Uwaga chuligani!
Poland, 1955, black and white, 12 mins
Although signs of a thaw could be discerned the previous year (Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski’s sternly moralistic lecture Are You Among Them?/Czy jesteś wśród nich? did at least acknowledge the existence of petty crime and other forms of antisocial behaviour), their second film Look Out, Hooligans! is recognised as their most important breakthrough in the field of Polish documentary. It inaugurated what became known as the ‘black series’ (‘czarna seria’), a movement that ran for roughly three years, during which filmmakers tackled subjects that would have been completely unfilmable when Stalinist socialist realism and its associated vision of an impossibly perfect, universally co-operative society was imposed on Polish cinema across the board.
Indeed, the calculatedly sensational title marks a break with the past in its own right, as does the opening scene, a vicious knife fight between rival gangs that could have come straight out of an American International Pictures teen exploitation film (complete with tilted camera angles, noirish lighting, punctuating zooms and stabbing orchestral chords). The voiceover only starts after a grieving mother has been informed of the fight’s outcome.
Even though the film then settles down into a sober sociological analysis, complete with open questions (“When will they take measures to stop it? How did this happen? How could this happen?”), the cutting is nervous and jittery, as though similar eruptions of violence could take place at any moment, even on a crowded street in broad daylight. In such a crowd, the commentary singles out teenage truants and follows them to the park, where they meet an older mentor who plies them with cigarettes when he’s not making advances to equally wayward teenage girls (the commentary calls him “that dandy”, though anyone less impressionable than his targets will agree that we’re not exactly talking Beau Brummell).
Unsurprisingly, Polish teenagers ultimately have exactly the same desires and concerns as their western counterparts: the need to spend disposable income on consumer goods. Black markets thrive in everything from alcohol to tickets for sold-out shows. But how to raise the necessary funds? Legitimate employment being off limits to the youngest, they’re taught to steal by their suppliers, the less adept ones getting caught, or worse.
Janek is an example of the latter: he came to Warsaw from the countryside (i.e. naïve, easily led) and ended up working in a factory – he’s therefore a wage-earner, but has no idea what to do with his money. So he hangs out in bars, where he’s quickly adopted by the same miscreants seen earlier. There, he drinks himself into a stupor and participates in increasingly wild, jazz-fuelled dances (the cutting gets especially frenzied at this point), finally getting caught up in a large-scale brawl.
Having drunk his first pay packet, he turns to muggings, first in dark alleys, then on trains in full view of passengers – who do nothing, even when a ticket collector is pushed off the train, presumably to his death. We return to the brawl seen in the opening scene and learn that one of the gang members was killed – one assumes that the Jan Podgórski of the police report is our own Janek from earlier on. The final shot superimposes his grieving mother over a line-up of his killers (the oldest just eighteen), as the commentator asks “Why did this happen? Which of them is guilty? And are they the only guilty ones?”
What most impresses about Look Out, Hooligans! is the way that it’s honest about the appeal of a gang and crime-fuelled lifestyle: the sensationalised (“westernised?”) style isn’t so much eye-catching as lapel-grabbing, as if to say “Look! This is what your kids get up to! And can you blame them?”, the shock tactics designed as much to stimulate debate as to provide illicit thrills. The film’s moral message grows organically out of the drama, and is nuanced enough to avoid comparisons with the kind of Manichean good-versus-evil conflicts between ‘feral’ kids and law-abiding adults that provides the staple daily diet of readers of the tabloid press.
There’s a telling detail in a scene where a couple of clearly underage kids buy vodka – the commentary sarcastically explains that it’s “for their parents”, though a pan to a chart showing the shop’s sales figures suggests that they probably didn’t need to give an excuse: the owner would have been happy to take their money regardless. 14-year-old Wladek is shown getting involved with gangs because they provide a more congenial environment to his traumatic home life run by a violent alcoholic father (Alcoholism would be the subject of Hoffman and Skórzewski’s next, even harder-hitting film, The Children Accuse/Dzieci oskarżają). Similarly, the film shows the lack of alternative options available to Janek – the youth club only offers chess, table tennis and magazines, while there’s nothing in the library aimed at teenagers apart from vacuous posters seeking to educate them about electoral regulations. As the commentary implies, if we don’t care enough about them to provide attractive alternatives, do we have the right to express outrage when they turn bad?
If the film’s style has inevitably dated, it’s all too easy to appreciate the impact it must have had at the time: the only thing it has in common with, say, Destination Nowa Huta! (Kierunek – Nowa Huta!) and its implausibly utopian vision of Polish youth selflessly banding together to create a brighter future is (WFD’s in-house commentator) Andrzej Łapicki’s voice on the soundtrack and the exclamation mark in the title. Like the film’s subjects, Look Out, Hooligans! didn’t so much throw down a gauntlet as kick in the door, smash up the cinema’s interior, slash its seats and daub paint on the screen – and Polish film as a whole would never be quite the same again.
- Director/script: Jerzy Hoffman, Edward Skórzewski
- Camera: Antoni Staśkiewicz
- Editing: Ludmiła Godziaswili
- Sound: Hamila Paszkowska
- Commentary: Karol Małcużyński
- Narration: Andrzej Łapicki
- Sound Editing: Marian Duszyński
- Production Company: Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio)
The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: The Black Series double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). The picture is far from flawless, but I suspect the dark and grainy image closely reflects the original – certainly, it doesn’t work against the film in any way, and the exposure in the tiny handful of daylight scenes is spot on. The subtitles aren’t quite as polished as they’ve been on, say, the Andrzej Munk set (one even mixes up its languages when it refers to “15-letni Jan Podgórski”), but they’re perfectly comprehensible, and both coverage and synchronisation are fine.