handsomely. Through the sustained act of looking, the viewers become his accomplices as he vivisects his desire to know. Is curiosity damning? What if it means trampling someone’s privacy or safety? Łoziński has noted that So It Doesn’t Hurt is probably the one film for which he turned the camera off more than he turned it on, and scraped more film than ever before. What is left makes clear just how complex and daunting the injunc- tion to hold back can be for a filmmaker—a delicate balance between the voyeuristic curiosity so potent in
How to Live and a new, at times sublime, reticence (not without irony, Łoziński has said that, given absolute free- dom, he has in a way become his own censor). Like a fine essayist, Łoziński never relinquishes the paradoxes inherent to his role as filmmaker, yet he stays open to the medium’s endless possibilities. Perhaps the nonfic- tion-film conundrum, and its glory, is best captured by Urszula herself: “So it doesn’t hurt,” she speaks her final wish—an impassioned plea for the humanity that must be granted to each person, while giving art its due.
in t e r view with marcel ł ozinski ó ELA BITTENCOURT: You often speak of wanting to
“thicken reality” in your films. Can you explain the phrase? MARCEL ŁOZIŃSKI: 89mm from Europe is a good
example. If I had a month, I’m sure that some passen- gers would have ended up getting off the train and talking to the railroad workers. During the two weeks of documentation, we met all the workers, drank vodka with them, and saw maybe one passenger get off the train. But during the nine days of the shoot, I was very concerned that no one would, and I wanted a scene like that, so I sent my son. I knew that if I let him loose he would run to the train workers, but I had no idea what else would happen. He started saying to one, “my hands are dirty, yours are dirty too.” So that’s my example of “thickening reality,” moving towards a situation that already exists, or has a potential to exist, with a different railway worker or child. My point is that I introduce ele- ments that I know exist, but may not necessarily occur spontaneously in that moment.
n I’ve worked in this mode from the start. For How to
Live, we only had enough film for seventeen minutes, not for one hour and a half. Our cinematographer, Jacek Petrycki, had an incredible sense of timing, but when- ever he began to shoot, his hands would tremble from all this pressure. It was living hell, but two of the couples we used in the film were my friends. My colleague from [my earlier film] Happy End was, at that time, a direc- tor at a government ministry. I offered him a vacation at the camp and gave him just one directive, to act like he’s trying to make a name for himself. The other couple I knew is the one that does not want to fit in. We just asked them to be themselves. I introduced into the mix a careerist and a passive dissenter, but no opposition leader, because I understood the camp to be a metaphor for what was happening in Poland. Poland’s opposition movement began in 1976, two months after I shot the film. If the Committee of the Defense of Workers [KOR] had existed before, I would have certainly introduced someone who spoke his mind openly. But since it didn’t,
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