“There’s only one thing that interests me: the person.“—BOGDAN DZIWORSKI
A communist official once sent me to Sozopol, [on the
coast of] Bulgaria. He wanted me to make a film about a socialist competition, showing which worker caught the largest herring, etc., but I made the film my way […], using the fishermen’s faces to tell the story, kind of like showing the emotions of a boxing match. I was called in by Comrade Szczukowski. “Comrade,” he
said, “we must have a voice-over with some commentary in your film.” I said, “Comrade, there’s not going to be any
commentary.” “But we must have it.” “It’s a straightforward story.” “Well, we don’t get it!” “Well then, if you don’t get it, I’m leaving!” And so I left.
—BOGDAN DZIWORSKI An uncompromising maverick, tireless improviser,
teacher, photographer, filmmaker, cinematographer— Bodzio, as Bogdan Dziworski’s friends and students endearingly call him, has been all of these things. Yet he vir- tually disappeared from the Polish filmmaking scene after the fall of communism. Socialist quotas privileged certain types of scripts (for example, those that included animals and children), and Dziworski wrote his to guarantee more
film reel, even if he didn’t follow them. Once the state art patronage floundered, however, Dziworski struggled to secure funds. He has made a comeback only recently: after being given an international retrospective at Play-Doc in 2009, he was also awarded the Lion of Lions for lifetime achievement and given a full retrospective at the Kraków Film Festival last year. Dziworski’s experiments as a cinematographer are
legendary, particularly his work on Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s first feature, Through and Through, about two unrepentant outsiders who commit a heinous crime. The shock waves of this film continue to reverberate, but we can hardly imag- ine how potent it was at a time when Poland’s communist regime preached unending social progress. Decadent, amoral, and visually jarring, the film was showered with epithets. Today, some forty years after its premiere, it is still Dziworski’s searching, disquieting camera that enthralls. In one scene, set up in a long continuous take, a murky hotel interior and a vertiginous elevator ride convey a uto- pian fantasy with nightmarish portents. With equipment lagging behind western standards, long handheld takes were Sisyphean, but Dziworski established a national record (300 hundred meters, when the standard length of a 35mm film reel is 305 meters). Dziworski’s seemingly directionless, hallucinatory camera perfectly captures the Poles’ initial hopefulness after World War II—the country’s
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