Krzysztof Zanussi Revisited. A Conversation

Abstract

Dorota Filipczak: Professor Zanussi, let me first thank you for your kind agreement to share your thoughts with Text Matters. I would also like to congratulate you on joining the board of the European Film Academy.Krzysztof Zanussi: If I may interrupt you, it's not a terribly great honour, because I am one of the founders of this Academy. Then I withdrew from it for many years because I was very disappointed by the way it developed. However, I have lost my battle, and I'm again ready to serve this academy. But it is not what it was meant to be. The Academy was practically formed and founded by Ingmar Bergman, and he wanted to create a very exclusive club of people whose work is known beyond the limits of their own language, and of their own culture. And he had the idea to have a numerus clausus of one hundred like, say, in the Vatican conclave, and have it like the French Academy. Unfortunately, this idea came to Ingmar Bergman too late. I was one of the first forty members whom he convoked. But an Academy of that sort did not attract enough attention and enough sponsors, so after a couple of years we had to change the profile, and now we are over a thousand people, and the members' fees are making life for the Academy possible, but it is definitely not the same Academy. So there is nothing to congratulate me on. It's rather a surrender.DF: Thank you for setting that straight. Could you comment on the challenges facing the European Film Academy then and now?KZ: Well, the Academy was born already too late, because Europe was so divided that practically no artist knew any counterpart in a neighbouring country. We didn't know each other. Bergman, for most of his career, did not know Fellini. He did not know Pasolini. He did not know Truffaut. Very few directors were multilingual. Fortunately, Bergman was, but not that many, not Fellini. Three fourths spoke some English, but that was the time when English was not so commonly spoken in this professional circle. So originally it was meant as a club to meet and talk, and try to compare markets, views, cultural traditions and roots. Today it's all different, and it is again the club where we may exchange some views and some ideas. And the European Film Academy is holding quite a few seminars and MA classes. I think this is the most important part of it. It's also awarding a European film prize, which is of very limited importance; we couldn't make it more prestigious, because not that many European films travel. They do not travel. French films are shown in France, Italian films are shown in Italy, and German films are shown in Germany. And it's only American cinema that is uniting us. It is again a great defeat, because at the time of my youth all was different. My father was sending our maid and our driver to see American films, because they were seedy. And it was a natural expectation that American films would be very popular but very simple-minded. And at the same time educated people were choosing French, sometimes Italian, sometimes Spanish, and sometimes British films. Not German, because after the war German films were almost non-existent, and it took us a long time before we recognized that Germany had an existing culture. But if we drop this limitation, then we understand that what was true forty or fifty years ago is not true any more. And now international European films are very few. There was a time in the sixties when we were trying to make co-productions that were meant to be intercultural. And the British, in this very aloof way, were calling it Europudding, because these films were shot unnecessarily in English, using English as a vehicle to bring various actors together. And a native-English-speaking audience was never ready to accept it. There is one example that is interesting for European readers; an example of Rainer Fassbinder, a German director, who made a film based on Genet (translated by Trout), and he shot this film in English with Jeanne Moreau, who is bilingual, and other actors who were quite fluent in English. …