The Cameraman's Revenge

I know it’s reasonably late at night now and it should be getting colder, but I’d almost swear this film has made the temperature in here plummet… brrr. Anyway, I bought The Devils today and we’ll see that in due course, but tonight I watched this slightly earlier retelling of the tale of the devils of Loudun, transposed to Poland. It’s not a literal rendering of that event, rather an adaptation of it, and produced, obviously, under markedly different conditions to what Ken Russell could (just about) get away with a decade later. As such, it’s a markedly less hysterical film, which is fine; Jerzy Kawalerowicz obviously just had differing concerns, such as the creation of a sustained mood of subtle disquiet. Although the film feels rather leisurely as the tale unfolds (priest comes to convent to investigate claims of possession at a convent, exorcism ensues), once I got into its rhythm I started to feel quite unsettled by it; there’s a scene where the priest has a confrontation with a rabbi—both roles played by the same actor—that really rattled me. I don’t think I’d classify the film as horror per se like IMDB does, but it unnerved me in a way comparatively few “real” horror films do… I can’t quite explain why but the whole film is suffused with a sense of Things Not Being Quite Right, though there are relatively few overt signs of this wrongness; I think the sense of isolation the film creates is a big part of it, though. It’s a few centuries in the past, there’s remarkably little sense of a bigger outside world, and whatever’s happening is doing so a long way from civilisation. In the limited world Kawalerowicz depicts, it seems equally likely that literal demons are at work as it does that the film’s ultimately tragic events are the product of madness, and that love (which the rabbi says is at the heart of everything) and madness are not exactly far apart. Grim stuff.

What a difficult film to approach, let alone appraise; I don’t suppose any film touching on the Holocaust is ever easily approachable, but this is harder than most. Second Run’s presentation doesn’t altogether help (an odd glitch at one point fucked the image up), being a non-anamorphic presentation of what should’ve apparently been a Scope film in cropped form, although on their website they note that was all they could get either from the production company or the Polish archives. But the film was also famously “cropped” in mid-shoot by the death of director Andrzej Munk, with the unfinished thing being released two years later with additional stills and commentary. It’s that which really makes the film hard, because Munk never got to shoot whatever else he had to do (plus reshoot existing scenes he was unhappy with). It’s a story of two women, one a prisoner at Auschwitz,  the other a German guard; the latter sees the other boarding a cruise ship she’s travelling on, and this spurs her to remember their time in the camp in two different ways, one in which she tries to convince herself she treated the other woman well and the other in which she remembers what actually happened. I can’t believe no one seems to know how Munk actually intended to end the film, but so it seems; interestingly, the commentary at the end of the film seems to speculate that whether or not the other woman actually was the prisoner from Auschwitz was perhaps meant to be left an open question. The DVD booklet essay insists we take the film as it exists as a finished work, and to some extent that’s possible, but with so much apparently still unclear about what Munk was really going to do with it if it hadn’t been for that accident in 1961, it’s hard to say anything too definitive about the film, least of all whether he was successful with it.

Again I find myself cursing whatever dickhead borrowed this disc from the library before; I wouldn’t have thought that DVDs in the Polish section of the library—and yes, I actually did borrow the Polish DVD release (what does it say about me that I’d go that length rather than watch my own taped-off-cable VHS of the same film? Clearly I am become a 16:9 snob) from a section of my local library I didn’t even know existed until a few weeks ago—would get as damaged as the ones on regular loan, but I’d have been wrong. Consequently I must’ve been unable to watch 20-25 minutes of the fucking thing just because of it skipping about and bits being unwatchable, so I never got into it as much as I wanted. Shame, cos it looked like a pretty good film, if perhaps not quite the masterpiece it’s usually called. Glad to see what I did; maybe I’ll just have to make do with the VHS until I can get a DVD copy my player won’t choke on…