A cinematic treat
Pawel Pawlikowski confesses he "cringed throughout" the back-to-back screening of five of his films at Magdalen's Grove Auditorium on Saturday, which was hosted by the John Ruskin School of Fine Art.
Perhaps it's an understandable reaction, given the director himself had not seen some of the works shown for over ten years. The day's programme, comprising of three documentaries followed by two more recent feature films, spanned 15 years of his directorial career, which began with work for the BBC before a move into independent cinema.
"I was never properly trained in either documentary or feature film-making," explained Pawlikowski, a self-professed amateur and former Oxford graduate student who never went to film school. Despite this he has always insisted on pursuing ideas which interest him, and is now able to command a budget of over a million pounds per film.
Contrary to what his success might suggest, Pawlikowski comes across as incredibly modest - an amusing contrast to the fawning panel of critics and academics with whom he was discussing his works. Though he moved to Britain in the 1970s, he admits that he still finds the country "exotic" and his accent bears traces of his Polish childhood.
His first-hand knowledge of the interaction, and frequent incomprehension between two cultures, have made Pawlikowski into an astute observer of lives at the extreme margins of society. Saturday's films presented a bewildering arc of human experience, from alcoholics in Moscow to teenage delinquents in Halifax. What come across most strongly from these films are the similarities which unite such apparently disparate scenes - Pawlikowski himself stated that the motif of the journey has always been important in his work; another might be that of the vodka bottle, which after all offers the same escape in Moscow as in Margate, the setting for his most recent film, Last Resort.
The creative freedom he was afforded resulted in documentaries which are sometimes so unconventional as to blur the borders between fact and fiction. In Dostoevsky's Travels we are introduced to Dmitri, great-grandson of the renowned 19th century author and Leningrad tram driver, as he blunders across Europe hoping to profit from his famous name in order to "make a bit of cash and buy a western car". He is feted at literary gatherings where self-appointed experts confidently declare: "most people are familiar with Dostoevsky through the film Anna Karenina" before a surreal encounter with Count Tolstoy at a London ball. Moscow to Pietushki follows Pawlikowski's attempts to track down Benedict Yerofeyev, the terminally ill, alcoholic author of a seminal underground Soviet novel. It is similarly disorientating. The depressingly relentless alcoholism could make you swear off drinking, but, in the words of Yerofey: "we are all in our own way drunk." For a hung-over audience at 10am on a Saturday, unfamiliar with Pawlikowski's work, this was an abrupt and uncanny introduction.
The afternoon began with Twockers, an hour long drama focusing on the empty lives of teenagers in desolate estates on the outskirts of a Northern city. The parallels between Pawlikowski's Russia and this "dead place" are unavoidable, down to the crumbling tower blocks. He reveals that the city reminded him of Sarajevo, where he made a documentary in the early 1990s about the Bosnian conflict. Filming was a lengthy process which involved a six-month search for the ideal actor to portray Trevor, the 17-year old who provides the "spark of romantic yearning" which Pawlikowski wanted to explore.
The film's surreal music creates an eerie atmosphere which is complemented by shots depicting processions of Adidas-clad children trailing shopping trolleys filled with debris across dismal scrubland. In Last Resort, his most successful film, we are again confronted with aspects of Britain usually ignored. "I'm interested in the forgotten places, the dumping grounds," says Pawlikowski, "the places we have taken out of our mental picture. I want people to see images of lives that will catch them off balance."
Pawlikowski concentrates on the experiences of Tanya, a self-confessed bogus asylum-seeker who ends up trapped in a thinly-disguised Margate, here labelled as Stonehaven, with her young son.
The film's bleak depiction of Margate created controversy, with local councillors furious at the director. Tanya's options seem to be limited to a choice between making her £20 meal vouchers last all week or taking up a career in cyber porn. However, Pawlikowski insists that his intention was neither to condemn the town nor just to expose the plight of asylum-seekers, and was irritated by British critics' haste to "take the film at face value as a political, sociological document," when what most interested him was the central relationship between mother and son. He comments: "in Anglo-Saxon cinema, foreigners and outsiders are always reduced to very basic ciphers."
His career has been devoting to humanising these characters and portraying them "without reducing them to types."
Approaching the day with no idea of what to expect was an odd experience, and the open-ended films refused to satisfy an audience with any definitive interpretation. Saturday's event was successful in attracting both devotees of Pawlikowski's work and those like ourselves who were taken on an impromptu tour of his imagination. Although it is quite a demanding task to absorb 15 years of film making in one day, it was encouraging to see such a gifted director participating so willingly in an Oxford event.
19th Feb 2004