A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 17, 2017

The Scar (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1976)

Franciszek Pieczka in The Scar
Stefan Bednarz: Franciszek Pieczka
The Chairman: Mariusz Dmochowski
Bednarz's Assistant: Jerzy Stuhr
TV Editor: Michal Tarkowski
Minister: Stanislaw Igar
Eva: Joanna Orzeszkowska
Bednarz's Wife: Halina Winiarska
Bednarz's Secretary: Agnieszka Holland

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Romuald Karas
Based on a novel by Romuald Karas
Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak

The Scar was Krzysztof Kieslowski's first non-documentary theatrical feature -- he had previously made a fiction film for television -- and it's a quite accomplished one. He draws heavily on his work as a documentary maker to tell the story of the frustrating experiences of Stefan Bednarz, a member of the Polish Communist Party, who is picked to build and run a factory making chemical fertilizer in Olechów, a town where he and his wife had previously lived. His wife, however, has no interest in returning to Olechów -- she has unpleasant memories of the place and its people, some of whom Bednarz will be forced to work with -- so she stays behind in Warsaw, as does their grown daughter, Eva, whose liberated lifestyle vexes Bednarz. From the outset, Bednarz is faced with conflict from the residents of the town, who resent having the forest felled and some of the older houses torn down to make way for the construction. Throughout his stay in Olechów, Bednarz will struggle with townspeople, old resentments, management bureaucracy, government bureaucracy, discontented workers, and the media. Seen today, The Scar resonates with both Polish history and worldwide environmental concerns -- there's a heartbreaking scene of a deer, displaced from the forest, begging food from humans, who feed it cigarettes -- but even then it was a striking demonstration of Kieslowski's ability to work with actors, including many non-professionals, and to craft a narrative.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel