Hanging on the Word: A Conversation with Krzysztof Zanussi

The Polish auteur discusses the importance of words in film, working in Communist Poland, and "Ether," his new film about an immoral doctor.
Ben Nicholson

Krzysztof Zanussi Ether

Ether

As he approaches his 80th birthday, distinguished Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi shows little sign of letting up. Although his reputation in wider cinephile culture has diminished somewhat since a remarkably febrile period in the 1970s and 80s (several films from which were seen in last year’s retrospective on MUBI), Zanussi remains an ambassador for his nation’s cinema internationally, in an esteemed triumvirate alongside dearly departed colleagues Krzysztof Kieslowśki and Andrzej Wajda.

Zanussi’s latest film, pre-First World War drama Ether, premiered at the Rome Film Festival in October and continues the director’s recent interest in examining the structures of power and our relationship to religion. In something of a warping of the stereotypical “Zanussoid” protagonists for which he originally became famous—young, scientifically-inclined men searching for meaning, often in a hostile world—Ether follows a doctor using morally questionable means to pursue his studies into the oppressive potential of the eponymous chemical.

The doctor (Jacek Poiedzialek) is shown to be unscrupulous from an opening scene in which he accidentally kills a young woman who he is trying to incapacitate and rape. Inexplicably pardoned on the gallows, he flees to a military outpost on the Austro-Hungarian border. Here he continues his research, probing at the limits at which he can control people through emotional manipulation, or exposure to ether. Zanussi’s characters have often searched for higher truth through science, but this film essentially inverts that showing the doctor as a villainous mad scientist with hints of Dr. Frankenstein, and a black surgeons smock that plays on cinematic imagery of sadistic Nazis.

The film is a probing psychological study, somewhat typical of a filmmaker who has been referred to as his country’s cinematic “moral conscience.” An additional layer of complexity is added when an epilogue, titled “The Secret Story,” effectively peels a layer back to reveal a parallel metaphysical narrative that has Faustian overtones and entwines previously ancillary religious dialogues with the film’s theme of empowerment, oppression, and submission to another’s will.

Zanussi was in London for the annual Kinoteka Polish Film Festival for the UK-premiere of Ether and a repertory screening of his early work—about an entirely different troubled young doctor—Family Life (1971). We were lucky enough to spend some time with him to talk about working within the confines of Communist censorship, the state of modern creativity, and exploring parallel dimensions. 


NOTEBOOK: It struck me that the idea of the two of us sitting here and talking about your work and ideas and ethics is a bit like one of your films.

KRZYSZTOF ZANUSSI: [Laughs] Quite right, quite right.

NOTEBOOK: And so that got me to thinking about how important the idea of dialogues are in your work.

ZANUSSI: OK, but here is a heresy that I pronounce quite often: film is not that much about visuals, it is hanging on the word. Film was born of literature, historically. So, because we communicate by words, as long as cinema was mute, it was incomplete. So, cinema started in the 30s. However, I’m aware—and I try to teach my students—"don’t rely on the word only, but don’t neglect words," because most of the time we communicate by words not by images—this is an illusion. This is just to counterbalance a common conviction that it is image only. No, not only, and maybe not even in the first place.

NOTEBOOK: I remember reading a quote in an interview that suggested you don’t necessarily trust the visuals in films. Would “trust” be the right word?

ZANUSSI: It is not about trust, but images cannot carry as much as words can. We all know, and we notice it with Chekhov and writers of the late nineteenth century, that people don’t say what they mean—they hide what they mean, and we have to guess. If you write your dialogue well you will guess what somebody is hiding which is far more interesting than most TV series where people declare what they feel.

Family Life

NOTEBOOK: This feels like a particular skill of yours, these pairs of men—in  The Structure of Crystal [1969], Camouflage [1977], and Wit even has Marek in Family Life—who speak around issues and express complex ideas while also retaining a real sense of authentic character.

ZANUSSI: You have to think about the psychological situation, which is something that I find quite exciting and also deeply paradoxical. I write, and strongly disagree with, my characters. They say not what I want them to say, but what they must say. It sounds very pretentious but it is a mysterious process that, in certain moments, when you write the script, starts to have its own independent life. It brings you to something you did not expect. You feel that if you want to be true to the story you have to follow this line, even if your ideas are totally to the contrary. It happened to me in Family Life. There is something that might be of interest to your readers: I made kind of a sequel to this film very recently, Revisited [2009].

NOTEBOOK: Yes, indeed. I’ve seen it.

ZANUSSI: You have? Ah. So in that, I tried to say what I hadn’t said many years ago and tried to surprise even myself by the fact that the further story was not predictable. I mean, would you say that the crazy doctor would have an interesting life abroad and find a totally different perspective involved in some social-political movement and so on? The same goes for Camouflage, where I wanted to show someone who was so evil but has a moment of redemption, as many people did, and we should not judge them too easily because suddenly they became heroes after being deplorable characters at the beginning.

And, you know, Family Life was in a way slightly autobiographical because it was about this social background, it was about this kind of relationship with a father I had in my life, and I was not very lenient with my leading character. I was rather critical of him and I did not want to make him right, because he is not right. In fact, it haunts me because when I wrote the script there was a different ending and I changed it during shooting. I remember Andrzej Wajda, who was a real mentor to me, and a real genius of cinema, said: “You idiot! You spoiled such a beautiful ending.” Now, after so many years I can see that I could have combined the two. It was a very cinematic ending, there was a big fire—and fire is always cinematic! The father dies and a candle is put in his hand and some curtains waved and caught fire. My protagonist would be too scared to stop the fire, just stepping backwards and from the far distance, he would see the house burning. This world would disappear but then he would have the same [facial] tick as his father—because the tick was more important than the fire.

NOTEBOOK: That moment with the tick is amazing and of course, when we first see Daniel Olbrychski, who plays Wit, in Revisited he still has the tick and his father still seems to be there. What was your motivation for going back the characters after several decades?

ZANUSSI: The most banal thing. I think cinema has a unique capacity to show the passage of time. When the camera can cover a distance of forty years, and you see what really happened to the faces of the actors—how they really aged, with no need for make-up—you see what happens to us. In literature, it is only reference, it’s not sensual; in cinema it’s sensual. It was also interesting to think about what we were expecting to happen, because the narrative pattern we developed in Europe was from the Greek tragedy; there is a culmination, things are resolved. Forty years later, what was the resolution is not a definite resolution, there are changes and there were other periods of time with other dramas. That was the motive. Besides, I remember I was 75, it was five years ago, so I got a chance to make a film for my anniversary and so I thought I must revisit my old films.

Illumination

NOTEBOOK: Around the period—of Camouflage and The Constant Factor (1980)—you were making films with idealistic young protagonists. In your cameo in Kieslowśki’s Camera Buff you say something about how at that time, honest people didn’t stand much chance.

ZANUSSI: The other half of that sentence was cut by censorship.

NOTEBOOK: Really?

ZANUSSI: Yes. I was reiterating much the same in a different formulation and they said you must cut it in half. One half or the other, it doesn’t matter. It may be this idea “at least not twice”—because then the public gets it too clearly. It was a very particular operation that they performed because, of course, it was an accusation that the system that was offering happiness was not delivering and they didn’t want to hear that.

The question of idealism is a very wide one. East of our European civilization, as in the Byzantine East, there is more in conflict with the material world. They tend to state that an honest life is practically impossible unless you are a beggar in front of the monastery. Look at Dostoyevsky, what happens to Prince Myshkin [in The Idiot], and look at other characters of great literature in Russia: never is someone who is a saint a winner, he must be a loser. Idealism is impracticable. With our Roman, Latin, Mediterranean spirit, we still believe that we can improve this world a bit, but we have to admit compromise. This was my problem throughout all my life, what was the level? You know that you cannot make a film if you don’t compromise—with the world, with producers, with money. You must do hundreds of things, which sometimes are humiliating, sometimes morally dubious. If you refuse it, you don’t make films. If you accept it, you become corrupt. Where is the limit? And this fight is very exciting to me, even today. Then I was trying to point out that radical idealism is very suspicious—don’t trust a radical idealist, they end up in hypocrisy. So it’s better to be defended by a little shield of cynicism. It is the way to preserve your idealism.

NOTEBOOK: And you were making films during a time of heavy censorship and policing what you could do. You and several other hugely creative filmmakers were walking a fine line.

ZANUSSI: You could not be suicidal. Some of my colleagues were and ended up eliminated from the profession. I always remember what happened to them, they were so intransigent that they were simply eliminated.

NOTEBOOK: Do you agree with that idea of the restrictions spurring your creativity?

ZANUSSI: This is a very bad concept, I think. You know, I own eight dogs, so I have all elements of experience with dogs. A repressive system doesn’t make dogs better, they defend you better when they are well-fed and not neurotic. They were making us neurotic and poorly fed—it was not a help. There’s kind of this illusion that when you see an artist suffering, then you believe his art. Not true. A very 19th century concept—La bohème [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: But you did feel restricted by the system.

ZANUSSI: Of course, yes. I was a realist. Knowing what the limits were we often joked amongst ourselves that if censorship did not have a problem with it, then we didn’t go far enough. If we went too far, we could have been totally eliminated from the game.

NOTEBOOK: Do you think filmmakers today—in Poland and more broadly—are still pushing at boundaries and challenging established orders like that?

ZANUSSI: No, I have the opposite feeling, that there is some kind of dictatorship of certain ideologies, of political correctness, that makes people say the same, predictable things. Political correctness is now formulated to push conflict back and hide it. With a postmodern approach, there is a conviction that we must not evaluate anything.

We have no right to “you are inferior” any more, which is wrong because some people are superior, and some inferior. It doesn’t mean that we have the right to hurt them, to condemn them, but evaluation of every act is necessary. Of course, we must admit that we may be wrong, that we are not ultimate judges, but we must make this distinction between good and evil, a good choice and a bad choice, good conduct and bad conduct. Diversity is not enough. Things may be diverse but some people are good and some are bad—but I’m not supposed to say this. Some civilizations and cultures, at certain moments in history, are superior to others. I remember talking about it with Umberto Eco, who should be an ultimate authority on this. When he told me, “yes, you are right, but it is very difficult,” I was angry enough to tell him, “but you have a big salary at the university, you are one of the leading minds of Europe, so you are supposed to say it.” You know what he said? “Well, the salary is not so big” [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: Hearing you talk about the importance of evaluation, I’m put in mind of your background—first studying philosophy and then physics. It’s common for critics, myself included, to see these formative years as crucial to your film work. Do they feel as important to you personally in what you’ve done since? Is film to some degree a continuation of those earlier interests?

ZANUSSI: What probably formed me most is the war and the Stalinist time—this time of persecution. I’ve heard people being tortured, some people vanished and we never found their graves. It gives you the feeling of how tricky life can be and I can never forget it.

But, to answer you: while I didn’t become a physicist, physics helped me a lot. Philosophy helped and also damaged some things because when you canalize your expression in words, then you are writing essays instead of dialogues. I had the same conversation a couple of times with Andrei Tarkovsky—we were friends, which was a great privilege for me—and he was telling me he worries when in his interviews he reads lines which are from the dialogue from his films: “there is something wrong with me” [laughs]. Otherwise, I’d say philosophy helped a lot.

NOTEBOOK: Philosophy and physics is also a good segue into Illumination (1973). This is perhaps my favorite of your films, but it feels very formally different from your other work.

ZANUSSI: Oh listen—this was the time when such form was still acceptable. It is not anymore, because we made big steps backwards in film language. Film language in the 70s—with Godard, Resnais, many others—was a great field of new means of expression. Then film became to such an extent a mass culture that it had to become much more simple. We were able to make it far more complex. Now, when I tell my students of Anton Chekhov’s remark that when the gun is hanging in the first act, it must fire in the last act, they say: “Why? We forgot about it immediately.”

People always feel that when an old man says that language has been more developed in the past it is nostalgia, but I think that regress is as common as progress. Film language will probably go forward again but at the moment it is not as flexible, and the public is not ambitious enough to put the effort in. They want to see it as they’re used to, that’s why they like serials because every portion will be the same as the last one.

Krzysztof Zanussi on the set of Ether

NOTEBOOK: Do you feel that has had an effect on your own work and stopped you pushing formally as far as you might have?

ZANUSSI: Yes, definitely. I’m not suicidal, so I don’t want to make a film that nobody will see but I know I’m on the edge of what is acceptable for distribution. With my latest film, Ether, I got the suggestion from my sales agent that if I cut the metaphysics, it will sell immediately.

NOTEBOOK: Interesting. To cut the epilogue completely?

ZANUSSI: Yes, yes, yes. Because he correctly believes that cinema may disturb for a moment, but when the lights go on you must feel released. If you leave the spectator with a problem that stays with them, they won’t recommend this film to their neighbor—unless they don’t like him [laughs].

NOTEBOOK: That would quite drastically change what the film is.

ZANUSSI: Yes, exactly. More banal and more acceptable. Basically a spying adventure. Sells better.

NOTEBOOK: I’m not sure it would work for me without that ending. Anyway, that quite nicely brings us on to Ether before we wrap up. Where did the idea for the film come from?

ZANUSSI: It comes from the concept—well, that’s from Shakespeare—that there are things in this world that philosophers wouldn’t dream about. That we are so attached to the vision of a three-dimensional world, of our space and time, as a complete reality. But physics says that no, we have potential different, parallel worlds. Other dimensions that maybe even give death a different meaning. Maybe it’s a passage to a different dimension only, one that doesn’t need to be material. And that was very interesting to me as the legacy of my study of physics, of my reading of Einstein. So I had this idea that I would show a story that explains everything and then say, "but you haven’t noticed things which were hidden," and reveal another reality. That was the starting point of the story.

NOTEBOOK: I found the use of music from Wagner’s Parsifal quite interesting as it suggests a search for some sort of Holy Grail. This is particularly striking given the villainous protagonist in your film and how he is positioned in conflict with religion—are we to take this as some form of holy quest? For knowledge, perhaps?

ZANUSSI: Yes, definitely—knowledge and power. But this is an indirect reason I used it. The direct reason is that all my films were scored by the same composer [Wojciech Kilar] who was my great friend. Later on, he was making scores for Francis Ford Coppola, Polanski, Jane Campion, and many others. It was my privilege that I never abandoned him—he abandoned me many times, betrayed me. I reproached him: “How dare you make such good music for Coppola, it should be for me.” He responded: “Make such a good film; I will make you such good music.” If our friendship survived such an insult, I think it was a deep one. But he passed away [in 2013] and I felt that I didn’t want to ask any other composer as it would feel like a betrayal. I was writing this script listening to Parsifal—I like it a lot, I like it as an expression of a very mature artist, he was old when he wrote. And of course there is also this quest, that’s true, which is so deeply inbuilt as a European mythology.

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