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Craig Wallace wrote: Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:55 pm Bernard Hepton

War of the Worlds: Next Century (Wojna światów – następne stulecie, d. Piotr Szulkin, 1981)

The sly opening dedication to H.G.Wells and Orson Welles works on at least two levels: as an acknowledgement of the men who respectively wrote and adapted the original ‘The War of the Worlds’, and as a warning not to take anything in the film at face value. Sure enough, in addition to constructing a memorably sour Orwellian vision of a near-future Poland after a visit by Martians (it’s unlikely the references to invasion and occupation would have been lost on its original audience), Szulkin also examines how the media are complicit in both its presentation and in behind-the-scenes string-pulling, and his view of the population-lulling effect of “reality television” (which is even called that at one point) is worryingly prescient. Fittingly, the protagonist Iron Idem (Roman Wilhelmi) is a television anchorman who first realises that something might be awry is when he’s given an entirely new script to read mere seconds before he goes on air.

O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilisation (O-Bi, O-Ba. Koniec cywilizacji, d. Piotr Szulkin, 1985)

While the previous film was set in a just about recognisable near future, here civilisation has collapsed completely, with a gaggle of survivors of an unspecified catastrophe waiting for their own Godot in the form of a mysterious Ark that will take them to a far better place. Government apparatchik Soft (Jerzy Stuhr) knows that it’s all a propagandist lie concocted to stave off absolute despair – but is startled to find his normally sane colleagues taking it seriously. Szulkin’s film certainly doesn’t lack ideas, and his realisation of a crumbling civilisation is highly convincing (especially given a clearly limited budget), but this did less for me than the other two: the satirical elements of the others are muted in favour of a setting and narrative that’s a little too familiar to Western eyes.

Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (Ga, Ga – Chwała bohaterom, d. Piotr Szulkin, 1986)

The third Szulkin dystopia seems to begin where its predecessors left off, as its unnamed protagonist (Daniel Olbrychski) is blasted from a prison ship onto a supposedly uncharted planet. Instead, he finds a conveniently Polish-speaking world full of people who worship him as a hero and offer him all manner of blandishments, including sexual ones. But he is rightly sceptical: he’s actually being groomed to play the leading role in a hi-tech variant of the crucifixions on Mount Golgotha. This is much closer to blackly comic farce than its predecessors, laced with generous splashings of gore in set-pieces reminiscent of the early work of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. Olbrychski plays it admirably straight, while a grotesque Jerzy Stuhr has a whale of a time as a sinister cultural attaché.

King Ubu (Ubu król, d. Piotr Szulkin, 2003)

I haven’t read Alfred Jarry’s play since my teens, so can’t recall too many specifics, but Szulkin’s adaptation certainly catches its blend of the childishly scatological and the politically pointed. The play was also set in Poland, so it’s entirely fitting that its themes have been grafted onto a present-day Poland in imminent danger of complete collapse as its various institutions struggle to retain their authority in the face of Ubu’s arbitrary cruelty. The caricature is often extremely broad, and performances are borderline demented, but that’s true to Jarry too. This wouldn’t be my first recommendation for someone new to Szulkin, but it’s good to see him back to making features after a break of over a decade.

domino harvey wrote: Mon Aug 06, 2018 5:42 amCharlotte Rae, Mrs Garrett from the Facts of Life

colinr0380 wrote: Thu Aug 09, 2018 5:54 pm It is interesting that Kline worked on both The Boston Strangler and The Andromeda Strain, which both have sequences in which the action splits apart into multiple frames, which seemed to be a technique that was briefly in vogue from the mid 60s into the mid 70s.

Aunt Peg wrote: Fri Aug 10, 2018 1:49 pm Actor Richard Dix has passed away.

“Among the many great writers he championed were Samuel Beckett, Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Borchert, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Sadegh Hedayat, Aidan Higgins, Henry Miller, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Hubert Selby, Jr, and Claude Simon… In short, John Calder was the right publisher at the right time who introduced international post-war literature music and theatre to a country not always sure it wanted to make those discoveries, but when you look at his list 50 to 60 years later you realise just how far ahead of his time he was."