The aim of Lynx, a film by Stanislaw Rozewicz, is to show the reality of evil, and overcome the boundary between its mythical representation and its occurrence in history. The audience is confronted with two extreme forms of evil that originate on the opposing poles of human free will. The first of these refers to the biblical myth of Adam and the problem of individuals yielding to evil. The second one, associated with the experience of Shoah, confirms the existence of evil in the human being, but above all in people, especially in the social, and systemic dimensions. The visual narrative in the film is a confrontation of both of these faces of the reality of evil, which confirms their interdependence and mutual entanglement, that cannot be fully explained and rationalised. Because of that the thesis about the banality of evil seems to be unacceptable.
Maron presents a little known film by Stanislaw Rozewicz – The Romantics (1970) – an intimate historical and psychological drama, which takes place during the late Spring of the Nations period (winter of 1849, after the fall of the Poznan uprising), in an aristocratic manor in Greater Poland region (Wielkopolska), where two young brothers are hiding – the conspirators Wladyslaw and Henryk. Through their history Rozewicz shows how the romantic notions and ideas (messianism, national philosophy, poetry, the ideal of romantic love and romantic act) penetrated into the consciousness of people and determined their existence, placing it between the dreams of the free life and harsh political reality. The director sketches the portraits of the protagonists in a realistic manner as well as the social and psychological conflicts between them. Despite this “realistic” trend in Rozewicz’s film, as in the works of the romantics, the visible world relates primarily to the “invisible” world of existential and spiritual values. The Romantics is a work that accurately reflects ideals and problematic of romanticism, and also illustrates typical Polish combination of reality and phantasm.
The author analyses the ways Holocaust was presented in Polish films that were made during the existence of the Polish Film School. Using the examples of films, the majority of which remains in the shadow of the great „canon” of the Polish school, Haltof attempts to place the image of Holocaust presented in them within the artistic, historical and political context. The author analyses films such as Andrzej Wajda’s Samson, and Generation, Ewa and Czeslaw Petelski’s Barker, Stanislaw Rozewicz’s Birth Certificate, Jerzy Zarzycki’s White Bear, and Andrzej Munk’s The Passenger, as well as two short films: Andrzej Brzozowski’s By the Railway Track, and Janusz Morgenstern’s Ambulance. By analyzing them, the author writes about how ways of connecting and disconnecting the Polish and Jewish fate, the tragedy of children that were victims of the Holocaust, about the attitudes of Poles towards Jews seeking help, and of the film attempts to find the psychological dimension of the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors.
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