'The Dancing Hawk': Directed by Grzegorz Królikiewicz

This 1977 film by Grzegorz Królikiewicz tells the story of a peasant making a career as an official in the People’s Republic of Poland. It is a worthy starting point for the adventure of getting to know the work of this controversial Polish director.

For a large segment of the audience, Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s cinema is an excess of form over content, unnecessary embellishments and intellectual gibberish. Considered the enfant terrible of Polish cinematography, the director does not try to win the viewer’s favour, avoids conventional tricks and obscures meanings, which actually leads to the extreme incommunicability of some of his works. However, Królikiewicz is not an artistic hack, creating elitist art for art’s sake. In films such as Na wylot (Through and Through), bizarre experiments adjoin sociological concreteness, and the protagonists are ordinary, grey people, rarely shown in Polish cinema with similar sensitivity. The combination of semi-avant-garde form with psychological and social content yielded excellent results, especially in Tańczący jastrząb (The Dancing Hawk, 1977), a story about a peasant trying to make it as an official in the People’s Republic of Poland.

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In the film, which runs for about an hour and a half, we see the entire life of Michał Toporny (Franciszek Trzeciak), from birth to death. Not only that, almost all the events depicted in The Dancing Hawk are filtered through the emotions and feelings of the main character. The man’s fate is highly individualised, but also symbolic, as it reflects the situation of thousands of Polish peasants after 1945. As a ‘man of the people’, Toporny is – at least theoretically – a beneficiary of the regime changes. After the war, he can easily leave his hometown and go to the city to build the new, socialist order. The man makes a radical break with his previous surroundings: he leaves his wife in the country (‘You want me to be a lowly farmhand with you?’) and his son and enters into another marriage, this time with a refined woman from an intellectual home (played by Beata Tyszkiewicz). Thanks to his conscientiousness, hard work and cleverness, Toporny becomes somebody and climbs the career ladder. However, professional success eventually stops bringing satisfaction, and the man realises that he is a lonely, uprooted and deeply unhappy man.

In one scene, Toporny is looking in a mirror in a restaurant: he examines the shape of his nose, combs his hair with his hand, rubs his shoe against his trousers. There would be nothing special about this were it not for the fact that the mirror image is out of sync with the protagonist’s movements – this disjunction has a deeply symbolic significance in the context of the entire film. Upon arriving in the city, Toporny puts on a new social mask and tries at all costs to fit into the image of an educated and cultured man. All the while, however, he remains someone dramatically torn as he does not feel authentic in his new role. By severing all contact with his village, the man renounces his own identity and thus condemns himself to an unhappy and unfulfilled life.

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Grzegorz Królikiewicz admitted that in The Dancing Hawk he was making a reference to Citizen Kane, another film about loneliness and disillusionment. However, while Orson Welles defamiliarised the American myth of a ‘rags to riches’ career, Królikiewicz shows what social advancement looked like in practice in Poland after 1945, celebrated by the socialist authorities and officially painted as a rosy picture.

The literary prototype for The Dancing Hawk was a novel by Julian Kawalec, a writer associated with so-called peasant prose in literature. Królikiewicz was fascinated by the text, which at the time belonged to the school reading canon, but he did not like its mannerist style (see Piotr Kletowski and Piotr Marecki, Królikiewicz: Pracuję dla przyszłości [Królikiewicz: I’m Working for the Future], p. 86). The form of The Dancing Hawk is much more hectic, surprising and grotesque than the narrative of the original. All this is done to build an evocative representation of the protagonist’s mental state. The gigantic bookshelves in the university library, the claustrophobic interior of a house belonging to the intelligentsia, the empty and dingy corridors in the workplace – the set design by Zbigniew Warpechowski, a well-known artist and performer, perfectly conveys Toporny’s sense of being lost in a new social space. This atmosphere is heightened by the restless camera work (for which Zbigniew Rybczyński himself was responsible), the rapid editing and the sound, grotesquely sharpened, for example, when (nomen est omen) the ‘Toporny’ [meaning coarse, clumsy in Polish] character awkwardly knocks things off the table during a date in an elegant establishment.

Despite its unconventional form, The Dancing Hawk is an accessible and moving film, which cannot be said of all of Królikiewicz’s pictures. This adaptation of Julian Kawalec’s novel is a good place to start your adventure with the work of the controversial Polish director. Unfortunately, The Dancing Hawk, one of the most outstanding films in the history of Polish cinema, also remains the most underrated.

The Dancing Hawk, Poland 1977. Director: Grzegorz Królikiewicz. Screenplay: Grzegorz Królikiewicz. Cinematography: Zbigniew Rybczyński. Music: Janusz Hajdun. Production design: Zbigniew Warpechowski. Starring: Franciszek Trzeciak (Michał Toporny), Beata Tyszkiewicz (Wiesława, Toporny’s second wife), Beata Tumkiewicz (Maria, Toporny’s first wife), Czesław Przybyła (teacher), Tadeusz Łomnicki (manager), Jerzy Zelnik (Zatorski) and others. Production of Profil Film Studio. Colour, 98 min.

Written in Polish by Robert Birkholc, last updated 27 November 2015

Translated by Patryk Grabowski

Grzegorz Krolikiewicz