Afterwards, I edited out my questions. That’s how I mixed fiction with something that feels tangibly real. In a way, that moment in court is a documentary.
EB: When it came out, Through and Through was billed as a crime movie, which led some viewers to mis- understand it, and it evoked pretty furious reactions. Some went as far as demanding their money back at the box office.
GK: The film was shown in a kind of shopping mall. But some political game was also involved. The Party attacked me, because I thought of the criminals’ emo- tions, which was unthinkable. At the Warsaw Party Conference, I was denounced as amoral.
EB: It was said that you were being too sympathetic
towards Jan and Maria Malisz. Yet you show them as both, criminals and victims.
GK: Yes, I do show their blindness and brutality.
That’s what is so tragic about our lives. I am a child of the war. I was born in June 1939 and was free till the end of September, but after that I always felt like I was being enslaved by someone. The war destroyed my fam- ily’s financial standing. We had to start anew. And so my films are about people who became even more vulner- able than my mother, a war widow who managed to feed and clothe us, and still to help those who were in even greater need (alcoholics, people who just got out of prison). That sense of life on the margins has always stayed with me.
EB: This comes through in Jan Malisz’s incredible ten- derness and vulnerability. But he also says, “The crime is the only thing that’s entirely mine.”
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GK: Because everything else has been taken away
from him. Jan Malisz’s losing his job at a photography studio makes sense, because people like him can really bring down a business. But on the other hand, it is an enormous social crime to eliminate people like him.
EB: And Maria Malisz?
GK: She believes that she has earned the right to curse the unjust world. EB: Both of your films focus on the undesirable. In The
Case of Pekosiński, there’s a sense that in new, capitalist Europe, there are also clear winners and losers.
GK: And no room for dregs. That is a good starting
point to ask why we don’t want to see ugliness on the screen. It’s a paradox, because those who wish that ugli- ness would go away end up ignoring human suffering. Sometimes very interesting films fail to capture this con- nection between ideals and brutality, the fact that good people may also end up on “a garbage heap.” And that dirt bothers us.
EB: How did you approach working with Pekosiński on such painful personal material?
GK: First, I was told that it was impossible to make the film, because Pekos [Pekosiński’s nickname] was in a terrible physical shape. When I visited him, a young woman opened the door insisting that he wasn’t in. The apartment stank. Pekos lay in bed looking like a corpse, his clothing stained with piss. Whenever Pekos got his retirement check, local hoodlums immediately hauled him to a bar. He wasted all his money buying drinks, and drank himself until he blacked out. That day,
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