Snatched Out of Oblivion: Polish Found-Footage Documentaries

1970_tomasza_wolskiego.jpg, default, Frame from ‘1970’, directed by Tomasz Wolski, 2021, photo: Mayfly press material, center, #000000

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What secrets do film archives conceal? What is the truth that emerges from previously unknown material? What can we discover in the bits and pieces cut out of communist newsreels? And how can one of the masterpieces of Polish documentary filmmaking be built around a several-second shot of a man on fire?

For a long time, Polish cinema did not appreciate archival materials. Yes, it willingly made use of them, but it treated them instrumentally. The recordings unearthed in old video libraries were supposed to illustrate phenomena, to be a sort of striking image or simply an editing curiosity. The observation of reality and the ‘live’ recording of it were valued more highly in the domain of domestic documentaries than montage tomfoolery with what had been created years before. According to the teaching received at the documentary school of Kazimierz Karabasz, the documentary filmmaker was supposed to accompany the protagonist, waiting for the moment when the truth would reveal itself in front of the camera rather than to search for it in the dispersed materials of other filmmakers. Found-footage montage cinema based on archival materials was associated with critical art more akin to the gallery experience than to documentary storytelling. With time, however, this attitude shifted, and recent decades have shown that there is also room in our domestic documentary scene for artists who can create original stories out of archival materials.

The tale of a certain masterpiece

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Still from ‘Usłyszcie mój krzyk’ by Maciej Drygas, photo: archival material

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The breakthrough title turned out to be Maciej Drygas’s Usłyszcie mój krzyk (Hear My Cry), one of the greatest masterpieces of Polish documentary filmmaking, a film whose story began with a seven-second fragment of a newsreel.

It was 1990, Poland was in the midst of a political upheaval, and Drygas was just finishing a script for a feature film for Lithuanian director Raimundas Banionis. While writing it, he came across the story of Romas Kalanta, a nineteen-year-old who committed the act of self-immolation near the KGB building in Kaunas in the spring of 1972. Despite attempts by the authorities to discredit his act, he became a political myth. His story inspired the director to create a story about Ryszard Siwiec, who immolated himself at Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium in a protest against the participation of Polish soldiers in the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Drygas was puzzled as to why Siwiec’s story had gone almost unnoticed in Poland. So the director took it upon himself to investigate whether any clues explaining this mystery had survived in documents from that time.

Working on the film turned out to be a pursuit worthy of a detective. For instance, when looking through photographs of the 1968 harvest festival archived at the Central Photographic Agency, Drygas noticed an empty spot where two deleted frames had once been. A meeting with the author of the photographs confirmed the director’s suspicions – the cut-out photos managed to capture the burning figure of Ryszard Siwiec, and both images were removed due to preventive censorship.

So Drygas checked further, researching, among other things, the radio archives. The breakthrough came when he visited the archives of Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych (Documentary Film Studio), where he found the materials that had been recorded for Kronika Filmowa (Film Chronicle), as well as fragments rejected by its creators. This is how the director recalled that moment:

I couldn’t find anything in the discard catalogue, although it’s kept extremely meticulously. After an hour, an archive worker, who had started rummaging through boxes of tapes, brought out a rolled-up miniature reel with a yellowed sheet of paper attached. On it was written in pencil: ‘shot of a burning man’. The cinematographer was ‘PKF’ [Polska Kronika Filmowa, Polish Film Chronicle] cameraman Zbigniew Skoczek. Then I put the tape on the editing table, and a mere seven seconds of this dramatic event flashed before my eyes.

This microscopic fragment became the warp of the cinematic masterpiece that Drygas created in 1991. Hear My Cry was the story of oppression and oblivion, of moral duty and collective denial. Drygas built a moving mosaic of archival material around the short video to form a gripping moral thriller.

From a private point of view

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Frame from ‘Mundial: Gra o wszystko’, photo: Solidarity of Arts press materials

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For Drygas, this was the beginning of his path towards documentary created from archival material. In 2005, the director came out with another story about the reality of communism. His Jeden dzień w PRL (One Day in the People’s Republic of Poland) was based entirely on historical materials. Extracted from the archives of film, television and radio studios, they formed a story reconstructing a single eponymous day – Thursday, 27 September 1962.

‘Thanks to the documents presented in Maciej Drygas’s picture, one can learn more about the totalitarian system than from hundreds of books or films dealing with those times’, Joanna Pawluśkiewicz wrote in Culture, while the director himself admitted in his memoirs that working on the film One Day in the People’s Republic of Poland taught him great patience and humility in his pursuit of the truth.

Six years later, Drygas again drew on his experience – in Cudze listy (Violated Letters), he went back to the past to use archive material to tell the story of Polish letters written between 1945 and 1989. They differed in almost everything – authors, addressees, tone, literary form and emotional character. The one thing they all had in common, however, was that they had all been inspected by the state apparatus of the People’s Republic of Poland. At a meeting with the audience during the Watch Docs film festival, Drygas recalled:

When I was collecting material for ‘One Day in the People’s Republic of Poland’, I inevitably reached for perlustration materials at some point, and then I found an annual report from 1962 with information on how many Polish and foreign letters had been sorted. It was in the tens of millions. I was blown away by this scale and thought that, once I had dealt with ‘One Day in the People’s Republic of Poland’, I would like to take a closer look at perlustration.

Looking into historical archives, Drygas created a movie-metaphor which, under the innocent guise of a found-footage film, concealed a bleak picture of an oppressed country and omnipresent state control. His Violated Letters was both overwhelming and light-hearted, not devoid of humour but invariably bitter in its message.

Wire-tapped life

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Zwyczajny kraj (An Ordinary Country) - trailer | 18. Millennium Docs Against Gravity

Documentary found footage from the land along the Vistula identified the People’s Republic of Poland as its favourite protagonist. It is the reality of ‘the happiest bunkhouse in the socialist camp’ and its dark secrets that is recounted by Tomasz Wolski, an outstanding documentary filmmaker, whose most recent films – Zwyczajny kraj (Ordinary Country) and 1970 – are created according to the found-footage formula, with their essence being materials recorded by, among others, the communist security state apparatus.

In an interview with Marek S. Bochniarz of Czas Kultury (Time of Culture) magazine, the director explained his artistic turn as follows:

…at some point, I wanted to think about who I am as a Pole and where I am, and why I am in this place and not in another. So I needed to delve into our history, to look at it through the eyes of someone who had never been passionate about the subject, and who mostly slept through history lessons.

It began with Ordinary Country, in which Wolski used operational film footage from Secret Service surveillance to create the image of a country of people entrapped by an oppressive state. He demonstrated the mechanisms of privacy infringement in a society subjected to endless surveillance. Awarded at festivals in Nyon and Kraków, Ordinary Country became Wolski’s invitation to make his stay within the archives a longer one.

History is written by the victors

And not just in film archives. In his next picture, 1970, Wolski used audio recordings made by the Security Service which were a transcription of conversations held in the offices of the communist apparatchiks responsible for the massacre that had taken place during the suppression of the strike at the Gdańsk shipyard.

His film was based on 16 hours of recordings stored in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance, and the audio material was illustrated by images from the Polish Film Chronicle and TVP programmes, as well as... fragments of animation. This is how the director explained this artistic decision:

I wanted the viewer to stay with the people involved in the events, to look at them, to feel their fear and horror of the situation. Puppet animation fulfilled this role. The characters were made to reflect the realistic details of the individual characters in the film at a scale of 1:6. The viewer has the sense of observing a photograph that has been put into motion.

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Trailer | 1970 | Tomasz Wolski

For Wolski, whose niche over the years had been mainly observational documentaries, working with archival materials proved to be a new and very inspiring challenge. In recounting the darker moments of Polish history, Wolski developed an authorial narrative style that set him apart from other domestic documentary filmmakers. While Maciej Drygas’s historical films are told objectively, in Wolski’s films a ‘private’ perspective predominates – that of secret-service officers recording the everyday lives of citizens and of people in power eavesdropping on each other. The archival material in his films is not just an illustration; it’s also a critically developed source of knowledge about the past world. In an interview with Czas Kultury, Wolski said:

Documentary is characterised by a lot of things happening outside of us, independently of our creation – as documentarians, we are there to catch them. This also applies to archives. There has to be an openness in people, they can’t stick to their thesis, they have to let the materials speak for themselves. […] I approached archival material in a way that was somewhat like observational cinema. When I was working on such films, I waited patiently for certain events to take place. In this case, I also searched patiently, but I also acted without pressure. So if I came across something strong but couldn’t build a scene around it, I discarded such material.

Thus it was that historical documentaries of extraordinary artistic precision with the emotional power of a thriller were born. Distinguished at the most significant documentary festivals, they have become – alongside Drygas’s films or Serhii Loznytsia’s Blockade – some of the most important found-footage documentaries of recent decades.

A world from the archives

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"Mundial gra o wszystko" - Michał Bielawski

Wolski is not the only representative of the young and middle-aged generation of documentary filmmakers who looks to film and radio archives for inspiration for their next picture. For years, a similar creative method has been employed by Michał Bielawski, the director of films such as 1989 and Mundial: Gra o wszystko (Mundial: The Highest Stakes).

It was the latter title that made Bielawski (who can also take credit for the excellent Wiatr [The Wind]) one of the most interesting found-footage filmmakers. In it, he told the story of the 1982 world cup and the political and social circumstances surrounding the Polish national team’s participation in the event.

He presented his story from two independent perspectives: the stories of opposition activists were intertwined in his work with the recollections of the footballers selected by Antoni Piechniczek to form the famous team. In this way, Bielawski created an image of the era in which one would be hard put to find a tone of martyrdom or a one-dimensional narrative.

When the young director was beginning to work on the film, Maciej Drygas, already all the wiser thanks to his experience with documentaries, warned him that he was in for many weeks spent in the archives. The creator of Mundial spent months digging through press archives, recordings preserved in Polish Television and documents collected by the Karta historical centre. He used them to craft a story about the world of football and political oppression, and above all – about a world in which even the smallest element of reality is subordinated to the political goals of the authorities of the time.

The attendance and media success of Mundial immediately made Bielawski an expert on found-footage documentaries, and with 1989, which came out a few years later, he confirmed that this opinion was not exaggerated. In his next picture, he weaved the narrative of the moment when communism collapsed and Poland transformed into a young democracy. Bielawski put this film together from archival footage, creating a peculiar mosaic of textures and content, and thanks to the materials uncovered by the director, we are able to witness history from a more personal perspective. In an interview with Łukasz Bertram of Kultura Liberalna (Liberal Culture) magazine, the director recalled working on the film as follows:

I was careful not to fall into using any one specific tone. […] It was a time when a great deal was changing and fluctuating. I was amazed by the minor tone of moods recorded in memoirs and personal accounts, the aloofness and lack of hurrah-optimism on the part of society and the opposition – exemplified, for instance, by the diagnoses from Tomasz Jastrun’s diaries. On the other hand, a strangely energised official message, a much more optimistic one, especially from the moment Mieczysław Rakowski became prime minister. […] And in all of this mess, the most interesting moments for me were the ones like those when the craftsman being taped for television, who was theoretically supposed to be praising the reforms, says: ‘Ma’am, I’ll tell you what I really think when you turn off the microphone’.

Out of oblivion

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PO-LIN. Okruchy pamięci (fragment) | Jolanta Dylewska

Although Poland’s post-war history is the most common subject of documentaries made with the use of archival materials, the domains of exploration of the filmmakers from the land along the Vistula do not end there. Indeed, one of the most spectacular Polish documentaries crafted from archival material was Jan Komasa’s Powstanie Warszawskie (The Warsaw Uprising), a documentary made in 2014 and edited from fragments of war newsreels recorded in Warsaw in 1944.

The film’s tale of the uprising’s tragedy was, however, somewhat controversial, as the filmmakers (including producers from the Warsaw Rising Museum [Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego]) decided to create a quasi-fictional narrative that would breathe life into the archival material. As a result, we saw shots of the capital city standing up for itself from the perspective of young people, whose voices – added by the filmmakers and recorded in a studio – were supposed to complement what we saw on screen. In the context of the tragic history of the uprising, this formal measure, intended to make the film more attractive to young viewers, seemed to many a moral and artistic abuse, a kind of transgression that questioned the documentary nature of the film.

By contrast, there was no controversy in the case of another found-footage documentary about Polish history. In Po-lin: Okruchy pamięci (Po-lin: Slivers of Memory), Jolanta Dylewska, an outstanding cinematographer and documentary filmmaker, told the tale of the world of pre-war Polish Jews using archival material – short films made by amateur filmmakers.

Dylewska’s film was a continuation of a photographic project initiated in the mid-1990s by the Shalom Foundation, which created the album I ciągle widzę ich twarze (And I Still See Their Faces) from photographs depicting the everyday life of the Jewish community before the war. In her film, the director of Po-lin also recreates the everyday reality of that community, reminding us of a time when Jews formed a large part of the Polish cultural landscape.

In an interview with Stopklatka [TV station], Dylewska said:

Some of these films were already known to a narrow audience, some had already been used in other films. Most often we used those fragments that were technically excellent. The films from Kałuszyn were shot at 6 frames per second, flashed quickly before your eyes and had to be stabilised. Some of the tapes were damaged, faded or too high contrast. Their technical condition was discouraging. But above all, there was one thing that I disagreed with: these films were used in a very illustrative manner. That was usually the case, especially when the Holocaust was discussed. There is some injustice in the fact that when you say ‘Polish Jew’, immediately somewhere under our eyelids we have images of these tormented, degraded people. These are usually pictures taken by the Nazis. We seldom remember that the Holocaust lasted more than a dozen months and the coexistence of Poles and Jews lasted several hundred years. And therein lies a huge injustice: a Jew is constantly associated with someone who has been degraded. I felt that in the work on ‘Po-lin’ there was an opportunity for redress.

Her film became a triumph of life, a record of its everyday rituals and ordinariness. Made in 2014, Po-lin is certainly one of the most important and daring Polish found-footage documentaries today and proof that for contemporary filmmakers, a visit to the film archives can be the beginning of a fascinating artistic adventure. The documentary stories by Maciej Drygas, Tomasz Wolski, Michał Bielawski and Jolanta Dylewska moreover show that reprocessing can be an act of creation in the field of documentary filmmaking as well and that, when viewed and interpreted after many years, archival materials can uncover a previously unknown aspect.

Translated from Polish by Michał Niedzielski, 10 April 2024

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