Interrogation [Poland 1982]

Przesłuchanie
Director: R. Bugajski
Cinematographer: J. Petrycki

Like The Ear, Interrogation is a film about the Stalin era (Bierut in Poland) that was not released until 1989, probably because it too contained some measure of allegory about the contemporary situation in Poland. Here is the Inquisition spoken of in Blind Chance: an irrational machine for extracting useless confessions in the name of a greater good that is harmed rather than helped by the process.

This is a film about psychological torture, and about confinement, but most of all about arbitrariness. Here the arbitrariness takes on its worst form: internal irrationality driven by paranoia and rationalised by whatever means necessary by the perpetrators. At least the kind of arbitrariness one faces when waiting for housing because of a shortage as in Family Nest, while maddening, seems to come from somewhere that has a grounding in reality. But being the victim of irrational paranoia and being told that inventing confessions constitutes self-sacrifice for the greater good must have been unbearable.

The protagonist in this film is developed very strongly. She transforms completely during the course of the movie and the early parts of the film set this up well. The fact that the camera work is carried out mainly as very close shots (undoubtedly to maintain the cagey feeling of a prison) also works to focus the film squarely on the main character, so that we feel we are experiencing her own personal story, not the stories of those around her.

But the most interesting characters in this film are the Communists. One is a cell mate of the protagonist who knows that she has been wrongly imprisoned but feels she is serving the revolution by confessing and serving her sentence. Another is one of the interrogators, who we learn was a prisoner at Auschwitz, and is eventually torn with guilt over what he is doing, though he, like the cell mate, rationalises it as best he can. Caught up in a tide of events which is not what they expected and is in some ways contradictory to their own ideals, these characters cling to their beliefs rather than face the impossibility of challenging their circumstances.

The cinematography is competent, and the fact that we are so often focused on faces, characters, etc, means that we get the feeling that the people around the protagonist are the walls of the prison, rather than the walls themselves. This effect makes the film into an interrogation movie rather than a prison movie; it also emphasises that this is something that one set of human beings is doing to another (and to themselves).

Interestingly, the movie was made during martial law in Poland in 1982. Of course it could not be released at that time and several critics who saw it at the time apparently expressed disgust at it, calling it anti-socialist. This is an interesting fact, for it seems that for all the openness about what happened during the Stalin/Bierut era, people still had not quite coped with it enough to feel comfortable with this depiction. Clearly parts of the movie can be seen as allegorical--not the specifics of the terror but the imprisonment, the way that the other prisoners are the first to jump on the main character and try to silence her so the guards do not, etc. However most of it is really about the past, so the reaction in 1982 is interesting. Undoubtedly enough scars were created in the early 1950s that they could not just be forgotten in 30 years.

This is an important movie both because it is a strong and disturbing depiction of the witch hunts carried out during the Stalin period, and the psychology of those involved (mostly well-intentioned people), and because it tells us something about what Polish people were thinking and feeling in 1982. This was not the 1970s, when to criticise the system was to criticise the bureaucracy, economic mismanagement, etc, as in The Scar. This was 1982, martial law, and a time of revolt, so presumably all the old wounds were being reopened. It is interesting to think that no matter what happened during de-Stalinisation, that period still haunted the Polish political scene in 1982.