passed on to Radio Free Europe. And Radio Free Europe reported it as an unconfirmed account.
EB: In the stadium interviews, we witness so many dif- ferent levels of denial. MD: Because the film is a psychodrama, though I
imagined it very differently at first. The second camera was supposed to follow all witnesses around the sta- dium, recording their conversations about what had really happened. Except that day it poured like hell. The discussions took place in a dark tunnel; we couldn’t shoot them. For me, the greatest surprise was that Siwiec’s act left no mark on the witnesses. Journalists would say that witnessing tragedy was an occupational hazard, though they had never filmed anyone else who set himself on fire. The only person really affected was the fireman who tried to extinguish the flames.
EB: Yet there’s so much palatable trauma in the film.
MD: In the 1960s, there was talk about “communism with a human face.” People believed that the system could be reformed, but Siwiec had no illusions. Today we want to believe that it was the secret ser-
vice that shut people up, but here this is absolutely not true. People themselves were scared; no one scared them. It’s the fact that 100,000 people spontaneously turned away that shocks us.
EB: You brought in Father Tischner, a renowned Polish theologian, to speak of Siwiec.
MD: Siwiec was incredibly religious. He left behind a ten-point plan to prepare for death. His last point was
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a confession. I interviewed Father Tischner to help me understand how a religious person could make such a decision. Tischner had never studied immolation but had no doubt about Siwiec’s martyrdom. The tragedy was that the Church as an institution had no room for people like Siwiec. The meeting with Tischner also heightened my sense
of composition, so the film sits on two “pillars,” or turning points. The first part retraces Siwiec’s steps. Then Tischner steps in, like a Greek chorus, and lends the film its unity. I knew that I had to reveal Siwiec’s family slowly, not just summarize, “Siwiec had a loving wife and five children.” The structure had to be dramatic.
EB: Speaking of structure, what was it like to work with
film editor Dorota Wardęszkiewicz? MD: I was a young filmmaker with no nonfiction
experience. I wrote a careful screenplay that she refused to read. Later, I realized she never reads screenplays. She doesn’t want to be influenced by a filmmaker’s vision. She would look at materials and say, “This isn’t good, throw it away,” and I couldn’t believe it! But she was right. Though sometimes she’d end up using the rejects. This kind of collaboration is very demanding. You must always convince your editors as to the structure of your film, or they won’t cut it right. Sometimes we’d have intense technical discussions, exploring each episode to arrive at the final structure. In this sense, Dorota was my teacher. She has incredible intuition. Later, working for the radio, I learned about the three-dramatic-line structure that I teach to my students today: first the storyline, see how basic story develops, then the build- up of metaphorical meaning, and then, most impor- tantly, the emotional line.
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