serve something that she did not believe in. When I came to see her, she did not want to speak with me. She said, “No more cameras, no more TV.” We kept going back. Finally, a crewmember mentioned offhandedly that one of my films had been censored. Urszula asked which one—it was Happy End—and then agreed to shoot. We’ve been in touch ever since. It was not so much her auto-censorship, but the fact that she had just been so mistreated by the media and by the peo- ple in the village. After our visit, on the other hand, her neighbors finally saw that they had not known her. For me, it’s a small miracle.
EB: Why did you go back to Urszula after your first film with her, The Visit? MŁ: I guess I had no new ideas, and it occurred to me
that it would be great to return. We have a lot of friends in common, so many coincidences that don’t even seem plausible. Truth is stranger than fiction. That’s why I tell my students this heresy: “It’s not enough for something to be true, it has to be plausible.”
EB: In So It Doesn’t Hurt, Urszula phrases it as “the truth of the image.”
MŁ: She also asks who needs the truth. I told her that perhaps others could identify with her. Perhaps some- one does need her story. For me, the key impulse behind making documentary films is so that others, directors and viewers alike, feel less alone. My dream is always that a viewer may come out of my screening and say, “Wait,
I also have these problems.” It’s not about discovering a recipe for life; that would be nonsensical. It’s about seek- ing communication, discovering common fears, weak- nesses, and dreams. In documentaries, the identification can be stronger than in fiction films since these are real people.
EB: I wonder about the status of nonfiction filmmakers
in communist Poland. In the Soviet Union, someone like Dziga Vertov was seen as potentially dangerous.
MŁ: Yes, but our films were watched very carefully by the
government officials and not just because of censorship. The films made by Irena Kamińska, Krystyna Gryczełowska, Paweł Kędzierski, and Krzysztof Kieślowski helped the government to get in touch with reality. Without them, the Party only got falsified reports. They learned what was actually happening in their country from us.
EB: Yet a good number of your films were at first banned
because of censorship. MŁ: Of course, I wouldn’t say that our situation was
better than now, but for nonfiction filmmakers, censor- ship turned out to be a blessing. We knew that our films would be blocked, but we had a vague hope of outsmart- ing the censors. Without them, we would have probably talked about our country’s plight more bluntly, capturing the poverty and the corruption much more straightfor- wardly, just as you see it done on the news today. The censorship forced us to be more sophisticated visually and conceptually.
15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52