witnesses back to the stadium. The responses that he draws forth range from coolness and helplessness to quiet defiance. Memory as gloss emerges from the con- trast between the post-factum statements (“we were told to keep our mouths shut”) and the terror-stricken faces of those reacting to the incident in real time. The montage interplays unmediated horror with a cover-up until the status quo emerges as trauma. The fact that the whole film is shot in black and white accentuates the sense of temporal continuity and extends the aftershock. It is ultimately the film’s montage that opens up the
RAT CATCHER
story is thus bracketed by two burnings: one aimed at erasing the record of surveillance and political crimes; the other, Siwiec’s, to challenge the pernicious fabrica- tion of history that the communists perpetuated. Drygas takes us on a scavenger hunt to the cavernous secret ser- vice archives, where we learn that Siwiec’s file has gone missing. It is hard to imagine what it was like for Poles to see the ominous headquarters—the Polish Stasi or KGB—stand open. Drygas reveals layers of Siwiec’s personality in inti-
mate interviews with his friends and family. In voice-over, he plays, refrain-like, the personal testament that Siwiec recorded days before his death. It is all bits and pieces, an intricate mosaic. In one shot, a table with the items that Siwiec bequeathed to his children serves for a mauso- leum. In another, Siwiec’s wife recalls seeing him for the last time from their apartment window. Drygas recon- structs Siwiec’s journey to Warsaw and brings firsthand
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in-between spaces and transforms the raw material into a chimerical visual poem or lament. The sheer magnetism of the archival television clips astound. Fetes, national- ist pomp, and folkloric pageantry don’t make for the most exciting subjects. Nevertheless, Drygas and his edi- tor, Dorota Wardęszkiewicz, harness the power of myth inherent in such celebrations. European harvest fetes hark back to ancient pagan rituals, an evocation of a life cycle that speaks of birth but even more powerfully of death. Death haunts these clips, in the distortion of the young dancers’ heads and the elongation of their torsos, as if they were liturgical figures. Drygas interviews theo- logian Józef Tischner to stress the spiritual undertones of Siwiec’s sacrifice. Through repetition and incantation, the film’s structure echoes the sacral notes. “Who needs the truth?” asks a solitary protagonist of
Marcel Łoziński So It Doesn’t Hurt. Drygas’s film responds, We all do. Except, truth must hurt; without pain, there is no catharsis. Drygas stresses that what shocked him most when he saw Siwiec burn in close-up was the absence of suffering on his face—here was a man on a mission. In the final sequence Drygas, resisiting our urge to see, moves in on Siwiec’s face slowly. The inflectionless pantomime, set to hypnotic music by a Polish contempo- rary composer, Paweł Szymański, becomes all the more
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