if he had any psychiatric history. Some passages were blocked with white paper. Three secret service officers guarded me, but I persuaded the director to show me the farewell letter that Siwiec had written to his wife. I later handed it to her after all those years. And that same day I convinced him to let me copy the entire folder.
EB: How soon did you know what structure you wanted, for example, using refrains?
MD: I really think that nonfiction film comes into being on the editing table, whereas fiction is more limit- ing. But this was my first documentary, so I was very pre- pared. I had written a screenplay. Also, I had shot it on 35mm film. There weren’t many sync cameras in Poland at that time; most were used for fiction. Documentary filmmakers had to contend with a monstrously heavy camera that took three assistants to carry it. Before you pointed it, you had to be sure where and why. Lighting was complicated, the film wasn’t sensitive, plus you had microphones and so on. Hardly an intimate scenario. So you had to create intimacy. When I found the seven-second clip (196 frames)
I knew I needed to stretch time. After I interviewed the Siwiec children, who lived in the United States and Canada, we blew up the 110th frame to see what was happening at the stadium. We projected the image onto a big screen using stop-animation, because I wanted each movement to run at a unique speed. We worked on one frame per day. The whole process took over a month. The shots of Siwiec came last. I knew that if I said the film was about a man setting himself on fire, viewers would be waiting for it. I wanted to postpone it. Another thing that influenced the structure was
Paweł Szymański’s music. It’s very contemporary but has lyricism and emotion. I didn’t want any music that was
illustrative, because music is as important as the dia- logue or image.
EB: One of the most eerie images for me is of the young
men and women in folk costumes. They look like liturgical figures.
MD: That archival footage was shot with a cinema-
scope. The figures would have been stretched on the big screen, but I didn’t want to stretch them. All those gothic faces, the march with the bread, it’s very metaphorical.
EB: You’ve always said that you didn’t want the film to be about sacrifice or guilt.
MD: Or a historical, journalistic film either. I was con- scious of building a “character” that imprints itself on people’s minds. I wanted a cinematic experience. That’s why I don’t give details about Siwiec’s life, his studies, or his work as a bookkeeper, which I used for a radio docu- mentary. I worked on the radio show and the film at the same time, but the radio show is more about the fam- ily’s personal burden. It also includes more secret service material.
EB: What about Siwiec’s farewell message?
MD: He recorded it four days before going to the sta- dium. A friend helped him, but Siwiec didn’t tell him that he intended to set himself on fire. The friend later got frightened and buried the tape. Then when Jan Palach burned himself to death [in Prague], the friend went to the American Embassy. He was treated like a provo- cateur, so he found a catalogue for a Swedish furniture store, and sent them a letter (I guess it was the only for- eign address he had) asking for the information to be
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