Chapter Twelve

Beyond Polish Moral Realism:

The Subversive Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski

Michael Goddard

Introduction

When Andrzej Żuławski’s debut feature film, The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia część nocy, 1971)

was released, it could only be received as a major scandal. Even in the relatively open and

experimental context of “third generation” Polish cinema at the time, Żuławski’s film was an affront

to the most “sacred” period of both Polish history and its cinematic representation, namely the

Polish experience of the Second World War. This was, of course, a preferred subject of Polish

School filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk whose representations of Polish

martyrdom, whether romantically heroic, or ironic, were no preparation for the delirious, brutal and

expressionist presentation of these events in Żuławski’s film. By the time of his third Polish feature,

On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie, 1977/1988), Żuławski could not have been further

removed form the dominant tendencies towards realism evidenced by the “Cinema of Moral

Concern”, of which he was a particularly severe critic.i Eventually production was halted on the

film and was only able to be resumed, in a truncated form, eleven years later. Meanwhile the

director had initiated another series of films made in France, beginning with L’important c’est

d’aimer (The Most Important Thing: Love, 1975), which while aesthetically and contextually very

different, nevertheless can be seen as a continuation of and development of this critical escape in

the necessarily transnational context of making films in another European country. This chapter will

therefore look at these two strands of his cinematic career as related attempts to escape the limits of

“moral realism” via expressive excess and argue that from the start this trajectory had transnational
dimensions. Even in the case of productions taking place entirely within Poland, the films of

Żuławski can be productively seen in terms of “accented cinema”, to use Hamid Naficy’s term, in

that they transgress the borders of Polish national cinema, even if this is as much in stylistic as

geographical terms or refers as much to internal as external exile.ii This chapter will therefore

examine key films of this director, both those made in Poland and abroad as strategies against and

beyond the dominant aesthetic and political tendencies of Polish cinema.

National and Transnational Dimensions of Żuławski’s Cinema

Contextualizing the work of Andrzej Żuławski within Polish cinema is problematic. Recent

attempts have tended to view this work through a variety of lenses including the Polish New Wave

or Surrealism whereas critics at the time of his first films tended to see his as a representative of the

“third generation” or “third Polish cinema.” The first generation were the immediate postwar

filmmakers like Wanda Jakubowska and Aleksander Ford who embraced the prevailing doctrine of

socialist realism, the second was the Polish School filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej

Munk whose debuts took place in the 1950s, and the filmmakers like Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof

Zanussi, Żuławski, Witold Leszczyński, and others whose debuts were in the 1960s belonged to the

third generation. Tadeusz Lubelski argues that these directors shared: “a manifestation of the

author’s identity and a tendency to poetic stylization”.iii However such common traits are fairly

vague and only point to the general idea of an auteurist art cinema, less obviously engaged with

history or social issues than earlier filmmakers. Nevertheless, the idea of “generations” is a

persistent one in Polish cinema not only in terms of its filmmakers but as a cinematic theme

beginning from Wajda’s debut feature, A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955). The fact that Third Part of

the Night directly references both this film and, in its title, the idea of third Polish cinema, not to

mention the idea of generations in basing the film in part on his father’s memoirs, means that the

idea of generations in and of Polish cinema cannot be easily dismissed.

 At the same time, it must be remembered that in addition to these national influences, there

were already transnational dimensions of Żuławski’s career even prior to making films outside of

Poland stemming from his training at the French IDHEC rather than the more usual route of the

Polish film school. Even before his career began therefore, there was already an aesthetic response

not only to Polish generations but to the French New wave which Żuławski was exposed to early

on. Żuławski acknowledged the aesthetic significance at least some of the work of Godard such as

Contempt (Le mépris 1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965)iv and was certainly inspired by Godard’s

disregard for conventional narrative structures and expressive use of apparent limitations such as

available light, hand-held camera and real locations. Nevertheless, his disparaging comments about

the French New Wave in general serve to underline that he saw it less as a coherent cinematic

movement than as just another site of generational conflict: “infighting among a group of young

[filmmakers] who, in the process of ousting the old hands, had found a way of making movies about

their own cousins, mothers, fathers, and housekeepers ... I saw nothing interesting form an artistic

standpoint”.v This quotation should be enough to indicate caution when using terms like “new

wave” or “generations” in relation to Żuławski’s cinema and yet it paradoxically underlines the

centrality of such generational thinking to his conception of cinema.

This brings us to a more recent way in which Żuławski’s work has been situated, namely in

relation to surrealism. This is apparent in Kletowski’s chapter in the Polish New Wave book which,

after claiming that his auteurism and “thinking through form”vi position him in proximity to the

French New Wave, refers in relation to his second feature, The Devil (Diabeł, 1972), to an

“expressionist and surreal vision”.vii More specifically, two essays in the recently published A Story

of Sin position Żuławski’s work in proximity to surrealist aesthetics.viii The non-existence of any

Polish surrealist movement, as equally non-existent as any historical Polish new wave leads to the

idea that surrealism in Polish cinema, like the new wave, is the product of transnational

appropriation in relation to national traditions. These dynamics of the appropriation of transnational

aesthetics in a national context will be engaged with in the next section in relation to Żuławski’s

Polish films of the 1970s.

Cinema at the Limits of National Space From The Third Part of the Night to On the Silver

Globe

As already indicated, addressing Poland’s experience of war and Nazi occupation in The Third Part

of the Night invites analysis as a revisiting of the Polish School, since this was the subject of many

key films belonging to this paradigm. As if to underline this point, the film explicitly refers to

Wajda’s A Generation (1955), in which the resistance fighter Jasió escapes his German pursuers by

climbing a staircase, only to be trapped at the top of it. In Third Part of the Night, the staircase

scene is the crux of the film and is extended into a harrowing sequence in which the main character

Michał (Leszek Teleszyński), having just seen his friend shot in the street ascends a staircase and

only escapes death due to a man in his likeness being mistaken for him by the Germans. The pursuit

which lasts a long time at once combines American genre conventions of the shoot-out from the

western and the gangster film with expressionist tendencies, all captured by a dizzying

choreography of hand held camera. In Żuławski’s treatment this staircase takes on the metaphysical

implications of a type of “Jacob’s Ladder” whose ascent and descent literally distributes life and

death. In part the difference between these two films can be seen as reflecting that between Wajda’s

generation that lived through the war, if only as children, and Żuławski’s generation who only know

about the war form their father’s stories and from Polish cinema. But the film’s revision of the myth

of Poland under Nazi occupation and of the Polish resistance is more radical 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, even if, ironically, the

film was made for Wajda’s Wektor film group and the latter was one of the film’s main defenders.

While the title of the film might well derive from the biblical Book of Revelations, which is cited at
the film’s opening, it also clearly refers to the third generation of Polish filmmakers as the “third

part” of Polish cinema after the Polish School. It is hard not to see the combination of the title and

the revisiting of Wajda’s debut as the announcement of a new beginning for Polish cinema, by

taking a darker, more apocalyptic direction that would be followed in Żuławski’s subsequent films.

The opening scene announces this new direction as a reading from the Book of Revelations

gives way to the brutal slaughter of Michał’s mother, wife and child by mounted German soldiers

explicitly evoking the horsemen of the apocalypse, while Michał is walking with his father (Jerzy

Goliński) in the nearby forest. The narrative context that is given for these events is sketchy and

enigmatic, leading more to a fatalistic than a historical reading of these events, as if they are the

playing out of a divine punishment. At the same time, the entry of the soldier on horseback into the

family home seems a perverse inversion of the historical myth of the Polish cavalry attempting to

meet the invading force of German tanks that was the subject of Wajda’s fourth war film, Lotna

(1959). However, even here, were the accent seems to be on revising the myths of the Polish

School’s mythic presentation of the war, the visceral representation of Michał’s reactions seems to

owe more to Hollywood genre films than to Polish cinema. In fact it is as if Hollywood action

cinema was being deliberately employed as a counterpoint to the Polish dimensions of the film. As

such it operates as an alien dynamism employed deliberately to explode these myths not by

abandoning them but by exaggerating them to the point where they become metaphysical rather

than historical, even at times bordering on kitsch. This is nowhere more apparent than in the

staircase scene referred to above, initiated by the death, on another staircase of Michał’s A.K.

(Home Army) comrade who is shot then falls over the balcony virtually into Michał’s arms. We

then follow Michał’s pursuit via a dizzying and dynamic hand-held sequence during which he runs

through streets, ducks down dark alleyways, climbs stairs and at one point leaps of a roof onto a

garbage heap, before ascending the final fatal staircase. Yet, if this sequence does owe something to

Hollywood genre cinema it is in a mutated form since the pursuers are rarely visible but rather act in
the sequence as shadowy presences dispensing death from a position just outside of both the frame

and Michał’s perception. The resulting visual sequence, aided by the fragmented electric guitar

soundtrack produces the type of effect that would characterize most of Żuławski’s subsequent films,

presenting not so much reality itself as the delirium that it provokes, as several critics have

observed.ix While it seemed that Żuławski had gone as far as possible in overturning everything that

was sacred in Polish political and cinematic history, this tendency would be carried, at least in

censorship terms, beyond acceptable limits in his subsequent film, The Devil (1972).

The Devil similarly dealt with a “sacred” moment of Polish historical trauma, namely the late

18th Century partition of Poland by Prussia, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire. This was less

a revisiting of Polish cinematic history than of Polish romanticism, appearing almost as if it was the

adaptation of an undiscovered work of Adam Mickiewicz, even if the script was an original one. As

in the previous film, The Devil begins in horror, as the main character Jakub (Leszek Teleszyński) is

led away by the devil (Michał Grudziński), along with a terrified nun, from a scene of carnage in

the prison/asylum to which he has been condemned for an attempted regicide fueled by patriotic

motives. From this scene onwards, the film comes across as if it were the film of Polish

Romanticism that Wajda should have made but didn’t due to stylistic and political compromises.

Even more than The Third Part of the Night, the whole film takes place in a state of delirium

filtered by Jakub’s madness or demonic possession. Jakub will subsequently, manipulated by his

demonic companion, murder his mother, sister, brother and best friend all of whom are shown as

human beings destroyed by the overturning of their world in the context of occupied Poland. For

Kletowski this demonic possession is shown in Oedipal terms as a horrified response to a world

upside down in which “a father rapes his daughter who he takes for her dead mother, and a mother,

desiring all the men in the world, wants to make love to her son”.x Yet, the violence and destruction

in the film clearly exceeds a familial Oedipal framework and the family and the nation are

represented as inseparable and permeable constructs, both subject to traumatic transnational forces
in the forms of marauding armies, spies and traitors. In fact the mythical model here is less Oedipus

than Shakespeare’s Hamlet since Jakub not only returns to find that “all is not well” in the house of

Poland but also encounters a group of nomadic and licentious actors who perform Hamlet and who

number among his first victims. This mirrors the function of the play within the play in Hamlet

which equally results in tragic bloodshed.

Again the symbolism of the film is multi-layered; apart from its reading as a horror film of

demonic possession, the most obvious reading of the film is as a metaphysical version of the

partitioning of Poland which led to the loss of independence for over a hundred years. In the end the

devil is indeed revealed to be a Prussian spy wanting to defeat a patriotic conspiracy on behalf of

his military masters. On another level, however, the demonic treatment of Poland as an occupied

territory clearly has another historical resonance: of Poland under socialism. This latter aspect of the

film was not lost on the censors who banned the film until 1987. This reading of the film was based

on real events in that it was partly inspired by the suppression of a student rebellion in 1968 after

which a large number of the Jewish intelligentsia were subsequently expelled form Poland in one of

the regime’s more notorious purges. In this reading the devil would be less a Prussian spy than a

government informant or a surrogate for those parts of the population willing to improve their lives

by spying on and denouncing their neighbors. If The Devil seemed more preoccupied with death

and violence than the affirmation of any new birth, Żuławski’s next Polish film, On the Silver Globe

would return to questions of genesis and genealogy in its adaptation of his great uncle’s Moon

Trilogy, even if the film itself would remain “still-born” for eleven years.

When On the Silver Globe was being filmed a new tendency in Polish cinema, the so-called

Cinema of Moral Concern, was well underway. Initiated by Wajda’s formally atypical Man of

Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977), the Cinema of Moral Concern became applied to a group of

realist films produced between 1976 and 1981 by Wajda, Zanussi, Holland, Kieślowski and others,

whose aim was to use cinema to critically illuminate aspects of contemporary Polish reality. A
typical example was Kieslowski’s film Camera Buff (Amator, 1979) in which a worker starts

making amateur films, an activity that soon starts to reveal the shortcomings and corruption in the

town in which he lives and by implication in Poland in general. The implicit nature of these films’

critique was essential to how they worked; it being impossible to make a direct political critique of

the state, these films focused on particular situations and minor issues, with an assurance that their

limited critique would be generalized by Polish audiences into a critique of the system as a whole.

By these means some of the most celebrated productions of Polish cinema under socialism were

produced even if later on some of the directors like Holland acknowledged that making good

cinema was subordinated to getting across the message that “evil is linked with communism”.xi This

paradoxically resulted in a cinema close to the long since rejected one of socialist realism in that as

Haltof argues it tended to “produce types rather than real-life characters”,xii and to reduce complex

situations to a simplified and moralized form.

The limitations of this approach to filmmaking were hardly lost on Żuławski who described it

in the following terms: “those young people ... executed a coup d’état on cinema itself. They

managed to create radiophony. Pictures were not needed”.xiii For Żuławski cinematic politics and

aesthetics are inseparable and it is hard to imagine anyone more at odds with this prevailing

tendency in late 1970s Polish cinema; perhaps the only thing On the Silver Globe shared with it was

being equally the target of censorship, or rather more since it was an unusual case of censorship not

of a script but of a film in the middle of being produced. Ironically, eleven years later when

Żuławski finally had the opportunity to complete his film, he would do so via the incorporation of

documentary scenes of contemporary Poland, rendering the final film as at once a visionary fiction

and a unique document of Poland under socialism. As the director put it, the completed films is

“simultaneously a film in itself and a history of that film. It is the history of a certain life and a

certain country”.xiv In this regard, despite being a unique example of epic science fiction, it needs to

be understood as a critical alternative to the aesthetics of the Cinema of Moral Concern. Operating
by a heightening of expressive cinematic aesthetics, rendered it at once one of Żuławski’s most

abstract and most political films.

On the Silver Globe was even more remarkable formally than its predecessors and had it been

completed in its envisaged form had the potential to make a revolutionary contribution to both the

science fiction genre and to Polish cinema. In the first part, a rider from a seemingly primitive tribe

brings to some scientists a recording device claiming that it fell from the sky. The recording device

presents the history of a group of astronauts who landed on the moon and proceeded to create there

a new humanity, recounted entirely through these fragmentary recordings made by the device which

is initially attached to the space suit of one of the astronauts, Jerzy (Jerzy Trela). These fragments

tell a tale of degeneration as the astronauts, after their initial struggle for survival, generate a new

human colony. Marta (Iwona Bielska), the only woman on the spaceship, after losing her lover

Tomasz (Leszek Długosz), gives birth three times and this is enough to start a series of generations,

whose development seems to be accelerated as is their degeneration into primitive ritual, cruel

violence and sacrifice. While the original astronauts, especially Jerzy, try to hold on to their

civilized rationality, it is meaningless in this new context and they are powerless against this process

that eventually turns them into objects of both religious worship and fear. In this process, they

become a series of archetypal figures to be endlessly repeated. Soon Jerzy, the only survivor of the

original colonists, becomes worshiped as the god-like figure of “the old man”, while still

documenting the process whereby ever greater degrees of hierarchy, adornment and violence

escalate into fully fledged wars and organized religion. Ultimately the descendants of the colonists

attempt to sail to the “other shore” of the sea where the colonists have made their home for the

purposes of conquest and domination. The humans then become enslaved by the creatures they

encounter there, the Shernes, and it is at this point that Jerzy returns to the desert where they first

arrived and sends the recording back to “old earth.”

This description, which is only an account of the first part of the film does little justice to the
richness of the imagery, and imaginative use of costume, settings and performative ritual throughout

the film. Shortly after the astronaut’s arrival, the viewer is plunged into a world of expressive

performance and dynamic images that are highly disorienting and follow a logic that while coherent

is more like being caught up in a ritual or a dance than the exposition of a linear narrative. In the

unfolding of this history, the camera plays an active role as a situated observer, sometimes the

object itself of a power struggle, filming the events in a disjointed but panoramic way, often by

means of a wide-angle lens. It thus enacts a peculiar deformation of point of view since while most

of the time associated with the figure of Jerzy, the old man, this is increasingly the perspective of a

semi-divine outcast and therefore an observer who is both within and outside of the world of the

film. This position is emphasized both spatially in his association with the desert and temporally in

his survival of successive generations of the colonists. This enables the constitution of the cinematic

equivalent of the Old Testament, that is complemented in the second part of the film, whose visual

style, use of color and lenses is entirely different to the first part, is associated with the New

Testament. In this part of the film, a new astronaut, Marek (Andrzej Seweryn), arrives alone, and

takes on the role of an unwilling sacrificial, Christ-like redeemer who will deliver humanity from its

bondage to the Shernes.

The excess in every possible sense of this film in relation to the dominant tendencies of Polish

cinema could not be greater, in terms of its narrative ambitions, formal experimentation and ecstatic

and ritualistic performances. Nevertheless, what was also present in the film was a political

engagement with its own time, updating the anti-Christian message of the original novel. If the

repetitions of the Bible in the original was meant as a critique of the violence of monotheistic

religion, in the film, there was a clear allegory of life under communism as the attempt to construct

a utopian world becomes increasingly cruel, violent, hierarchical and prone to degeneration. This is

not to say that the film is an equivalent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, since aesthetically it has a

richness that surpasses any simple didactic interpretation, nevertheless the questions it raises about
human history and social organization went well beyond what was acceptable in the context of state

socialism. In the director’s own words, the science fiction in the film was used as a mask,xv and

while the original censors who approved the script did not see beyond the mask, or only noticed the

film’s anti-clericalism, the new Minister for cinema, Janusz Wilhelmi, clearly did, and not only

demanded that filming cease but ordered the immediate destruction of all sets, props and costumes;

it is purely by chance that there was any surviving copy of the film when Żuławski was given

eventual permission to complete the film in 1988. The decision to use documentary sequences of

contemporary Poland at the end of the communist regime, reinforces this political reading of the

film since it seems to imply an equivalence between the science fiction world presented on the

screen and a strangely dislocated view of contemporary Poland as an alien world. As Ronduda puts

it, these added scenes “make science fiction appear to be a commentary on the situation of

communist modernity, in which the cult of rationalization and the supervision over [sic] all aspects

of life, became a new variation on religious faith”.xvi The shutting down of production of the film

meant not only that after a difficult eighteen months of filming, no film was completed but also that

Żuławski himself was placed on a blacklist and forbidden on any film set. It was during this

extremely difficult time, compounded by his wife Małgorzata Braunek leaving him, that Żuławski

came up with the idea for his next film Possession (1980), which would be made in Berlin.

Possession as Transnational and Transitional Family Narrative

If the emphasis so far has been on the disjunction between Żuławski’s cinema and dominant

tendencies in Polish national cinema, Possession clearly calls out for a truly transnational analysis

seeing as it is a film conceived of in Poland, shot in Berlin with a French producer, French, New

Zealand and German actors and with an American scriptwriter and American money. It is also the

only film Żuławski ever made in English and has had a wide international cult audience, despite

being censored for periods of time in the UK and elsewhere as a “video nasty.” Nevertheless
Possession, in contrast to many of the films Żuławski made in France beginning with The Most

Important Thing: Love (L’important c’est d’aimer, 1975), maintains strong links with the Polish

context, indeed Żuławski claims that it was only made in Berlin because this is as close as it was

possible to make it to Poland and the Eastern Bloc in general. It is for these reasons that this film

will be dealt with separately and apart from the series of films he made in France which, in fact, had

already begun beforehand. If the fate of Possession under censorship was not as severe as its

predecessor, its circulation as a censored horror film has led to many distortions in the reception of

the film, not least of which is the bracketing out of its sociopolitical context. While the film takes on

the mask of the horror film as had The Devil before it and as On the Silver Globe had done with

science fiction, there is much more to Possession than the mere presentation of shocking scenes of

abjection and the horror provoked by a woman’s relationship with a tentacled monster.

Nevertheless, even today there are critics who only perceive these aspects of the film. In contrast,

the following will bring out the geopolitical dimensions of the film, to show how, perhaps more

than any other film by Żuławski, it is a direct expression of his relations with contemporary Polish

reality.

Just as in the image of Gombrowicz “spying” on Poland across the Berlin wall after many

years of exile in Argentina, Żuławski uses the Berlin Wall as a deliberate way of looking back at

Poland and the world he had recently left behind. In “The Other Side of the Wall”,xvii the

documentary feature that accompanies the recent DVD re-release of the film, Żuławski places great

emphasis on these Polish aspects of the film, saying not only that for him this was the only reason

to base the film in Berlin but also that for him the monstrous miscarriage produced and nurtured by

Anna is an analog of the communist regime itself. Without necessarily embracing this reading of the

film, it is striking to what extent the film emphasizes the Cold War and the divided constitution of

Europe, from Marc’s (Sam Neil) initial job which seems to be that of a cold war spy, to the ending

of the film in an apparent nuclear apocalypse. Beyond this, the real center of the film is the account
of the breakdown of a couple, and the quest of the male character to understand an affective

metamorphosis that has no logical explanation; as in Godard’s Contempt (1964), for Anna (Isabelle

Adjani), love has turned into revulsion, a process which the rational male protagonists in both films

are unable and unwilling to understand.

At any rate the film begins on this level with no hint of any fantastic dimension, except for the

seemingly irrational behavior of Anna which seems, at first, to stem simply from her guilt at having

taken on a lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), who she refuses to relinquish. While some critics have

limited the “real” events of the film to this beginning, arguing that the rest takes place in Marc’s

head as he descends into madness or a process of Jungian self-realization,xviii nothing in the film

legitimizes such a black and white distinction. Instead, as in the surrealist idea of the permeation of

reality by the imaginary, a monstrous, fantastic dimension emerges by degrees as it is revealed that

Anna’s new love is not for Heinrich but for a tentacled creature, a thing which is growing in a dingy

Kreuzberg apartment that Anna visits whenever she has the chance, and with which she is involved

in rationally inconceivable sexual relations. While there are various reasons to account for this, “the

thing” is a singularly unstable entity appearing first as a a dark and glistening eye, then a pathetic

pulsating octopus, a phallic shaped being with tiny eyes, a tentacled and virile half-human monster

and ultimately as an almost exact replica of Marc. In some respects this metamorphic thing is

finally given an explanation as the result of a violent miscarriage in a Berlin subway, presumably

taking place during Marc’s absence, but at the same time it seems to be the pure embodiment and

materialization of evil. However, this evil is not something abstract but something that has been

produced between Anna and Marc, the darkness that has come to contaminate their relationship.xix

On another level, one has to take seriously that this “monster” is somehow from the East, the effect

of Berlin as a Western outpost being surrounded by an evil and abject force that despite the wall,

finds a way of infecting the characters’ lives. As Anna’s doppelganger, who comes from East Berlin

says at one point in the film, “where I’m from evil is easier to spot, because it’s personified in
people”, a statement that is metonymic for Żuławski’s view of Poland and the whole of the Eastern

Bloc.

[Insert figure 12.1 here: Żuławski, Possession (1980), Isabelle Adjani]

Possession, despite the darkness of its subject matter was a new beginning for Żuławski’s

career, and perhaps for this reason revisits his Polish debut The Third Part of the Night in intriguing

ways. Not only is the famous staircase shootout reprised towards the end of the film but also its

apocalyptic tone, especially in the ending of the film. More than this, Possession is the apotheosis

of the expressionist theme of the double in Żuławski’s work. Not only is Marc doubled, first by his

substitute Heinrich whose feminine, open personality first supplants Marc’s place in Anna’s

affections and desires and then by the monster itself, a fact underlined by it finally becoming Marc’s

replicant but Anna also has her doubles both in her school teacher look-alike and in her parable of

the two sisters of “faith and chance.” This account of the process she is undergoing as a splitting

into these two sisters is explicitly associated with the miscarried monster making it also Anna’s

double, referred to in her dialogue as “her faith”, that she is obliged to care for, if not all that will be

left is meaningless chance. The revelation about Anna’s splitting into these two parts, is tellingly

given to Marc in the form of a film taken by Heinrich, which marks a substantial shift in the film

from Marc as rational male trying to investigate and control the desire of the female other, to a less

conventional story of both of them on parallel journeys into and through madness, to a

confrontation with their various doubles. Interestingly this personal quest which seems tied up with

conjugal and familial relations is always opening up to others whether Anna’s friend Margie and her

lover Heinrich, the schoolteacher Helena and finally Marc’s shady cold war colleagues, giving the

sense of a not merely personal but world political apocalypse. Again while it would be banal and

against the aesthetics of the film to reduce it to autobiographical details, it is tempting to read it as a

transfiguration, not only of Żuławski’s break-up with his wife but also the breaking of contact with

Poland and the ambivalence surrounding this other divorce, ranging from nostalgia to bitter
resentment. The increasingly desperate attempts on Marc’s part to hold onto his family, however

contaminated or distorted it might be by evil and unfathomable forces, is the masked expression of

a real struggle and a real loss not only of Żuławski’s family but also of the violent wrenching from

his former social context.

Żuławski’s ‘French’ Cinema: Performativity, Intertextuality and Cinema in a Transnational

Context

As had already been suggested, the series of films Żuławski made in France, beginning with The

Most Important Thing: Love, and continuing in the 1980s with La femme publique (The Public

Woman, 1984), L’amour braque (Limpet Love, 1985), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (My

Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days, 1989), and then with less frequency till Żuławski’s last

completed film La fidelité (Fidelity, 2000) are aesthetically and stylistically distinct from his Polish

work. One obvious difference is a relative shift from male “romantic” protagonists to female

“performers”, whose performance is central to the films’ themes and style. Similarly, whereas his

Polish films were based on his own scripts or in collaboration with his male ancestors, with the

exception of Limpet Love, his French films tended to be adaptations, often of the work of young,

unknown female novelists, a tendency that was also apparent in his one later film made in Poland,

Szamanka (1996). However, the practice of adaptation with Żuławski is a complex one since, in all

cases, he transformed the original texts according to his cinematic vision and, in two cases, added

layers of intertextuality by incorporating direct references to the novels of Dostoyevsky. It is as if

the best way Żuławski, as an émigré Polish filmmaker, could continue making films was to situate

himself somewhere between Dostoyevsky’s 19th Century novels and contemporary French fiction.

Despite these complexities, it is still possible treat these films as a response to and an exceeding of

the limits of Polish national cinema, even if this has shifted from a direct confrontation with these

limits to an exploration of what lies beyond them.

 In The Most Important Thing: Love, female performance is emphasized from the very first

scene in which Servais (Fabio Testi) bursts onto a film set to snap pictures of the once famous

actress Nadine (Romy Schneider), now performing in a Z-grade movie and being directed abusively

by her female director. While purportedly an adaptation of Christopher Frank’s novel La Nuit

Américaine (1972), Żuławski changes the context completely, not only by showing the actress’s

descent in such a brutal and extreme way but also by depicting this as Servais’ own professional

world, since when he is not being a tabloid paparazzi he is taking perverse porn pictures for a

dubious underworld boss—instead of photographing artists and intellectuals, as done by his literary

counterpart. More importantly Żuławski uses the narrative situation of the novel to generate an

intense and disturbing scene in which the actress is subject to multiple mediated looks: the look of

the camera on the set, the look of Servais’ tabloid still camera and the third look of the camera by

means of which we are seeing the film, the only look that actually sees her not as an exploitable

surface appearance but as a talented and emotional performer, expressing an affective inner life. To

dramatize this difference, Żuławski begins the film with a contrast between two camera

movements—that of the on set film camera pushing forwards towards Nadine, as the actual camera

is tracking backwards, thereby distinguishing these two views of the actress’s performance. This is

reinforced later as the actress is being berated by the director and first becomes aware of a third

gaze, that of Servais camera; her pleading for him to stop, not to film her like this (straddling a

bloodstained body in a role unworthy of her, in heavy artificial make-up), is what initiates the

contact between the two lovers. This is reinforced by the Georges Delerue music which at this point

is highly reminiscent of his romantic theme used in that other film about filmmaking Contempt (Le

mépris, Godard, 1963). More than this it shifts the alignment of Servais’ gaze from exploitation to

love, or from the on-set to the off-set camera, as it instils the desire in him to photograph her

properly, to find a role worthy of her and ultimately to become her lover.

[Insert figure 12.2 here: Żuławski, The Most Important Thing: Love (1975), Romy
Schneider]

This complexity is not limited to this formal reflexivity, however, but also reflects the

transnational constitution of the film as a French, Italian and West German co-production. While

hardly a big budget “Euro-pudding”, the international funding of the film explains, as in Possession,

the presence of performers from a variety of European countries, including in addition to Testi,

Klaus Kinski, who dominates his scenes as a theater director, whose obsessional approach to his

production leads to its artistic failure. As such, Kinski’s role as director of the play within the film,

which is the artistic complement to the exploitative film within the film already described, is also a

stand-in persona for Żuławski himself, and his Polish origins would certainly been part of what

made him ideal for this role. Schneider, as an Austrian actress working in France, whose career had

undergone a similar if less drastic decline to the character she plays, is also to some extent a Central

European outsider to the French context. All of these transnational influences, not least of which is

the foreignness of the director, who was at that time only in temporary exile in France, decenter the

film from merely being a French art movie or a continuation of the French New Wave. So despite

the many references to French popular and cinematic culture, especially via the character of Jacques

Chevalier (Jacques Dutronc) whose cinephilia and cultivated immaturity are reminiscent of Jean-

Pierre Léaud’s performances in the films of Godard and Truffaut, the film presents a foreign

perspective on the French context in which it takes place. This perhaps accounts for the recasting of

the novel’s intellectual milieu into that of the seedy porno underbelly of cultural production, a

milieu more accessible to diasporic artists than that of high culture. At the same time, without

constituting a critique of capitalism per se, the film uses the idea of porn to emphasize the

exploitative dynamics of Western media culture, a milieu every bit as distorting of human relations

and creativity, as the world of socialist Poland.

This transnational constitution of the film is not unrelated to the ways in which it

foregrounds representational practices and performances in relation to film, photography and

theater. While Żuławski’s Polish films were already mediated by a combination of Polish cinematic

and literary representations with transnational cinematic styles, in the films made in France these

processes of mediation and performance that cross different media are foregrounded, to the extent

that the films are more about these different mediations and their corresponding performances than

any underlying reality. Even the main love affair in The Most Important Thing: Love, is expressed

via these mediated performances since Servais’ love for Nadine is expressed first by wanting to take

better, more worthy photographs of her, and then by finding her a suitable, theatrical and artistic

role, manipulated from “behind the scenes”, as if he wanted to influence her life in a similar manner

to a cinematic or theatrical director influencing a performance. The “love” referred to in the title,

(which would originally have been the same as the novel, La nuit Américiane, if this title had not

just been appropriated by Truffaut’s recent self-reflexive film), is therefore highly mediated by a

series of performances, not only of Nadine as an actress, but also by Servais as a seedy

photographer, coming in the end to reject the more unsavory and exploitative dimensions of his

professional role. This combination of transnational elements, with a focus on practices of

performance, mediation, and representation, would only be intensified in the films Żuławski would

make in France in the 1980s when his temporary exile had become permanent.

In The Public Woman, this emphasis on female performativity takes center stage in the story

of a young actress Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky), trying to succeed in movies while supporting herself by

posing nude for pornographic pictures, landing the lead role in an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The

Possessed. Here, self-reflexivity takes on new dimensions, since the film is not only concerned with

representational practices from literature and cinema to exploitative photography, but also stages a

bleeding between these practices and the world of the film. The director of the film Lucas Kesling

(Francis Huster), who is also playing the lead male role of Stavrogin, seems to be playing out the

nihilistic themes of the novel in his extra-cinematic life, especially in his manipulation of a Czech

couple, the woman Elena who seems to have been murdered, while the man Milan is manipulated
into a political assassination. Similarly Ethel “performs”, not only in front of the still or moving

camera, but also in her relationships with Kesling and Milan, especially when she deliberately

becomes the dead woman Elena, in order to become closer to Milan and to know more about the

sinister events surrounding the production of the film. In a sense she is performing all the time since

as an unknown struggling to survive in world based on performances, all she has is her

performance, and most elementally the performance of her body as dramatized by her performance

in front of the still camera being used to create erotic images. The tension between these attempts to

capture her performance, which she resists via frenetic and aggressively choreographed movements

of such violence that they send her photographer into cardiac arrest, is a more brutal and raw

encapsulation of her struggle in front of Kesling’s camera and indeed in relation with him more

generally.

This performativity is presented in an explicitly intertextual framework between the almost

banal story of a young actress trying to succeed in the exploitative world of cinema and the thematic

concerns of The Possessed that are echoed in the extra cinematic events already referred to.

Mediating between these two texts is the process of filmmaking itself whose foregrounding makes

this film considerably more self-reflexive than any other film by Żuławski. As if to emphasize this,

the opening scene of the film turns out not to be happening in the present world of the film but is a

scene from The Possessed, in which a woman, played by Ethel, delivers some money to Stavrogin

who is besieged by creditors. However, it turns out that this scene is yet to be made but is only Ethel

unsuccessfully reading for the part, a decision which is then overturned by the director, who is less

interested in her skills and experience as an actress than her inner self. This opens the way for

numerous scenes of filmmaking in which the boundaries between what is inside and outside the

film become increasingly porous. This is rendered explicit by a scene in which Ethel is failing to

separate her performance form her own emotions about Kesling and also failing in Kesling’s eyes to

deliver an adequate performance, in lines that give some insight into Żuławski’s own practice as a
director: “playing each scene separately isn’t enough …. I don’t want you to play each scene I want

you to play your role! … What matters is what is between each scene, the truth of the character”. xx

In terms of transnationality the film makes several masked references to Poland and Eastern

Europe. Firstly it is located between in the intertextual sense of being a film based on a French story

in a French context that at the same time is concerned with making a film based on a Russian novel;

both this cinematic context and the adaptation of Dostoyevsky being key changes between the

original story and the film. Then there is the identity of the director, in the film he is presented as a

German filmmaker and enfant terrible, modeled at least partially on Rainer Werner Fassbinder; his

later playing around with political violence being an explicit reference to the latter’s supposed

support of the Red Army Faction. However, Kesling no more “is” Fassbinder than he is Żuławski,

but rather a complex and composite figure expressing at once ideals of true creativity, and the

failure to live up to these ideals, expressed via the manipulation and betrayal of those he comes into

contact with. The transnational resonances of the film do not end there but are also present in

another innovation of the film; the rendering of the political crime that Kesling manipulates Milan

into committing, namely the assassination by a Czech dissident of a Lithuanian Archbishop,

Schlapas. Not only does this latter virtuous figure clearly resemble the Polish Pope, John Paul II,

but it also echoes his connection to East European dissidence. So it is not only that one could draw

a line between Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, as between France and Russia and arrive at Poland

but that the film is explicitly making oblique reference to Poland’s recent political experience of the

Solidarity era while at the same time referring to political violence in Western Europe. While this

hardly renders the film one of “moral concern”, and this entire subplot could be considered to be a

background one relative to the foregrounded issues of creativity and performativity, it nevertheless

gives the film a transnational, trans-European resonance and reference to the still divided situation

of cold war Europe.

This transnationality is also evident in Żuławski’s following film, Limpet Love which rather
than being an adaptation of Dostoyevsky, is a modern day adaptation of The Idiot, played

somewhere between a comic strip and a gangster film. Here the intertextuality is not with any

French original but various aspects of Western popular culture ranging from comics to the French

New Wave and arguably, as one of Żuławski‘s most choreographed films, to modern dance. Again

there is a reference to political violence as Micky’s gang conduct themselves as something

inbetween James Cagney style gangsters and urban guerrillas. The film also starts with an encounter

on an improbable train journey from Hungary; casting the “idiot” as an Eastern European migrant,

again making reference to cold war Europe, and decentering the film from being merely a modern

day “French” adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel. While not foregrounding these elements and

being less explicitly self-reflexive than The Public Woman, Limpet Love nevertheless generates a

trans-European aesthetic space in which the tragic events of Dostoyevsky’s novel are played out

against the experience of migration and diaspora, that become especially evident in Léon’s dealings

with other members of his displaced Hungarian family, many of whom are involved with theatrical

performances and in general are “performing” for their hosts in order to secure their otherwise

precarious existence in France. In both these films the emphasis on performativity and modes of

representation and expression, is inseparable from trans-European and transnational dynamics, that

destabilize the French context and continually point to Eastern European if not Polish cultural and

political experiences.

Passing over the later films made by Żuławski in exile, which express these experiences of

transnationality to a more or less explicit extent, it is worth finishing this chapter by briefly

considering the one film he made subsequently in Poland, Szamanka (The She-Shaman, 1996).

Żuławski has referred to this as a film made “without masks”, and this certainly seems to be the

case in its brutal presentation of the situation of contemporary post-communist Poland. In this film,

gangsterism and violence seems to be lurking behind every ugly corner and everything from

intimate relationships to scientific inquiry and the Catholic church seem irremediably corrupted. Yet
the response to the film, which may indeed have been informed by a rejection of this picture of

contemporary Poland, tended to focus almost exclusively on the alleged maltreatment of Iwona

Petry who played the main role of “the Italian”, the present-day Shamanness whose behavior comes

to echo that of her ancient predecessor that her anthropologist lover Michał (Bogusław Linda) has

dug up the victim of. While much of this attention was in the tabloid press, it was sufficiently

echoed in Polish film criticism to constitute a near total rejection of this film as an unethical and, by

implication, inaccurate portrayal of contemporary Poland.xxi Critics have also seen the film as

misogynist in its reduction of the female figure to an almost animalistic level of eroticism and

violence, while her lover Michał still maintains a professional life. Some of this criticism, however,

attributes this violence to Żuławski alone, when in fact it was already present in the original and

arguably feminist novel, again written by a young female novelist, Manuela Gretkowska. In other

words the violence and horror in the film was intended as an attack on the patriarchal values

dominant in post-communist Poland, an attack that the film certainly transforms and intensifies but

doesn’t necessarily submit to any misogynist agenda. Considering that both Gretkowska and

Żuławski were exiles at the time, the film can legitimately be read as an outside view of

contemporary Poland from the specific position of the insider who has become an outsider due to

the condition of exile. In this sense, regardless of whether The She-Shaman is considered a great or

minor film in relation to Żuławski’s other work, it is very much an example of accented cinema, in

the quite literal sense of the making strange of the familiar, by seeing it with critical eyes that have

become foreign. Certainly, Żuławski made no attempts to please the Polish audience whether

popular or critical, but given the subsequent tendency of Polish cinema towards grim social realism,

the film is both prescient of and in many ways goes beyond more recent attempts to represent Polish

post-communist conditions. Of course, such realism was perhaps not at all what Żuławski was even

attempting, and yet his description of the film as being “without masks” and related to the idea

taken from Przybyszewski of the “naked soul”xxii render it an attempt to create an expression not so
much of the surface reality but the underlying power dynamics, violence and prevailing misogynist

gender relations in contemporary Poland. As such it is as much against prevailing tendencies in

Polish cinema such as genre films and the then nascent “new cinema of moral concern” which it

both pre-empts and critiques, as his 1970s Polish films were challenges to the cinema of the Polish

School and rejections of the Cinema of Moral Concern. In both contexts, what Żuławski rejects is

the separation between aesthetics and politics, in favor of an expressive cinema whose politics lies

precisely in its refusal to turn away from horror, sex and violence, without at the same time

abandoning aesthetic expressivity and invention.

Conclusion

In this chapter, the expressive strategies in the films of Andrzej Żuławski have been examined as

subversive responses to hegemonic realist styles in Polish cinema ranging from the Polish School

and the Cinema of Moral Concern, to the equally hegemonic genre cinema and social realism in

post-communist Polish cinema. It has argued that the expressive excess in these films has a political

dimension and has been perceived as a danger to the social and political values represented by and

in old and new moral realisms. At the same time it has been demonstrated how Żuławski has

adopted a range of transnational styles and genres but still succeeded in adapting them to his own

creative ends. As such, Żuławski’s cinema very much merits being considered as a form of

accented cinema, one that draws on Polish national cinematic traditions but then combines them

with transnational elements ranging from genres and styles to modes of performance and

cinematography. In his films made outside Poland, this transnationality becomes even more

pronounced not only because the films were made as European co-productions, but because often

transnationality played a key thematic role, dramatizing Żuławski’s own experience of exile.

Nevertheless, even when Żuławski seemed to be expressing himself in a foreign language, not only

linguistically but in relation to other cinematic traditions like the French New Wave, a stubborn
Polish accent still remained, just as when making films in Poland, and especially on his return in the

1990s, he seemed to be introducing a foreign accent into Polish cinema, speaking its language but

strangely, hence the disturbing effect on Polish critics and audiences. This is something like the way

Deleuze and Guattari describe Franz Kafka in terms of a “polylingualism of one’s own

language”,xxiii referring to the way in which the Czech Jewish writer managed “to be a sort of

stranger within his own language”,xxiv in his making what they call a minor use of the German

language. In a similar way, Żuławski’s cinema can be understood not only as an accented but also

as a “minor” Polish cinema, not in the sense of being insignificant but of putting Polish cinema into

a different key, a key that is intrinsically “polylingual” in style.

i
Żuławski cited in Łukasz Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański: Excerpts from the History of
Polish New Wave,” in Polish New Wave: The History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed, ed. Barbara Piwowarska
and Łukasz Ronduda, (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle,
2009), 40.
ii
See Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 11-13, 31-32.
iii
Tadeusz Lubleski, “Was there at least a bit of the new wave in Polish cinema?” In Polish New Wave, 20.
iv
Żuławski cited in Piotr Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver
Globe as specimens of Polish new wave auteur cinema”, in Polish New Wave, 72.
v
Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver Globe”, 72.
vi
Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver Globe”, 73.
vii
Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver Globe”, 74.
viii
Kuba Mikurda and Kamila Wielebska eds., A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema, (Kraków: Korporacja
Ha!art, 2010).
ix
Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver Globe”, 75 ff.
x
Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver Globe”, 75.
xi
Agnieszka Holland cited in Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema, (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2002), 155.
xii
Haltof, Polish National Cinema, 155.
xiii
Żuławski cited in Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański”, 40.
xiv
Żuławski cited in Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański”, 40. Strangely this was hardly the
first such example of an unfinished Polish film that was subsequently supplemented by documentary materials.
Munk’s The Passenger (Pasażerka, 1963) had to be completed with a voice-over accompanying production stills
due to the sudden death of its director and Skolimowski’s Hands-Up (Ręce do góry, 1967/1981), while adopting a
formally different procedure, is another example of a film supplemented by documentary materials responding
directly to censorship.
xv
Żuławski interviewed in Daniel Bird and Andrzej Żuławski, “The Other Side of the Wall”, Posession [DVD], special
feature, (UK: Second Sight, 2010).
xvi
Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański”, 40.
xvii
Daniel Bird and Andrzej Żuławski, “The Other Side of the Wall”, 2010.
xviii
Ewa Strzalek-Smalls, “Who’s Possessed? The cinema of Andrzej Żuławski as an example of visionary art,” in
Żuławski, ed. Daniel Bird, (Keele: Keele University Press. 1998), n.p.
xix
For a fascinating reading of the film, tightly focusing on the unstable, “mucousal” figure of the creature, see Patricia
MacCormack, “Mucous, Monsters and Angels. Irigiray and Zulawski’s Posession,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy
and the Moving Image, No. 1, 2010 [Online]. http://cjpmi.ifl.pt/storage/1/C1%20Articles%20MacCormack.pdf .
[Accessed 01/05/13].
xx
Kesling in Andrzej Żuławski dir., Le femme publique, (The Public Woman, 1984).
xxi
See, for example, Jan Olszewski cited in Ewa Mazierska, “Witches, Shamans, Pandoras – Representation of Women
in the Polish Postcommunist Cinema”, Scope: June, 2002 n.p. [Online].
 http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=jun2002&id=268&section=article [accessed 03/05/13].
According to Mazierska, Olszewski’s “main concern is the fate of the actress, Iwona Petry, [and he] argues that her
experience had to be traumatic and degrading.” This was a common reaction to the film for both Polish critics and
audiences.
xxii
On Przybyszewski’s concept of the naked soul, see Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of Califronia Press, 1992), 330-333. The naked soul is a kind of spiritual essence animating
reality but remaining untouched by its compromises, an absolute only accessible in modernity via art. As such it
could be seen as not unrelated to a secular mysticism or indeed shamanism.
xxiii
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Dana Polan trans. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), 26-27.
xxiv
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 26.