The three most revolutionary filmmakers to emerge from Poland after World War II—Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Andrzej Zulawski—might not have been so revolutionary had they not also been so Polish. All three are old enough to remember the end of the war, when the Nazi occupation gave way to the Soviet occupation without so much as a moment of self-rule between them. From the 1790s to the end of the Cold War, Poland was a sovereign nation for only 25 years. One can easily see why Polanski, Skolimowski, and Zulawski all have been drawn to psychological horror, black comedy, and defeatism: these are central aspects of Polish history.
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Nearly all of Polanski’s films are available in the United States, and Skolimowski has enjoyed sporadic attention here as well. But Zulawski, despite his notoriety in Europe, remains all but unknown in this country. None of his 12 features has been distributed here theatrically except for a butchered version of Possession (1981). This is a shame, because Zulawski has created some of the most original, unpredictable, and downright terrifying of modern European movies. His work sustains a level of intensity that few films ever reach at all. They’re filled with graphic violence, perverse sexuality, and hysterical emotional outbursts, yet they also contain bold color, allusions to high culture, and sincere professions of love and longing. Zulawski brings together extremes in the hope that the interaction will be explosive. “The cinema is an instrument of mega force,” he said in a 1996 interview, “to shake, to break the barriers, to show you something you couldn’t imagine possible.”
But then something strange happens. Mark confers with some men for whom he’s recently completed an assignment (Zulawski never explains what it is, but it seems to be surveillance-related). As they cryptically discuss his work, the camera circles the room several times, occasionally veering away from the actors by as much as a dozen yards. It’s a virtuosic shot, but it has no discernible connection to the scene: one feels as though the camera has taken on a life of its own. This is a stylistic signature of Zulawski’s, and he employs it often in the film. It connotes a world so debased that even the attempt to record it is corrupted.
That’s as good a way as any of describing Zulawski’s confounding masterpiece. Possession conveys the fear that some terrible rift—madness, war, apocalypse—might sever us from our own identity. Zulawski communicates this by perverting nearly every convention of narrative cinema—even the exterior shots, which we count on to provide a sense of geography. Completely devoid of extras, the locations in Possession seem as alien as a lunar landscape. This awful sense of dislocation is what makes Possession a truly Polish film, no matter where it was made: the characters can’t go home again, because they’ve never had one.
Directed by Andrzej Zulawski
