Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 17, 2013 8:35:44 GMT -7
Contributing Op-Ed Writer
The Conscience of a Director
Great Polish film director Agnieszka Holland once more involved with controversial film.
www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/sierakowski-the-conscience-of-a-director.html
By SLAWOMIR SIERAKOWSKI
Published: October 17, 2013
WARSAW — This year the Czech Republic selected, as its Oscar candidate for Best Foreign Language Film, a picture by the Polish director Agnieszka Holland. This was the first time the Czech Film Academy had ever nominated a foreigner. Last week, however, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified the film, without explaining its reasoning.
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Slawomir Sierakowski
Ms. Holland has been nominated for an Oscar several times in the past, and she will no doubt be nominated again. The interesting question is: What did a Polish director do to deserve such an honor from the Czechs?
The film, “Burning Bush,” tells the story of Jan Palach, a student who set himself on fire in January 1969, after the Soviets suppressed the Prague Spring.
The film’s true focus is not Palach, who dies in the first few minutes, but Czech society. Palach’s self-immolation was in protest not against the military invasion, but against the passivity and indifference of the people around him.
Up until now, the Czechs have been unable to come to terms with this event or even talk about it. They waited for a prophet from abroad.
In Palach’s case, this had to be a Pole, because Palach is a typically Polish hero, romantic and suicidal. He is as different from the typical Czech hero as Warsaw is from Prague — the former city is desperately heroic, which is why it was completely destroyed during World War II.
Ms. Holland’s film has been received as a kind of national purification. Various Czech directors began to offer a kind of public self-criticism, apologizing for the fact that they have been unable to make such a film. During this year’s Czech film awards, broadcast live on television, the renowned director Jan Hrebejk burst onstage, saying, “Listen, all that you’ve done this year amounts to nothing. The only good thing is ‘Burning Bush.”’
This was not Ms. Holland’s first trip to the Czech Republic. Indeed, her life itself could serve as the basis for a film script. Her father was a well-known Communist of a revisionist bent, who died during an interrogation by the security services by falling (or jumping) out of a window. Agnieszka, unable to enroll in a Polish university, left for Prague, where she joined the Prague Spring movement and spent a month in prison for “attempting to forcibly destroy the international system of socialist countries.”
She never met Palach, but she moved in the same circles. When he left behind a letter saying his was only the first of many self-immolations, she was convinced that one of her friends was next.
Upon returning to Poland, Ms. Holland became a leading representative of the politically active Cinema of Moral Anxiety, alongside men like Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski. She was the least sentimental of the bunch; she had the fewest illusions not only about the evils of the system, but about the weakness of society, human pettiness and the questionable grandeur of historical events.
In the 1980s, Ms. Holland belonged to a small group of filmmakers who found success in both Europe (with her Oscar-nominated films “Angry Harvest” and “Europa Europa”) and Hollywood (with, for instance, “Washington Square,” a great adaptation of Henry James’s novel). She has even directed episodes of American TV shows like “The Wire” and “Treme.”
But her heart has remained political. She is a kind of one-person opposition party, criticizing the political class for backwardness and hypocrisy.
I remember one instance, during a celebration of the anniversary of the fall of Communism, when Ms. Holland was listening to a boring discussion among famous former dissidents, all men, including figures like Adam Michnik and Janos Kis. She sat in a row of women who had formed the core of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s but now, in free Poland, were relegated to the roles of deputy chief, deputy director, deputy president.
After two hours, Ms. Holland got up and began to wonder aloud whether, if the gentlemen ever took a basic course on feminism, they would continue to exchange such predictable banalities, which she could no longer bear to hear.
Ms. Holland was also nominated for an Oscar last year, but as Poland’s candidate. Her “In Darkness” was one of the rare films about the Holocaust whose hero is not a representative of the upper class, like Steven Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler or Roman Polanski’s Wladyslaw Szpilman. Hers is a sewer worker from Lvov. In this way, she managed to demonstrate the period’s state of mind more convincingly than through a story about exceptional heroes. The film drew large audiences in Poland and played a significant role in the processing of the country’s World War II-era sins and failures toward its Jews.
Now Ms. Holland has aided the Czechs in confronting their own traumas. It would be nice if the Czechs sent us one of their many outstanding directors to tackle one of our traumas. The question is, which one?
How about history? Poles are proud of their history, perhaps too much so. We believe we have a great history because everyone beat us down and betrayed us, and thus we deserve respect. Whoever does not understand this logic is simply confirming that he is our enemy, a traitor. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, as a result of which the Polish capital was all but wiped off the face of the earth, as told by the Good Soldier Schweik, the pacifists’ favorite Czech hero, might not appeal to our ever-bellicose youth.
Or maybe the secularized Czechs could look under the cassocks of our crude Catholic hierarchy. What if they went about telling the story of Pope John Paul II the way they did with the muckraking “Citizen Havel”? Oh yes, that would be quite the revolution!
I appeal to the Czech Film Academy. Since there will be no Oscar for Holland this year, you’ll have to repay us some other way. We ask for the same type of revolution we’ve given you. It doesn’t have to be historical, just cultural. We’re waiting for reciprocation.
Slawomir Sierakowski is a sociologist, a founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Warsaw. This article was translated by Maria Blackwood from the Polish.
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