Next month it’ll be exactly half a century since Polish director Andrzej Munk was killed in a car crash aged just 40 – thus robbing Polish cinema of a major talent and cruelly cutting short what might well have turned out to be a great career.
Although today still better known within his homeland than outside, Munk’s influence lingers on – he taught such future eminences as Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof Zanussi and Roman Polanski during his four-year stint as lecturer at the National Film School in Lodz, while the precocious Polanski was his assistant on Bad Luck (1960), one of only three features Munk completed before his death.
Munk’s entire big-screen output – which also includes a couple of mid-length documentaries, the unfinished Auschwitz-set feature Passenger (reconstructed by colleagues and released in 1963) and various shorts – was one of the major attractions of the 11th New Horizons Film Festival (NHFF), held in the south-western Polish city of Wroclaw in July.
With a reputation for emphasising non-mainstream, experimental and adventurous work, NHFF is now well-established as a significant draw for international critics, festival-programmers and film-makers, as well as being a massive element in the city’s burgeoning artistic calendar – indeed, only a few weeks ago Wroclaw was named, along with Spain’s San Sebastian (home of another noted film festival), as European Capital of Culture for 2016.
In terms of its own big screen appearances, Wroclaw’s finest hour remains Munk’s 1957 masterpiece Man on the Tracks, much of which was shot in and around its railway depot. Cinema history has no shortage of great train movies, but Man on the Tracks deserves a very lofty place in that pantheon.
Having worked during the Second World War at a railway construction company, Munk in 1953 made the documentary A Railwayman’s World – and, while it’s a fictional story, he brings a rare tang of verisimilitude to Man on the Tracks, which includes several thrilling sequences evidently shot aboard real steam-trains rattling along at high speeds.
An engrossingly believable account of workplace pleasures and strifes, it’s also a tantalising mystery revolving around the death of veteran engineer Orzechowski (a magnificent performance from Kazimierz Opalinski), who in the opening sequence is knocked down and killed by a speeding engine driven by a former protégé with whom he has fallen out.
After some slow, somewhat talky early stretches the pace steadily gathers to a stunning denouement – Munk and his scriptwriter Jerzy Stefan Stawinski painstakingly craft one of the most astonishing, moving and shattering endings in the whole of cinema – a sequence which, like the rest of the movie, is greatly boosted by the use of atmospheric train noises rather than a musical score.
Even by the renowned standards of Polish cinematography, the visuals by Jerzy Wojcik and Romuald Kropat are a consistent wonder – achieving bold chiaroscuro effects via the inky, grimy, greasy intensity of the black machinery and coal-fuel, starkly contrasted with the fire-lit faces of the workers.
More than five decades later, Munk’s name lives on via Studio Munka: a production-company dedicated to supporting directorial debuts and responsible for the one of the best-reviewed Polish features of this year, Oscar-nominated documentarian Bartosz Konopka’s Fear of Falling (a contender in NHFF’s competition section dedicated to national productions).
Among Studio Munka’s handful of NHFF-selected shorts, one of the most pleasing was Dominika Montean’s For A Hatful of Pears, a comic and poignant look at three long-retired ice-hockey stars now passing on their skills to a team of eight-year-old juniors.
As well as providing a showcase of current Polish cinema, NHFF’s dauntingly vast programme also serves as national launch pad for numerous eagerly anticipated art-house releases. This year, the “biggies” included the latest from Lars Von Trier and Aki Kaurismaki – both bouncing back to form after slightly below-par efforts last time out.
Von Trier’s cosmic-apocalyptic family-drama Melancholia opens here on September 30, while Kaurismaki’s delightful urban fable of égalité and fraternité, Le Havre, will presumably appear soon after a likely British premiere at October’s London Film Festival.
