Still from Andrzej Zulawski's "She Shaman", photo: YBCA
After years of thinking Żuławski's work would remain outside of the periphery of cinema culture in English-speaking parts of the world, his films are finally being celebrated in North America. At the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, he receives the Lifetime Achievement Award
To describe the work of Andrzej Żuławski, the French coined the term "Zulawskienne," meaning "over the top". A nonconformist visionary of world cinema, he has created characters who have played out the most high-pitched emotions in cinema history - cathartic explosions of violence, sexuality and despair. "Like movies by David Lynch or Roman Polański", the Wall Street Journal's Kristin M. Jones wrote, "Mr. Zulawski's work addresses love, madness and troubled relationships, but his approach to storytelling and his cosmology of personal, political and biblical allusions are all his own".
His stories are non-linear, including elements of surrealism, and bodily functions and sexuality are given free rein. There are recurring themes, details and doppelgängers across multiple films - as well as sudden intrusions of humour in the most horrific scenes. In an interview with Margaret Barton-Fumo, Żuławski describes his films as provoking a certain kind of awareness, nervousness and open-eyed insistence, which cannot be equated to showing hysteria in its clinical understanding.
A director, a screenwriter, novelist, essayist and actor influenced by his experiences in wartime and communist Poland, he is "Loved by many, hated by some", and "this nonconformist visionary remains one of Poland's - and Europe's - most radical filmmakers".
His art-house movies have received increasing attention in North America since 2012, with extended screenings and mini-festivals in New York City (BAMcinematek), Los Angeles (Cinefamily) and San Francisco (YBCA). At Montreal's Fantasia International Film Festival, Żuławski will pick up the Lifetime Achievement Award on the 25th of July. The genre festival, held since1996 and featuring an "eclectic line-up" of Canadian and international films, also screens two of the director's films, She-Shaman and L'amour Braque.
She-Shaman, 1996
Still from Andrzej Zulawski's "She-Shaman", source: Fantasia International Film Festival
The film has been called an "unorthodox love story" and is considered one of Zulawski's most outrageous. A middle-aged anthropology professor (Boguslaw Linda) meets a free-spirited younger woman referred to as "the Italian" (Iwona Petry). The professor recently exhumed the miraculously preserved remains of a 3,000-year-old shaman, and his escalating obsession with "the Italian" is matched by his fascination with the remains of the shaman. Over the movie's course, sexual encounters between the professor and the young woman become increasingly avid, ritualistic and violent. She-Shaman, also called The Shaman (Szamanka in Polish) culminates in a apocalyptic finale.
L'amour braque, 1985
Advertising for Andrzej Zulawski's "L'Amour Braque", source: Fantasia International Film Festival
Fist fights, car chases and rampant flamethrower use, the film follows a Hungarian immigrant’s induction into a gang of Parisian hooligans. A loose adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (the author was a favorite of Zulawski’s) transposed from Saint Petersburg to Paris, this is Sophie Marceau's first "film for grown-ups". Commenting on the Fantasia Festival website, Daniel Bird write "L'amour braque is a crime film like no other, a postmodern riff on the Russian 'yurodivy' (holy fool) by way of classic Hollywood gangster flicks and Busby Berkeley musicals.
Arguably Zulawski’s most extreme film, L'amour braque is a thoroughly uncompromising work that not only plays with genre tropes, but pushes its performers to their limits while demanding an unparalleled level of both emotional and intellectual investment on the part of the viewer. "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night".
For more information on the festival see: Fantasia International Film Festival
Editor: MJ 10.07.2013
Sources: culture.pl, Fantasia IFF, PISF, YBCA, Filmmaker Magazine, The Obscene Mirror, NY Times