Adelheid


A short excerpt from the booklet essay on Camouflage by Michał Oleszczyk.


It is crucial to remember that the feeling of living in a country incapable of redemption, still incapable of moving past the effects of continuing dominance by its powerful neighbors, lies at the very foundation of a much wider movement, one which Camouflage (Barwy ochronne, 1977) merely marks a peak of. The so-called 'Cinema of Moral Anxiety' ('kino moralnego niepokoju') brought about a slew of Polish films that can be best likened to the British 'kitchen sink' dramas of late 1950s and 1960s, such as Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) - all of which sought to explore the contradictions of British class system by means of introducing a set of fierce (mostly male) working-class characters, whose status anxiety and sexual hunger proved as disruptive as it was medicinal.

In the Cinema of Moral Anxiety, the focus is usually not the working class, but the so-called intelligentsia (i.e. intellectuals, mostly hailing from the working class anyway, albeit chronically alienated from it). A typical film belonging to the movement depicts an individual (again, mostly male) trying to affect some sort of institutional change in his working environment (be it a factory in Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Scar/Blizna, 1976, a university in Janusz Kijowski's Index/Indeks, 1977, or a small-town theatre in Agnieszka Holland's Provincial Actors/Aktorzy prowincjonalni, 1978, etc.) and then failing miserably due to general moral indifference and the inevitable intervention of a communist party superior (a member of the so-called góra, or "upper echelon"). The villain is usually presented as an uncouth hack: enjoying his position due to corruption and complacency, as well as poised to destroy the idealist character we are rooting for. (In a notable exception to this rule, Feliks Falk's chilling Top Dog/ Wodzirej, 1977 reversed the perspective, focusing on a ruthless individual trying to play the corrupt system to his own advantage.)

It was in 1976 that the Cinema of Moral Anxiety sensibility took full shape, thanks in part to an epic simultaneousness of Zanussi's Camouflage with Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1976 - also on Second Run DVD). The latter film's ambition was much wider, since it investigated the crimes of the Stalinist 1950s, but its basic plot fitted the general 'Moral Anxiety' pattern rather neatly, thanks to the centrality of its young heroine Agnieszka (played by Krystyna Janda): a young filmmaker running into a wall of institutional negligence and downright silencing that would seem very familiar both to Zanussi's Jarek and to countless other characters populating Polish films of the period.

Those two iconic films may not enjoy equal international stature nowadays (a state of affairs this DVD release hopes to partially rectify), but in fact they are closely intertwined – so much so that the actual 'man of marble' (e.g. the bulky statue of bricklayer Mateusz Birkut, his face gazing optimistically skyward) actually makes an appearance in Camouflage in one of the scenes between Jarek and Jakub (the latter leans upon it in the staircase in the second half of the film). What is more, the films became part of a real-life political scandal when the secretary of the Polish Ministry of Culture, Janusz Wilhelmi, decided to play one filmmaker against the other. At the infamous 1977 edition of the Gdańsk Film Festival (later to relocate permanently to Gdynia), all political strings were pulled to exclude Wajda from official jury recognition, with Camouflage winning the state-approved Golden Lion for Best Picture (as the supposedly 'less radical' film). Ill-at-ease at accepting the honour and wary of any action that might have been misrepresented as shunning his cherished colleague, Zanussi purposefully did not make it to the award ceremony – a meaningful absence greeted with audience's applause, even as Wajda received a special award from members of Polish press on the staircase of the festival building.

Despite limited distribution, Camouflage became a massive hit with the Polish audiences, which reacted with joy at the acute representation of everyday inequalities and omnipresent corruption familiar to any Polish citizen of the era. (In one oft-quoted scene, the university dean is not above casually accepting several crates of apples from the local orchard: a bribe that would have seemed pitiful in any thriving economy, but was still quite desirable in a country with an average monthly salary hovering around ten dollars a month).

Just how much of a cultural landmark Camouflage has become, is most evident if one looks at the single work that remains the crowning masterpiece of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety movement: namely, Krzysztof Kieślowski's Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), which includes both a cameo of Zanussi playing himself and a clip from the film, watched with admiration by the main character, the amateur filmmaker Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr).


Michał Oleszczyk's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the DVD of Camouflage.

Contents
Disc Info

Larks Boxshot

Poland, 1970 / 1977 / 1981
Length / Main features:
266 minutes
Length / Special features:
44 minutes
Sound:
Original mono (restored) / Dolby 5.1 Surround
Black and White / Colour
Original aspect ratios: 1.78:1,
1.66:1 16:9 anamorphic / 1.42:1
Language: Polish
Subtitles: English (On/Off)
PAL DVD5 x 1 / DVD9 x 2
Region 0
RRP: £34.99
Release Date:25th May 2015 Second Run DVD 096

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