Radiance Films: The Dancing Hawk (1977) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

Radiance Films continues to surprise and delight with their unveiling of previously hard-to-obtain Eastern European titles throughout the world in lovingly detailed deluxe limited-edition releases replete with plentiful extras and the time-honored OBI spines and in recent months they’ve started showing love for the work of Polish director Grzegorz Królikiewicz.  Following the release of his debut work Through and Through from 1973, Królikiewicz found work in television between 1973 and 1974 up until his second feature Permanent Objections, the already experimental atonal avant-garde provocateur was about to deploy his most anarchically radioactive cinematic nuclear bomb with 1977’s feverishly phantasmagorical The Dancing Hawk.  A film which feels like Andrei Konchalovsky’s decades-spanning Siberiade if it were directed by Sergei Parajanov by way of Shinya Tsukamoto, the film is furiously audaciously alive nonstop audiovisual sensory assault and though running at ninety-nine minutes it doesn’t waste a millisecond of time or space in the boldest Soviet Eastern European film since Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

 
Told in fleeting elliptical episodes that crash and subliminally flash cut against our eyes and ears, The Dancing Hawk more or less follows the upbringing and exploits of peasant farm boy Michal Toporny (Through and Through actor Franciszek Trzeciak) who quickly ascends the social ladder in post-war Poland faster than his ancestors ever could.  Rather than follow in his father’s footsteps, he abandons his family including his wife and son to wed a socially upstanding woman in furtherance of his own career aspirations.  Working his way up to becoming the head of a mining company, however, his new wife Wieslawa (Beata Tyszkiewicz of Sexmission) grows increasingly disillusioned with the amount of time Michal is spending on the job and eventually begins an affair with one of Michal’s younger engineers.  Before we really have much time to process this, we’re propelled faster than the Stargate concluding 2001: A Space Odyssey into the future where we see Michal as an ailing elder trying to rekindle the frayed bonds with his long-estranged son.

 
Throughout this hallucinatory hyperactive psychedelic freakout, the film drifts in and out of visions real and imaginary of the changing sociopolitical landscape of Poland up through the Second World War up through the present.  Bearing structural and thematic similarities to the aforementioned Andrei Konchalovsky four-hour saga but with the bug-eyed fever pitched hysteria of Polish maestro Andrzej Zulawski (Possession), The Dancing Hawk from its experimental and atonal, borderline industrial soundscape speaking to why David Lynch would eventually come to Poland for Inland Empire makes itself known as a wholly anarchic exercise in pure cinema.  From Angst cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczynski’s utterly jaw dropping “how-the-Hell-did-that-do-that?!” camerawork including a rotating camera shot positioned between the floor and a bed to Killing Auntie composer Janusz Hajdun’s otherworldly atonal score which seems more like sound engineering than music, we are thrust head over heels into a sphere and headspace that’s wholly captivating and has the wide-angled bug-eyed feel of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange by way of the frenzied energies of Zulawski’s The Devil.

 
Performance-wise, the film is an ensemble chorus of supporting players including Blind Chance actor Tadeusz Lomnicki but between our two leads Franciszek Trzeciak and Beata Tyszkiewicz the stars of this madcap horror show are the cinematographer, production designer Zbigniew Warpechowski’s outlandish set pieces and co-editors Jadwiga Ignatczenko and Halina Nawrocka’s hyperkinetic phantasmagorical cross-cutting in a film that doesn’t seem to slow down as much as it keeps picking up speed.  From beginning to end, it does not let up and seemingly unfolds with greater anxiousness.  While ultimately a portrait of urbanizing and the overarching impact of capitalism on a communist society with ever shifting sociopolitical mores reshaping the country from top to bottom, you’re hit so fast with so many psychedelic hallucinatory images at times it feels like a Polish Stan Brakhage. 

 
Making its worldwide Blu-ray disc premiere via Radiance Films in a sparkling new 4K digital restoration, crisply preserving the frenetic 1.37:1 camerawork with Polish monoaural sound, the disc comes housed with two short films by the cinematographer Soup and Oh! I Can’t Stop! as well as a collector’s booklet featuring essay writing by Polish film scholar Piotr Kletowski.  Also included in the Radiance package’s time-honored OBI spine design and reversible sleeve art is an interview with film critic Carmen Gray.  Already fond of the director’s debut Through and Through before being floored right off the racetrack by this wickedly energetic speed demon of a Soviet Polish film, The Dancing Hawk is from a viewer’s standpoint a sheer smashing into smithereens of the sensory faculties leaving you shattered but not necessarily broken into pieces by the overwhelming experience.  Radiance Films have done it again with another fantastic release in a director’s oeuvre I hope to soon see more of!

--Andrew Kotwicki