Like a halo around the head, photos of late actors, legends of south Indian cinema — from Sivaji Ganesan to Thilakan — hang on a brown wall behind him. Krzysztof Zanussi sits on a chair, looking very comfortable on what could be his third or fourth visit to Kerala, he is not sure of the exact number. It’s usually for the film festival he comes, when his films are screened.
There was one last year too — Foreign Body — but he didn’t come. He’s here now, at the Revathy Kalamandir Film Academy in Thiruvananthapuram, for a workshop.
The Polish filmmaker, who has become a kind of legend for movie lovers all over the world, sits in that room with brown walls and says he is a little bit nervous about going to the students and telling them not only his tales of success, but also of what he did wrong.
“It is beneficial for them to know that every filmmaker commits mistakes,” he says. He hopes to make them do an exercise and analyse some of his films.
In 2009, he did one such analysis but through another film. Revisited revisits three of his heroes from his older films — Family Life (1971), Camouflage (1977) and The Constant Factor (1980).
“I am one of the very few people in the film world who has an access to my old films. I spoke to my Hollywood colleagues and they said none of them would ever be able to do it. Films are owned by studios and I am running this studio that has shot all my films.”
He says that in cinema you can document a passage of time, with the power of vision. “When you write, I don’t know if you wrote it now or 50 years later, it looks the same. But when you see me, you know that I am speaking now as a 76-year-old man. People have been asking me, what would my protagonists do, 40 years later? And I thought okay, I would answer your questions.”
Forty years have also brought a lot of change to the ways of filmmaking. But none of it matters, Zanussi says. Only the social changes do.
“Art may be high and low. Low level is selling better. Rabindranath Tagore, if he were alive today, would not be a very popular writer. The trash writers would have won.”
He can’t imagine being born at a later time. “I remember World War II, post-War time and other dramatic events. It is a happy life now, far more relaxed.”
There was a bit of disturbance in one of his Kerala visits too. This was in 1998 when he had a sort of exchange with the late Communist leader P. Govinda Pillai.
“I remember it because it was a big shock for me that people promote ideas which have been proved universally to be wrong and dangerous.”
The exchange of words has been apparently about the idea of communism. “The Communist regime in Russia killed more people than Hitler did.”
Zanussi agrees that there was some achievement in local politics. “But it is not comparable. In Kerala, you had communism by power and you had your Indian constitution that prevented dictatorship while we had communist dictatorship and the constitution was submitted to it.”
Apart from politics, he has also observed keenly and liked very much the Christian heritage in Kerala. “Here (Thiruvananthapuram) and the Syrian orthodox in Kochi. Even the Jewish tradition...”
He is also impressed by the literacy rates here and the ‘great activity in arts’. Films, though he has seen, he is not sure at the festivals which part of India it comes from. But India itself is not unfamiliar to him. His heroes would often come to the Himalayas.
He has no trouble making parts of his life into movies, the 1996 film At Full Gallop was an autobiographical account. There were to be two more, from two more parts of his life but that didn’t take off. His next —Ether — will circle on the use anaesthetic for operations.
“Many were dying, because there was no way to know if you were putting enough, it was dangerous. It was also a symbol of possession. You can possess another person. It is Faust. It is the intriguing idea that a human being may sell his own soul. People don’t sell their work, they sell their soul.”
