Golem (1979) “Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?”

Released to Blu-ray by Second Run this week, Golem was the astonishing debut of Polish sci-fi auteur Piotr Szulkin. Based on the eponymous mythical clay-made creature of Jewish folklore and, specifically, Austrian author Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, the film stars Marek Walczewski and Krystyna Janda, Szulkin’s high school friend and a muse of many Polish filmmakers, including Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Żuławski, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Several other actors would go on to become regulars in Szulkin’s films, such as Joanna Żółkowska, Wiesław Drzewicz, Mariusz Dmochowski, and Krzysztof Majchrzak.

Set in a 21st-century ravaged by an atomic war sometime in the 1940s, and shot in sickly greens and other peculiar tones, Golem has widely been held up as a classic of the genre, viewed as both a contemporary of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (also 1979) and a precursor to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982). Walczewski stars as Pernat (named after Meyrink’s protagonist, Pernath), who we meet at the start of the movie in a police station, being interrogated about the suspicious death of a respected ophthalmologist that occurred in his apartment block. Pernat insists that he knows nothing and seems even more in the dark about the fact that his ill-fated bespectacled double is being interrogated in the room next door.

Eventually released into empty streets swirling with abandoned newspapers, Pernat makes his way home in something of a daze, determined to return to his quiet life as quickly and smoothly as possible. However, an array of neighbours, including Janda’s sex worker Rozyna, her consumptive and frustrated student brother (Majchrzak), the landlord Holtrum (Dmochowski) with his mysterious oven, doll repairer Miriam (Żółkowska), and her ailing father (Drzewicz), will seek to ensure that Pernat’s existence remains a surreal nightmare.

It is Miriam’s father who first voices a suspicion that Pernat is, like the mythical Golem of Prague, not a real person. This suspicion is subsequently confirmed to the audience in several asides featuring a group of scientists, surgeons, and medical administrators who reveal that Pernat is, in fact, a genetic clone, mistakenly released into civilisation with the memories and experiences of the other Pernat, the bespectacled figure who died under police interrogation. Shot in fuzzy scarlet, the scenes featuring those white-coated figures routinely interrupt Pernat’s narrative, cutting into the main action like rogue transmissions of naff ’70s Aussie soap The Young Doctors, if you were watching them with a deep red sweet wrapper in front of your eyes.

Meanwhile, Pernat, the artificial human newly awakened into this world, engages with a dystopic society that seems designed to keep the masses subdued in a trance-like slumber and is built wholly on artifice. He visits a porno cinema with Miriam’s father (the old man insisting that it’s “the Church of the Transfiguration of Jesus”) and observes the audience succumbing to sleep during an advert for sleeping pills. Later, he is taken to a televised rock concert by Rozyna, only to find that the roaring and appreciative crowd assembled on the TV screen does not exist; the TV studio is empty save for the guitarist, a bored TV director (Szulkin, doing a Hitchcock), and a cleaning lady, busily mopping the desolate studio floor.

As a filmmaker, Szulkin stood apart from many of his fellow contemporaries in Soviet-controlled Polish cinema. While the métier of Kieślowski and Wajda (whom, as I previously noted, Janda also routinely worked for) was one of realism, seeing how far they could go in portraying an authentic and critical vision of Communist rule on screen before the censors struck, Szulkin concentrated on critiquing the system by more oblique means. In focusing on sci-fi and surrealism, Szulkin found a way to address and reflect the issues of the nation and its audiences that would not be immediately clear to the apparatchiks and censors whose role it was to pass his work as suitable for general release. After all, to the authorities, this was simply a modern update of a Jewish folktale. However, by updating Meyrink’s novel to a bleak, post-industrial landscape that was heightened and only slightly removed from the reality of Poland at the time, Szulkin conveniently used allegory to protest against an authoritarian regime that routinely informed its people that they were living in a socialist utopia.

It is this disconnect between what citizens were being told about their society and their actual experiences of life within it – the artifice, if you will – that Szulkin explores in Golem. In the opening credits, we see the surgeons at work constructing the titular golem/Pernat. For want of an oral clamp, they proceed to stuff rolled-up newspapers in his mouth. Not only does this recall the myth of the Golem, an animated anthropomorphic being created without the ability to speak, whose activation was completed by the stuffing into its mouth of a piece of paper upon which is written a shem (the explicit name of God composed by letters in the Hebrew alphabet), it also puts the propaganda of the society that Pernat is about to enter at a physical, literal remove from his very being.

Likewise, the swirling, discarded newspapers in the street, which, as Rozyna’s brother laments, make it impossible to tell where one story begins and another ends, implies that the truth lies in the public’s grasp, but it has been jumbled up so much as to remain elusive. The newspaper motif reappears when Pernat is called for a dental check-up, where he meets a peculiar dentist who is far more interested in his eyes than his teeth. Portrayed by Jan Pietrzak, the dentist stuffs another rolled-up newspaper into Pernat’s mouth and begins to examine his eyes, enabling him to see society more clearly.

Cinema proves to be the (literal) opium of the masses, though Pernat himself seems immune to its slumber-inducing effects, recoiling from the screen in horror to vomit in the loos and shed a layer of skin from his face as he’s harangued and accosted by a ghoulish cleaner, whose layers of make-up are perhaps another example of artifice. Television is subsequently shown to produce a fantasy manipulated by the unseen authorities, with the director (Szulkin) revealing that he himself is as much a tape recording as the rapturous audience superimposed over the musician deploying his guitar licks.

The métier may be surreal, but the meaning is clear: Pernat’s on a voyage of self-discovery, opening his eyes to the fabrications, misinformation, and gaslighting of officialdom. While his neighbours fight in the dirt for their own sense of self, Pernat instinctively knows that he must progress towards his own sense of self in order to take absolute control of both his own identity and reality.

Second Run present Golem in a new 2k restoration supervised by the film’s sound engineer, Nikodem Wołk-Łaniewski, and by Szulkin himself before his death in 2018 at the age of sixty-eight. It features an all-new audio commentary from Michael Brooke, and its extras include four of Szulkin’s early short films ranging from 1972 to 1976. The release is rounded off by a booklet containing writing from Tomasz Kolankiewicz and Michał Oleszczyk.

Mark’s Archive – Golem (1979)