In a 1981 issue of the punk-and-art zine Post, Piotr Rypson likened punk to the dadaist and futurist activity of the early 20th century. He saw in the phenomenon yet another strand of arrogant, nonconformist, valiant-avantgarde anti-art, another stage in the necessary and dramatic process of the renewal of culture.
The exhibition's title is a travesty of the slogan from a banner photographed by the communist secret police during the Jarocin rock festival. Its provocative message was directed against the institutionalised and monopolised - state-controlled - music industry.
Our use of the slogan is to point not so much to a conflict between the art world and the punk subculture but, quite contrarily, to an 'alliance of attitudes' that took place when Polish punk was being born. It was then Henryk Gajewski, artist and manager of the Remont art gallery, and Piotr Rypson (at present, a known art-critic and curator) started organising the first gigs, recording sessions, publications, produced demo tapes (Warsaw-Tricity scene: Tilt, Kryzys, Deadlock). They became the managers of one of Poland's first new-wave bands, Tilt. In their activity, they consciously exploited the institutional infrastructure of art. By doing that, they provoked the art community, even its most progressive factions, accustomed, despite claims of being committed to 'reality,' to the 'splendid isolation of art.' They thought of the model of an anti-mainstream culture, devoid of hierarchy and authoritarian centre, a culture consisting of equally rightful, extremely different trends, proposing alternative (to the dominant ones) means of expressing one's creativity, of image- and mentality-forming.
Tilt in front of Remont Gallery. Photo: © Henryk Gajewski, 1980
Rypson and Gajewski used producer-promoter strategies to support punk. Importantly, they adopted them as part of fulfilling their own unselfish artistic vision, rather than in order to capitalise on the trend and commoditise everything connected with it: the music, the fashion, the lifestyle (as was the case with similar punk managers in the West, such as Malcolm McLaren).
Moreover, the alliance was to overcome an impasse that pervaded in the field of contemporary Polish art, a field employing a hermetic language, antagonised (the 'neo- or pseudo-' debate), limited to the activity of a narrow circle of people, lacking a non-professional audience, a field no longer setting any new cultural trends, no longer participating in any broader socio-cultural debate (which was noted, for instance, by J.S. Wojciechowski in the Post zine edited by Gajewski and Rypson). To emphasise a parting away with the hitherto model of the functioning of artistic institutions, they changed the Remont gallery to post-gallery and renamed it to Post-Remont in 1980. Analogically, Tomasz Sikorski 'opened' the Dziekanka gallery he managed ever more to life-stream events rather than art-stream ones.
Besides the mentioned activists, others too, perceived punk as not only an eruption of a vital energy that art had missed for so long but also a new, adequate to the era's socio-political situation, mean of expression. In Lodz, the punk phenomenon was studied closely by Jozef Robakowski (e.g. the 'energy recording' featuring the band Moskwa) and by Zbigniew Libera (trying his hand, together with artists Jerzy Truszkowski and Barbara Konopka, at being a punk musician in the bands Sternehoch and NAO), and filmmakers (Michal Tarkowski, Andrzej Titkow, Mariusz Trelinski, Piotr Lazarkiewicz, Andrzej Kostenko and others), professional and amateur artists. Akademia Ruchu, combining in its shows the vocabulary of the visual arts and theatre, and in its street actions searching for radical (avant-garde) forms of social communication, also made references to punk music (it used punk rock songs as soundtrack for its shows, and its performance at the Documenta 8 in Kassel was accompanied by a show by Pawel Kelner Rozwadowski, a member of, among other things, Fornit and Deuter).
What art and punk had in common in Poland at the time was a desire to oppose the status quo, the communist regime, the dominant aesthetical, moral, political, cultural standards (though it needs to be remembered that, during the era of an acute economic crisis and the harsh martial law realities, the slogan 'no future' meant something else in Poland than in the West, and the regime tried to rechannel, control and exploit the energy by luring some new-wave musicians with various kinds of profits.)
Finally, it needs to be added that the exhibition's title applies also to contemporary artistic and curatorial practices (not entirely strange to ourselves) consisting often in parasitising on informal, grassroots means of expression and communication. At the same time, it is an expression of a yearning for expressive, bold, even desperate attempts to renew the artistic language and its functioning in society. Showing the exhibition in the building of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, adjacent to the building that once housed the Polish Communist Party's Central Committee and just a short walk from the National Museum, does not aim, of course, to launch a naive and self-deconstructing criticism of the 'system.' Rather, the point is to go against the grain and recall the punk nonchalance and anti-authoritarian arrogance.
Lukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski
The exhibition's title is a travesty of the slogan from a banner photographed by the communist secret police during the Jarocin rock festival. Its provocative message was directed against the institutionalised and monopolised - state-controlled - music industry.
Our use of the slogan is to point not so much to a conflict between the art world and the punk subculture but, quite contrarily, to an 'alliance of attitudes' that took place when Polish punk was being born. It was then Henryk Gajewski, artist and manager of the Remont art gallery, and Piotr Rypson (at present, a known art-critic and curator) started organising the first gigs, recording sessions, publications, produced demo tapes (Warsaw-Tricity scene: Tilt, Kryzys, Deadlock). They became the managers of one of Poland's first new-wave bands, Tilt. In their activity, they consciously exploited the institutional infrastructure of art. By doing that, they provoked the art community, even its most progressive factions, accustomed, despite claims of being committed to 'reality,' to the 'splendid isolation of art.' They thought of the model of an anti-mainstream culture, devoid of hierarchy and authoritarian centre, a culture consisting of equally rightful, extremely different trends, proposing alternative (to the dominant ones) means of expressing one's creativity, of image- and mentality-forming.
Tilt in front of Remont Gallery. Photo: © Henryk Gajewski, 1980
Rypson and Gajewski used producer-promoter strategies to support punk. Importantly, they adopted them as part of fulfilling their own unselfish artistic vision, rather than in order to capitalise on the trend and commoditise everything connected with it: the music, the fashion, the lifestyle (as was the case with similar punk managers in the West, such as Malcolm McLaren).
Moreover, the alliance was to overcome an impasse that pervaded in the field of contemporary Polish art, a field employing a hermetic language, antagonised (the 'neo- or pseudo-' debate), limited to the activity of a narrow circle of people, lacking a non-professional audience, a field no longer setting any new cultural trends, no longer participating in any broader socio-cultural debate (which was noted, for instance, by J.S. Wojciechowski in the Post zine edited by Gajewski and Rypson). To emphasise a parting away with the hitherto model of the functioning of artistic institutions, they changed the Remont gallery to post-gallery and renamed it to Post-Remont in 1980. Analogically, Tomasz Sikorski 'opened' the Dziekanka gallery he managed ever more to life-stream events rather than art-stream ones.
Besides the mentioned activists, others too, perceived punk as not only an eruption of a vital energy that art had missed for so long but also a new, adequate to the era's socio-political situation, mean of expression. In Lodz, the punk phenomenon was studied closely by Jozef Robakowski (e.g. the 'energy recording' featuring the band Moskwa) and by Zbigniew Libera (trying his hand, together with artists Jerzy Truszkowski and Barbara Konopka, at being a punk musician in the bands Sternehoch and NAO), and filmmakers (Michal Tarkowski, Andrzej Titkow, Mariusz Trelinski, Piotr Lazarkiewicz, Andrzej Kostenko and others), professional and amateur artists. Akademia Ruchu, combining in its shows the vocabulary of the visual arts and theatre, and in its street actions searching for radical (avant-garde) forms of social communication, also made references to punk music (it used punk rock songs as soundtrack for its shows, and its performance at the Documenta 8 in Kassel was accompanied by a show by Pawel Kelner Rozwadowski, a member of, among other things, Fornit and Deuter).
What art and punk had in common in Poland at the time was a desire to oppose the status quo, the communist regime, the dominant aesthetical, moral, political, cultural standards (though it needs to be remembered that, during the era of an acute economic crisis and the harsh martial law realities, the slogan 'no future' meant something else in Poland than in the West, and the regime tried to rechannel, control and exploit the energy by luring some new-wave musicians with various kinds of profits.)
Finally, it needs to be added that the exhibition's title applies also to contemporary artistic and curatorial practices (not entirely strange to ourselves) consisting often in parasitising on informal, grassroots means of expression and communication. At the same time, it is an expression of a yearning for expressive, bold, even desperate attempts to renew the artistic language and its functioning in society. Showing the exhibition in the building of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, adjacent to the building that once housed the Polish Communist Party's Central Committee and just a short walk from the National Museum, does not aim, of course, to launch a naive and self-deconstructing criticism of the 'system.' Rather, the point is to go against the grain and recall the punk nonchalance and anti-authoritarian arrogance.
Lukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski
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| Henryk Gajewski and Kryzys in Post-Remont gallery. Photo: © Henryk Gajewski |
Frantz (Tomek Lipinski), Luter (Jacek Lenartowicz) of Tilt and their manager Piotr Rypson, 1980. Photo: Piotr Rypson's archive | |
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 Piotr Rypson, 1984. Photo: Henryk Gajewski's Archive |
 Moskwa band (Guma, Rogoz and Wozek). Photo: Jozef Robakowski / Exchange Gallery, 1985 |
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FILMS DESCRIPTIONS
Henryk Gajewski
Tilt Back
1980
A legendary documentary presenting the germinations of Polish punk. The film consists of three parts. The first is the record of one of the punk band Tilt's first live shows, organised by Gajewski, Rypson, and Zdzislaw Sosnowski at the Studio theatre in 1979. The film starts with a scene where a work by the then-guru of Polish conceptualism, Jerzy Rosolowicz, as well as works by other artists (e.g. Zbigniew Dlubak), exhibited at the Studio Gallery on the venue's premises, are 'profaned' by 'arrogant and nihilistic youth,' and in the following sequences, after the show has started, there enter Zdzislaw Sosnowski (artist, the famous 'Goalkeeper,' then-director of the Studio Gallery) and Lukasz Szajna (member of the group Baldyga Onuch Szajna / Pracownia Dziekanka) who, playing thoughtless bouncers, try to restore order. The film's second part documents Tilt's gig at the Wielki Mlyn in Gdansk (1980), amid the remnants of an artificial flower exhibition. The stage design is made complete with parachute canopies spread under the ceiling and clouds of smoke. The film's closing scenes were shot at a new wave music festival in Kolobrzeg, featuring, besides Tilt, Kryzys, KSU, etc., also Piotr Rypson (Tilt's manager at the time), Pyza taking photographs, and the leader of the NY-based band Art Attack. The film is interspersed with existential comments by Frantz and Luter.
Henryk Gajewski, Jacques de Koning
The Passenger
1985
The film (known internationally as Punk in Poland) is a kind of continuation of Gajewski's Tilt Back. It tells of the adventures of two friends, co-founders of the band Tilt - Tomek Lipinski (Frantz) and Jacek Lenartowicz (Luter), who become separated when one of them emigrates. The film features a lot of existential poetry by Luter - the eponymous Passenger - who is 'in exile' in West Berlin. We follow his neurotic attempts to find a place for himself in the new reality, to set up a new band with his girlfriend Pola. We also watch a lot of 'archival' footage from the 1979-1981 period, e.g. Get Up, Stand Up performed by Tilt in Gdansk three days before the outbreak of the shipyard strikes (that eventually led to the formation of Solidarity), scenes with Piotr Rypson announcing performers at the legendary first new-wave festival in Kolobrzeg, or de Koning's humorous 1982 'interview' with Kryzys.
Jozef Robakowski
Energy Record: Moskwa and My Eye...
1985
Air (music video), performed by Moskwa
1986
In the rented space of Lodz's Cytryna movie theatre, the punk bank Moskwa plays 'for camera' for Robakowski who is also present on stage (he is the event's only witness and addressee). The film is a unique recording of a rehearsal/live show, and at the same time a fulfilment of Robakowski's artistic strategy, under which he explored issues such as art as a field of energy transmissions, of biological-mechanical processes - focusing on celebrating qualities poorly represented in the field of art, such as intensity, vitality. The second film is a two-and-half-minute-long montage of pogo dancing at the Jarocin festival.
Tomasz Sikorski
Waiting for the Signal
1981
music: Brygada Kryzys
featuring: Tomasz Sikorski, Tomasz Lipinski, Zbyszek Olkiewicz, Kasia Kobzdej
According to its author's own words, the film (part of the series War-Saw) is a 'neurotic' document of the first weeks of the martial law. It combines the 'cold' methodology of analytical art (Sikorski) with a sense of existential drama and hopelessness (Tilt leader Lipinski). The film's structure follows a rigid, rational principle - each sequence has the camera, held each time by a different person, rotating around its own axis. This constant neo-constructivist repetition becomes a metaphor of the vicious circle in which the film's main protagonists, who can do nothing else but wait passively for things to change, have found themselves.
Tomasz Sikorski
The Raft of Medusa
1982
music: Brygada Kryzys
featuring: Tomasz Sikorski, Marysia Lewandowska, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Pawel Kwiek, Przemyslaw Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Joanna Stanko, Piotr Rypson, Tomasz Lipinski, Robert Brylewski
The film documents an event conceived by Tomasz Sikorski who, in June 1982, invited a number of people from the contemporary art community as well as members of the Warsaw punk scene for a boat trip down the Vistula river. As Sikorski described it, 'a typical excursion, on a Sunday morning in June, down the languid Vistula, undertaken by a group of unusual trippers, castaways drifting through the shallows of Babylon Warsaw of 1982.' Besides many other interesting aspects, the film enables us to watch a group of Soc artists (Zygmunt Piotrowski, Przemyslaw Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Pawel Kwiek) who, amid the trip's dominant anarchic-melancholic atmosphere, seem to ultimately part with their martial law-shattered utopias of the early 1970s (e.g. the possibility of reforming communism, transforming it into a more democratic and less authoritarian system).
Akademia Ruchu
Other Dances, English Lesson
1982
music: Biale Wulkany, Brygada Kryzys
For Akademia Ruchu, punk became an important formal feature, a specific reaction to the reality of the martial law. Both shows, Other Dances and English Lesson, use punk music, which becomes the key element organising the structure of the performance. In Other Dances, the performance's individual elements - the acting out of neurotic gestures corresponding with the social reality of the time (euphoria, downfall) - have been subjugated to the music of Biale Wulkany (an ephemeral formation started by Luter, known better for its legend than actual recordings) and Brygada Kryzys.
The fast-montage 'clip' promoting the English Lesson show uses music by Brygada Kryzys that conveys the era's pervasive sense of helplessness, neurosis, linguistic void, and the dilemma between the yearning for becoming part of the West (symbolised by the process of learning English quoted in the title) and a fear that such a transition would mean moving 'out of the frying pan into the fire.'
Zbigniew Libera
Teofilow
(excerpts)
1987
Excerpts from a film documenting an open-air organised by the Kultura Zrzuty group in Teofilow that becomes something of a punk scene of Polish art. As part of the event, Zbigniew Libera gives an unbearable 'concert for the heater,' in which he is joined by the art critic Jolanta Ciesielska. Moskwa's show, though not very successful either, nonetheless stands out above the rest of the event, an increasingly intense display of artistic impotence. Artists and critics, e.g. Jan Swidzinski, Andrzej Rzepecki, Marek Janiak, Zbigniew Libera, Jacek Kryszkowski, jiggle around to the beat of music. Guma, the Moskwa leader, and his band mates, lost in the space of 'art,' eventually decide to stop the embarrassment and leave during one of the artistic appearances (by Przemyslaw Kwiek).
Andrzej Titkow
The Passer-by
(excerpts)
1984
A film about writer Tadeusz Konwicki, made in the Orwellian year 1984. The music by Tomasz Lipinski and Tilt, accompanying the key scenes, amplifies the piece's catastrophic-existential atmosphere (the opening Palace of Culture and Science scene, the finale, highlighting the text of the song Let There Happen What Is to Happen, the gig audience scene). That is particularly well evident in the grotesquely surreal party at the writer's apartment, where, next to actor Jerzy Stuhr acting out some costume skit, a spectacular rendition of the 1st of May parade is held while the Warsaw bohemians lose themselves in partying with the punks. All that is accompanied by a noisy show by Tomek Lipinski, witnessed by a select company of elite actors: champagne-celebrating Gustaw Holoubek, Marta Lipinska, snatched to the dance floor by Konwicki, or Wlodzimierz Borunski, clutching his head at the sight of all the mayhem.
Mariusz Trelinski
A Film about Punks
1983
Trelinski's documentary exercise, in which he records interviews with punks, live concerts, and private meetings. The time is the late martial law, an era of stern censorship, omnipresent state propaganda, manipulation, and mass media control. At the same time, it is the young filmmaker's moment of reflection on technique and the medium. Trelinski tells his protagonists they can say whatever they want for the camera, hearing in response that truth cannot be mediated that way, that the camera kills it, that they prefer to talk directly to another person (or write something on the wall) than to a stupid recording machine. In one of the scenes, they spit at the lens. The film features, among others, the members of Dezerter (including Skandal, who fulfilled his life in a punk manner), Zygzak of TZN Xenna, and others.
Jacques de Koning
I could live in Africa
1983
A documentary about the band Izrael, made by a Dutch filmmaker and scriptwriter, lost in Poland of the martial law era, fascinated with the Polish punk underground. The film is a grotesque fun play, a conscious tongue-in-cheek over-identification with roles, confronting an ignorant filmmaker from the 'affluent West' with the members of a punk bank from communist Poland.
Camerata
(excerpts)
1981
A TV programme that discussed a crisis in classical music (empty concert halls, ailing education system, the overlapping economic depression). In that context, the Polish TV for the first time presented a punk band (footage from a Kryzys show and comments by Robert Brylewski). That was accompanied by an appropriate - though still moderate - commentary, but the most amazing thing was the fact that, besides the piece Television, criticising the hypocrisy of the regime-controlled media, the censors let pass a text that, in its live version, contained the line 'Ambition is your fucking religion.'
Michal Tarkowski
The Concert
(excerpts)
1982
A feature film that is a stream of music and images. It features fragments of live shows, as well as animated images, abstract shots, and visual effects corresponding with the texts of the songs and the climate of the music. Besides numbers by popular rock, metal, and blues bands, we hear tunes by punk and new-wave bands, e.g. Brygada Kryzys, Deuter, or Republika. The film proved inspiring for many music fans, enthusiasts, as well as artists, although not necessarily with full awareness. There is new work by Wilhelm Sasnal, made particularily for this event, related to the film The Concert.
Mariusz Trelinski
A Huge Whale's Rump
(excerpts)
1987
Trelinski's debut feature film, showing the successive stages of the main protagonist's (played by Wojciech Malajkat) gradual demise, as he sinks into a drug addiction typical for a 'cursed artist.' One of the scenes juxtaposes the ultimate disintegration of this decadent, artiste figure with a high-energy live show of the punk band Post Regiment (which appears to be a more interesting and adequate response to the crisis and decadence of the Polish reality of the 1980s).
Darek Skubiel, Zdzislaw Zinczuk
Touching the Sound
AWA Amateur Filmmakers' Club, Poznan
1981
The film's aim was to present the Jarocin festival as an ecstatic, virtually delirious, manifestation of the state of anarchy, the kind of 'life in suspension', that reigned in Poland between the signing of the August Agreements in 1980 and the introduction of the martial law in December 1981. The film's incredible atmosphere is built by a rigorous formal structure - the growing ecstasy of the ritual's participants is accompanied by ever louder, trance music that, at the climax, unable to keep up with the image, suddenly stops. Getting closer to nature turns out to be the best way to escape the paranoia of reality.
Andrzej Krolak
Jarocin '84
(excerpts)
SCF "Stodola" 1985
A film etude on the 1984 Jarocin festival featuring, among other things, unique footage from a live show by the cult band Siekiera. Besides those explosive scenes, other interesting features include a naive 'clip' by Madame, and footage from a gig by the reggae band Bakshish, crosscut with sea images.
Andrzej Kostenko
My blood, your blood
(excerpts)
1986
A music documentary made by Andrzej Kostenko for the BBC. The film, recorded at the 1986 Jarocin festival, features live footage and music videos (by, among other things, Proces, Tilt, Kosmetyki Mrs Pinky, Siekiera, Moskwa) as well as interviews with musicians and managers. One of the scenes to remember is where the fans in the audience use amateur tape recorders to record the music that is ignored by the official record industry.
OTHER FILMS
Many other films are within our scope of interest. Among the most important of those is Piotr Lazarkiewicz's The Wave, a great classic documentary (available on DVD) on the 1985 Jarocin festival. Besides live footage, it shows the broader context - the everyday life of the town of Jarocin and the tent town, interviews with government officials and musicians.
Pawel Karpinski's feature It's Only Rock (1983) includes a scene from a fictional rock festival in Gradow, featuring, among other things, live shows by Rejestracja Przedpoborowych and Dezerter (the scene features actors Marek Bargielowski as chairman, and Zbigniew Buczkowski as member of the jury). The same year Pawel Karpinski made a documentary called Smierc Kliniczna (Clinical Death) about a Gliwice-based band of the same name. The film starts with a scene of a civic education class that is attended by Darek Dusza, the band's then 17-year-old leader. The Polish Newsreel also noticed the phenomenon of the Jarocin festival, showing a sensational report called In the Rhythm of Rock, featuring, among other things, snippets from a live gig by the punk band Sedes, accompanied, naturally, by an 'appropriate' commentary.
Besides those works, we are also interested in music videos (e.g. Siekiera's brilliant 1985 clip for its track Cobbler Kills Cobbler) as well as amateur video footage from punk concerts (e.g. a 1987 TZN Xenna gig at the Remont).
Curators: Lukasz Ronduda and Michal Wolinski
Thanks to: Robert Jarosz
Tilt Back
1980
A legendary documentary presenting the germinations of Polish punk. The film consists of three parts. The first is the record of one of the punk band Tilt's first live shows, organised by Gajewski, Rypson, and Zdzislaw Sosnowski at the Studio theatre in 1979. The film starts with a scene where a work by the then-guru of Polish conceptualism, Jerzy Rosolowicz, as well as works by other artists (e.g. Zbigniew Dlubak), exhibited at the Studio Gallery on the venue's premises, are 'profaned' by 'arrogant and nihilistic youth,' and in the following sequences, after the show has started, there enter Zdzislaw Sosnowski (artist, the famous 'Goalkeeper,' then-director of the Studio Gallery) and Lukasz Szajna (member of the group Baldyga Onuch Szajna / Pracownia Dziekanka) who, playing thoughtless bouncers, try to restore order. The film's second part documents Tilt's gig at the Wielki Mlyn in Gdansk (1980), amid the remnants of an artificial flower exhibition. The stage design is made complete with parachute canopies spread under the ceiling and clouds of smoke. The film's closing scenes were shot at a new wave music festival in Kolobrzeg, featuring, besides Tilt, Kryzys, KSU, etc., also Piotr Rypson (Tilt's manager at the time), Pyza taking photographs, and the leader of the NY-based band Art Attack. The film is interspersed with existential comments by Frantz and Luter.
Henryk Gajewski, Jacques de Koning
The Passenger
1985
The film (known internationally as Punk in Poland) is a kind of continuation of Gajewski's Tilt Back. It tells of the adventures of two friends, co-founders of the band Tilt - Tomek Lipinski (Frantz) and Jacek Lenartowicz (Luter), who become separated when one of them emigrates. The film features a lot of existential poetry by Luter - the eponymous Passenger - who is 'in exile' in West Berlin. We follow his neurotic attempts to find a place for himself in the new reality, to set up a new band with his girlfriend Pola. We also watch a lot of 'archival' footage from the 1979-1981 period, e.g. Get Up, Stand Up performed by Tilt in Gdansk three days before the outbreak of the shipyard strikes (that eventually led to the formation of Solidarity), scenes with Piotr Rypson announcing performers at the legendary first new-wave festival in Kolobrzeg, or de Koning's humorous 1982 'interview' with Kryzys.
Jozef Robakowski
Energy Record: Moskwa and My Eye...
1985
Air (music video), performed by Moskwa
1986
In the rented space of Lodz's Cytryna movie theatre, the punk bank Moskwa plays 'for camera' for Robakowski who is also present on stage (he is the event's only witness and addressee). The film is a unique recording of a rehearsal/live show, and at the same time a fulfilment of Robakowski's artistic strategy, under which he explored issues such as art as a field of energy transmissions, of biological-mechanical processes - focusing on celebrating qualities poorly represented in the field of art, such as intensity, vitality. The second film is a two-and-half-minute-long montage of pogo dancing at the Jarocin festival.
Tomasz Sikorski
Waiting for the Signal
1981
music: Brygada Kryzys
featuring: Tomasz Sikorski, Tomasz Lipinski, Zbyszek Olkiewicz, Kasia Kobzdej
According to its author's own words, the film (part of the series War-Saw) is a 'neurotic' document of the first weeks of the martial law. It combines the 'cold' methodology of analytical art (Sikorski) with a sense of existential drama and hopelessness (Tilt leader Lipinski). The film's structure follows a rigid, rational principle - each sequence has the camera, held each time by a different person, rotating around its own axis. This constant neo-constructivist repetition becomes a metaphor of the vicious circle in which the film's main protagonists, who can do nothing else but wait passively for things to change, have found themselves.
Tomasz Sikorski
The Raft of Medusa
1982
music: Brygada Kryzys
featuring: Tomasz Sikorski, Marysia Lewandowska, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Pawel Kwiek, Przemyslaw Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Joanna Stanko, Piotr Rypson, Tomasz Lipinski, Robert Brylewski
The film documents an event conceived by Tomasz Sikorski who, in June 1982, invited a number of people from the contemporary art community as well as members of the Warsaw punk scene for a boat trip down the Vistula river. As Sikorski described it, 'a typical excursion, on a Sunday morning in June, down the languid Vistula, undertaken by a group of unusual trippers, castaways drifting through the shallows of Babylon Warsaw of 1982.' Besides many other interesting aspects, the film enables us to watch a group of Soc artists (Zygmunt Piotrowski, Przemyslaw Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Pawel Kwiek) who, amid the trip's dominant anarchic-melancholic atmosphere, seem to ultimately part with their martial law-shattered utopias of the early 1970s (e.g. the possibility of reforming communism, transforming it into a more democratic and less authoritarian system).
Akademia Ruchu
Other Dances, English Lesson
1982
music: Biale Wulkany, Brygada Kryzys
For Akademia Ruchu, punk became an important formal feature, a specific reaction to the reality of the martial law. Both shows, Other Dances and English Lesson, use punk music, which becomes the key element organising the structure of the performance. In Other Dances, the performance's individual elements - the acting out of neurotic gestures corresponding with the social reality of the time (euphoria, downfall) - have been subjugated to the music of Biale Wulkany (an ephemeral formation started by Luter, known better for its legend than actual recordings) and Brygada Kryzys.
The fast-montage 'clip' promoting the English Lesson show uses music by Brygada Kryzys that conveys the era's pervasive sense of helplessness, neurosis, linguistic void, and the dilemma between the yearning for becoming part of the West (symbolised by the process of learning English quoted in the title) and a fear that such a transition would mean moving 'out of the frying pan into the fire.'
Zbigniew Libera
Teofilow
(excerpts)
1987
Excerpts from a film documenting an open-air organised by the Kultura Zrzuty group in Teofilow that becomes something of a punk scene of Polish art. As part of the event, Zbigniew Libera gives an unbearable 'concert for the heater,' in which he is joined by the art critic Jolanta Ciesielska. Moskwa's show, though not very successful either, nonetheless stands out above the rest of the event, an increasingly intense display of artistic impotence. Artists and critics, e.g. Jan Swidzinski, Andrzej Rzepecki, Marek Janiak, Zbigniew Libera, Jacek Kryszkowski, jiggle around to the beat of music. Guma, the Moskwa leader, and his band mates, lost in the space of 'art,' eventually decide to stop the embarrassment and leave during one of the artistic appearances (by Przemyslaw Kwiek).
Andrzej Titkow
The Passer-by
(excerpts)
1984
A film about writer Tadeusz Konwicki, made in the Orwellian year 1984. The music by Tomasz Lipinski and Tilt, accompanying the key scenes, amplifies the piece's catastrophic-existential atmosphere (the opening Palace of Culture and Science scene, the finale, highlighting the text of the song Let There Happen What Is to Happen, the gig audience scene). That is particularly well evident in the grotesquely surreal party at the writer's apartment, where, next to actor Jerzy Stuhr acting out some costume skit, a spectacular rendition of the 1st of May parade is held while the Warsaw bohemians lose themselves in partying with the punks. All that is accompanied by a noisy show by Tomek Lipinski, witnessed by a select company of elite actors: champagne-celebrating Gustaw Holoubek, Marta Lipinska, snatched to the dance floor by Konwicki, or Wlodzimierz Borunski, clutching his head at the sight of all the mayhem.
Mariusz Trelinski
A Film about Punks
1983
Trelinski's documentary exercise, in which he records interviews with punks, live concerts, and private meetings. The time is the late martial law, an era of stern censorship, omnipresent state propaganda, manipulation, and mass media control. At the same time, it is the young filmmaker's moment of reflection on technique and the medium. Trelinski tells his protagonists they can say whatever they want for the camera, hearing in response that truth cannot be mediated that way, that the camera kills it, that they prefer to talk directly to another person (or write something on the wall) than to a stupid recording machine. In one of the scenes, they spit at the lens. The film features, among others, the members of Dezerter (including Skandal, who fulfilled his life in a punk manner), Zygzak of TZN Xenna, and others.
Jacques de Koning
I could live in Africa
1983
A documentary about the band Izrael, made by a Dutch filmmaker and scriptwriter, lost in Poland of the martial law era, fascinated with the Polish punk underground. The film is a grotesque fun play, a conscious tongue-in-cheek over-identification with roles, confronting an ignorant filmmaker from the 'affluent West' with the members of a punk bank from communist Poland.
Camerata
(excerpts)
1981
A TV programme that discussed a crisis in classical music (empty concert halls, ailing education system, the overlapping economic depression). In that context, the Polish TV for the first time presented a punk band (footage from a Kryzys show and comments by Robert Brylewski). That was accompanied by an appropriate - though still moderate - commentary, but the most amazing thing was the fact that, besides the piece Television, criticising the hypocrisy of the regime-controlled media, the censors let pass a text that, in its live version, contained the line 'Ambition is your fucking religion.'
Michal Tarkowski
The Concert
(excerpts)
1982
A feature film that is a stream of music and images. It features fragments of live shows, as well as animated images, abstract shots, and visual effects corresponding with the texts of the songs and the climate of the music. Besides numbers by popular rock, metal, and blues bands, we hear tunes by punk and new-wave bands, e.g. Brygada Kryzys, Deuter, or Republika. The film proved inspiring for many music fans, enthusiasts, as well as artists, although not necessarily with full awareness. There is new work by Wilhelm Sasnal, made particularily for this event, related to the film The Concert.
Mariusz Trelinski
A Huge Whale's Rump
(excerpts)
1987
Trelinski's debut feature film, showing the successive stages of the main protagonist's (played by Wojciech Malajkat) gradual demise, as he sinks into a drug addiction typical for a 'cursed artist.' One of the scenes juxtaposes the ultimate disintegration of this decadent, artiste figure with a high-energy live show of the punk band Post Regiment (which appears to be a more interesting and adequate response to the crisis and decadence of the Polish reality of the 1980s).
Darek Skubiel, Zdzislaw Zinczuk
Touching the Sound
AWA Amateur Filmmakers' Club, Poznan
1981
The film's aim was to present the Jarocin festival as an ecstatic, virtually delirious, manifestation of the state of anarchy, the kind of 'life in suspension', that reigned in Poland between the signing of the August Agreements in 1980 and the introduction of the martial law in December 1981. The film's incredible atmosphere is built by a rigorous formal structure - the growing ecstasy of the ritual's participants is accompanied by ever louder, trance music that, at the climax, unable to keep up with the image, suddenly stops. Getting closer to nature turns out to be the best way to escape the paranoia of reality.
Andrzej Krolak
Jarocin '84
(excerpts)
SCF "Stodola" 1985
A film etude on the 1984 Jarocin festival featuring, among other things, unique footage from a live show by the cult band Siekiera. Besides those explosive scenes, other interesting features include a naive 'clip' by Madame, and footage from a gig by the reggae band Bakshish, crosscut with sea images.
Andrzej Kostenko
My blood, your blood
(excerpts)
1986
A music documentary made by Andrzej Kostenko for the BBC. The film, recorded at the 1986 Jarocin festival, features live footage and music videos (by, among other things, Proces, Tilt, Kosmetyki Mrs Pinky, Siekiera, Moskwa) as well as interviews with musicians and managers. One of the scenes to remember is where the fans in the audience use amateur tape recorders to record the music that is ignored by the official record industry.
OTHER FILMS
Many other films are within our scope of interest. Among the most important of those is Piotr Lazarkiewicz's The Wave, a great classic documentary (available on DVD) on the 1985 Jarocin festival. Besides live footage, it shows the broader context - the everyday life of the town of Jarocin and the tent town, interviews with government officials and musicians.
Pawel Karpinski's feature It's Only Rock (1983) includes a scene from a fictional rock festival in Gradow, featuring, among other things, live shows by Rejestracja Przedpoborowych and Dezerter (the scene features actors Marek Bargielowski as chairman, and Zbigniew Buczkowski as member of the jury). The same year Pawel Karpinski made a documentary called Smierc Kliniczna (Clinical Death) about a Gliwice-based band of the same name. The film starts with a scene of a civic education class that is attended by Darek Dusza, the band's then 17-year-old leader. The Polish Newsreel also noticed the phenomenon of the Jarocin festival, showing a sensational report called In the Rhythm of Rock, featuring, among other things, snippets from a live gig by the punk band Sedes, accompanied, naturally, by an 'appropriate' commentary.
Besides those works, we are also interested in music videos (e.g. Siekiera's brilliant 1985 clip for its track Cobbler Kills Cobbler) as well as amateur video footage from punk concerts (e.g. a 1987 TZN Xenna gig at the Remont).
Curators: Lukasz Ronduda and Michal Wolinski
Thanks to: Robert Jarosz