questions about the price of his success ring deadpan, and here and there the film plunges into sordid comedy. Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl or Neil Jordan’s
The Butcher Boy come to mind; like those daring films, Rat Catcher is a litmus test for a gutsy point of view. It boldly pushes the limits of identification.
in t e r view with maciej dry g a s
ELA BITTENCOURT: You don’t think of yourself as pri- marily a nonfiction filmmaker. How did you arrive at the documentary form to tell Siwiec’s story?
MACIEJ DRYGAS: I studied fiction film in Moscow, and
worked for Krzystof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski. So I was positioning myself as a fiction filmmaker, though I was interested in stories based on facts. I learned about Siwiec’s self-immolation by accident. I had never heard of him, but then I was only twelve in 1968. My elders, how- ever, hadn’t heard of him either. Some twenty years later, I wanted to give meaning to his death. And I believed that only a nonfiction film could do this. If this had been a story we all knew, I would have probably filmed a feature. But I knew that Siwiec would remain in our conscience the way I pictured him. This gave me a sense of responsi- bility. I put aside my “fiction ego.” This was right after the fall of communism. The same
people continued to work at the Central Photography Agency as before. I couldn’t tell them I was investigat- ing the truth, so I made up a story about making a docu- mentary on harvest festivities. It was like being Sergeant Columbo. I basically acted not to arouse suspicion. I recall during one visit they showed me albums with over four hundred images. Two were missing. I found the neg- atives that said, “The photographer requested that the images be removed.” But it turned out that the censors
42
had had them removed. The photographs were indeed of Siwiec, but the photojournalist didn’t know who he was. He had not investigated the story. Siwiec’s family didn’t know much either. Luckily, the documentary film archives in Warsaw were well inven- toried. One day, a woman brought me a scrap of film that she had found in the basement. It was wrapped in yellow paper and labeled, “A shot of burning man.” She said, “I’m not sure if this interests you.” I kept my poker face. The material had to be rescued, it had fungus. The process was nerve-racking, because cleaning fungus could destroy the whole thing. But the shot was in fact of Siwiec. It was only then that I went to the archives direc- tor and requested that the image be kept in a safe for my documentary.
I made a call for witnesses on television and drove
around the country to interview them. Getting to the secret service archives was the hard part. This was before the Institute of National Remembrance. When I finally gained access to the secret service headquarters at the Mostowski Palace in Warsaw, I felt like I was still in the 1950s. I saw people in faded blue-gray suits, their hair slicked down and their faces so bitter. The world had changed, but the place continued the same. The folder on Siwiec was small. The secret service only cared whether Siwiec was part of a larger organization. They wanted to spread rumors that he was mad, and had investigated
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