Almost a year to the day after Second Run released its first collection of Polish Cinema Classics, they brought out a second volume. Whereas the first consisted of four films from Polish cinema’s first golden era (the late 50s/early 60s), this triple-bills three very different films whose only real point in common is their creative excellence and the reputation of their makers – at least at home. (In the UK, Wojciech Marczewski is all but unknown compared with Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, but that has far more to do with lack of access than lack of merit.) Second Run also pulled off a genuine coup in securing the world DVD premiere of the original theatrical cut of Wajda’s The Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana, 1974), previously only available on DVD in the director’s contentiously truncated 2000 cut or the four-part TV edit from 1978. Zanussi’s Illumination (Iluminacja, 1972) and Marczewski’s Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema (Ucieczka z kina ‘Wolność’) are both available in Poland, but in transfers ranging from adequate to terrible, whereas all three films here have benefited from the same kind of wholesale digital restorations that fuelled Second Run’s first box – director-approved in all three cases.

I wrote the booklet for Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema, which also gave me an excellent opportunity to delve into the rest of Wojciech Marczewski’s hugely impressive back catalogue. I uncovered a surprising amount of it, including his early TV movies Easter (Wielkanoc, 1974), Whiter Than Snow (Bielszy niż śnieg, 1975) and The Steward (Klucznik, 1979), plus his first two cinema features, Nightmares (Zmory, 1978) and Shivers (Dreszcze, 1981) – the latter in particular, with its semi-autobiographical portrait of a summer at a Stalinist holiday camp (!) would make a brilliant Second Run release in its own right, and apparently it was a toss-up between that and Escape from the ‘Liberty’ Cinema. But I can see why they picked the latter: its portrait of a jaded provincial censor trying to deal with the cast of a completed film rebelling against its banal and compromised story and dialogue (in a medium-bending conceit consciously lifted from Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo) is much more accessible and its are concerns far more universal.

Unsurprisingly for someone so little known outside Poland, there was a distinct paucity of material on Marczewski to draw on, but the booklet for the Polish box set of his first three features included some useful interviews, and I also managed to track down a copy of the only book about his work (Andrzej Szpulak’s Filmy Wojciecha Marczewskiego, 2009), which included an entire chapter on ‘Liberty’ Cinema – it was much more analytical than factual, and I’d already written the bulk of my booklet essay when the book arrived, but it had a few exploitable nuggets.

Back in 2005, one of Second Run’s very first releases was Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka Joanna od aniołów, 1961). Back then, the label had a guiding philosophy that it was more important to get a particular film out there in an English-friendly edition than it was to secure the best possible source, and so the fact that it was only available in a clearly elderly analogue tape master wasn’t considered a major drawback. The grey and smeary end result was, frankly, VHS quality, but the excellence of the film itself meant that it got surprisingly sympathetic reviews, thus vindicating their strategy at the time.

Jump forward nearly seven years, and the film finally underwent a state-of-the-art high-definition digital restoration, with the involvement of cinematographer Jerzy Wójcik. Although they’d never reissued one of their back-catalogue titles before, the improvements were too dramatic to ignore, as was the fact that this new version had only been released in Poland on an unsubtitled DVD (which came out about a year ago). Hence this revamped reissue – and they also took the opportunity to beef up the package as a whole, by replacing the original skimpy booklet essay with a far more substantial piece by David Sorfa and a slightly rewritten version of the Kawalerowicz biography that I originally wrote for Night Train (in the Polish Cinema Classics box). They also changed the cover artwork, reflecting their current preference for much more stylised treatments:

On top of all that, they asked me if I’d record my second 20-minute video appreciation for them, which was filmed in the afternoon of March 11 (I can be very precise about the date, because I hosted a Q&A with actor Robert Więckiewicz that evening), but I had to keep schtum about it until the release was formally announced. This was pretty straightforward – unlike the first time round, I knew in advance what the setup would be, and that I’d have to talk directly to the camera without notes, and we got the whole thing in the can in less than an hour.

My biggest problem during recording was a repeated inability to pronounce the character name ‘Chrząszczewski’ correctly (I’ve forgotten how many takes that one needed!), but I’m reasonably happy with how it came out. I have two complaints, one of which is completely my fault (at the very start, I left out the month from the film’s opening date), the other of which was an ill-advised edit (removing an explanation about the difference between the French town of Loudun, where the original alleged possessions took place, and the Polish town of Ludyń, where the events were relocated, thus making a later and uncontextualised reference to Ludyń sound like a straightforward case of mispronunciation), but I daresay I’m the only one who noticed.

Second Run’s latest box set is out today, but while its predecessors simply repackaged older single-disc releases in a more attractively-priced collection, this one contains brand new releases in the form of four Polish films from the turn of the 1960s that have long achieved classic status at home but which are still comparatively little known in Britain: Andrzej Munk’s Eroica (1958), Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960), Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train (Pociąg, 1959) and Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (Do widzenia, do jutra, 1960), all taking advantage of new high-definition digital restorations commissioned by the newly reconstituted Studio Kadr and supervised by the films directors and/or cinematographers, if still alive. I wrote the booklets for the last two titles, which presented different challenges.

Night Train was the most straightforward: I’d written a thousand-word piece about it in the past, so recycled bits of that, and added a more detailed character study (in which I had to devise names for many of the train’s passengers, as they’re not given in the actual film) and a biography of Kawalerowicz. The latter gave me an excuse to watch as many of his films as I could track down: this was easier with the 1950s and 60s titles (I saw everything from 1953′s Cellulose/Celuloza to 1966′s Pharaoh/Faraon) than it was for many of the later ones – I don’t think I’ve ever had the chance to see his Italian film Maddalena (1971), a film that’s best known for its Ennio Morricone score (although far more people know it as the theme to the BBC series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George), although I was able to see Death of a President/Śmierć prezydenta (1977) and Austeria (1982).

Goodbye, See You Tomorrow was markedly tougher given the comparative lack of research material in English. A major godsend for background material was the booklet in Best Film Co’s 50 Years of the Polish Film School box set, whose essay by Marek Hendrykowski provided a fair amount of detail, as did a comparative study of this film and Three Colours: White by Elzieta Ostrowska and Joanna Rydzewska. A chance discovery of Kathleen M. Cioffi’s book Alternative Theatre in Poland 1954-1989 provided essential background on the experimental theatre scene that fuelled Zbigniew Cybulski’s original script and his approach to realising it onscreen. I also found a long interview with director Janusz Morgenstern in Gazeta Wyborcza, which provided useful biographical info (unlike the situation with Kawalerowicz, most of Morgenstern’s films aren’t easily viewable, even on unsubtitled video copies). Almost at the last minute, I realised that this would be a heaven-sent opportunity to quote from Alexei Sayle’s hilarious memoir Stalin Ate My Homework, specifically the bit where he decides to use Cybulski as a role model, with disastrous consequences.

Second Run’s DVD edition of Zoltán Huszárik’s masterpiece Szindbád comes out today, and reviews have generally been ecstatic.

• The Digital Fix (Anthony Nield);
• DVD Outsider (L.K. Weston);
• Mondo Digital (Nathaniel Thompson);
• Sight & Sound (Michael Atkinson);
• Sunday Telegraph (Alan Stanbrook);
• Time Out (David Jenkins)

These ones are less keen on the film, but are nice about the extras:

• Electric Sheep (Alison Frank);
• 24 Frames per Second (Sam Inglis)

…and here’s Second Run’s own page about the film and the DVD.

A test pressing of Second Run’s Szindbád arrived in the post, allowing me to confirm a few things about the final release (currently scheduled for 11 July – Amazon/MovieMail/Play).

1. It’s definitely a fresh anamorphic transfer, not an upscale of the old letterboxed Mokép DVD. A side-by-side comparison reveals noticeably more detail on the Second Run version.

2. Even though I can’t judge the accuracy of the translation, I can confirm that the subtitles are a clear improvement on Mokép’s, both in terms of filling in previously untranslated gaps in the dialogue, and in subtitling onscreen text (which the Mokép disc didn’t do).

3. Although there were rumours that Zoltán Huszárik’s breakthrough short Elégia would be included on Second Run’s disc (as it is on the Mokép one), it seems that a last-minute and wholly unexpected rights complication meant that it had to be dropped.

4. So the only video extra is one of Second Run’s “personal appreciations”, this time by Peter Strickland, the director of Katalin Varga. To my surprise, he opens by crediting me with his discovery of the film in the first place (it was my contribution to Sight & Sound‘s “75 hidden gems” feature of summer 2007), so I should probably acknowledge that Stefan Kuhn was the man responsible for drawing my attention to it a few months earlier when he sent me the Mokép DVD. It was fascinating seeing Peter visibly wrestling with the same issues that I had with the booklet (see below) – namely, how do you put into words what you feel about such a supremely visual and aural experience?

5. The other extra is a 20-page booklet, which I haven’t seen yet, but I suspect it’s mostly devoted to the 6,000 word essay I wrote about the film, its literary origins and its director. To put it mildly, this was one of my more challenging recent commissions – I agreed to do it without hesitation because I loved the film, but even aside from the difficulty of conveying its pleasures in verbal form, background research was stymied by the lack of much of any substance available in English, or indeed any other language besides Hungarian. Thankfully, Google Translate was my friend (though I was very careful indeed to source factual claims from more than one document), and various back issues of the Hungarofilm Bulletin (produced by the Hungarian Communist authorities five times yearly to promote their national cinema to English speakers) supplied interviews and other useful background. I also drew on George Szirtes’ translation of some of the original Gyula Krúdy short stories (published as The Adventures of Sindbad), and a New Yorker piece on Krúdy by the Hungarian critic John Lukacs).

Oh, and here’s an enlargement of the cover:

I’ve been a fan of Second Run’s artwork more or less since the label was launched (you can see the lot here, and I singled out personal favourites in this Kinoblog post), but I really think they’ve excelled themselves with this. It was no small challenge summing up this gorgeously-shot but deliberately slippery and elusive film in a single image (the Hungarian DVD opted for the film’s original poster), but they’ve done a blinding job here, conveying the sense of fading memories, the way they’re triggered by Proustian associations with objects, the film’s literary source and Szindbád’s obsession with the opposite sex.