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| Images courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome |
In August 2018, the renowned cult Polish dystopian
science-fiction writer-director Piotr Szulkin passed away at the age of 68,
leaving behind a legacy of ten incredibly obscure films which were banned if
not censored outright in their country of origin in addition to hardly being
seen at all outside of Poland. A former
teacher at the directing department of the Polish National Film School in Lódz,
Poland, the pioneering filmmaker despite the censorship figured out a way
around much of the restrictions and between 1980 and 1985 unveiled four films
based loosely on renowned novels or fables that reflected the sociopolitical
climate its director lived in. Though
some of his works found their way out of Poland through tight film circles,
Szulkin for decades remained all but completely unknown to Westerners…until
now…
Thanks to the concerted efforts of boutique label Vinegar
Syndrome who have assembled a deluxe boxed set edition aptly named Piotr
Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy consisting of the films Golem; The
War of the Worlds: Next Century; O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization and
Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes, filmgoers around the world now have a chance
to see this quartet of films in pristine digital restorations along with a bevy
of extras including but not limited to newly recorded commentary tracks, video
essays and a 40-page booklet of newly written essays and an archival original
interview with Szulkin himself.
Unlike anything anyone has seen before in the annals of
post-apocalyptic sci-fi filmmaking, pushing forth elusive political allegories
about life under a police state and featuring more than a few actors from David
Lynch’s Inland Empire showing up in them, Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse
Tetralogy is a never-before-seen netherworld of subtly satirical filmmaking
spoken of the same breath as Terry Gilliam, George Miller, Lars Von Trier,
Ridley Scott or even Konstantin Lopushanksky.
Now sit back and let us take a deep dive into this unusual,
difficult-to-categorize foursome of distinctly Polish dystopian disintegrating
sci-fi waking nightmares.
Golem (1980)
Loosely inspired by the Jewish folklore being and Gustav
Meyrink’s 1915 novel The Golem which told of Pernath, a jeweler and art
restorer living in the slums of Prague and his surreal misadventures peppered
by encounters with an anthropomorphic being who takes the form of mysterious
characters intended to evoke despair and suffering, Piotr Szulkin’s postmodern reimagining
of the tale moves the proceedings to a near-distant decaying futuristic Poland
with many of the details and plot points rearranged in an enigmatic
manner. In the film, our protagonist now
named Pernat (recurring character actor Marek Walczewski) finds himself being
interrogated by the police over a crime he has no recollection of. Seemingly suffering from amnesia, Pernat is
released back into the public which is overrun with maniacs, sadistic dentists
and dangerous doctors. Simply trying to
reclaim his identity and find out who he is, Pernat’s bizarre, oppressive and
sometimes foul odyssey takes him and audiences through a bleak, otherworldly
form of deep sleep.
Episodic, elliptical and highly confrontational including many
inexplicable surreal asides such as an apartment full of windows that open and
close by themselves simultaneously, an insane man played by Inland Empire phantom
Krzysztof Majchrzak, a rock band playing to an empty auditorium, a stairway
prostitute obsessed with dolls and many, many white rats, Piotr Szulkin’s
abstract, deliberately crumbling with decay cinematic grotesquerie begins in a
mad Hell and only descends deeper as its hapless protagonist saunters from one
encounter to the next. A thoroughly
unpleasant place to be replete with tattered wallpaper and rust, shot in deep
sickly green levels by veteran Polish cinematographer Zygmunt Samosiuk, the rotted
and worn looking sets designed by Zbigniew Warpechowski and Janusz Wlaso feel
like a tangible deep dive through a netherworld that’s at once imaginary and
uncomfortably close to reality.
Before
the opening montage of fuzzy deep-red video images of scientists being
interrogated, the score by Zygmunt Konieczny and future recurring collaborator Józef
Skrzek is a low-key hum of nebulous unfocused dread, letting audiences know
right away we’re in for a horror movie of sorts. Throughout the mournful and hopeless
soundtrack, we feel trapped inside some sort of nightmare neither we nor the
protagonist seem able to really wake up from.
Even as the end credits roll, however you take the experience, the overwhelming
sense of doom the film begins with never lets up, keeping in the spirit of the Golem
folklore of the entity causing all within an earshot to wallow in
suffering.
The
ensemble cast is solid with Marek Walczewski making the film’s stumbling
protagonist relatable by being an individual wading through a world where such
a thing doesn’t matter and Krzysztof Majchrzak’s local vagrant coming off as
genuinely certifiable. Occupying this
netherworld are female characters that drift in and out of Pernat’s life played
by Krystyna Janda, Joanna Zólkowska and veteran actress Anna Jaraczówna in her
final screen role, coming through Pernat’s hazy, disjointed perspective. As our characters seem to wade through
increasingly repellent looking places, the decorum and look of the world of the
film itself becomes a character in and of itself with an identifiable
personality.
Effectively the feature directorial debut of Piotr Szulkin,
the film went on to win a special award at the 7th Polish Film
Festival in Gdańsk for best new director, Basque Photographic Society winner
for the film’s cinematographer and four more awards a year later including the
Silver Asteroid for Krystyna Janda. A
standout first feature with a top-to-bottom wholly original aesthetic and sense
of worldbuilding, Golem also managed to subvert the literary sources and
folklore from which it was very loosely based.
Given this newly established brand of distinctly Polish futuristic ruin,
it was invariable the new director Szulkin would set his sights next on yet
another renowned and pop culturally successful sci-fi property with H.G. Wells’
1897 classic novel The War of the Worlds.
The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981)
On December 28t, 1999, television personality Iron Idem
(Roman Wilhelmi) reads the nightly news to the general Polish public and tells
his viewership not to be afraid of the Martians which have just landed on Earth
and begun their invasion. Almost
immediately thereafter his most recent broadcast while at home with his wife
Gea (Krystyna Janda), Martians saw through his front door, invade and ransack
his apartment before kidnapping his wife to an undisclosed location. The police in cooperation with the Martians
begin wielding totalitarian authority over the people as the Martians then
instruct Iron Idem what to say and what not to on the air lest he wants Gea to
live. Feeling like a pawn in a sick
global game of world domination, Idem decides to fight back.
Snarky, satirical and allegorical, this postmodern Polish
takedown of the media and political powers got itself banned by the Polish
government almost immediately and the film wasn’t theatrically released until
two years later. A loose study of the
nature propaganda in general as surreal science fiction horror, this elusive
send-up of H.G. Wells as written for the screen by Piotr Szulkin starts out
with a loud bang and only gets noisier and nuttier as it goes on. While maintaining the bloodsucking Martian
aspects of the novel, Szulkin’s reimagining of these details are as viscerally
unsettling as anything in the world of this movie. With a fiery, raging score by Józef Skrzek
and arresting teal-blue cinematography by Zygmunt Samosiuk, the subversive tone
of this particular The War of the Worlds take sets it apart from the pack
of previous iterations, using the framework of Wells’ text to fire a swift
rebuke of the then-domineering Polish government.
The film’s hero played by renowned stage and film actor
Roman Wilhelmi with his gruff eyes reminiscent of Darren McGavin is at once the
omniscient narrator of the novel and countercultural spitfire of the then
Polish People’s Republic. Krystana Janda
from the director’s previous film Golem plays dual roles as the hero’s
wife as well as a prostitute and Mariusz Dmochowski plays the beleaguered TV
station managing director. The real
standouts though are the Martians which are dressed to look like officers of
the Polish martial law of 1981, a clearly political cartoon satire of the
situation going on in Poland at the time.
An incendiary masterwork firing on all cylinders from the cast and crew,
The War of the Worlds: Next Century saw a bizarre and terrifying
situation in Poland through the eyes of maybe the country’s greatest
science-fiction satirist.
O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1984)
Drawing loosely from the story of Noah’s Ark if the biblical
tale existed in a decaying post-apocalyptic future where the outside air is
unbreathable with a postwar nuclear winter, O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of
Civilization zeroes in on a secret underground society protected from the
outside world called ‘The Dome’. The
populace of tattered and worn last vestiges of humanity gathers together within
the mouth of The Dome patiently awaiting rescue from an unseen spacecraft known
as ‘The Ark’, led by a mysterious wanderer named Soft (Jerzy Stuhr of
Kieslowski fame). His daily routine
consists of keeping the spirits of the people up, luring prostitutes, snuffing
out dissent and once in awhile providing food for the needy. Over time however, details come about The
Dome that casts the whole endeavor in a different light and Soft begins
questioning whether or not the last surviving humans should survive at all.
Considerably less snarky than the previous film with its
tongue-in-cheek tone, O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization is perhaps the
most visually striking film yet in the Tetralogy. Recurring scenes of a squalid and rotting
interior walls of The Dome with faceless human figures bumping into one another
give the sense of a Boschian hellscape of catacombs and bunkers beset by
blindingly bright blue lights, echoing the neon-tinted sepia tones of Lars Von
Trier’s equally bleak The Element of Crime. Mostly about hopeless optimism and how such a
yearning can eat you alive, the film contains perhaps some of writer-director
Szulkin’s darkest and most uncompromising visual ideas yet including an
unforgettable image of a sea of humans racing toward an incandescent light.
Switching cinematographers this time, opting for The
Hourglass Sanatorium director of photography Witold Sobociński and changing
up his composer to Day of the Wacko composer Jerzy Satanowski, the look
and feel of this newer Szulkin iteration is perhaps brighter and shinier than
his previous two features with more than a few scenes of deep neon blue light
filling the frame. It is also
considerably heavier tonally than the films before it, ruminating on the
desperate measures undertaken during desperate times. The film’s hero played brilliantly by Jerzy Stuhr
finds himself running into not one but two Inland Empire stars including
Krzysztof Majchrzak and Knife in the Water star Leon Niemczyk and later
still the hero’s boss played by Golem leading man Marek Walczewski. Seeing these actors show up makes one wonder
just how many surrealist Polish masterworks American writer-director David
Lynch was watching.
Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes (1985)
Somewhere in the near distant future exists a space station orbiting
Earth comprised of Polish prisoners where people are selected at random against
their will to venture out and explore unknown worlds on the far reaches of the
universe. Today is Scope’s (Daniel
Olbrychski) turn and he is sent kicking and screaming to Australia 458, a largely
criminal, decrepit planet overrun by lecherous aliens, underage prostitutes and
slovenly alcoholics. To Scope’s
surprise, the aliens greet him warmly with Chudy (Jerzy Stuhr) offering up a
young girl named Once (Katarzyna Figura) for sexual exploitation and treating
him like a prince. Constantly referring
to him as the “hero”, his hospitality comes at a price in that he must commit a
crime, of any kind, so that he may go down in a blaze of glory in a public
televised execution.
Easily the goriest and most violent film in the tetralogy
while also ironically the most playful, deriving its childlike title from the
director’s daughter’s childhood babbling, Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes takes
the impetus driving the film series and pushes it to its logical extreme in a
fiery phantasmagoria of sights and sounds.
Though existing within an oppressive world, the sense one gets from this
endeavor is anarchy, chaos and impish glee.
Firing on much more hyperactive energies than anything preceding it in
the series, Ga-Ga is the closest Szulkin has come to fine tuning his
brand of grotesque dark irony into being Felliniesque. Startling in its unexpected detours into
extreme violence and inappropriate carnality, this is perhaps the countercultural
sociopolitical provocation the writer-director has been working towards his
whole career.
Switching cinematographers again, this time employing the
talents of Edward Klosinki who went on to shoot Lars Von Trier’s particularly
artificial dystopia Europa, the film for all its squalor and ruinous
decay is shot sumptuously, illuminating the blue-green winter streets with soft
amber lights in the background lighting the frame up light a radioactive
Christmas tree. Contrary to his prior
works in hiring a singular composer, the efforts go to a variety of preexisting
tracks by Wagner or Verdi interspersed with avant-garde Polish compositions by
six other artists, creating also arguably the most sonically lively work in the
tetralogy. For being dumped into such an
ugly pestilent shithole, Ga-Ga is in its way kind of beautiful to see
and hear even as it wades knee deep into debaucheries and murders.
Our “hero” figuratively and literally is played by veteran,
still working actor Daniel Olbrychski from Salt and most recently Kill
It and Leave This Town from 2020.
Making the hapless character into a complicated figure who finds himself
at moral crossroads with the world he’s landed in, Olbrychski imbues the
astronaut with empathy and reserve despite forces working against him to get
him to commit a criminal act. Jerzy
Stuhr fresh off of O-Bi, O-Ba makes a complete role reversal in the
shoes of a reptilian “tour guide” keen on the “hero’s” wrongdoing. The one with the most heavy lifting involved
is The Player actress Katarzyna Figura who is constantly making
uncomfortable preteen passes at Olbrychski who does develop an affinity for her
but not in the way you’d expect. Also,
once again, look for Inland Empire stars Krzysztof Majchrzak and Leon
Niemczyk in sneaky cameos.
While undeniably the most transgressive film in the trilogy,
replete with scenes of a baby doll getting rectally impaled, a guard getting
his arm torn off by the bare hands of another man, blood-soaked shootouts of
women and children and a murky “happy ending”, Ga-Ga is perhaps the most
fully realized work in the series. For
all of its atrocities committed on and offscreen, it is the funniest and most
colorful film in an already decidedly grim saga. A bumpy, irreverent ride that’s also the most
technically proficient film in the quartet, Ga-Ga closes out Piotr
Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy gracefully and with a glimmer of hope after
four films of wading through mire.
Though sadly Szulkin didn’t live to see the newly translated
restorations of four of his most important projects, he would be delighted by
the expenditures of the Polish Film Institute and Vinegar Syndrome to bring his
previously obscure oeuvre into the eyes and ears of adventurous cinephiles
globally.
--Andrew Kotwicki
