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Warsaw: City of Orphans
BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Dariusz Gajewski
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Warsaw (Warszawa), the first feature from director Dariusz Gajewski, premiered without a poster at the 28th Festival of Polish Feature Films in Gdynia. Though few people had seen the movie, the jury awarded Warsaw the top prize in six categories, including Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. The audience jeered, but Gajewski became an overnight sensation.
Shot on digital video and transferred to 35mm for exhibition, Warsaw depicts a cold, oppressive city in which perambulatory characters seek direction, opportunity, identity, and intimacy.
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BRAINTRUSTdv: You studied law originally. How did you get into filmmaking?
Dariusz Gajewski: It was my family who forced me to study law. During the law studies I had an internship in a court of law. That is where I understood that I could not become a lawyer. This is a much formalized world in which I would bore myself to death. When I was about six, my father bought a Super-8 camera and I made my first film on some holidays. The action was set on a beach and it was supposed to be a horror and, at the same time, making it was a lot of fun. That is how my father, who strongly opposed my plans of becoming a film director, is in fact the perpetrator and initiator of my later decision. This is one of these sweet paradoxes that life is made of.
BTdv: You have a lot of experience in the documentary form, working mostly for Polish Television. Do you want to continue working in documentary, despite your success with narrative?
DG: There is a great future for documentary film. It won't be long before this underrated genre returns to the theaters. Bear in mind that the first film ever made was the Lumière brothers' documentary. The audiences are more and more interested in watching the real world because the [narrative] feature films have less and less to offer. At the moment I am working on a large documentary about the Solidarity trade union, which defeated communism in Eastern Europe. I want to start shooting it soon, but first I have to complete my feature film project.
BTdv: You attended Łódź film school, where Polanski, Wajda, Kieslowski, and Skolimowski studied. Each of those filmmakers faced challenges under the communist Ministry of Culture. How have things changed since the collapse of communism?
DG: Before the collapse of communism in Poland, film had been one of the few areas where truth could be seen. The audience went to see Polish movies in order to see undistorted reality. Now they come to the cinema with a question: what is this reality like? What is actually happening around me? The filmmakers in Poland must find the answer to these difficult questions if they want to make the audiences interested.
BTdv: Does filmmaking seem more important to Polish culture than it did twenty years ago?
DG: Film is always an essential part of a given country's culture. Nothing has changed in this respect during the past fifty years.
BTdv: Political restrictions are no longer an issue for filmmakers, but financing must still be difficult, due to the new economic structure.
DG: It is very difficult. There are two sources of funding: the state Cinematography Committee grants or the national Polish Television. Private businesses sporadically invest their money in purely commercial film productions.
BTdv: Did Polish Television commission you to write the Warsaw script?
DG: Nobody commissions scripts in Poland, especially in case of a [first-time director]. In general, beginner directors are left solely to their own devices. Completion of a film is mostly a case of victory of spirit over matter.
BTdv: So how did you go about financing the project?
DG: I wrote the script in 1998, and for the next three years I tried to close the budget. In 2001, I had the money and was about to start shooting. A week before the shooting, the main investor went bankrupt. I was able to get the national Polish Television interested in the script, and I finally made the film in 2003.
BTdv: Then Warsaw was released as part of a Polish Television program called Generation 2000 [Pokolenie 2000].
DG: Throughout the nineties it was hard to debut in Poland. [First-time directors] could not find money for their films. It was impossible. In 2000, Polish Television decided to produce several low-budget debuts in order to see whether there are still people who are capable of making movies. The outcome was a couple of very interesting films, and their authors are right now changing the face of the Polish cinema. Warsaw was the last film produced in this series.
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BTdv: Warsaw is very unusual. Throughout the movie, characters swerve toward one another and then away again. For instance, Paweł and Klara seem to be ready to make love on a sofa in an office, then we suddenly see them parting ways; near the end of the movie, Paweł leaves a café where he's supposed to meet Klara, and she meets him in the street by chance.
In a parallel story, Wictoria and Andrzej warm to each other, then grow distant and hostile—yet they remain together in Andrzej's car, tooling through the city. |
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Paweł (Łukasz Garlicki) has just left an orphanage.
Klara (Agnieszka Grochowska) has just been rejected
by her married lover.
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A father seeking his estranged daughter meets with two young women, either of whom could turn out to be his daughter—but they aren't.
This happens with smaller plot points as well: Paweł drives off in a woman's car, and it seems that he's stolen it—but moments later he returns it with a smile. The movie is chronically anti-climactic—like a feature-length exercise in coitus interruptus. This is the opposite of what an audience usually wants from a movie.
DG: Nobody knows for sure what it is that the audience wants. The problem is that certain people think they do. As a result of this "knowledge" there are more and more films which resemble standard industry goods. This is a denial of what cinema is all about—it is meant to be a great adventure, both for the public and the filmmakers. The only thing that the audience wants is fun, but how long can you have fun watching films which endlessly exploit the same fictional patterns? Such an attitude is unrealistic. The Warsaw feature was meant to polemicize with film conventions. For example, we have a gun which does not go off, an affair with no sex scene, or a corpse which is not a corpse, a main heroine whom we do not see for most of the movie, etc. What I found interesting was to build tension without all these film "tricks," which are usually abused. Why did I make such a movie? Because when you choose between the movie conventions and the real life, the latter seems much more interesting.
BTdv: Right, the gun doesn't go off. A rebuttal of Chekhov's maxim, "If you fire a gun in act three, it must be seen on the wall in act one; and if you show a gun on the wall in act one, it must be fired in act three."
It is also interesting that freedom seems to antagonize these characters—freedom of movement, freedom of commerce. It has been said that they seem to be victims of capitalism specifically, but it seems larger than politics. It seems more philosophical. However, the character of Paweł could be seen as a metaphor for capitalism: he is young, naïve, and energetic; he takes risks and makes demands. His only friend, by contrast, is shown as weak and indecisive.
DG: The problems connected with being free are a key point of reference when building characters. How to remain free and at the same time not to be molded by the society? How to be a responsible member of the society and yet retain one's own individuality? How do you bring these two together?
Warsaw is an attempt at creating a picture about the problems of people in Poland in the moment of transformation from socialism to capitalism. There are great many people who have this problem. The transformation is a large social process which affects all the aspects of life. Hence, many people feel very adrift. They are free, yet they do not know what they are supposed to do with this freedom. The biggest mistake of socialism was to imprint within us the inability to take responsibility for our own lives. Very few people in Poland know how to act in their everyday life. However, I strongly believe that we are learning a great social lesson and things are on the right track.
BTdv: To continue extracting metaphors, the father searching for his daughter could be read as the older generation of Poles experiencing a disconnectedness from modern Poland. He seems utterly confused by the young women he encounters. They are strange and unrecognizable to him. Was it your intention to address this difference between generations?
DG: Things are changing rapidly in Poland. I daresay they are changing much faster than anywhere else in the world. After years of stagnation, life here has gathered the momentum. One negative aspect of this situation is that life experience of parents is useless for their children. As a result, the generations find it hard to communicate. This is very painful.
BTdv: At the Gdynia Polish Film Festival, Warsaw won Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Picture. Reflecting on the festival, one writer remarked, "the voice of young Polish cinema was the most resounding and persuasive at this year's festival." Do you sense a new movement forming?
DG: To answer this question, you need to have an objective perspective. I am in the center of events. One thing I am sure of: Polish [cinema] definitely has a human potential that right now has been given a chance to "sing [its] own song."
BTdv: I read that the audience booed and jeered when Warsaw was announced as the winner in so many categories.
DG: Warsaw was the only film at the festival in Gdynia which did not have its own poster. The film was made outside the mainstream of Polish film production industry. I was a totally unknown [director]. Furthermore, Warsaw is not a typical movie. The viewers at the festival were mostly members of the film industry establishment who had not taken the trouble to see my film because they had their own favorites. When I got all these awards, they were really mad. This was unpleasant until I realized that none of the enraged filmmakers had seen my film. Then I started laughing. After that they saw Warsaw, and I had great satisfaction of receiving a lot of phone calls with apologies.
BTdv: The movie was hounded by critics and press after the festival, as well.
DG: The victory at the festival was for me a Cinderella kind of adventure. In one moment, I became a well-known director, and my face appeared on the first pages in most of Polish newspapers. On the next day I went for a stroll, and soon I had to run away home because dozens of people would approach me to learn something more about the film and to ask me
to tell them the real story behind the whole affair. This was a special and a very happy experience. It is a very pleasant feeling to become someone commonly recognized within one night. Today I understand the Cinderella fairytale much better.
I think that the Polish film establishment was not accustomed to having someone totally out of the mainstream to become so successful. For many years it had been simply impossible. Jurors proved very brave because they decided to bring a kind of revolution in the Polish cinema. The verdict has changed Polish cinema.
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Gajewski receiving the award
which "changed Polish cinema."
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BTdv: Warsaw has been compared to the work of Tadeusz Konwicki. Have you been influenced by him?
DG: The writing of Konwicki has always been a great source of inspiration for me. His perspective on Warsaw is similar to the one I chose in my film—a perspective of a newcomer. Konwicki, when depicting the city, tried to capture "the intangible," the genus loci of the city. This was also the main goal of my film.
BTdv: Why did you decide to shoot on digital video?
DG: Apart from the budget reasons, I got interested in one aspect of digital video: the perception of space. I wanted Warsaw to relate to Bruegel's pictures also through the flat perspective. DV, through its imperfection, captures the perspective exactly in this "non-perspective" way. I like the effect.
BTdv: It struck me that the skin tones of the people in the movie as well as the colors of cars and buildings were all muted. DV is very forgiving of overcast days, gray buildings, and ivory complexions—very forgiving of Poland, it would seem.
DG: There is no big secret about it. We simply used a lot of light on the set, and we tried to do it responsibly. We also used the magical switch called CCU.
BTdv: How collaborative was your relationship with the cinematographer?
DG: Warsaw was made with Wojtek Szepel, with whom I have been working for the past eight years. He is a fantastic director of photography. He is excellent at building the mood with light. We made our decisions together, although I reserved the right for the final choices.
We adopted two main guidelines for the camera. First, the mise-en-scene and the camera work were not to overwhelm the actors. On the contrary, they were to support them and discreetly record their work. In filmmaking, actors are most important. The camera should be "invisible." Second, the camera is supposed to build the atmosphere of the story.
BTdv: Has digital exhibition arrived in Poland?
DG: If DV films made in Poland get distribution, they are transferred onto 35mm, and in this form they are shown in cinemas. DV is, above all, valued for economic reasons. If you make a DV film, the costs are much lower.
BTdv: So, then, do you want to continue working with digital video?
DG: It is very convenient to have fewer people worried about their money and running after you. The lesser the money, the greater the freedom. The problem is that conventional [film] is of better quality than the video systems—for example, in case of shooting against the light. Yet I believe that technical quality is not as important as the meaning of the film.
BTdv: What is the international distribution status of Warsaw?
DG: We are searching for an international distributor of our film.
BTdv: What are you working on now?
DG: I intend to make a film based on an Austrian novel entitled Mr. Kuka's Recommendations. It will be a film about a young Pole's adventures during his holidays in Vienna. This is going to be a very funny story of becoming an adult. Apart from that, I am writing new scripts, and I find this work more and more captivating.
BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of production, distribution, exhibition, and public reception.
DG: DV is a chance to significantly lower the film production costs. This is an essential factor, since it will cause the democratization of filmmaking. One does not need to plan [for] huge audiences. Breaking from big budgets is a real revolution. One may make films without compromising the senses contained in a film. Probably, it will not be long before we see the arrival of new genres and distribution channels of niche films. Besides, we are still awaiting the improvements in DV technology. I am sure that soon digital recording—in terms of picture quality—will become competitive with traditional 35mm film.
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