Krzysztof Zanussi, who was in the south for a film workshop, speaks about his previous visits to Kerala
Legendary Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi
Like a halo around the head, photographs 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. He usually visits the film festival where his films are being screened. There was a screening last year too — Foreign Body — but he wasn’t able to make it. 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 and says he is a little bit nervous about meeting 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 sees 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 access to his 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, but I run the 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. Because the trash writers are winning.”
He can’t imagine being born at a later time himself. “I remember World War 2, post war time and other dramatic events. It is a happy life now, far more relaxed.” There was a bit of disturbance on 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 that have been proved universally wrong and dangerous.” The exchange of words was apparently about the idea of communism. “The Communist regime in Russia killed more people than Hitler did.”
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 morefrom parts of his life but that didn’t take off. His next — titled Ether — will circle on the use of 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.”
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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