Passer-By (1984) - full transcript

Film Studio Ki

presents

Film by Andrzej Titkow

PASSER-BY

With

Also With

- Do you believe in man?

- What a terrible question.

So extremely exalted one does

not know what to answer.

If I say I do not believe

in man

and I would like to lock everyone

up in concentration camp,

it would not be good for art.

An artist should say —

I love people and I dream

that all people can be happy.

This is not a question for

the first night performance.

I don’t believe in man,

man is a freebooter.

Please, ask me a normal,

European question.

l was brought up in a cult

of mankind,

mm“?

uniqueness as a phenomenon

in the universe.

When I saw terrible

human misery,

pettiness, wickedness

I learned to be cautious.

I am a pilgrim.

I am coming back

to my homeland from far.

What does bring you here?

- I came to right wrongs.

- Did you hurt people?

- l was hurt.

- Who did it?

Maybe you, maybe he,

maybe they...

People helped me a lot.

I was lucky, I guess.

Wherever I went,

whenever I got anywhere,

I owe it a great number

of people.

Some of them were well-known

and famous, some were anonymous.

Maybe in a certain way I should

also be grateful to my censors.

You may think What you Will

but I have been through a lot.

This isn’t anything new

in this country.

If I wrote it in a book,

nobody would believe it.

l governed people and built roads.

l distributed houses

and begged for bread.

I shot at a man and was strangled

With concertina Wire.

All this shyness of mine,

all my weird behaviour,

all my fears stem from my...

...fear of ridiculousness.

This particular fear probably

has some deeper roots.

Anyway, this element... I don’t have

to tell all and reveal all.

Look at the genius

Who walked triumphantly

through the World.

He still moves himself and moves

you although almost a century old.

l have never wanted to become

a professional writer

or a professional film-maker.

There is some vanity in it.

I don’t write or collect letters,

I don’t have a desk,

fountain pens,

a type-writer,

I don’t have a technique,

I don’t take notes...

“you have just said something

very interesting,

please, let me take it down“.

I could become a writer

with some “inner warmth",

I would write nice books

full of humour and some tears.

If they started to pay me,

to support me,

to pat me on the back,

maybe I would achieve

something in the field.

Yet as the situation here was

different, socialist reality,

they pay the same for anything

and the audience awards almost

the same for anything.

Are you writing anything?

l have just started.

What is this going to be?

Nothing special.

l have just had the idea to write

some nonsense about myself.

You have always written

about yourself.

To success.

Your health.

Shall we sign something?

We would like to make

you an offer.

On behalf of our colleagues.

What offer?

We would like you to set

yourself

- on fire in front of the building...

- Why me?! Why do you come to me?

It makes me wonder what

happened to me.

It seems to me that

I haven’t changed at all.

And yet there are some objective

proofs that l have changed a lot.

I may even be a completely

different person.

It is difficult to talk about it,

a demagogue will immediately

say “he wants to weasel out,

he wants to excuse himself.

He may want to say that he

is not responsible

for the errors of his younger

years or his adult age. “

This isn’t true.

It is an interesting phenomenon

how far one can go in his life.

I am a master of social

intrigue.

| always try to make people

come together in a joyful way.

I want for things to happen,

I don’t want any boredom.

When I stand in a queue

and I turn into an old hag

who will cook her dinner,

and I know it all,

what pasta, what...

When I sit among bitter

intellectuals I also become bitter.

It seems to me that

always try to behave

in such a way as if I did

not exist at all.

As you know I am often

taken for somebody else.

And Who are you?

l have scars on all my body.

One by one, as if my skin

was put on a barbecue.

Maybe death would be better

than this kind of life.

Watch out.

Not a word.

If anything happens

knock thrice.

They won’t take me alive.

Everyone has one special skill.

A circus performer

may do a triple twist somersault

and this is his special skill.

My special skill has been

the ability to cast away any pose,

any falsity immediately.

I can wake up to reality in just

a second and so I wake up.

We are building a new

house for our future,

for better days, Warsaw,

Help us With this task,

share With us this task,

we have a common aim,

Warsaw,

May the construction grows from

its foundation to the roof,

this our common dream,

Warsaw...

Once I had a great passion

for travelling

but I could not travel then.

When I could travel I lost

this passion.

As a man gets older he feels

the best in his own space.

| feel the best in my room

with my cat.

The world gets smaller,

from my point of view Manhattan

or Long Island

are a province of Oszmiana

or Vilnius province.

They are islands off the shore

of this province.

l was very much impressed

by China.

China expanded

my knowledge of art, of man,

of his existence on the Earth.

l was so full of reverence

for this country

and then I took a local train

from Vilnius to Kolonia Wilenska.

I got out and I looked

towards the Wilenka

into the depth of the valley,

and I thought that Kolonia Wilenska

is the most beautiful.

My writing is the best

and easiest

only when I lead my

characters

to places I remember from

my childhood

which I adapt in various ways

to post-war,

contemporary situations. Warsaw is

probably the only exception.

I finally got used to this city,

it became the location for

several of my novels.

It seems to me that

I am extremely sensitive.

I can act like a medium

in responding to national

hysteria or social moods.

I can feel the social

temperature which is to say,

I can tell exactly

when this temperature

is above or below the average,

what is going on.

I can feel something approaching,

I know what it is going to be.

Maybe it is so,

that in Poland miracles

happen when nobody wants them.

They happen in other societies

as well but they think

about their miracles,

they work for it to happen

and it finally comes.

In Poland it is always

the other way round,

miracles happen

when nobody expects them.

My childhood was full

of sun,

full of freedom.

I would spend all days

investigating every nook

and cranny of my small world.

I would come home late

during the summer

to find one of my relatives

already waiting for me

at the garden gate.

When my father died my

mother would lock me up

and leave me at home

and go to work.

l was three and a half years old

at that time.

I remember that it took me many

years to overcome this fear.

I dream that there was just

a chink in the window left for me.

Naturally, when l was twelve

to fifteen years old,

love affairs were the

most important.

I fell for my school-mates

who were all much taller.

I remember how tiresome

it was walking on my tiptoes

to seem a little taller.

When we went for a walk,

six kilometres,

it wasn’t either easy or nice

to walk on tiptoes all the way.

We all have something

that bugs us...

Every man climbs

constantly upwards.

Unless he degrades his

social status.

Going up is a natural tendency.

Naturally, one may say that

there are historic opportunities

as well as social

and political moments

which make such climbing easier.

I certainly used such

a historic opportunity.

War brought with it the fight

but also joy.

We wanted very much to join

the guerrillas.

We wanted to fight

although we were not allowed in

order to take our maturity exams.

We simply ran away and joined

the first guerrilla unit

we could find during the

Vilnius uprising.

We survived the rising,

we experienced the greatness and

the misery of the action Storm...

It did not succeed...

My unit was one of the last

ones to stay and fight.

Just a few boys from

city families.

Brilliant, intelligent boys

who did not fall into

any trap.

They survived until

some girls scouts

got them out of the forest,

convinced them that it made

sense to live on.

There were still many

people fighting for Poland

they imagined during the war.

I am talking about

the resistance now.

The resistance was still strong

and until the very end some of

them were quite desperate.

Actually, I was one of them.

| just managed to escape

the forests a little earlier.

The joy of life was stronger

than any political fierceness.

That was why the

Home Army units

left the forests

and entered the civil life.

Biology, pure vital force.

Just as after a severe winter

all the nature seems to explode

uncontrollably life started

to bloom madly on the ruins

left by the war.

Everyone wanted to

experience life.

I started to write shyly, slowly.

In the beginning it was

some journalism.

Naturally, I wrote some six

poems in my life.

I tried writing reviews

with Mach’s assistance.

My Polish was closer to the

language of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky

at that time than to the language

of Mickiewicz and Kochanowski.

“Nurt” was just about to start.

Borowski and Bratny were

the editors,

they came and said to me —

we need some prose

and we heard that you

write prose.

I wasn’t in the position

to say “no“.

I lived in Bristol Hotel

at that time,

l was transferred with the whole

editorial board to Warsaw.

l locked myself up and

wrote the short story

“Corporal Koziolek and Me".l think

I did it during one weekend.

Ididn’t eat, I didn’t drink,

l sweated with fear,

and I wrote my debut.

I gave in to Marxism for

the simplest reason.

A reason which is obvious

for my generation

but for other generations

is oddly incomprehensible.

It was disappointment caused by

the war my generation had lost.

I joined the party,

I got to like Marxism

I had not known before

and I never gotten to know.

Maybe now I will look something up.

I liked its rationalism.

I could have become a dandy,

slightly offended by reality

but I fell to the very bottom

with the party officials,

with the “sinners“...

I did not write to order.

I wrote what I thought I should.

I believed that once in a lifetime

one can subjugate oneself,

give up purely artistic

ambitions for a cause.

My losses included five failed

or lame, or handicapped books.

I became successful

as a writer

only when I told myself:

“Never again! “

l welcomed 1956

with major reserve.

From my point of view

this catastrophe

was not a simple backward

somersault

to be achieved in just

a few hours.

I did not change overnight.

I had to digest it,

remove the poison from my body.

I could not pretend

I was only naive.

I had made a conscious decision,

a painful decision

which left its traces

in my books.

“Power“ for example, and all the doubts

of an intellectual are all

written down in my books.

I did it as honestly as I could.

I could not just stand up

and say —

well, I am sorry, I was wrong

but now I am a different person.

I felt cheated or rather as

if I participated in a fraud.

But you know already,

I had said that

I cannot find a few pages

or a few takes that I would like

to save from oblivion.

Actually, I don’t know if I would

like to save anything.

I can hardly imagine

that anyone

will be interested in reading

it some years after my death.

| feel like a bankrupt

Babylonian priest.

During the Second World War

all the old artistic canons

were destroyed

as if to take revenge on the

self-assuredness of the old art,

as if to punish its vanity, its

contempt for simple people.

Wonderful talentless

hacks rule the world,

their lack of talent is

liberated and naked.

We should give up any hopes

that there are God given

laws in the arts.

Your noble artistic

standards

which you want to uphold

are provincial and old-fashioned.

Father, we live in days

of great crisis.

Forests die, rivers die,

seas dry up.

People fly to the moon.

People crossed the threshold

of the skies,

they entered another world.

There was terrible scream

like in the tower of Babel.

Thousands of slogans,

thousands of catchy phrases.

They all fly in the air

and nobody knows what is what

but as the smart alecks claim,

nobody knows

what is true because everyone

has their own truth.

However, when you corner

a man he knows what is true

and what is a lie.

Complication is the mother

of simplicity.

What does it mean?

It means only as much.

We seek relief in our suffering,

in our uncertainty,

our fears, our hysteria.

It is strange but

art works as a cure

even though it is a product

of some illness itself.

There are many things that

I admire but I think

that our only real

achievement

is art because art

is a testimony to our presence.

I reached the conclusion

after numerous experiences

that a man who writes

should not be limited by any

form of external discipline.

He should listen only to his

own conscience

and write down his time

as his old-fashioned soul dictates it.

It is better for an artist

not to be a member of anything.

Exactly, this June 22

it was 58 years ago...

and this is something of my

personal boundary.

Tell me exactly the date

and hour of your birth.

- Midnight, June 22.

- I like this constellation.

Cancer in opposition to Venus.

This is not the best moment

of my life.

| feel a need for an internal

change and in what I do.

I want to write a short novel

about supposed life

of my grandmother

about whom I know nothing,

and about the birth

of my father

about whom I also know nothing.

I did not have the time to ask

about him when I still my

relatives around me.

Now that l have the time to ask

them they are mostly dead.

Maybe your mother told you

Who my grandfather was?

A Lithuanian peasant,

a Russian soldier?

A wandering Jewish merchant?

My grandparents had a hard life.

It was full of hard work,

they worked a lot

and had so few pleasures.

Their greatest pleasure was prayer.

I am thinking now that

l have succeeded,

l have gone further,

I have flown further,

lam thinking -

am | happier then they were?

I am not quite sure.

As I say, all this I realise

that this is my long,

great, and very precisely

prepared defence.

I am defending what

I have done,

my gestures, fingers, my eye.

I would like to save many things I did.

Feelings, moods I described, fate of some

generation that I managed to capture,

some landscapes

that existed and passed...

I wanted something...

I wanted something very

important

but I can’t remember

any more.

Maybe you wanted to leave behind

a lasting shape of your life.

There is something

interesting in what I said,

I am sorry I praised myself.

Liar!

He is a liar!

Come on, why don’t you

say something?

A quite important function

of art

is helping our fellow creatures

who also found themselves

in this vale of tears.

Our neighbours suffer the most

because of solitude.

This is the greatest scourge

of our lives.

I think that all loves,

all friendships

are born of this wild,

extreme feeling of solitude.

I want to be a passer-by,

that a man meets in life.

I want to wave at this man,

give him a sign

that there are other people

in the world, that he is not alone.