Another two of Munk’s films, both short sketches of Warsaw, strongly contrast with the director’s other movies. In these, the most clearly expressed theme is the incredible desire to live and enjoy life in its ordinariness and simplicity, a theme which grasped many filmmakers in the 1950s and 60s. The Red Balloon and Zazie in the Metro debuted in theatres in France, in England The Knack …And How to Get It, in the Soviet Union Walking the Streets of Moscow, the Americans made Roman Holiday. All of these films are a bit naïve but charming, occasionally plotless and completely devoid of tormented conflicts. It seems that peace is about to be achieved and everything will be fine from then onwards. The Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis and the creeping stagnation both in socialism and Western society, will soon destroy this feeling, but thanks to film, we can revisit it.
Munk managed to uphold this feeling of a fragile, but joyful world. His two short films Niedzielny Poranek (Sunday Morning) and Spacerek Staromiejski (A Walk in the Old City of Warsaw) can also be considered to some extent as both fictional and documentary film. In the former, the narrator tells us about a driver and a conductor of a Warsaw city bus who must work on Sundays. They are young and unremarkable people, who are clearly fond of each other. Their route runs through the most striking landmarks of new Warsaw – past the Palace of Culture and Science, the Old Town, Nowy Świat, Constitution Square. The trip leads to easy flirting between the heroes and small vignettes of the passengers. There is nothing else in the film, but there doesn’t need to be. Niedzielny Poranek is interesting first and foremost for its brilliant form and attention to detail. This was Munk’s first colour picture, and he takes advantage of it. The colours are expressive and emotional, painting the new Warsaw, only just reborn from terrible destruction, in an idyllic light. The banal bus route turns into a poetic journey.
Spacerek Staromiejski, which came out three years later, was filmed in a similar manner. This brightly-coloured movie is without conflict but endowed with considerable expression. At the heart of the narrative is a 10-year-old girl returning home from music school through the Old Town. Her walk is filled with a symphony of sounds – a janitor’s broom scratches against the pavement, cobblestones clop with the hammer of heels, a repairman blows a pipe organ he is tuning in the church. Warsaw’s cosy and lively Old Town is gradually replaced by ruins that have yet to be restored after the war. However, the girl is more interested in the boys who are playing in the ruins and having fun.
On the one hand, it’s surprising that Munk, who in many ways was a polemical director, who knew how to depict conflict in the most ordinary everyday activities, made these two pieces, both dissimilar from the rest of his oeuvre. But at the same time, it fits perfectly into his logic. Munk very accurately reflected the mercurial time in which he lived. In his very next movie Zezowate Szczęście (Bad Luck), he severely ridiculed himself and the themes that he had addressed earlier. His hero is an arbitrary, scummy man, self-confident only in prison. The heroism that Munk had spoke so much about, can be illusory, false and meaningless. This film is completely permeated with scepticism and impending doom.
For many years, Munk was occupied with agonising survival, then he made films about it. It was as if he wanted to show us that it is necessary to survive, if only because life is worth it, because the world can be a good place. The upcoming era brought expectations of new wars, socialist inequality, a crisis of ideology, and additionally, in Poland, state antisemitism and tanks cast against protesting workers. Munk did not live to experience these times. He remained in the era when a person had to force their way out of the shackles of war, Stalinist repression and ideological dictation. An era, that despite all hardships, was filled with hope that the world is a place worth fighting and being a hero for.
Originally written in Russian, July 2016, translated by Katherine Alberti, Sept 2018