Kazimierz, a middle-aged tradesman, collects wood. The action moves from a courtyard of an old building to his workshop. Wiszniewski intertwines the color shots of Kazimierz sawing wood, filmed at unusual angles, with snippets of black-and-white archival footage. Most Polish viewers would recognize the voice of a cult actor, Jan Himilsbach, in the voice-over (though his name does not appear in the credits)—the first clue that we aren’t dealing with a documentary. In fact, Wiszniewski wrote the text, a fictionalized account of a generation, and cast an anonymous actor as Everyman. Carpenter is thus a pure fantasy that poses as a documentary. We could even call it a mockumentary, given Carpenter’s
dark, underhanded humor. Particularly when the carpen- ter associates his joining the Communist Party with “orders pouring in” and war with continuous business. A mournful note slips into his account when he relates how he made coffins for the young Warsaw Uprising soldiers, but history viewed from his perspective is necessarily skewed and solipsistic. Wiszniewski takes on sacred national myths that in propagandist hands would be a requiem to a class hero, and weaves them into this very personal dirge, whose final aim—a demand for housing—he reveals at the end. And so, year before Andrzej Wajda made Man of Marble, a feature about a forgotten exemplary socialist worker, Wiszniewski peers behind the regime’s mask and reveals its true face. Wiszniewski’s use of archival footage is no less
pointed. In one clip, he shows Hitler dancing as the voice-over relates the outbreak of WWII. Wiszniewski plays this footage thrice and repeats the strategy else- where. By looping motion à la Muybridge, he strips the image of its particular context. History, events repeat, at times to a bizarre, incongruently comic, effect. The image is no longer sacred, and the fact that it is real tells us precious little about what it represents or means. This
goes to the heart of much that has been said since about images as problematic truth-bearers. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes that images dupe us into believing in universal messages and recipients, a communal “we.” Yet readings are necessarily multiple, as Wiszniewski recognized. The image’s status is ambigu- ous, for it depends as much on what is shown as what we read into it. In our media-crazed, technological age, Wiszniewski’s skepticism towards signs (both images and words) would make him fit right in. In communist Poland, how- ever, no other nonfiction filmmaker confounded the censors as much as he did. Fellow Łódź School filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz was at times labeled “a madman” (and jokes wryly that the epitaph afforded him rela- tively free rein), Marcel Łoziński was seen as a necessary evil, but Wiszniewski was treated like a patient with a deadly plague. It must have taken loads of auto-irony for Wiszniewski to endure the regime’s cynical attempts to contain him. With nine of his twelve films denied dis- tribution, including Carpenter, which was held off until 1980, it is no wonder that his friends described him as increasingly despondent. In his wife’s words, he was “like a man without a compass, desperately trying to find his way out of a labyrinth.”* Wiszniewski spent years cam- paigning for permission to shoot his second feature and left it unfinished upon his death of a heart attack in 1981, at the age of 34. He would not experience the bitter winter of that year, when Communist Party leader General Jaruzelski quashed the opposition by imposing the martial law. Yet, in a way, Wiszniewski’s art was pro- phetic—today, we may glimpse in it a visually pointed, and poignant, autopsy of Poland’s dictatorship.
*Marek Hendrykowski, ed. Wojciech Wiszniewski. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2006 (Polish language edition).
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