Apocalypse Now: Four Sci-Fi Parables by Piotr Szulkin is now showing on MUBI in many countries.
O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (Piotr Szulkin, 1984).
When considering the complex and fraught history of Polish science-fiction cinema, one may quote the first words of Stanisław Lem’s novel Eden, which opens a mature period of his writing: “There was a miscalculation.” Between government censorship and long periods of economic recession, the genre was bound to fail.
The first Polish sci-fi films were shorts made for TV through the 1960s and ’70s (among them, Andrzej Wajda’s Roly Poly in 1968, from Lem's script, based on his radio play). These films were beloved by TV audiences and often very funny, but they were made with shoestring budgets and did not screen in cinemas. A notable early attempt at creating an ambitious science-fiction film was Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe (1988), which aimed for a grand, epic canvas. Because of the Space Race, both Polish politicians and audiences had high expectations for this film. Production started in 1976, but filming was halted by the Polish government in 1977; officially attributed to overspending, this was part of a wider crackdown on the Polish film industry after the release of Wajda’s disillusioned Man of Marble (1977). (A decade later, after the fall of Communism, On the Silver Globe would open Un Certain Regard at Cannes, but only in an abridged version from the preserved reels; commentary was used to fill in the gaps.) The Polish People’s Republic (PPR) was part of Interkosmos, a space program of the USSR and its allies, including East Germany (DDR), Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, and Cuba; the first Polish cosmonaut reached outer space in 1978. The Polish public danced to popular songs about space, read science-fiction comic books and novels, and listened to radio shows about the exploration of space: the cinema had to follow.
Top and bottom: Golem (Piotr Szulkin, 1979).
The first Polish science-fiction film to be released theatrically was Marek Piestrak’s Pilot Pirx’s Inquest (1979), again based on a Lem story. The Polish-Estonian co-production was very popular, and audiences wanted more like it. That wasn’t easy amid the escalating financial crises and consequent political breakdowns of the 1980s. In these uneasy times, the most significant director of Polish science-fiction cinema appeared: Piotr Szulkin. He had already attracted the attention of critics as a student at the Łódź Film School with his earliest shorts for class and a series of short experimental folklore films. His debut feature, the brilliant, dystopian Golem (1979), was an adaptation of Gustav Meyrink's novel—itself inspired by the titular Jewish legend of a clay-made being—first recommended to Szulkin by the prominent Polish film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski, with whom he wrote the screenplay. The film, like others in Szulkin's science-fiction tetralogy, takes place in a world after a nuclear cataclysm. Demonic doctors experiment with genetic engineering and transplants, endeavoring to create ideal individuals, one of whom is Pernat, a man who slowly realizes his true nature. The film was a veiled diagnosis of Polish society, where individuals were subjected to omnipresent mechanisms of control and surveillance.
Szulkin’s debut feature immediately makes it clear that he is an artist with his own directorial style, using his own formal language. His sci-fi films configure the world of the future in the existing urban scenery of Poland. We won't see too many unusual sets or spaceships here: everything reminds us of the declining world of the PPR, from the dirty streets and the smeared walls of tenement houses to the ragged, terrestrial costumes that look nothing like space suits. After Golem, Szulkin decided to further explore the atmospheric potential of science-fiction cinema, calling his works “asocial fiction.” He was attracted to visions of a world after the great apocalypse, a world in which social relations are disintegrating, where the authorities (and their propaganda apparatus, in the form of the media) hold absolute power over society. His films are set everywhere and nowhere; and it’s hard to determine exactly when we are: he transports us to a near future, but the backdrop is the streets of contemporary Poland; we are supposedly in the US but are faced with familiar Polish realities; even when his characters find themselves in post-apocalyptic worlds and on faraway planets, they still grapple with the political and social problems of Poland in the early ’80s.
Top and bottom: The War of the Worlds: Next Century (Piotr Szulkin, 1981/83).
The second film of the series, The War of the Worlds: Next Century, was completed in 1981 but premiered in 1983, after a two-year period of martial law was lifted. Szulkin dedicated the film to two artists: his favorite science-fiction author, H. G. Wells, whose novel was the basis for Szulkin’s film, and Orson Welles, who had in 1938 adapted it into a legendary radio broadcast. Iron Idem (Roman Wilhelmi) is a TV talk-show host convinced of his independence, though he comes across as a conformist and propaganda officer. The Martians arrive—played by dwarfs covered with silver paint and wearing silver down winter jackets—claiming to have come in peace, but it soon becomes clear that their intentions are anything but peaceful. From one day to the next, Idem's life is turned upside down: state security forces, on behalf of the aliens, kidnap his wife; Idem himself is given a special earring like the ones used to tag cattle; and for his broadcast that evening, he is given a script with propagandistic messages urging viewers to be subservient to the extraterrestrial newcomers. Gradually pushed out of his comfort zone, Idem begins to notice the oppressiveness of the world he operates in and his role in that oppression. After the disappearance of the unmasked Martians, the authorities, in an effort to cling to power, televise the execution of Idem. Szulkin deploys a great trick here: it turns out that the execution was only a TV recording, an Orwellian act of political theater to keep the public in line—the real Idem is alive and alone in a large soundstage. The door opens: the face of our hero is flooded with bright light. He is free—but is he really?
Once again, Szulkin disguises his critique of early-1980s Polish society as sci-fi cinema. The film is a prefiguration of martial law in the country (Szulkin finished shooting before it was imposed in December 1981); the special forces subordinated to the Martians closely resemble the militiamen who were soon to patrol the streets. The analogy of bloodthirsty Martians to the government of the Soviet Union was by no means new in world cinema; the many alien-invasion films made in the US in the 1950s and ’60s were, of course, an emanation of the collective fears of an invasion by the Soviet Union. In Poland, however, it was something new. Making a science-fiction film set in an unspecified place—perhaps the US, perhaps Great Britain, but surely in a world that resembles visions of the capitalist West from Soviet propaganda—was a smokescreen. The government censors. could imagine Szulkin’s critique was of Western society, not of the Soviet occupation of Poland.
Top and bottom: O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1984).
Szulkin's next work—the most outstanding film in the tetralogy—was the great O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1984). The unusual title (like that of his next film, Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes, from 1985) was inspired by the first sounds uttered by the director’s son.
The film takes place in the post-apocalyptic, semi-oneiric world of the “Dome,” which protects the survivors of a nuclear war from radioactive fallout. For propagandistic purposes, to give the survivors some hope, the rulers have invented a mythical Ark, whose promise of rescue the people soon began to worship as a messianic concept. In order to maintain this blind faith—and their control over the masses—the authorities begin denying its existence. “The Ark does not exist and will never come” is a mantra repeated throughout the film, to which stupefied people sway while waiting for their daily food allotment.
The protagonist, Soft (a meaty role for Jerzy Stuhr, one of the greatest Polish actors of all time) is a typical Szulkin hero: a low-level administrator, a cog in the system, a conformist, a person without illusions and focused on himself. After learning that the concrete dome protecting people from deadly radiation is cracking, he decides to escape the trap at all costs. He trusts only his beloved, the sex worker Geja (played by Krystyna Janda: a great star of Polish cinema, Andrzej Wajda’s muse, and Szulkin's friend from high school in Warsaw, where they both studied art), who unwaveringly believes in, and dreams of, the possibility of reaching the Ark. As the apocalyptic atmosphere escalates, each of their hopes for rescue turn out to be dead ends. The presumed shelter of Soft’s half-mad friend (Krzysztof Majchrzak)—a refrigerator, in which, once electricity fails, he can insulate himself from harsh outside conditions—is co-opted by a murderous maniac as a storage locker for his victims. An airplane is demolished by a millionaire (Mariusz Dmochowski) to make razor blades, the currency of the dome. Finally, the Dome bursts, the world is flooded with light—people rush toward it, thinking that the long-awaited Ark has arrived.
The film is a pessimistic reflection on the human condition: mechanisms of control and subordination, power and money, religion and faith. Szulkin’s previous films were shot by Zygmunt Samosiuk in brown and sepia tones, with a static camera. Here, Witold Sobociński’s camera is in constant, smooth motion; the color palette is dominated by a wide tonal range of blues. However, what attracts the most attention is the film’s masterful use of light, a hallmark of Szulkin’s work all the way back to his formally innovative television shows. There is often a light source in the frame: characters are backlit by a lamp or rows of neon lights; large spotlights enhance the atmosphere into the realm of the extraordinary; halation is crucial to the frame composition. Szulkin and Sobociński manage to make the Dome feel truly post-apocalyptic; we never know whether it is day or night, or whether time has stopped altogether. As usual, Szulkin ends the film on a despairing note—he sees no hope for humanity. The PPR was in a long stretch of economic and social agony, on the verge of dissolution; prospects for the future were not very bright.
Top and bottom: Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes (Piotr Szulkin, 1986).
In Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes, the last work of this “asocial fiction” saga, Szulkin finally depicts a spaceship and discusses the topic of interplanetary travel. The film begins in a large penal colony: the death-row prisoner Scope (Daniel Olbrychski, one of Andrzej Wajda’s key collaborators) is about to embark on a deadly mission to conquer an unknown planet. He goes to the carnivalesque planet Australia 458, where he is treated as a hero and a messiah, guided everywhere by the obliging official, Skinny (Jerzy Stuhr, whose performance is a self-parody of his roles in the so-called “cinema of moral anxiety,” which had dominated Polish art cinema in the late ’70s and early ’80s). At the same time, another hero arrives on the planet, and both of them are encouraged to enjoy the pleasures of life: drinking, gambling, and copulation. Once again in Szulkin's cinema, the hero shares a special emotional bond with a sex worker, a figure on the margins; here it is a character named Once, played by Katarzyna Figura at the peak of her popularity. Scope can neither conquer the planet nor save it; he does not understand this world. He is involuntarily led—and constantly manipulated—toward the destiny designed for him by the inhabitants of Australia 458. Only the beautiful Once can draw him out of his stupor, and it is revealed that all this hospitality is just a façade: everything is aimed at discrediting Scope, and the final show in the arena is to conclude with nothing less than his impalement.
This time, Szulkin gives viewers a happy ending. Scope escapes from the hands of his captors, and he and Once fly to safety in his spaceship. This finale, incongruous with the rest of the film (and with the director's clearly pessimistic style), was apparently inspired by Szulkin’s wife’s request for him to end a film happily for once. However, it is difficult to take the note of optimism seriously: once again, we are dealing with a world from which there is no escape. The film reflects on the condition of an individual entangled in modes of social manipulation. Of course, the hero’s impaling in the arena in the company of two other unfortunates has strong Biblical connotations; Szulkin emphasizes the way in which this ritual is degraded by the spectacle that engulfs it, the reduction of a religious symbol and gesture to cheap television entertainment. There is no faith, no hope in this world; people are half androids, as we learn in striking sequences in which the autonomous hand of a policeman (Majchrzak) eats hot dogs made from human fingers, bringing to mind the poetics of body horror.
Entering the world of Szulkin's films—dark, unfriendly, devoid of hope—viewers may feel like they are descending into hell with Dante: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” An incredible melancholy emanates from them, and Szulkin does not place himself and his characters above the terrible world; they are always part of it, cogs in that great machine of destruction: humanity itself. Depressing as that may sound, there is beauty here. Invariably, these are films about gaining consciousness: waking up. The light that floods the characters in Szulkin’s final scenes is both the glow of atomic destruction and a revelation—a flash of knowledge.