The Public Woman
Sat 14 MarBefore he tampered with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in Mad Love, Andrzej Zulawski made The Public Woman, a startling, indirect adaptation of another work by the same author—namely, the white-hot political tale of terror and conviction, The Possessed. (Wajda would adapt the same book in France in 1988!)
Rather than taking the novel’s plot at face value, Zulawski embedded it in a postmodern frame of reference, telling a story of an actress playing in a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky and being consumed by two on-set relationships: one with the movie’s Svengali-like director, the other with a poor and radical Czech immigrant terrorist. Valérie Kaprisky gives an animated performance that includes notable portions of hyper-energetic naked dancing, while Francis Huster (as her director-cum-Pygmalion) manages to be both carnal and otherworldly. Watched together with Everything for Sale, the film reveals Żuławski as Wajda’s opposite number in his philosophy of film directing. While Wajda was always focused on the communal aspect of making a film, for Żuławski a film set was rarely less than an arena of soul-crushing spiritual struggle, in which the bodies and urges of people involved interacted in ways both magical, carnal and sublime.
This film is part of the strand: Two Visions, One Nation: Wajda and Żuławski (Read more below)
Two Visions, One Nation: Wajda and Żuławski
Andrzej Wajda was Andrzej Żuławski’s senior by 14 years, and in terms of international festival prizes (Palme d’Or, Academy Award), he seems to be the more recognized of the two. And yet, Wajda’s filmography was regularly visited, interfered with — as well as downright haunted — by the presence of his brilliant student, assistant and (ultimately) creative opponent.
Żuławski’s initial fascination with Wajda was clear in his choice of a M.A. thesis he wrote on Kanal in 1959 at IDHEC film school in Paris. Later on, he assisted Wajda on the Polish segment of Love at Twenty (1962) and on the epic Ashes (1966). From 1970 on, Żuławski turns from protégé to rival, as his progressively more frenetic films challenge Wajda’s more classical approach.
This series aims at presenting a series of double-bills that highlight the myriad ways in which Wajda’s and Żuławski’s bodies of work not only co-exist in a lively dialogue with one another, but also joyfully meet, orgiastically merge and violently clash. While both artists were different in their career trajectories and personal choices, what unites them is a fervid engagement with the vortex of Polish history, eager exploration of class and ideological conflicts of the 20th century, as well as — last but not least — the transnational dimension of their work, with Żuławski traversing the Iron Curtain as a director of alternatively Polish and French films, and Wajda engaging in multiple co-productions, in which he tried to address international audience on its own turf.
This series, while far from exploring the complete set of connections between two filmographies, is an invitation to further comparisons and explorations.
Michał Oleszczyk, Season Curator
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