Piotr Szulkin (1950 – 2018)

On the 3rd of August 2018, Piotr Szulkin died at the age of 68. He was a Polish director, mostly renowned from the dystopic tetralogy (Golem, 1979, The War of the Worlds – Next Century, 1981, Obi-Oba. The End of Civilization, 1984 and Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes, 1985). Szulkin graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1970 and in 1975 he completed his second degree at the directing department of the State Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź. In his works, he linked artistic sensibility with literary, theatre and cinematic visions. Szulkin’s early short films, from the beginning of 1970s, already contained strong links with the poetics of absurd and grotesque. His next two films (The Virgin and the Devil, 1975) and (The Cursed Eyes, 1976) were praised by the Polish critiques for the intelligent play with folk tradition and deep knowledge of the history of art. The first film thematises the religious perspective during the middle ages and Renaissance and local beliefs attracting viewers’ attention with unique, dynamic camera work. The latter retells a peasant tale poetically suspended between the oneiric fantasy and expressive horror story. The uncanny narrative returned in Szulkin’s first full feature called Golem. The film’s script, co-written with a Polish film critic, Tadeusz Sobolewski, was inspired by Gustav Meyernik’s novel from 1914. The main protagonists of the film, Pernat (performed by Marek Walczewski), might be interpreted as an artificial human or a clone. The Polish golem tries to face reality in an distressing mixture of Kafka’s antiutopian world and post-apocalyptic vision. This grotesque place, full of signs of decay, contains some strong textual and visual references to the authoritarian system and propaganda. Apart from its obvious political meanings, the film can be nowadays re-read by the postor trans-human tropes, or analysed by some strategies leading to the Foucaultian heterotopies, Beckettian poetics of ambiguity and the Brechtian alienation effect. Dystopian tropes also appeared in the fictional story in The War of Worlds: Next Century, loosely based on the famous H. G. Wells novel. The movie was finished in 1981 but did not appear in the Polish cinemas until 1983. Its futuristic plot starts on 28th of December 1999, which is the twelfth day of a Martian invasion on Earth. Such a narrative was perceived in Szulkin’s homeland as a prophetic vision of the dark period of Martial Law, introduced on 13th of December by the communist government. But thirty-seven years after the its premiere at the Chicago International Film Festival The War of Worlds goes beyond such connotations and may be treated as well as a still up-to-date critique of the postmodern culture, full of digital media simulacrums and fake news. More symbolic figures might be found in Obi-oba. The End of Civilization, where postapocaliptic society lives under the gigantic dome, waiting for the Ark, which is the imaginary space ship taking everybody to the New World. The main protagonist of the film, called Soft (acted expressively by Jerzy Stuhr) is an ex-propaganda worker who wanders around the last shelter of the human race. Thanks to the great camera work of Witold Sobociński (who also worked with Roman Polanski on Frantic and Pirates) this retrofuture world looks