOL. 7, NO. 3, 314 317
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2016.1216776

OBITUARY

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Andrzej Zu»awski (1940 2016)

Shortly after the surprise appearance of his film Cosmos (2015), after a filmmaking hiatus
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of 15 years, Andrzej Zu»awski succumbed to a long-term cancer and died at the age of 75
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in February 2016. Zu»awski’s departure at this precise moment was no less dramatic than
his entrance into Polish cinema and, while a great loss of a director who had just returned
to filmmaking, left the world with an appropriately enigmatic final statement, in the adap-
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tation of Witold Gombrowicz’s final novel. Zu»awski was part of a line of Polish emigre
auteurs choosing or obliged to leave Poland to continue their cinematic careers including
Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Pola nski and Jerzy Skolimowski, the very filmmakers who
might have constituted a Polish new wave movement had they been willing and able to
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remain in Poland. However, Zu»awski was of a different generation, the so-called third
generation of postwar Polish cinema, and had a notably distinct artistic trajectory from
any of the above exile directors.
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It is not without significance that Zu»awski came from an aristocratic and artistic back-
ground and also studied filmmaking in Paris rather than the ºodz Film School where
many of the key Polish filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s were trained. He nevertheless
worked as an assistant to Andrzej Wajda, and his first feature The Third Part of the Night
(1971) set in Lviv during World War Two, was an explicit revisiting of the Polish School,

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 315

since the war was both the subject of Wajda’s first films as well as the other key films of
the Polish School that announced the emergence of Polish postwar cinema. As if to under-
line this point, the film explicitly refers to Wajda’s A Generation (1955). In part the differ-
ence between these two films can be seen as that between Wajda’s generation, which lived
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through the war, if only as teenagers, and Zu»awski’s generation, who knew about the war
from their father’s stories, as well as from Polish cinema itself. But the film’s revision of
the myth of Poland under Nazi occupation and of the Polish resistance is more aggressive
and delirious than a mere generational difference could account for. Every aspect of the
film can be seen as either an exaggeration or destruction of the myths sustained by Polish
School cinema about this history. The title of the film clearly refers to the third generation
of Polish filmmakers as the ‘third part’ of Polish cinema after the Polish School and abor-
tive attempts at forming a Polish new wave in the 1960s.
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Zu»awski’s next feature, The Devil (Diabe» 1972) dealt with a no less ‘sacred’ moment of
Polish historical trauma, namely the late eighteenth-century partition of Poland by Prus-
sia, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead of cinematic history this was a
return to the context and themes of Polish romanticism, despite being based on an origi-
nal script. From its excessive beginnings, in the horror of a hospital/prison, which is in
the process of being sacked by invading soldiers, the film is less an attack on Polish
romanticism than an apotheosis, far outdoing the most baroque productions of Wajda in
its expressionist excess. This film went considerably beyond the aesthetics of its predeces-
sor, and seems to take place in a continual state of delirium as the main character Jakub is
‘rescued’ by the devil, in the form of a Prussian spy, and proceeds to visit and murder his
mother, sister, fiancee and others in a kind of divine retribution for their complicity in
Poland’s capitulation. What is most striking in the film, however, is not its content but its
style. From its opening scenes of carnage the film operates at a level of delirious intensity
that seems to be aiming at inducing an audiovisual trance in the viewer. Certainly many
of the characters on-screen, especially the female ones, all seem to be in a trance-like state
but this sense of trance also permeates the mise-en-scene and rhythm of the film.
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At this point Zu»awski was ‘encouraged’ to leave Poland and made his next feature film
in France, The Most Important Thing: Love (1975) starring Romy Schneider. This would
be the beginning of a series of films made in France where he would return in the 1980s,
which tended to shift towards a focus on female protagonists and questions of perfor-
mance, in several cases involving film, theatre or photography within the films and hence
layers of reflexivity. These films are not merely disguised artistic self-portraits but also
raise questions about creative practices, the relations between creativity and exploitation,
and the sacrifices entailed by engaging in collaborative art forms like cinema.
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Prior to this, Zu»awski made two of his most notorious films: On the Silver Globe (1979/
88) and Possession (1980). The former was made on his return to Poland in the late 1970s
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and was an adaptation of his great uncle Jerzy Zu»awski’s science fiction Moon Trilogy.
Already a problematic project in terms of gaining official approval, it was allowed to go
ahead largely due to its perceived anti-clericalism. The film recounts a type of second gen-
esis by means of recordings left behind by the first astronauts to colonize an earth-like
planet. In the film, this is presented as a process of rapid degeneration in which all the
norms and standards of human civilization are swiftly abandoned and all the mistakes of
human history such as organized religion, oppression and systematic violence are
repeated. After only 50 years, the descendants of the original colonizers are little more
316 OBITUARY

than instinct driven, if highly adorned animals. While it might seem provocative to inter-
pret this film as a critique of the People’s Poland, in many ways it is a more direct critique
than the contemporaneous Moral Concern films in its denunciation of a project of build-
ing a new society that nevertheless repeats, in a worse form, all the errors of an old one.
This reading is reinforced by the fact that, 10 years later when the authorities finally gave
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Zu»awski permission to complete the film, he did so by incorporating documentary scenes
from contemporary Poland, at the end of the socialist era, as if to underscore these critical
dimensions of the film.
On the Silver Globe had the almost unique fate of being censored not at the script or
distribution phase but during production; on the pretext of overspending the film’s budget
the Polish censor ordered all production work to stop immediately and for all materials to
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be destroyed. Zu»awski himself would be unwelcome on any film set and so was obliged
this time to leave Poland. This traumatic experience was formative of his next film, Posses-
sion, which was shot in Berlin with an international cast and crew. By far the best known
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of Zu»awski’s films acquiring a cult status internationally, only heightened by the ludi-
crous attempt in Britain to ban the film as a video nasty, Possession is certainly one of
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Zu»awski’s greatest accomplishments. Just as he had previously appropriated genres such
as historical films and science fiction, only to radically subvert them, Possession can be
seen as a version of the horror film, but one that is just as much concerned with the break-
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down of a relationship, an experience very close to Zu»awski at the time. Similarly, its set-
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ting in Berlin and references to the Cold War, attest to Zu»awski’s experience of exile at
the time of its production. On another level, it is a metaphysical horror exploring the
nature of evil, and presenting a unique vision of monstrosity. These apparently disparate
elements are combined by means of intense performances, especially on the part of Isa-
belle Adjani, and this delirious intensity has sustained a cult cinema following ever since
the film’s initial release.
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After the 1980s, Zu»awski’s films had a more limited circulation and it is largely due to
the efforts of Daniel Bird, in putting together high quality DVD versions of his films, and
organizing retrospectives, that he was able to return from relative obscurity in the 2000s,
especially in the UK and more recently in the US where there was a major retrospective of
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his work in 2012. Zu»awski himself was unable to attend this due to poor health, and was
certainly not too happy about its title: ‘Hysterical Excess’. In the period since his penulti-
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mate film Zu»awski was far from inactive and, apart from appearing at retrospectives in
France, Poland, the UK and elsewhere, was a prolific author, and also developed several
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film projects that were never realized. Zu»awski’s uncompromising behaviour certainly
made a return to cinema difficult, especially in Poland where he firstly alienated both film
critics and popular media by his film Shaman (1996), a confronting representation of
postcommunist Poland that no one wanted to see, and which led to the director being
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accused of Svengali-like abuse of the leading actress Iwona Petry. Second, Zu»awski’s
semi-autobiographical writing, with titles such as Nocnik (Potty), 2009, was so offensive
as to lead to legal proceedings for defamation, and certainly alienated potential allies for
future productions. Such seemingly perverse behaviour is very much a continuation of
the artistic attitudes and behaviour of Witold Gombrowicz who felt obliged to define him-
self through offending and mocking the very people who might have been in a position to
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help him. It is all the more fitting therefore, that Zu»awski was able to overcome these
issues to adapt Gombrowicz’s final novel as his own final artistic gesture, leaving a
 STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA 317

substantial cinematic work to be remembered by. While a notoriously difficult author to

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adapt, leading to artistic failure by as accomplished a director as Skolimowski, Zu»awski
was uniquely qualified to adapt Cosmos, resulting in a by most accounts remarkable final
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film, and a fitting end to Zu»awski’s artistic career.

Michael Goddard
University of Salford
m.n.goddard@salford.ac.uk