“Deep down I believe that reality is unknowable. I manage at times to register and to weave tiny fragments that contain a grain of truth, but this doesn’t mean that I’ve understood something completely. At the end of it all, I’m left with more questions, and with a sense that the stream of reality flows on, into eternity.”—MARCEL ŁOZIŃSKI
to the idea that while memory is frail and fallible, it can also be redemptive, using nonfiction film to heal its wounds. Nevertheless, the films Łoziński made before 1989
deal more consistently with political might and social group dynamics. They delve into the murky secrets of regime oppression while suggesting that many ordi- nary persons might act questionably when vested with undue power. Łoziński is never merely pointing the fin- ger; the point is not who succumbs to social pressure but how. Thus his passionate delving into the many dif- ferent ways in which human beings are innately mal- leable, making the sociopolitical machine, once set in motion, so devastating. For example, in one of Łoziński’s early black-and-white shorts, a psychodrama set at a fac- tory-management meeting, bickering and self-serving employees pin poor productivity on a coworker. On the surface, nothing could be as dull as a debate over pro- duction quotas. But Łoziński turns the psychology of searching for scapegoats into one of his most fascinat- ing themes. He uses it dramatically in Front Collision, a ten-minute documentary short from 1975. In the film, a lionized railway worker is stripped of honors on the eve of his retirement after causing an ill-fortuitous accident. Łoziński reenacts the railroad routine as well as the acci- dent via archival footage. Embracing theatricality, he
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stages a kind of double game. He shows the manage- ment’s point of view—in one scene, in which an offi- cial reads aloud a document condemning the worker, the slow zooming out creates distance as it jams the official against the wall, a typewriter clacking merci- lessly. Łoziński contrasts the aseptic official account with grainy images of the harsh realities of the rail workers’ daily grind (little sleep, crammed dormitories, isolation and tedium). Decaying buildings, glimpsed through drizzled windows, and dark tunnels create bleak, albeit poetic, mise-en-scène. The film’s tone swerves when Łoziński stages an elaborate fete that the government had planned for the demoted worker but canceled after the accident. Up to now, all scenes have been black and white, but Łoziński shoots the fete in vibrant color: a film- within-a-film, a utopian fantasy. He uses the system’s ide- alist veneer to mock it and then jumps back to the grim reality by returning to the image of trains passing by as the demoted worker watches passively. Meanwhile, the impressionist flash stands the documentary logic on its head, suggesting that the flash is more “real” than every- thing else—the official’s recitation but a feeble append- age to the fete film. How to Live, begun in 1976 and released in 1981, is
Łoziński’s first full-length film. Originally intended as a short, Łoziński sold the film’s concept as a portrait of
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