A Meeting with Today

Kinoteka in the Palace of Culture

Last week I attended 13 films at the DOCs Against Gravity film festival in Warsaw. Kinoteka, pictured at right, became my home. It may be that I actually attended more films in 2013 when I was here, since I became very interested in a Belorussian director who was being featured. Nonetheless, thirteen was an amazing experience -- I saw films made by Finns and Chileans, Italians and Norwegians, Croatians who studied film in the Soviet Union, Poles who had emigrated to Britain, and an American who spent three years riding trains while working on his PhD in anthropology in China. Films about Ukraine, and Argentina, and Russia. It was a truly international experience -- especially because of the beloved Polish tradition of the spotkanie -- meetings with directors, and in some cases with the actors featured in the films. In each screening room a moderator and a translator led discussions after the films, and it was interesting to hear the discussions and questions -- which ranged from the technical to the personal and took place in Polish, English, Spanish, French, Russian...

Two of the foreign filmmakers turned out to have studied in the late 1980s at VGiK, the film school in Moscow, during perestroika. Perhaps I should have studied at VGiK? The woman from Croatia, Tatjana Božić, took us deep into her personal life as she interviewed all her old boyfriends in the film Happily Ever After. Why did her relationships fail one after the other? Why could she not be herself when she fell in love with a man? It seemed obvious that this soul-searching had been prompted by the sudden death of her mother just as she was pregnant with her first child, and indeed, when I asked her about her parents, she admitted that her mother had had died of complications from alcoholism. She had been a strong professional woman when Tatjana was small, but then had quit her job for her husband and become a housewife, which made her miserable. Tatjana realized during the process of making the film that she had to be happy in herself and in her work, that independence was the answer. Seeking to be fulfilled through her relationship with a man was a doomed proposition from the start.

Open for business,
or for searching the soul?

This openness, this turning of the filmmaking and screening process into a version of the psychiatrist's couch, was not the norm, though. (See my previous post.) The director of the film Voice of Sokurov had also studied in Moscow. But she was so very serious about her filmmaking and so loath to expose herself, her process, or to expose Sokurov, that several British audience members were actually upset. "She didn't answer any questions!" they asserted. "We don't think she even made the film herself!" The experience -- with Leena Kilpeläinen protecting her subject ("he had some personal reasons for that, but it is not for me to share them") -- was diametrically opposite to Božić's candor, her lack of personal boundaries. I felt I had to defend Kilpeläinen from the Brits -- she had given her entire film over to Sokurov and was telling it using his voice only. Her reluctance to "dish" was not just personal preference, it was an artistic stance.

Now that the festival is over, I've been visiting some of my other favorite haunts in Warsaw, including the History Meeting House (which somehow sounds better in Polish -- Dom Spotkań z Historią) and other museums, and also doing some teaching. These two activities -- documentary film and museums/teaching, though -- turn out to be two sides of the same coin. The films I saw were echoed in the research papers of Warsaw University students I was working with -- one was looking at Hasidic pilgrims to a Ukrainian town who come annually to commemorate a pogrom, and I had seen a film about Polish visitors to a Ukrainian town where the Polish population had been massacred during World War II. Another student was writing about language processes, the emergence of communication, and her project "rhymed" with a film I watched called Dancing with Maria, about dance therapy, where one girl was deaf, one had a withered leg from polio, and a boy and a girl communicated through dance, though they both had Down's Syndrome. My own research presentation today turned out to very much be about genre -- about the line between "fiction" and history, about "documentary genres" that can include invented or falsified "facts."

Commemorative Stamp for the Centennial
of the Warsaw Cyclist's Union in 1986

At the History Meeting House, I found a journal article about the beginnings of cycling in Poland. The Warsaw Cyclist's Union was founded in 1886 -- and as I watch the traffic in downtown Warsaw I applaud those who brave the streets on their own two wheels. My next adventure will be a two-wheeled one, as I head to Slovenia to explore it on a bike. I will think as I ride about what I learned in Poland, and also about Bolesław Prus. Prus, the Polish novelist and journalist, famously declared the bike to be "one of the finest machines of the nineteenth century." Trains, he wrote, may be faster, but a train is a "flying prison, which I can neither leave nor stop, and which I need to share with others who are not always to my taste" (June 1894). In contrast, the bicycle gives one utter freedom -- it moves a bit more slowly, but it offers the cyclist choice -- to ride, to rest, to go, to stop, at her own pace and on her own schedule, alone with her own thoughts, or chatting with a beloved companion.

I can't wait.