It’s ironic that in Poland this supposedly unadaptable author has already been transferred onto the silver screen three times, and his only novel that hasn’t been filmed yet is Trans-Atlantyk. People keep trying even though they recognise Gombrowicz is completely impossible to film. His reflections about ‘form’ cannot be translated into a movie, his language and philosophical games simply cannot be rendered in any other language. His focus on the grotesque isn’t really pleasing to the eye, and while the influx of thoughts from the narrator and protagonists may be interesting, they all fail to merge into a unified cause-and-effect entity.
Witold Gombrowicz, Vence, photo: Bohdan Paczowski
Filmmakers may adore Gombrowicz and consider him a source of inspiration, but the author actually exposes the weaknesses of cinema as a medium. His literature happens in the sphere of thought, not as a series of events. Kosmos, Pornografia, Trans-Atlantyk and Ferdydurke show ideas, not emotions. Take away the philosophy, brilliant social and existential observations in their plots and they would become uninteresting weak framings devoid of dramaturgy. It would be too boring for the cinema, which feeds on emotions, kinetic energy, events, tension, and protagonists ready to trespass their boundaries.
Skolimowski reads ‘Ferdydurke’
Still from ‘Ferdydurke’, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, 1991, photo: Polfim/East News
One might think that Gombrowicz should be dismissed by Polish cinema, just like Mrożek has been. But in fact, he had actually been Polish filmmakers’ heartthrob for decades.
When Andrzej Wajda established the production studio Zespół Filmowy X in 1972, he wrote in its mission statement that 20th-century Polish literature should be turned into cinema, and among his first suggestions was Ślub by Gombrowicz (others included Mrożek and Witkacy). However, neither Wajda nor any of his X colleagues made the effort of filming a Gombrowicz adaptation. The first director to attempt this challenging task was Jerzy Skolimowski. And he failed on a massive scale.
It couldn’t have been any different, because his 1991 adaptation of Ferdydurke was not a long-awaited fruit of the director’s creative labour – it wasn’t developed throughout the years and carefully thought through. It was actually filmed by accident, as a result of personal ambition rather than an artistic plan.
Skolimowski described the circumstances which led to the creation of Ferdydurke in an interview conducted by Joanna Pogorzelska for Gazeta Wyborcza:
Just before this movie, I was engaged in the most commercial project I had ever worked on in my life. For the first time, I was getting a seven-figure remuneration. Everything looked great, we had an exquisite cast: Gary Oldman, Kelly McGillis; we purchased the rights to the book, on the basis of which I was to write the script. It’s not worth mentioning it by name. The story was about a sex murder, it happened in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century. I was interested by the opportunity to introduce Freud and Jung into the plot. They don’t actually appear in the book, but I wanted to highlight the fact that the story was linked to their work. In Vienna, I found great locations to shoot and I was ready to write.
Then, something strange happened: the more impressive the topic seemed and the more I enriched it, the more I was annoyed that the basis of the story was this filthy book, garbage of the worst kind, tabloid-like literature. I came back to California, I told my agent that I wanted to return my 10%. He told me: ‘But now I’ll have to return what I got too!’. ‘Do it then’, I said. We started fighting. I announced that I wanted to make a movie based on something reliable.
‘Do you have any 20th-century classics in Poland?’ asked my agent. ‘Gombrowicz,’ I said. Of course, he didn’t know that name. I told him about Ferdydurke. He answered: ‘Do it, but in English, with famous actors, so that we can spread it across the world. I’ll find you a co-producer.’ That was a mistake. Gombrowicz proved to be untranslatable.
Skolimowski’s ambitious venture turned out to be a failure. Even the attempt to universalise the story for the co-production proved to be futile. The original title was replaced by an equally enigmatic one in English – 30 Door Key. Polish actors (including Tadeusz Łomnicki, Jan Peszek and Marek Probosz) were accompanied by foreign stars, such as Ian Glen and Crispin Glover. Skolimowski wanted to get rid of the limiting Polish context – he left out the scenes about the grandeur of Słowacki, some of the scenes were simplified, and Józio’s story was placed within the broader socio-political context of the 1930s.
Still from ‘30 Door Key’, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, 1991, photo. Polfim / East News
The director of Bariera (Barrier) had seemed like the perfect person to translate Gombrowicz into cinematography. Both artists believed that compelling and important stories can only come from the artists themselves, and in Skolimowski’s Walkover or Identification Marks: None, one can even find traces of Gombrowicz’s reflection on the meaning of social roles in the process of the creation of human personality.
But Gombrowicz always managed to sneak past Skolimowski. The director failed to convey his reflections on form, which limits and shapes the protagonists. Even the weird face contest in the film was weaker than its literary counterpart.
Since he couldn’t find a proper language to express Gombrowicz’s ideas, Skolimowski bet on the plot of the book. He made sure to represent all of the book’s events but they proved too weak to become the basis of a convincing story.
Years later, Skolimowski described the process of creating 30 Door Key to Barbara Hollender:
The whole time I was in a horrible mood, I comforted myself with alcohol and other stimulants, I behaved badly, my wife filed for divorce, everything started to collapse. ‘Ferdydurke’ became my nemesis. After the premiere, I realised that I was lost and I had to leave cinema to find my inner artist anew.
After his battle with Gombrowicz and his literature, Skolimowski licked his wounds for 17 years. He came back in 2008 in a modest but spectacular manner with Four Nights with Anna.
Kolski rewrites ‘Pornografia’
Krzysztof Majchrzaki and Grażyna Błęcka-Kolska in ‘Pornografia’, directed by Jan Jakub Kolski, 2003, photo: Syrena EG
Gombrowicz’s fans didn’t have to wait long for another adaptation of one of the writers’ novels. The daredevil accepting the challenge was Jan Jakub Kolski, one of the most vulnerable and simultaneously tough Polish directors. Again, as in Skolimowski’s case, his decision didn’t stem from long consideration, but in fact happened by chance as a result of his untameable ambition. Kolski treated Gombrowicz ‘as a challenge, an adventure as a man and as a professional’.
It certainly wasn’t an easy task, an obvious fact for many directors before Kolski: Andrzej Wajda wanted to film his own adaptation of Pornografia; Luc Bondy and Gerard Brach, Roman Polański’s longtime collaborator, quit their own project after one year (it was Kolski who brought it back to life); and an adaptation by Grzegorz Jarzyna never materialised.
Having learned from their experiences as well as the story of Skolimowski’s misadventure, Kolski knew that in order to truly convey Pornografia on film, one should avoid approaching Gombrowicz from an inferior position. In fact, one should be ready to wrestle with the writer. Kolski followed his rule and soon learned that the author of Trans-Atlantyk is a truly tough opponent. He spoke about it with Magda Voigt from Interia:
After an entire year, I think that both for myself and for the other adaptors, the whole adaptation process appeared to be in a truly hopeless place. That was when I went to Witulin, to see Gombrowicz’s dearest landscape, where the ruins of a cardboard factory stand until this day, given to him by his parents instead of a scholarship. This was their way of financing their son’s education. There, I pulled out a large rock from the foundations, it weighed around 50 kg […], I put it in my car and took it to Wrocław, hundreds of kilometres away, and I put it in my garden. And I sat on it.
My wife came out of the house and asked ‘What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?’ That’s how it actually looked – like I had lost my mind. And I would answer: I will finally hatch Gombrowicz. I won’t hatch him with my head, so maybe I’ll do it with another body part.’ And that’s what I did. Something seemed to open up in this novel, there were some clearances which led to bold decisions; decisions which ended in a script ready to be used in a movie.
Sandra Samos & Krzysztof Majchrzak in ‘Pornografia’, directed by Jan Jakub Kolski, 2003, photo. Piotr Bujnowic / Fabryka Obrazu / Forum
Kolski decided to filter Gombrowicz through his own experience, to follow the spirit and not necessarily the language of the text.
I had to become immune to Gombrowicz’s language, his phrase and melody. I learned to say ‘no’ to entire fragments, impressive when read but impossible to translate into a movie. However, when I discarded these beautiful parts, there was little left. That is why I sewed some new events onto the protagonists, but most importantly I gave them new sources of motivation. The book may happen in the heads of the protagonists, but the film is made of images.
Again, as was the case with Ferdydurke, the strength of the dramaturgy in the novel proved too weak to support a long feature film. Kolski, together with actor Krzysztof Majchrzak, decided to add their own story. The director read Gombrowicz carefully and found traces leading to the protagonists’ past. That way, in Kolski’s work, Fryderyk, a bon vivant living his best life, becomes a father who years ago failed to prevent his little daughter’s death, leaving him now haunted by guilt.
This way of treating Gombrowicz was unacceptable to many people. Various journalists accused Kolski of going too far from the original and one of the critics even accused the creators of adding a Holocaust storyline in the movie only to attract more attention to the movie and… improve the chances of getting festival awards. The truth is that the story of the WWII extermination was introduced by Gombrowicz himself in the novel when he wrote: ‘In fact, nothing has changed, but the telling absence of Jews could be felt in the town.’ For Kolski, this line meant the beginning of his own, different story.
Premiered at the Venice Festival in 2003, the adaptation was never appreciated enough. But it should have been, because Kolski courageously began his battle with Gombrowicz by reading the novel in his own, unprecedented way. Most importantly – he created a touching movie with excellent cinematography from Krzysztof Ptak, a great performance by Krzysztof Majchrzak, and a score by Zygmunt Konieczny that still lingers after all these years.
'Kosmos' – Andrzej Żuławski’s farewell
Still from Andrzej Żuławski’s ‘Kosmos’, photo: Alfama Films / press materials
Another adaptation that will also stay with the viewer for a long time is Kosmos directed by Andrzej Żuławski. But this is not just because, after the director’s death, the movie happened to be his artistic farewell, which has led some to various, quasi-mystical interpretations.
Kosmos is an encounter between two extraordinary personalities and insightful minds. An extended interview with the director, conducted by Piotr Marecki and Piotr Kletowski, seems to prove that there has never been another Polish director who could adapt Gombrowicz’s prose with such success, who could understand the writer and read his works as critically as Żuławski did. Żuławski was the only artist to ever create a language suitable of conveying the writer’s thoughts without sounding like a student reciting them.
Surprisingly, the film was also created as if by accident. When asked by Tadeusz Sobolewski whether he had prepared for the movie for a long time, he answered:
No. But Paolo Branco, the producer of my Wierność, called and asked whether I knew Kosmos. My jaw dropped. I appreciate a producer who reads books like that. Adapting such an extremely intelligent, insanely literary text concerning eternal issues is a truly backbreaking task. But I read Kosmos yet again and I surrendered to its venomous charm. […] I asked for a month and tried to prepare a screenplay that would be faithful to Gombrowicz and cinematic at the same time. Branco didn’t get any money from the Polish Film Institute. The French, when told about Gombrowicz, asked ‘Who?’ […] Since I appreciated the courage of a producer who, instead of creating another shitty movie, wanted to film Kosmos, I decided to get moving. I wrote a script that nobody liked and we went to Portugal to start filming.
The fruit of Żuławski’s work was an extraordinary film: an autonomous work, completely independent from Gombrowicz, but simultaneously close to his literature. Żuławski didn’t cheat on Gombrowicz or add new meanings – he searched for cinematic ways of conveying the beauty of the writer’s story and its grotesque character. He interwove linguistic and intertextual micro jokes into the movie, including quotations and literary allusions to Stendhal, Sartre, and even Star Wars.
Most importantly, Żuławski expressed the same truth that constituted the foundation of Gombrowicz’s novel – a yearning for sense and the need to construct meanings. Just like Gombrowicz, he told the story of a protagonist who builds his worldview from seemingly meaningless details and tries to give a logical shape to haphazard events and understand their hidden sense.
Why was it only really Żuławski who succeeded in creating an adaptation of Gombrowicz? In his insightful essay about Kosmos, professor Tadeusz Lubelski points to a possible reason. Paradoxically, it is Żuławski’s lack of faith in the ability of the cinema to convey meanings equally subtle to those used by the author of Ferdydurke. Lubelski observes that in the course of his career, Żuławski transformed from a director into a writer. While in the first two decades of his career, Żuławski created nine movies, over the next 25 years he filmed only four, but wrote 25 books.
