admittance of guilt, stressed by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. What has rarely been mentioned is how Through and Through is a drama of wounded masculin- ity: from the opening brawl, in which a woman berates her husband as a good-for-nothing, to Jan’s repeated humiliations (Maria’s silence as Jan is being mocked for having “no talent and no brains,” his brother’s rant, and Maria’s defending herself against epithets as Jan sits pas- sively). Jan, as he will say in court, does not know how to live. This extends to Maria too, of course—in court, she notes that her relations with people are broken—yet Jan’s drama is compounded by his emasculation. Królikiewicz knows intimately the poverty that he
portrays. Łódź, his adopted city, flourished during the textile boom in the early 20th century. During that time, German, Polish, and Jewish merchants built opu- lent mansions in the city’s prime locations (the race to riches was poignantly portrayed in Andrzej Wajda’s The Promised Land). However, by the time Królikiewicz settled in Łódź, the dreams of fast fortunes had long gone bust. Postwar Łódź was a nightmare in Królikiewicz’s telling, its streets and courtyards filled with the homeless and the unemployed. Increasingly, it became a testament to the communist state’s egregious failures in carrying out the country’s reforms. It is no surprise that Poland’s pho- tojournalism and documentary filmmaking, devoted to exposing horrendous living conditions, alcoholism, and other socials ills, are closely tied to the city. Documentary form was a precursor to Poland’s cinema of moral concern, with the ordinary worker as its prime subject. Feature films such as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Camera Buff, Agnieszka Holland’s A Woman Alone, or Krzysztof Zanussi’s Constant Factor, to name a few, portrayed communist workers battling for their rai- son d’être. Królikiewicz’s ethos has been to depict the forgotten and the condemned without sentimentality
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but with empathy. Królikiewicz, who lost his father dur- ing the war and whose mother struggled to make ends meet, recalls experiencing kindness at the hands of the neighborhood ruffians. Hence, no matter how degraded his characters may be, their brutality is offset by startling, if at times prideful selflessness. This is why, in the end, Through and Through emerges as an improbable love story—a romance written for the harshest of times in a style that renowned Polish critic Tadeusz Sobolewski calls a “proletarian baroque.” Jean-Luc Godard once wrote that all films are docu- mentaries about actors, and Through and Through is indeed at times a meta-documentary. Based on an actual trial that took place in 1933 in the city of Grodzko, where Królikiewicz carried out his research, it features elements of psychodrama. Królikiewicz stages the trial of the Malisz couple in the courtroom where the actual trial took place. The actors sit in the benches where the couple once sat, with their inscriptions still chiseled into the wood. Królikiewicz interrogates the two actors about their intimate fears, then edits out his questions, so that all we see are the actors’ candid responses—a marriage of the Stanislavski method of acting with cinema verité, which has led some critics to frame Królikiewicz as an early precursor to the Danish dogma films. But some- thing else is also at stake, for the taut psychodrama makes the judge, i.e., the law, appear cruelly absent and impersonal. Instead, in a direct condemnation of the jus- tice system, it draws us into the agony of the condemned (the injustice of the death penalty was also taken up in 1988 by Krzysztof Kieślowski in The Short Film about Killing; the penalty itself was finally abolished in Poland in 1998). For all of its political relevance, it is Through and
Through’s artistry that guarantees its enduring power. Królikiewicz employs what he has called “off-camera
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