Three films by Jerzy Skolimowski: Walkover, Barrier and Dialogue 20-40-60 (1965-68) (Blu-Ray Review)

Jerzy Skolimowski’s film Barrier, the second in this Blu-Ray set of three early features from Second Run, begins with a manifesto. A youthful man is complaining that the young are always expected to make sacrifices while the old simply accumulate wealth, and questions why it can’t be him in the fast car with the trophy wife, while the 50-year-old fights for his country. Unlike the hero of Skolimowski’s prior film Walkover, this character isn’t played by the director himself, but this is still probably the most autobiographical moment in any of these films. Skolimowski’s early career was marked out by a mixture of extraordinary self-belief, deep impatience, and a determination to make his mark early that led him to greatness. Famously, he protested against the necessity to make short films before making a feature by crafting three of his film school shorts so that they could be re-edited into a full-length movie. That film, Identification Marks: None, was recently released by the BFI alongside its sort-of sequel Hands Up!, and now Second Run have given us a more complete picture of his early Polish work.

As with Identification Marks: None, they reveal Skolimowski to be a very careful planner. Walkover begins symbolically with the female lead from that earlier film throwing herself under a train. The camera then reveals this apparent exterior scene to have been shot from inside the train. It’s a trick shot so staggering, even that scrupulous researcher Michael Brooke can only guess (in his commentary) at how Skolimowski did it. As for why he did it, Skolimowski realised he could afford very little in the way of film stock, so each shot becomes an exercise in cramming as much in as possible. Skolimowski’s autobiographical character Andrzej Leszczyc returns from Identification Marks: None, still played by the director and now a boxer choosing between his career and a new love affair. The narrative is every bit as dizzying as the camerawork, and it’s very easy to get lost. What shines through is Skolimowski’s showmanship, as well as his Herzogian belief that sports, carnivals and stunts can be perfectly valid subject matter for an arthouse director.

There is a case to be made for hopping onto the last disc and watching the collection of Skolimowski’s shorts before tackling any of the features. They won’t make the narrative of Walkover any more coherent, but they will give you a solid grounding in the young Skolimowski’s style, thematic concerns and – perhaps most importantly – sense of humour. The Menacing Eye and Your Money or Your Life are both set at fairgrounds, the former a silent look at the preparation for a knife-throwing act, the latter a caper comedy that takes a detour to satirise antisemitism. It’s not the only dark note the shorts strike: Erotyk shifts from a demonstration of Skolimowski’s precocious brilliance at trick shots into a kind of abstract horror film. Mostly, though, these films show Skolimowski at his most playful. The best of them, Little Hamlet, uses its soundtrack to transform a slapstick brawl on a building site into a modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy. It’s both incredibly erudite and very silly: a duel is won when someone sprays a bottle of seltzer in someone’s face, and Ophelia’s tragic drowning becomes a gag involving the lead actress taking an early bath.

Walkover became a very divisive artefact on the film festival circuit, though it picked up some notable champions: Cahiers du Cinema named it the second-best film of the year, just behind Robert Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar. Skolimowski was unfamiliar with that film, but he checked it out, loved it, and nearly six decades later made EO as a homage. He was also unaware of the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who sent Skolimowski a note claiming they were the two best directors in the world. After seeing Godard’s Pierrot le fou, he found inspiration for his next film, Barrier. It shares Godard’s customary jazzy rhythm (and jazz soundtrack, thanks to Krzyzstof Komeda) and frequent breaks with realism, but it is very much not a copy. The style is vaguely French, but the subject matter is firmly within the Central and Eastern European absurdist tradition of Kafka and Ionesco.

Barrier begins with repeated shots of men kneeling and having their hands tied behind their backs before toppling forward. It looks like a mass execution, but it is quickly revealed to be a ridiculous game being played by a group of medical students. I wondered whether the game was real – it seems like it would result in a fair few broken necks – but by the time Jan Nowicki’s protagonist is climbing a block of flats in front of a crowd of spectators to free a tethered bird, I understood that realism was not the goal. The protagonist, simply called Protagonist, is subjected to a series of preposterous ordeals and forced to join in with strange rituals, several of which involve the wearing of little hats made of newspapers. Literal sense has left the building, but the message – we’re all dropped without warning from the education system into an adult world whose rules are near-incomprehensible – is surprisingly clear. It is a film full of symbolism, captured in the same elaborately-choreographed shots that Walkover and Erotyk gloried in, and it might just be the best thing in this box set.

In any other company, it would also be the strangest thing in the box set, but we’ve still got Dialogue 20-40-60 to consider. A Czech anthology film which matched Skolimowski with the Slovak director Peter Solan and the Czech Zbynĕk Brynych, it consists of three radically different takes on the same script by Tibor Vichta. The titular conceit – that each version ages the characters up by twenty years – never quite succeeds in its clear goal of making the film into a commentary on generational division, perhaps largely because Skolimowski’s opening segment is weird enough to defeat any attempt at sociological realism. (If the baby doll strapped to a crucifix has any relevance to Poland’s youth, it passed me by) What it does confirm is that Skolimowski was now standing proud among Europe’s most innovative film artists. As a fan of the Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman is Fear, Skolimowski was delighted to work with the Czech film-maker, and the title of Solan’s The Boxer and Death suggests they’d have some common interests there as well. The cast includes Jean-Pierre Léaud, the nouvelle vague icon who had previously worked with Skolimowski on 1967’s The Departure. The scandal over Hands Up!, banned for fourteen years in Poland, had not happened yet. But it was clear Skolimowski was becoming too big for his own country.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in Skolimowski’s short for Dialogue 20-40-60 comes right at the start, when he captures a pop concert in a fashion kinetic enough to stand comparison with Swinging London specialists like Peter Whitehead or Donald Cammell. Sure enough, he would enter the ’70s giving his own take on the British youth picture with Deep End, before doing a better job of keeping pace with changing trends in UK cinema than most British directors: folk horror in The Shout, Thatcher-era social realism in Moonlighting. Watching these early films gives you an insight into all the corners of Skolimowski’s zig-zagging career. He’s certainly got an eye for opportunities, and can get personal, unusual films made no matter what the obstacles in his way. Like any director worth talking about, he has a consistent set of themes, influences and ideas, but they bubble up at the most unexpected times: was anyone expecting that early career association with Au hazard Balthazar to pay off with an Oscar nomination in 2023? Skolimowski’s work is a maze, one that any fan of European cinema will be delighted to lose themselves in. Thanks to this box set from Second Run, we can see a few more paths through it.

Graham’s Archive – Three films by Jerzy Skolimowski