Wojaczek

I never quite realized how amazingly hard it is to write objectively about a film when the director is in attendance and afterwards takes questions. His or her answers will inevitably skew what you just saw. This conflicts me for two reasons. One, I desire at least one day to think about a movie before I talk about it. This often leads to frustrating questions from others mere minutes after the movie is over of "how was it?" or what'd you think?" This is a most frustrating question when one hasn't decided what one thinks. Or if I have decided but am not quite sure of why or wants to further reflect on it.

The second reason is that inevitably I will only be able to think about the film after the fact on the terms defined by the auteur. On one level I crave that sort of insider information which was going through the head of the director or writer. This is particularly fabulous when I see an image and say "wow" and then hear the film maker state the importance of that image. But at the same time I lose the ability to truly look past his intent and find something else.

Lech Majewski, who directed the wonderfully visual and entertaining story of Angelus was present at the viewing of his biopic about a Polish poet named Wojaczek. He is as you might expect of an artist at times charming, refreshing in his straight forwardness and with just a hint of the underlying temperamental nature (i.e. you have sense he can be a real asshole if he wants to be). He took a handful of generic questions formulated by film theorists more than film lovers and turned them into interesting answers about the nature of getting independent films made.

He talked of the power and beauty of paintings and how each viewing of a brilliant painting rewards countless new things. And it is clearly with this view that he approaches film making. In that regard he is amazing for trying experimental things and succeeding. He may not feel that the film is as amazing a medium as painting but I do. In fact I would take his view of paintings that each viewing reveals something new and argue that a truly great film can do the same thing. Granted a film takes more commitment and there are so many things to balance that more often than not a great film is not achieved.

But that isn't to say certain films do not achieve it. Some films are groundbreaking because they travel new paths, some are amazing because they do ever thing they are supposed to do to perfection. Some films I watch 25 times and find something new and fascinating in them ever time. Thin Red Line in my opinion is such a film as is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light and I could name others. Regardless of that it was quite refreshing to hear Majewski speak about art and film and if for no other reason his films are worth watching because they don't just adhere to a formula and they aren't mindless popcorn drivel. They are trying to be art.

Majewski noted that Wojaczek was a mythic figure in his youth and that his poetry in Polish is so beautiful and almost entirely untranslatable. In a nice summation of the film, Majewski himself on the night I viewed the film said (and I'm paraphrasing): "I couldn't make his poetry a film, so I tried to make the film a poem."

Wojaczek was a bright young poet with some serious manic depressive symptoms. Fearless in life in a era and location that was practically immobilized by fear. The film follows him in his last days as he interacts with friends and strangers and leads a ultimately destructive lifestyle. Opening with startling imagery and affecting a mythic stature the film follows Wojaczek and often pauses for beautiful imagery.

In terms of its impression on me, I found Angelus a far more beautiful film with its explicit attempts to recreate painting in staged film settings. But that is not fair to the film at hand, since its objectives are clearly different. In as much as its stated goal was to create a mythic narrative, I think it succeeds (another viewer held a different opinion). Admittedly the translation was not great, nor were the subtitles always legible and I found this distracted me most often.

I guess in the end I'm mostly positive about the film although I didn't enjoy it as much as his other film. And as this wordy post suggests I was more struck by the nature of the director than the film. But I must admit the imagery of the final scene was as powerful as anything I've seen in a while.