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.

Second Run’s latest DVD is out today, complete with a 5,000-word booklet essay by yours truly. Compared with the research challenges posed by the two Jan Němec films (Diamonds of the Night and The Party and the Guests), this was a breeze to write: as one of the most internationally renowned of all the Czech New Wave films, A Blonde in Love has been extensively documented in English, not least in Miloš Forman’s autobiography Turnaround, and so there was lots of anecdotal material to draw on.

Aware that the booklet was the only extra (planned interviews with Forman and/or co-writer Ivan Passer had foundered in the face of a release deadline), I tried to come up with something that hadn’t been offered on other editions, and decided to devote the second half of the booklet to a full-blown reception study. Thanks to Václav Březina’s invaluable Lexikon českého filmu (broadly speaking, the Czech equivalent of Halliwell’s Film Guide, purchased on impulse in Prague circa 1997), I had access to contemporary box office figures, and was able to compare the film’s success with that of Forman’s other Czech films, and the other Czech titles in Second Run’s catalogue. Handily, the figures were in admissions, not Czech crowns, so direct comparisons could be made regardless of inflation:

• A Blonde in Love – 2,255,858
• The Firemen’s Ball – 1,348,547
• Marketa Lazarová – 1,251,048
• Romeo, Juliet and Darkness – 1,202,677
• Black Peter – 978,142
• Larks on a String – 750,803
• Morgiana – 595,959
• The Cremator – 590,242
• Audition/Talent Competition – 545,161
• Intimate Lighting – 345,129
• The Valley of the Bees – 329,671
• The Ear – 272,785
• Adelheid – 258,247
• Daisies – 213,782
• Valerie and her Week of Wonders – 196,923
• The Party and the Guests – 86,124
• Diamonds of the Night – 76,001

(The figures are ticket sales between the original release and 1995 – I imagine they wouldn’t be that different today, unless any had a big theatrical reissue in the last fifteen years).

It’s interesting to see the very high placing for Romeo, Juliet and Darkness, which I always assumed was one of the more obscure titles in Second Run’s catalogue – and also that Larks on a String was a solid hit despite not opening in public until 1990 (though My Sweet Little Village had become an all-time box-office champ not much earlier, with a whopping 4,428,556 admissions, so Jiří Menzel clearly had a substantial following). And it’s amusing to see Diamonds of the Night at the bottom of the list, as it was officially registered as a box office hit on account of being sold abroad as part of a package containing far more lucrative titles – Czech Communist accounting regarded them as being equally successful even when they blatantly weren’t.

I also discovered that the film was pretty close to an unqualified critical hit in Britain (where it had a major impact on Lindsay Anderson, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach) and that it caused surprisingly big censorship rows in both Argentina and Australia. Looking at it now, it’s hard to believe that it was ever officially X-rated, though at the time this would only have prevented under-16s from seeing it, so the current (and fair) 15 certificate isn’t that different.

Reviews

• The Arts Desk (Tom Birchenough)
• The Digital Fix (Clydefro Jones)
• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze)
• DVD Outsider (L.K. Weston)
• Electric Sheep (Alison Frank)
• Subtitledonline.com

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.

Second Run’s second Jan Němec film is released today, complete with a video appreciation from Peter Hames and a booklet essay from yours truly. None of the reviewers have spotted this yet, but a fair chunk of the second half was essentially recycled from the booklet for The Party and the Guests – though I gave the text a thorough going-over and updated the story of Němec’s career to include his latest film, The Ferrari Dino Girl (2008).

The DVD presented an interesting challenge that I hadn’t come across before, which is to do with potentially over-zealous subtitling. The Czech DVD (released by Filmexport Home Video) subtitles all the film’s spoken content in English – which might seem exemplary, but for the fact that the film is in Czech and German, and part of the overall feeling of disorientation towards the end of the film comes from the fact that the boys don’t seem to understand their captors. Interestingly, the hard-of-hearing subtitles also offered by the Czech disc simply transcribe what’s being said – i.e. the Czech is presented in Czech, the German in German, so the German dialogue is not translated for Czech audiences in any form. Given that there’s so little spoken content in the film, it might seem perverse to deliberately omit subtitles, but there did genuinely seem to be a case for it here.

In the end, Second Run consulted Němec himself, to find out which lines he specifically intended to be understood by an English-speaking audience, and the final subtitles reflect that.

Reviews

• The Digital Fix (Clydefro Jones);
• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);
• DVD Talk (Chris Neilson);
• DVD Outsider (L.K. Weston);
• Mubi (Glenn Kenny);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.

My third Second Run contribution is a fairly considerable departure from the first two (The Party and the Guests and Valerie and her Week of Wonders). Although I generally specialise in writing about European cinema, and indeed have no real track record when it comes to the Australian variety, I was commissioned to contribute a booklet essay to accompany Ann Turner’s debut Celia after I let slip that I’d been peripherally involved with the original UK cinema release in 1990 (I worked for the Everyman Cinema, which at the time had strong links with independent distributors Electric Pictures – which effectively meant that I was frequently roped in to help with their releases).

I particularly remembered this one, because the reviews were terrific, and yet it sank like a stone when it opened – a sobering lesson that critical acclaim may not be enough if the public doesn’t seem to be that keen to watch an Australian film made by and starring complete unknowns. Another useful lesson came from my first professional encounter with the British Board of Film Classification, which raised concerns about possible animal cruelty – proscribed by the 1937 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act. Handily, the producers had anticipated issues like this, and were able to prove that the shot in question had been simulated, so the BBFC gave it a 15 without requesting cuts.

I’d always liked the film, and it stood up very well indeed – in fact, now that I’m a father myself it resonated with me much more deeply. The relationship between Celia and her father Ray is particularly well drawn: Turner both manages to get inside Celia’s head, with all the impulsiveness and unreasonableness that that implies, while at the same time presenting an entirely objective view of a man who isn’t wicked by any sensible yardstick – merely honestly baffled by his daughter’s obsessions and trying to do good by them while simultaneously trying to stay in line with the small-c conservative community that they inhabit.

The BFI Library was a major godsend when researching the piece, as they turned out to have an extensive collection of Australian magazines and cuttings, enabling me to trace the film’s long gestation (it won an award for Best Unproduced Script) as well as its reception both in its native country and elsewhere. The British reviews were every bit as good as I remembered, but I also found out that the US release was a disaster. It was already arguably a mistake for the British poster to hint that it might be a horror film (it’s much subtler than that), but the US version went the whole hog and retitled it Celia: Child of Terror. Ann Turner strongly objected, but she had no contractual veto, and the film duly died a death.

My booklet essay is a fair bit shorter than the one I wrote for The Party and the Guests, largely because I knew in advance that it would be sharing space with another piece, by Australian academic Joy Damousi, and the original folktale ‘The Hobyahs’. I was given a copy of Professor Damousi’s piece in advance, so that I could avoid overlapping material – and I tailored my piece so that it was more or less the same length.

Given the issues over previous ad campaigns, I was intrigued to see what Second Run would come up with for their cover. I knew in advance that they were determined to avoid the horror-film trap, and instead they came up with this:

The multiple layers of symbolism make more sense if you’ve seen the film, but the colour red is as important as the rabbits and the ghostly Hobyahs that can be seen scuttling out of the picture at the bottom.

Reviews

• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);
• DVD Talk (Chris Neilson)
• DVD Times (Gary Couzens);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.

Today sees the British DVD premiere of one of the best films of the Czech New Wave, complete with a video appreciation by Peter Hames and a booklet essay by me. It’s comfortably the longest booklet piece I’ve written to date, largely because Second Run didn’t give me a word limit, and I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to do some serious digging into Němec’s entire career: at the time the booklet was commissioned, I’d only seen his first two features (Diamonds of the Night and this).

The immediate challenge, as ever in these situations, was actually getting to see much of it. Handily, the BFI National Archive had copies of his 1988 documentary Peace in Our Time? and Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1990 documentary Kids from FAMU, in which Němec was one of the interviewees, and I was able to track down American VHS copies of Oratorio for Prague (1968) and Code Name Ruby (1996) and a DVD of Late Night Talks with Mother (2001). Which wasn’t perfect – I’d have especially liked to have had the chance to see Martyrs of Love (1967), the film he made in between the completion and release of The Party and the Guests – but it was better than nothing, and meant that I could piece together a pretty comprehensive career overview from assorted interviews in English and French publications.

A challenge when writing about the film itself was that I had to rely on an old VHS recording of a BBC2 broadcast from 2 June 1990, the last time British television showed any sustained interest in Czech cinema or indeed Czech culture in general (the same period saw the British television premiere of Jan Švankmajer’s BBC-commissioned The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia, a handful of 1960s Czech New Wave classics and various documentaries). The tape itself was still perfectly watchable, but it became very clear on closer examination that the subtitles were woefully inadequate – they translated the important dialogue, but tended to elide anything that sounded like an aside. The problem is, this film is overwhelmingly about asides, about reading (and therefore listening) between the lines, and I was very conscious that I might have missed out a potentially important detail simply because it wasn’t translated and my Czech wasn’t good enough to catch it when spoken.

So one of the first things I checked when the Second Run DVD arrived was whether it had used the same subtitles – and I’m delighted to confirm that it has a far more comprehensive translation. I don’t think there’s anything in the booklet that I wanted to change as a result, but I can say with some authority (based on the BBC2 version and a 35mm screening that I caught at the Ciné Lumière a few years later) that this is the most English-friendly version of the film yet released. Also, full marks for the cover, which wittily alludes to a key plot point without ever resorting to spoilers – here’s an enlargement:

Reviews

• DVD Times (Noel Megahey);
• DVD Beaver (Gary Tooze);

…plus more links in Second Run’s own webpage devoted to the film.