Production, Consumption, Power, and Humor in the Films of Marek Piwowski

Abstract

IT IS DIFFICULT TO LOCATE MAREK PIWOWSKI in any distinctive school of Polish cinema. His artistic output is quantitatively modest; he has made only three full-length fiction films and over ten documentaries, mainly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Being born in 1935, he was too young to belong to the Polish School, created by filmmakers born in the 1920s, and too old to be part of the Cinema of Moral Concern, which was created mostly by those born in the 1940s and '50s. Moreover, unlike the works of Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Krzysztof Zanussi, his films come across as unserious. However, despite the sense of his not belonging to any cinematic movement, he is among the best-loved filmmakers by domestic audiences. His Rejs [Cruise, a.k.a. A Trip Down the River] (1970) is described in various surveys as the ultimate Polish cult film and has its own fan club. Piwowski's other productions, such as Uwertura [The Overture] (1965) and Przepraszam, czy tu bija? [Excuse Me, Is It Here They Beat Up People?] (1976), also have a significant following, adding to Piwowski's status as the ultimate Polish cult director. This status is confirmed by frequent rereleases of his films by Polish state and private television and on DVD. It is also worth mentioning that photos from Cruise adorn covers of books devoted to wider phenomena than his films, such as a book on Polish comedy (Talarczyk-Gubala) and an edited volume devoted to the leading Polish film auteurs (Stachowna and Zmudzinski).There are many reasons that Piwowski's films gained such a position, but the most important is his talent for capturing on camera ordinary life in Poland and heightening its most absurd features. His films combine minute, subtle observation pertaining to realistic filmmaking with an affinity for creating (often unintentionally, as the director claims) metaphors-a feature conveyed by the short, general, and sometimes ambiguous titles of his films, such as The Overture, Hair, Success, and Cruise.1 However, despite the important place of Piwowski in the history of Polish cinema, there is little academic research devoted to his work, perhaps reflecting a perception that his films, being unserious, do not merit serious investigation,2 and the bulk of this is devoted to his Cruise. Moreover, although authors admit that there is continuity between Piwowski's short documentary films and his Cruise, which is a hybrid between documentary and fiction film, as well as his subsequent fiction films, they rarely investigate his documentary films in detail, typically limiting themselves to mentioning that the director remained faithful to his unique, quasi-documentary style.This article discusses the way Piwowski represents understood as production and consumption of various nondurable and even immaterial goods, such as popular music, leisure, and alcohol. My argument is that the director shuns what is regarded as the typical Eastern European setting of films about work- namely, a factory-and instead privileges places of immaterial production.3 In this way he draws attention to the fact that work has a much wider meaning than socialist economists assumed, traditionally being preoccupied with heavy industry and hence production divorced from consumption. Instead, Piwowski is interested in such issues as production of leisure and pleasure, which appeared in Polish political and social debates only in the 1960s and gained in speed in the 1970s. He thus chronicles the attempts to modernize Poland. To account for the specificity of Piwowski's style, I will focus on his use of montage as a means to produce laughter. First, however, I shall briefly sketch the period when he made his most successful films.Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s4Piwowski started his career in the late 1960s, and he made the majority of his films, including his most successful productions, in the 1970s. By the 1960s, World War II still loomed large in Polish cinema and culture at large, as demonstrated by films such as Andrzej Wajda's Samson (1961) and Wojciech Has's Jak byc kochana (How To Be Loved, 1962). …