Kolski's magical world
As a director of auteur films, Jan Jakub Kolski creates magical, surrealistic worlds that film critics and audiences refer to as Jańcioland / Johnnieland - a name that derives from one of Kolski's film heroes, but one that also clearly references the director's first name. Earlier, the artist had an altogether different moniker: he was called the Polish short film stuntman, a nickname he acquired in making a series of short documentaries and quasi-documentaries that required exceptional physical ability from him and his crew. These films almost invariably focused on mountain climbing and speleology (e.g. Najpiękniejsza jaskinia świata [The Most Beautiful Cave in the World]) or survival schools (e.g. Szkoła przetrwania [Survival School], Pałkiewicz ma rację [Pałkiewicz is Right]). Kolski himself was an avid mountain climber and cave explorer for twelve years.
The director often emphasizes in interviews that though he always dreamed of making feature films, the experience he gained in making documentaries proved invaluable. While awaiting an opportunity to make his first feature, he acquired many skills and simultaneously spent a significant amount of time thinking about his path in life.
Nothing can be compared to the perfect silence and darkness that reigns in caves, he once said in an interview. The human body begins behaving differently under those conditions. The light that is lacking in the cave begins to burn beneath your ribs. You begin to radiate light from inside; there appears within you a brightness that illuminates your inner space. (...) Given the lack of any external light, in caves you have the chance to see who you really are. While I was a cave explorer I formulated my fundamental question about the meaning of life beyond caves; now, through my creative work, I seek an answer to that question.
Among Jan Jakub Kolski's short films, critics assign special significance to Ładny dzień [A Nice Day], the story of two elderly people who spend their time taking care of their old horse. This film is perceived as a harbinger of the unique sensitivity that would come to characterise the world which the director would create in his full-length features.
Kolski's feature films are considered by some to be part of the 'rural' style in cinema, but limiting their description to this term hardly reflects their most important aspect.
His filmic countryside, wrote Grażyna Stachówna of Kolski's films, combines the authentic landscapes of the Mazovian countryside with the sophisticated beauty of visual creativity, realistic stories with entirely imagined ones, literary and film inspirations with historical facts, miracles and magic with the director's talent and imagination.
This beautifully filmed reality is enriched by a magical world derived in equal amounts from the realms of religion and pagan lore. In this world,
God is a good farmer who rules his little field, the Saints watch over the lives of people, while lamias and dwarves scurry around in the corners.
The protagonists of this world, born from a combination of the director's imagination and his camera skills, are often odd, imperfect people, or individuals who are condemned to being different. This is true of Kuśtyczka (Limpette) of Pograbek, the dwarf Janka and the literally two-faced Morka of Grający z talerza (The Man Who Read Music From Plates). Yet Kolski's characters are also different because they possess unusual talents and skills. The title character of Johnnie Aquarius, for instance, has the power to heal for a time, the main character of Magneto attracts metal objects, while Grażynka, a girl of ill repute in the film Cudowne miejsce (A Miraculous Place), proves a stigmatic. Kolski is often asked why he deems this menagerie necessary and if he needs this collection of odd characters. In response, the director invariably speaks of his protagonists as he did in an interview with Jerzy Wójcik:
I call them Children of God. Why? They are an oversensitive bunch, various 'scarecrows'. Their perception of daily life, life in general, is far more intense, involving every nerve. Their suffering is deeper as well. It is at them that the general aggression present in any environment is directed.
Although the originality of Jan Jakub Kolski's film world is undeniable, his method can be seen as reflecting certain models or containing evidence of his fascinations. Critics agree that Kolski's stylistic inspirations derive from the 'Fantastic Realism' of Iberia and Latin America. As Grażyna Stachówna once noted, this literary style,
allows descriptions of the world to combine harmoniously the real and the true with the fantastic and miraculous.
Kolski, born in the mid 1950s, was from the generation of young Poles who in 1970s became enchanted with Iberian and Latin American literature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is the title most frequently cited in connection to Kolski's films, and the director has confirmed his admiration for the Columbian writer in numerous interviews. Of course, the world this Polish director creates is hardly a facsimile of Marquez's 'Macondo'. Kolski has pointed out that the source of his imagined world can be found much closer to home:
I was a city child, he told Jerzy Wójcik, but I wound up in the country. I began living a rural life with my grandfather around the time I was in fourth grade. Everything was new and enchanting to me. My grandfather was a harness maker and all kinds of people would visit him. I listened to their stories. My secrets and my interests, reside in the education I received from them.
Popielawy, the village where Kolski spent those few important years of his childhood between the ages of 11 and 15, appears in each of his films, almost as if it were a trademark. This is even true of Pornografia (Pornography), which is otherwise unrelated to the director's life and biography.
The world that Jan Jakub Kolski has created in such films as Pograbek, Johnnie Aquarius, Cudowne miejsce (A Miraculous Place), Szabla od komendanta (The Sword from the Commander) or Grający z talerza (The Man Who Read Music from Plates) has its devoted admirers. As Grażyna Stachówna has stated, Johnnieland for them is
a separate and unusual place, one that is somewhat terrifying and mysterious, somewhat humorous and infantile, but one which they always seek out and hold dear.
Viewers and critics praised The Burial of the Potato, they liked Pograbek, and with Johnnie Aquarius, which features an exquisite performance by Franciszek Pieczka, Kolski cast a spell on almost everyone without exception. Humans, however, desire novelty, and Kolski's subsequent films in fact lacked any aura thereof and encountered much criticism. According to Anita Piotrowska, to name but one detractor, The Miraculous Place or The Man Who Read Music from Plates
offered us what was fundamentally the same fare: the immortal menagerie of rural oddballs inhabiting the same 'colorful bazaars' of the strongly mythologised Polish provinces.
As the director said in an interview for Rzeczpospolita:
Popular opinion has it that my films are similar to each other. They seem similar because my handwriting remains the same: I set up similar camera angles, I stage shots so that multiple situations happen in the frame, the same actors reappear in generally rural settings. I write my own screenplays, so the dialogues also probably have the same melody. Could I have dreamed merely five years ago that someone would be able to recognise the film they are watching as one of my own after a few initial sequences?
Jan Jakub Kolski's films, which are similar to each other in terms of storyline and aesthetic, are exceptional in contemporary Polish cinema. Specifically, they are exceptional examples of works in which there is an evident presence of a real author, a creator of a filmic universe and a distinct style, an artist who incorporates elements of his own biography and family history in his works, which manifest a private topography, an original imagination and autonomous moral judgments, wrote Grażyna Stachówna.
It would be an oversimplification to see Kolski's films solely as featuring an enchanting, poetic style, a gallery of characters that are a mere collection of eccentrics and beautiful photography. It should be underlined that autonomous moral judgments - deriving in the most general terms from the spirit of Manicheanism - are essential to the creative message inscribed in Kolski's films. Incessant analysis of the relationship between good and evil, which Kolski pursues in practically every film, renders each of them a kind of morality tale. Of course, these efforts need not be acceptable to everyone, as they were not to Jan Olszewski, who took an ethical position and published a highly critical review of Kolski's The Miraculous Place.
With Historia kina w Popielawach (The History of the Cinema in Popielawy), a film that differed somewhat from his previous works, Kolski proved capable once again of gratifying those members of the audience who had become somewhat bored with his consistency.
