I once knocked on Robert Więckiewicz’s door in Warsaw, accidentally. I had entered the wrong building for an English lesson and instead of Justyna, the Polish actor appeared. I had just watched him play Jerzy Pilch in Wojciech Smarzowski’s Pod Mocnym Aniołem and half expected him to lurch into the corridor in a drunken misstep. “Next door,” he said politely and returned to his home.
So, faces, then.
There are days when Warsaw appears to me to have been populated entirely by people who have just received some mildly disappointing news from a notary.
The faces are set.
The eyes look ahead.
People walk quickly and with purpose, even when the apparent purpose is buying yoghurt.
You smile at somebody and occasionally receive the expression of a person who has just discovered you sitting uninvited in their bath.
I have spent twenty-five years complaining about this.
This may tell you something about Poland.
It probably though tells you considerably more about me.
Because on other days the same city changes completely. A neighbour stops her car and smiles. Children help me in the garden. A woman speaks to me in English because she notices I am struggling with something. Somebody tells a joke in a shop. An elderly man explains at enormous length why the paving stones used to be better.
Suddenly Warsaw is warm, funny, eccentric and human.
Same streets.
Same people.
Different production.
I have begun wondering whether my problem is theatrical.
Shakespeare famously has someone announce that “all the world’s a stage”. The English appear to have taken this as an instruction.
We perform constantly.
Not necessarily well.
An English street is full of tiny scenes involving people who do not know one another and have no intention of becoming friends.
“Morning.”
“Lovely day.”
“Bit warm.”
“Can’t complain.”
“After you.”
“No, after you.”
“Oh, go on then.”
“Cheers.”
Two strangers nearly collide in Tesco and immediately perform a short Restoration comedy involving excessive apologies, bodily contortions and the ceremonial surrender of six square inches of floor.
Nobody means very much by any of it.
That is precisely the point.
The street becomes temporarily shared because everyone agrees to perform.
If somebody drops a bag, an ensemble forms.
If it starts raining, the weather becomes dialogue.
If a bus does not arrive, by minute twelve a small repertory company has assembled at the stop. There is the Cynic, the Optimist, the Woman Who Knows Another Route and the Man Who Has Lived Here Since 1978 and can confirm that the service has always been appalling.
I am British enough to enjoy all this immensely.
Possibly too much.
I walk through Warsaw waiting for somebody to give me my cue.
Frequently nobody does.
And then, like a provincial actor blaming the audience, I conclude that the entire country lacks emotional range.
Even our embarrassment is performed.
We have developed extraordinary linguistic machinery for saying things without saying them.
“Quite interesting” can mean catastrophic.
“With respect” means I am about to kill you.
“I might leave you to it” means I would rather chew through my own arm than remain in this conversation.
Perhaps this helps explain the extraordinary British acting tradition.
I am not proposing an academic theory here. I have no dataset demonstrating a causal relationship between discussing drizzle with strangers and producing Jeremy Irons.
But look at Irons.
He barely needs to move.
British acting has produced generation after generation of people who appear to have understood very early that personality itself is partly performance.
We change voices.
We imitate.
We take the piss.
We tell stories.
We exaggerate.
We become characters in our own anecdotes before the event has even finished happening.
And then Poland looks back
But here is the problem with my theory.
Poland has produced some astonishing actors.
Janusz Gajos can do more with silence than many British actors accomplish with three acts and a country house.
In Pod Mocnym Aniołem, Więckiewicz doesn’t need to tell you that alcoholism is degrading.
He allows degradation to occupy the body.
It is not particularly theatrical in the British sense.
It is observed.
That may be the distinction.
Perhaps Britain produces performers and Poland produces watchers.
And suddenly the argument turns around.
Because Polish cinema has one of the great gazes.
Smarzowski watches people almost indecently closely. The camera does not rescue them from themselves.
A wedding, a police station, a village, a hospital ward, a priest’s dining room, a drinking session: people are allowed to become gradually more revealing and less flattering.
There is enormous humour in it, but the humour rarely releases the subject.
You laugh and then discover that you have been laughing at something terrible.
Paweł Pawlikowski looks differently. His gaze is cooler, more composed, almost geometrical. Ida and Cold War leave extraordinary amounts of space around people. Pawlikowski, born in Warsaw but shaped partly by decades outside Poland, may actually embody the double gaze particularly well: looking at Poland from inside and outside simultaneously.
The ability to observe without immediately reassuring.
The British performer wants the scene to work.
The Polish observer sometimes seems quite happy to let the scene fail.
That can be maddening in a queue, but magnificent in a cinema.
Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz described Polish documentary as holding a mirror up to society and looking at reality in a way that might change how people perceive it. Aleksandra Sekuła, discussing Marcel Łoziński, talked about his carefulness, delicacy and humility before reality: observing people not in search of sensation but trying to locate something more elusive beneath the event.
That feels important.
Łoziński’s 89 mm od Europy takes an almost absurdly mundane event – railway workers changing the wheelsets beneath trains at Brest because Soviet and European tracks have different gauges – and lets twelve minutes of practical labour become an observation about East and West, poverty and wealth, borders and civilisation.
Nobody needs to stand up and explain Europe.
Men change wheels.
That may be a particularly Polish cinematic talent. The grand thing arrives through the small thing.
History enters through a kitchen.
Politics through a wedding.
Communism through one ordinary day.
Tadeusz Sobolewski called it “intimate documentary”: work avoiding easy answers and harsh preconceptions in favour of something approaching phenomenological observation – looking carefully at people before deciding what they mean.
What happens if we keep the camera running for another thirty seconds after everybody believes the scene is over?
That tradition runs from documentary into fiction.
Kieślowski began in documentary.
Smarzowski often seems to film fictional worlds as if he has arrived there with a documentary crew shortly before everything goes catastrophically wrong.
Pawlikowski does almost the reverse: he removes so much noise from the image that the remaining gestures become almost unbearably visible.
Wajda could make history enormous, but he also understood that history ultimately happens to bodies.
Polanski watches rooms. And people trapped inside them.
Perhaps this is what I respond to so strongly in Polish cinema: it does not always trust what people say about themselves.
Britain, by contrast, is extraordinarily good at saying what it is.
We narrate ourselves constantly.
We explain.
We joke.
We perform.
We tell you what sort of person we are before you have had time to form an opinion.
Polish film often seems to say:
Fine.
Now sit down.
We’ll watch.
Perhaps that is what I have loved here all along.
Not Polish friendliness.
Not Polish unfriendliness.
The Polish gaze.
There is a tradition of Poles standing slightly outside things and looking.
Joseph Conrad did it to Britain.
Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski arrived from the Polish lands, became one of the great writers of English and then stared into empire, commerce, masculinity and civilisation until they began to look considerably less civilised.
Bronisław Malinowski did something parallel in anthropology.
Go somewhere.
Watch.
Record.
Ask what the rituals are actually doing rather than what the participants say they are doing.
There is, naturally, a comic irony in a British man living in Warsaw invoking Malinowski to explain Polish people to themselves.
I am aware of it.
Poles have repeatedly been forced by history into positions from which they watch larger structures: empires, occupations, borders, ideological systems, Western Europe, Russia, Germany, America.
This also makes me reconsider the Polish faces I complain about.
I see granite because I am looking for granite.
After an unpleasant exchange, everybody becomes evidence.
The unsmiling cashier confirms Poland.
A driver confirms Poland.
A woman who doesn’t move aside confirms Poland.
Suddenly thirty-eight million individuals have been recruited into my argument without their knowledge.
I become, in other words, exactly the kind of national essentialist I spend large amounts of my professional life criticising.
Then the following morning somebody helps me pull weeds out of the garden.
Theory collapses.
This is slightly inconvenient.
Neither version is necessarily false.
They are encounters.
And perhaps this is why I remain fascinated by Poland after all these years.
I complain about the granite and then spend the evening watching Smarzowski.
I have apparently spent at least fourteen years writing about Poles looking at Poles and have only now realised that I was looking at them looking.
This is probably what happens if you stay anywhere too long.
I want the street to become theatre.
Poland keeps turning it back into anthropology.
Britain says:
Come on, darling. Give us a scene.
Poland says:
Sit down. We’re watching you.
And perhaps Poland gets the better deal.
I am still likely to say good morning to strangers.
I am nearly sixty. It is probably too late to stop.
Occasionally someone will smile back and I will spend the next twenty minutes revising my entire theory of Poland.
Then somebody will cut in front of me at Żabka and order will be restored.
All the world’s a stage.
But not everybody is in the same production.
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