The state, for its part, exerted constant
pressure. Łoziński, Dziworski, Królikiewicz, and Wiszniewski all had run-ins of various degrees either directly with the censors or with the Communist Party. A filmmaker like Łoziński or Królikiewicz saw his films travel to international festivals and win accolades while being forbidden to play back home. The regime used this international visibil- ity to appear magnanimous, even though directors like Wiszniewski were increasingly silenced at home. Maciej Drygas, also in this series but a generation younger, nearly gave up filmmaking before his career was saved by the regime’s collapse. In the late 1980s, Andrzej Czarnecki decried wide- spread oppression via thinly veiled meta- phors, but real systemic changes did not come overnight. In 1990, a year after Poland’s transition to democracy, the secret service was still hastily burning classified files. Thus the groundbreaking films in this series were
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN
created in difficult circumstances, politically and pro- duction-wise. Insufficient budgets and cumbersome, outdated equipment, along with a scarcity of film itself, presented practical challenges. The rise of television also played a role. Television sets had been introduced into Polish households in the 1950s. Already Karabasz wit- nessed the increasing dominance of the “talking heads” and deplored both the standardization and declining artistic merits of the nonfiction form. But the younger generation wanted to radicalize film language even more, splintering it from reportage while not losing sight of the country’s dire social and economic needs. Poland’s studio system, albeit threatened by the
regime’s insatiable appetite for cultural monopoly, offered crucial support. Marcel Łoziński, for example, recalls fondly
his old Chełmska days (Chełmska Street is to this day where Warsaw’s Documentary and Feature Film Production Studios are based). It was here, or at Studios Tor and Silesia (the production company behind Królikiewicz’s debut fea- ture) or even, paradoxically, at the Educational Film Studio (Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych, WFO) in Łódź that many of Poland’s renowned filmmakers worked, if not always flourished (WFO produced Dziworski and Wiszniewski’s films). Łoziński’s creative circle in Warsaw included fel- low filmmakers such as Agnieszka Holland and Krzysztof Kieślowski, who exchanged ideas and championed one another’s work. And so, in 1976 when Łoziński ran afoul of the authorities and found his first full-length project, How to Live, in financial straits, he turned to fiction film direc- tor Andrzej Wajda and came to his film studio, Studio X, to complete the shoot. The artists’ solidarity was a pragmatic tactic but also soon a widespread political phenomenon. In 1980, Poland’s political activism culminated in the formation of Solidarity, after a general strike at Gdańsk’s
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