Jerzy Skolimowski - The Masterpieces of Polish Cinema (4-DVD set)

The Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
Jerzy Skolimowski

Studio: SPI International
Number of disks: 4
Condition: Brand New, Sealed, Mint
Total time: 351 minutes
Language version:  Polish
Subtitles: English
Region: 0 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.

Content:

DVD 1

Bariera (Barrier)

About: Anyone who knows Fellini’s 8½ will not be surprised to learn that it is one of Skolimowski’s favorite films. Barrier involves a reality-merging-into-fantasy dynamics similar to the Fellini film’s.  Barrier is comparable to "Last Year at Marienbad" with its non-linear development, mysterious characters and inexplicable mis-en-scene. It also shares the guerrilla film-making style of the French New Wave. It is one of Skolimowski's best. The film follows a newly graduated medical student in his pursuit of an unattainable woman. He follows her through the streets of 60s Poland where spontaneous dance parties and candle-light rituals erupt. A dream-like meditation on post-industrial life in Communist Poland. Filled with exquisite, unforgettable images, this masterpiece finally found its way onto DVD soon.

DVD 2

Rysopis (Identification marks)

About: "The absurdity of the central character's behaviour turns out to be a well-thought principle on which the plot is built. Central to this is the anti-hero defined not by the consequences of his actions, but by the results of the lack - or avoidance - of them. The game Leszczyc plays with the world involves a consistent rejection of all forms of stabilization and a preference for uncertainty, provocation and an open perspective. At the other extreme, this game co-builds fiction - a chain of lies and sham joining clerks and customers, crooks and their victims, lovers, neighbours, families... The world of 'Rysopis' has no live, communication-oriented speech - instead there are repetitions, quotations and clichés, their most prominent feature being the focus on multiple use and impersonal judgment. Characteristically, the rare moments when Leszczyc tells the truth (e.g. the conversation with the draft board) and uses straightforward, rational arguments to express his thinking, make him an instant suspect" (Mariola Jankun-Dopartowa, "Kwartalnik Filmowy" 1997).

DVD 3

Walkower (Walkover)

Plot: An aging boxer makes a scant living as a prizefighter in this drama. A former college buddy helps the fighter get an engineering job. Still the lure of the ring is strong, and when the fellow learns that his factory has a boxing team, he eagerly signs up. During a major fight, he ends up winning when his opponent is a no-show. Later the late fighter arrives and demands half of the prize money as he was paid not to show up. The protagonist refuses to share and the two end up duking it out in the ring. The aging fighter is no match for the opponent and is badly beaten.

DVD 4

Rece do góry (Hands up!)

About: Censored by the Polish authorities, this film was reedited and new footage added. It begins with a sci-fi motif: abstract images and electronic music take the viewer from ruins of Lebanon to the set of Voelker Schloendorf "The Forgery" where Skolimowski plays a lead role. Another shift takes us to London, where Skolimowski shoots a street scene. There are also shifts into the past with the old footage, featuring a score of Polish actors in a setting resembling Kantor's experimental theatre.

About the director:

Jerzy Yurek Skolimowski (born May 5, 1938) is a Polish film director, screenwriter, dramatist and actor. A graduate of the prestigious Polish Film School in Lódz, Skolimowski has directed more than twenty films since his 1960 début Oko wykol (The Menacing Eye). He now lives in Los Angeles where he paints in a figurative, expressionist mode and acts occasionally in films.

Skolimowski was born in Lódz, Poland, the son of Maria (née Postnikoff) and Stanislau Skolimowski, an architect. He often recognized indications in his work to a childhood ineradicably scarred by the War. As a small child he witnessed the brutalities of war, even rescued from the rubble of a bombed-out house in Warsaw. His father, a member of the Polish Resistance, was executed by the Nazis. His mother hid a Jewish family in the house and Skolimowski recalls being required to take candy from the Nazis to maintain appearances.

Skolimowski was considered as a trouble maker at school as he was the origin of many harmless jokes which angered the authorities. At college he studied ethnography, history and literature and took up boxing, which was also the subject of a feature-length documentary, his first significant film. Skolimowski's interest in jazz and association with composer Krzysztof Komeda brought him into contact with actor Zbigniew Cybulski and directors Andrzej Munk and Roman Polanski.

In his early twenties Skolimowski was already a writer, having published several books of poems, short stories and a play. Soon he met Andrzej Wajda, the leading director of the then dominant 'Polish school' and twelve years Skolimowski's senior, who has showed him a script for a film about youth written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, the author of the novel Ashes and Diamonds. Skolimowski was not impressed and dismissed the script. However in response to a challenge by Wajda, he produced his own version which became a basis for the finished film, The Innocent Sorcerers (1960), directed by Wajda with Skolimowski playing a boxer. Skolimowski enrolled in the Lódz Film School with the intention of avoiding the long apprenticeship required before graduating to feature film direction. He used the film stock available to him for student exercises, and with initial advice from Andrzej Munk, he filmed over several years in such a way that the sequences cut together into a feature. While scoring poorly in course work Skolimowski had a finished feature by the end of the course.

Skolimowsi then collaborated with Polanski, writing the dialogue for the script of Knife in the Water (1962).

Between 1964 and 1984 he completed six semi-autobiographical features: Rysopis, Walkover, Barrier (1966), Hands Up! (completed 1967, released 1981), Moonlighting (GB 1982) and Success is the Best Revenge, a segment in Dialog and two other features Le Départ (1967) and Deep End based on his original screenplays.

While living and working in many countries, he also completed another six relatively big budget productions, including four international co-productions, between 1970 and 1992 (The Adventures of Gerard, King, Queen, Knave, The Shout, The Lightship, Torrents of Spring and Ferdydurke), all distinctly bearing Skolimowski’s signature.

Skolimowski has said that he makes films to please himself.  After Barrier he left Poland to make Le Départ in Belgium in French. According to him Le Départ was a light film rather than a comedy, "does not have the serious layers that I like in my work." Skolimowski returned to Poland to make Hands Up!, the third film of the Andrzej trilogy and the fourth of his Polish sextet. Between Hands Up! and his next feature, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Gerard (1970), Skolimowski contributed a story to a Czech-produced portmanteau film, Dialóg 20-40-60 (1968), in which three different directors (with Zbynek Brynych and Peter Solan) each devised their own story using identical dialogue even though the central characters in each section are separated in age by twenty years. Skolimowski's segment, "The Twenty Year Olds", would seem to be an extension of Le Départ with Jean-Pierre Léaud playing opposite Skolimowski's wife Joanna Szcerbic.

Deep End (1970) was Skolimowski's second non-Polish feature to be based on his own original screenplay. The movie with a coming of age storyline bears distinctive thematic similarities to Le Départ. Deep End was a promising film yet it was poorly handled by the studio. His films The Shout (1978) and Moonlighting (1982) became critical successes, with Moonlighting, made in the UK, the fifth of his Polish sextet, critically and commercially his most successful film.

The Lightship, Skolimowski’s first US production, was adapted from a novella by the German writer Siegfried Lenz. Set on a US coastguard ship it was filmed in the North Sea. It is suspended between psychological duel with a doppelgänger theme and a pure performance piece within the stage-like confines of the lightship. However, even though receiving the best film award at the Venice Film Festival, The Lightship had only a very limited release. Torrents of Spring (1989), adapted from a semi-autobiographical novella by the Russian Ivan Turgenev, was a big budget European co-production starring Timothy Hutton, Nastassja Kinski and Valeria Golino. It could be considered as Skolimowski’s most impersonal 'generic' film, the only real departure from his expressed interest in making films only to please himself.

Skolimowski is also an actor, having appeared as Colonel Chaikov, a ruthless yet composed KGB colonel, in White Nights (1985) and Uncle Stepan, a Russian expatriate in Eastern Promises (2007), among other roles.