“There was a time in the 1960s when the documentary form permeated the fiction films as something to recreate and to copy, sometimes even as a way to give the film the desired graini- ness. Graininess, amateur lighting, the use of very sensitive film—fiction features picked up all of these things from documentaries.”—GRZEGORZ KRÓLIKIEWICZ, I Work For Posterity: Interview in Book Form by Piotr Kletkowski and Piotr Marecki
“[Królikiewicz’s] ‘democratic mise-en-scene’ relativizes elements, activating our imagination.”
—Polish film critic TADEUSZ SOBOLEWSKI
If Marcel Łoziński is the living king of Polish nonfiction film, Grzegorz Królikiewicz is its enfant terrible, a terri- fying court jester. A documentary filmmaker in his own right, it is nevertheless primarily in his fiction films that he has expanded film’s capabilities, blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Startling and unnerv- ing to some, but certainly unforgettable, his two master- pieces, Through and Through and The Case of Pekosiński, are spectacular showcases for Królikiewicz’s extensive film theory, which he introduced in Polish film magazines in the 1970s. He has also taught for over three decades at the prestigious Łódź Film School. In Królikiewicz’s fiction debut, Through and Through, made in 1972, a couple of newlyweds struggle on soci- ety’s fringes. In the film’s opening, Jan and Maria Malisz (played by Franciszek Trzeciak and Anna Nieborowska) meet at a raunchy libation, in which Królikiewicz cast real-life criminals alongside professional actors. Given the scene’s direct-cinema rawness, it is perhaps no sur- prise that the Polish Communist Party officials deplored this exposition of drunkenness and violence in the
workers’ state. What they abhorred even more was the film’s pointed moral ambivalence. Through and Through, which alternates between seemingly unmediated scenes and highly stylized ones, has a visual language that is deliberately opaque. In the opening, Królikiewicz cuts from the shot of distraught Maria fixing herself the morn- ing after the party and Jan’s glimpse of her to their rather cold marriage in church. The abrupt transition points to Królikiewicz’s interest in an expressionist method that stresses psychological states (this includes fantasies and dreams) over physical reality. As soft-spoken, helpless Jan is fired from a photography studio and struggles to find work at a printing press and then at an architec- ture firm, Maria supports him with odd jobs. Slowly, she emerges as his source of strength, though Królikiewicz leaves the nature of their attraction poignantly ambigu- ous. Privileging image over dialogue and fracturing the narrative, he often challenges us to construe our own version of the events. After being driven by despera- tion to commit a heinous crime, Jan and Maria fiercely defend each other, each trying to assume the entire guilt to spare the other spouse. The critics who saw the film in Cannes in 1974 noted
the film’s Dostoevskian undertones, though Królikiewicz has always maintained that his film focuses more on the protagonists’ dignity than on their humbleness or
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