Dziworski’s longtime editor Agnieszka Bojanowska calls his films poems. Indeed, we encounter in them the rhythm, refrain, syncopation, and compression one might expect from a poem. The more we watch Biathlon, the clearer it becomes that the short is as much about sports as it is about unleashing and celebrating film’s possibili- ties: freeing the camera from stasis, defying gravity, which, at the time when equipment was still quite heavy, was no small feat. Using poetic shorthand, Dziworski rids skiing of superfluous accouterments, of ceremonies or trophies. He shows athletes shooting into the sky, like bullets, almost machine-like as their images flash across the screen. The frequent breaks in continuity and sped-up shots hark back to Eisensteinian montage but never feel overwhelmingly formalist. The post-sync sound—a skier’s heavy breath- ing, a long scratchy slide of a ski down the wet slope—is often slightly off. Dziworski mutes certain sounds while accentuating others, or breaks up the sound-image cor- respondence, frustrating our sensory expectations. The particular demands that Dziworski’s context-
free cinema places on the viewer are nowhere more visible than in A Few Stories about a Man (1983). As its offhanded title suggests, A Few Stories about a Man has no biographical pretensions. The film’s vignettes, or “stories,” lack narrative denouement, and instead are fleeting revelations of the physical abilities of one man (Jerzy Orłowski, who remains unidentified in the film). In another director’s hands, his actions—from ski jump- ing and diving to drawing and, more prosaically, piss- ing—could have appeared Herculean, given that our protagonist is armless. Yet Dziworski films Orłowski with casualness and humor. In one scene, in which Orłowski dives from a bridge into a river, a tourist passenger ship full of stunned onlookers swims by. Combining stag- ing and spontaneity, Dziworski hunts for life’s uncanny moments. Meanwhile, the lack of dialogue or backstory
curtails any attempt to psychologize; instead, the activi- ties are highly performative. A coy, even sly portrait, the film hovers between truth and artifice, concreteness and abstraction, chimerical through and through. Like Andy Warhol, but perhaps even more like the
many photographers before him, including Weegee and Henri Cartier-Bresson (the father of candid pho- tography and Dziworski’s idol), Dziworski has a knack for finding subjects on society’s fringes. A Few Stories about a Man takes its tone from the irascible Orłowski, a member of a gang of house robbers in real life. In fact, a sequel that BBC commissioned from Dziworski years later shows Orłowski behind bars, his identity revealed as he introduces himself—Dziworski’s rare bid to pro- vide more context. But Dziworski found his most endur- ing and affecting bit of marginalia in circus performers. He observes them in the arena and behind the scenes in the black-and-white twenty-minute short Arena of Life (1979). Here Dziworski proves again a contrarian portraitist who rejects the idea of capturing a person’s essence. He draws us in not so much with the perform- ers’ technical abilities as with their expressivity and panache. Arena of Life is about the aura of a spectacle: In one scene, two tightrope walkers perform their act as we glimpse a Chaplinesque man who holds their rope taut. When the show ends, the performers throw a feast dur- ing which they entertain each other. Here are again the showmen with wigs and props, the animal trainers with their beloved pets. In a metaphor that equates life and circus, their private behaviors emerge as kinds of masks. Reality and fantasy mix till the final shot of a vacated table, bottles shimmering Vermeer-like—pure poetry, Bojanowska might say of this final image, all the more forceful for its eerie stillness. Dziworski sees cinematographers as essential co- creators, so it’s important to mention that Arena of Life
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