Wes Anderson's Asteroid City

A film I just had to see: about  flying saucers; set in mid-1950s America, and Wes Anderson's visually stunning aesthetic - so close to my own tastes. My experience of Asteroid City was very similar to that of watching Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel - a delightful confection, very funny - but ultimately, it could have been deeper in meaning. The Coen brothers would have done a better job. 

Nevertheless, I found myself thoroughly entertained, laughing out loud many times (good that the cinema was nearly empty). I loved the comic touches, the homages to the era, the cultural references and the  overall klimat. And a soundtrack that contains Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Slim Whitman and other C&W acts from the early- and mid-1950s. And that train at the beginning...

The UFO conspiracy/cover-up theme is right on time - just as whistleblowers are about to be grilled by the House Oversight Committee in real life, the presidentially imposed quarantine on the Asteroid City mirrors the paranoia around the subject. The Military-Industrial Complex, supported by private  foundations, run the show. Who will own the intellectual property of alien-derived tech - free enterprise or the government?

I have a habit of watching a film's credits to the end; there were are large number of Spanish surnames involved in making the set and props (such as the railway - see below) - I naturally assumed that the film was shot in Mexico - but no - it was shot in Spain in a specially made set near the town of Chinchón, some 30 miles south-east of Madrid.

This is, I feel, a film made by a savant about savants for savants - quotable quotes aplenty, details to spot and laugh at (vending machines that served Martini cocktails and sold title deeds to tiny parcels of arid desert land), obsessively symmetrical shots. A sure-fire cult film that will be loved for many years to come by a small die-hard group of devotees, able to single out arcane references to this or that (alien symbols or cattle-ranch brands?). And indifference from the mainstream.

Below: example. Augie Steenbeck*, war photographer, in Asteroid City with his son, nicknamed 'Brainiac'. Note the camera. A Müller-Schmid Swiss Mountain Camera. Well, no. It's a prewar German Contax III or its postwar Soviet copy, the Kiev 4A. My guess is it's the latter, Contax cameras were used by American war photographers, Kievs weren't, so Wes Anderson had the front plate mocked up. Nice touch.

If you enjoy Wes Anderson's movies, you'll know what to expect; it's certainly one I'd want to see again. And then dive into a subReddit (r/AsteroidCity) with hundreds of nerds seeking Significance. You'll find more in The Big Lebowski or A Serious Man. Don't let that put you off - Asteroid City is still a highly likeable movie.

And if you like trains, have a look at this... (and then scroll down this post from 2017.)

* Steenbeck - manufacturer of flatbed film editing machines, used to edit 16 mm and 35 mm optical sound and magnetic sound film.

This time last year: 
Quarter of a century in Poland

This time four years ago:
22 years on the 22nd

This time four year:
A tale of two orchards

This time six years ago:
My 20 years in Poland

This time seven years ago:
PiS, Brexit, Trump and cognitive bias

This time ten years ago:
Portmeirion, revisited, again
[My last summer holiday - not had one since!]

This time 11 years ago:
Beach day, Llyn Peninsula

This time 12 years ago:
Down with cars in city centres!

This time 13 years ago:
8am and 26C already

Letters to the Postman

A film adaptation by Felix Dembinski of Robert Aickman's Letters to the Postman; set in a timeless rural England, atmospheric, emotionally absorbing and conveying the slightest mysterious hint of the supernatural. Unhurried, observed, observant, observational - steeped in a realistic nostalgia for a time less technologically connected than our own, when the Post Office was what connected people, letters and parcels, and the Royal Mail's formidable infrastructure to ensure delivery of missives into the remotest of communities.

The film deals with themes of erosion and decay, nature moving inexorably to wipe clean traces left by mankind's works. The wind, the tides, the rains - against which are played out the microcosmic dramas of the human heart, the hopes and longings that defy a hard reality. [Click below to watch on YouTube.]

    

A crucial element is the monument to 'the last man who knew everything', polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829), who not only deciphered the Rosetta Stone, but whose double-slit experiment prompted the question of whether light was a wave or a particle, and opened the door to quantum mechanics. "When a subject occupies your mind long enough, it manifests itself in the most unlikely places".  Is light a wave or a particle? 

A quiet, engaging film that deserves a wide audience (and repeated viewings - each time you delve into it, new layers of meaning emerge).

 

This time last year:
Progress at Warsaw West station
[One year on, it's still a bloody mess!]

This time four years ago:
From West London to South Warsaw

This time seven years ago:
Anger and hate have no place in political discourse
[Blimey! How times have changed. Bonk the vatniks!]

This time nine years ago:
Is Conservatism rural or urban in nature?

This time ten years ago:
Poland's roads get slightly less deadly

This time 11 years ago:
It's expensive being rich in Warsaw 

This time 13 years:
Winter commuting in colour and black & white

This time 14 years ago:
Zamienie in winter

This time 15 years ago:
Really cold (-12C at night)

[This evening as I write it's +6C]

Don't Look Up - a significant film for our time

When a film receives as many positive reviews and word-of-mouth mentions as Don't Look Up, I just have to watch it. An satirical allegory, ostensibly about a comet hurtling towards Earth, but clearly about climate change. And Covid-19. And Brexit. And Putin, Xi - any foreign threat to the West. That experts are warning us about, but to whom we pay no heed.

The film portrays the shallowness of contemporary society; glued to the social media apps on our smartphones, digesting the most moronic of news shows - there are strong parallels with the dystopian 2006 sci-fi movie, Idiocracy.  As with Idiocracy, a key role is played by a populist US president, relating to the pig-shit-thick masses. The masses are to be kept pliant so the money elite can continue to enrich itself, and use the wealth to buy more and more power. The educated middle classes just get in the way. 

They get in the way with their knowledge. About astrophysics, epidemiology, trade deals or geopolitics. 

They get in the way of venal politicians (a lovely role scripted for the president's son, mirroring that of the Trump children) and of billionaire plutocrats. The politicians pour scorn on the experts' knowledge, with a dumbed-down media (content guided by audience-interaction algorithms) finding it easy to mock anyone appearing too intelligent in front of the cameras.

Don't Look Up deserves to be watched by everyone. It's message is clear - as a species, we've dumbed down too much for our own evolutionary good. We have become too stupid, too greedy, too complacent, to see existential risks, and casually we ignore them - by driving our SUVs to the office, wasting energy and natural resources, ignoring appeals to get vaccinated and wear a mask - and voting for ridiculously dangerous politicians.

Not the best of scripts (easy to poke holes in the narrative structure and character/plot devices), nevertheless it does constitute a robust criticism of the way we live today. And it's not just preaching to the converted; if the message does percolate upwards and downwards through society's structures, it will have done a power of good.

The film will quickly become memetic - I can already see tweets featuring photos of the newsdesk at the Daily Rip (the parody TV show) - and will pervade popular culture for decades. Or longer. 

"We're 99.78% certain."
"Let's call it 70% and move on."

Quotable quotes cement a movie in popular culture. Just how much of Blues Brothers can you quote?

Stand back - Don't Look Up belongs to the Ages!

This time two years ago:
The Inequality Paradox - pt. 1

This time four years ago:
Warsaw's Christmas lights, 2017-18

This time 12 years:
Winter commuting in colour and black & white

This time 13 years ago:
Zamienie in winter

This time 14 years ago:
Really cold (-12C at night)
[last night's low: +5C]

The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson: Lent 2021, Day 34

In January 2014, 66-year-old Wilko Johnson, former guitarist with legendary pub-rock band Dr Feelgood, is told by a doctor that he has pancreatic cancer and 10 months to live. Or 12 with chemotherapy. He decides to forego treatment and face his last months in the presence of a film camera. The result is director Julien Temple's The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (2015).

Temple's directorial debut was the Sex Pistols' The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle (1980); in 2009 he directed a documentary about Dr Feelgood, Oil City Confidential*.  On hearing of Wilko's diagnosis and imminent demise, Temple set out to document the final months of the guitarist's life.

The resulting film is a work of wonder, of joy, of profound philosophical importance. Faced with the prospect of death, Wilko Johnson resigns himself to eternal oblivion. Being an atheist, he dismisses hope in any conscious life after bodily death. This sharpens his senses, his experience of the here and now; he begins to notice the everyday, the commonplace, and find beauty in it. This is purest existentialism.

There is no sadness, no self-pity; Wilko radiates a sense of a man who has lived a life that fulfilled his human potential. It is clear that he is an intelligent and mindful human being, observant, sensitive to the Universe (literally - he is an amateur astronomer), 

I can't help thinking that Wilko is an old soul - what else would draw a young man from a working-class home in Canvey Island  to make it through to university to study ancient Icelandic? It is clear to me at least that this extremely well-read man has a passion for times past that suggests some kind of a spiritual, metaphysical, supernatural connection with History, across History.

In a particularly moving part of the film, Wilko recounts the death from cancer, ten years earlier, of his childhood sweetheart and wife of 40 years, Irene. Painful memories that throw into relief the notions of human loneliness, togetherness and solitude.

The film intersected with music, film and literature that feature in my canon. Blind Willie Johnson's Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium, Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Interstellar Overdrive by Pink Floyd, William Wordsworth's The Daffodils and Hamlet's 'to sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub' [both quoted have been several times on this blog], clips from Tarkovsky's Stalker and Eduard Artemyev's haunting soundtrack to that film. References like this are close to home, they feel to me like a justification that I've been searching in the right places. And of course, Bergman's Seventh Seal, overarching the whole film, with Wilko as the mediaeval knight playing chess against Death - also played by himself.

Much of the film is shot in Canvey Island, a place that drew me there many times as a young man to photograph it in black and white. The unique atmosphere of the refinery island, lying below sea level, vulnerable to flooding yet a pleasure destination for the East End, is beautifully captured.

It's full-length feature, but it is worth every minute of your time watching something as deeply moving as this. If your time is short, please spend just one minute and 12 seconds of your life watching from 04:00 to 05:12. It encapsulates the Glory of Being Alive. Watch it, do. And as I watched it, I thought that it was no coincidence that serendipity brought this film to my notice during this Lent.

I won't tell you the film's ending. But that too ticks all my boxes.

[Postscript: Wilko Johnson died in November 2022]

* Oil City Confidential to be filed alongside So You Wanna Be A Rock'n'Roll Star?, Mark Kimmel's documentary about another Canvey Island pub-rock bank, the Kursaal Flyers).

This time last year:

Intimations of Immortality

[PAFF! And up comes Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and William Wordsworth's Daffodils and Hamlet's To sleep/to die again! In a post exactly year ago today! This is an utterly mind-blowing coincidence!]

This time two years ago:
Peace of Mind

This time six years ago:
The Name of God and the Consciousness of Everything

This time eight years ago:
The Church and Democracy

Three Coen brothers movies for lockdown

Moni and I watched A Serious Man (2009) the other weekend, ten years after first seeing it. The film complements our Covid-19 perfectly - it is about uncertainty and the place of God - and fate - in determining the outcome of our lives. The plot revolves around the tribulations of a 1960s Jewish lecturer, Larry Gopnik, trying to make sense of why his life is collapsing around him. Larry teaches physics at a Midwestern university; he is explaining quantum theory with the aid of Schrodinger's cat (which features regularly on this blog). "Is the cat dead or alive?" asks Larry of his physics class.

Will you catch Covid-19 or not? Have you already had it? Do you have the antibodies? Can you catch it a second time? Is that maskless, coughing person walking towards you along this narrow corridor infected? Will Covid-19 linger on, untreatable, in society for years or decades? Will it mutate into something nastier? Will there be a second and subsequent waves? Will there ever be an effective vaccine? Will you end up dying of it on a ventilator as some unspecified point in the future? 

Uncertainty, Larry. "The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can't ever really know... what's going on."

Larry asks the question "what's going on?" seven times in the film before he finally makes that above quote - in a dream. But then it is almost immediately negated by his wife's dead lover forcibly  explaining to Larry what's really going on - in the same dream.

Does Larry's doctor have news that Larry has terminal cancer? Will Larry's son Danny be killed by an approaching tornado? As the film ends, we are left with uncertainty. As the father of a South Korean student of Larry's says to him, "Please. Accept the mystery." This might make the film frustrating at a first viewing, but many subsequent re-watchings yield more and more substance as one begins to unravel the universal mysteries that underline our lives, that, like Larry's teeter on the edge of chaos.

The film is a masterpiece - one of my favourite films of all time ever, always a joy to return to, always something new to discover, which is one of the great things about most Coen brothers' movies - their multi-layeredness. 

My second Coen brothers' lockdown movie tip is O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000). Set in the Great Depression, it centres on three chain-gang fugitives led by a silver-tongued Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney). Far more light-hearted than A Serious Man, the Depression plays a central role in the film - like Covid-19, it is something that has descended upon society 'from above', something perplexing, beyond anyone's control. If the recurring line in A Serious Man is "what's going on?", in O Brother, Where Art Thou, it's "everybody's looking for answers". Are they to be found in the Bible? "The Truth! Every blessed word of it, from Genesee on down to Revelations! That's right, the word of God, which let me add there is damn good money in during these days of woe and want!" Are the answers to be found in religion, in politics, in music?

O Brother has a great musical soundtrack, one that's difficult not to like. And the wise-cracking dialogue has plenty of memorable quotes for everyday usage. Our favourite: "it's a fool looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart."

Finally - entirely unrelated to Covid-19, indeed an antidote to the gloom around us right now - The Big Lebowski (1998). An odd-couple buddy movie in the mould of Withnail and I and appealing much to the same sense of humour and quote-mongers. A Chandleresque detective mystery based on mistaken identity, this cult film gave rise to the religion of Dudism, about which I wrote a couple of months ago. Incidentally, I got an apologetic email from a Michael Dembinski the other day - a US serviceman for whom I have been receiving tons of official emails over the years whenever he gets posted to another overseas location. The entire machinery of the US Navy and its sundry contractors - logistics, realtors, client-satisfaction surveys - kicks in, and all of my protests about spamming fell on the deaf ears of bureaucracy - until now. 

"Okay sir, you're a Lebowski, I'm a Lebowski, that's terrific, but I'm very busy, as I can imagine you are. What can I do for you sir?"

Life mirrors art.

This time last year:

On cue - the Ice Saints

[Same this year: Monday afternoon, 25C, Tuesday morning 2C.]

This time five years ago:
Then and now: Trafalgar Square (recreating my father's photos)

This time seven years ago:
Reflection upon the City Car

This time nine years ago:
Biblical sky

This time ten years ago:
Travel broadens the spirit

This time 11 years ago:
Welcome the Ice Saints

This time 13 years ago:
On the farm next door

Nightmare echoes of the Holodomor

Agnieszka Holland's film Mr Jones (Polish title Obywatel Jones) is not perfect but it does stand out as an important film for our time. It tells the story of British journalist Gareth Jones, one of the first Westerners to report the scale of the famine set in train by Stalin in 1932-33 in Ukraine.

It is a film that resonates today as journalists and politicians conveniently side-step the truth for the sake of expedience - blinded to it by greed, ideology, laziness or just unwillingness to rock the boat. Parallels to today's politics - though far less murderous - are not lost on the audience.

Trying to tell a story as wide-sweeping and horrific as the Holodomor in a movie two hours and 21 minutes long is a demanding task. It depends on being able to break it down into bite-sized scenes that strung together over the film's length show a continuous narrative unfolding.

One criticism is that the actors portraying the starving Ukrainian peasants did not look starving enough; the emaciation that one sees in the few photos to have made it out of that hell is not evident in the film. But overall, the film's klimat or atmosphere is chillingly nightmarish. The brutal realities of Stalin's USSR, overseen by an army of thugs, informers and murderers, a landscape bereft of sunlight, Moscow a city of architectural monumentalism, dwarfing Soviet citizens. The technology of the time, put to use to invigilate and coerce a nation, is nicely shown too.

Mr Jones draws on history but uses some narrative ploys that undermine authenticity. The film suggests that David Lloyd George was the British prime minister in 1933. "By the 1930s Lloyd George was on the margins of British politics" (Wikipedia). The prime minister at the time was Ramsay McDonald. Throughout the film we see George Orwell writing Animal Farm, an allegory on Soviet communism; a book that was written ten years later (1943-44) and not published until 1945, ten years after Jones's death. It is unlikely that Orwell ever met Jones.

However, Walter Duranty, the British-American journalist, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times is portrayed with greater historical accuracy, being the villain of the piece. Duranty preferred to lie on Stalin's behalf to the Western world, denying the man-made famine in Ukraine. It was an event on a scale of inhumanity and barbarism on a par with the Holocaust.

Music - Antoni Łazarkiewicz - that recurring 12-note piano motif sounds very much like the motif in Carter Burwell's soundtrack for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (2009). But the Western jazz of the day, in its full decadence, clashes with haunting Ukrainian folk songs about the hunger and its effect on the people.

The film is truly international in scale, set in London, Moscow, Ukraine and Wales; the dialogue in four languages. Man's inhumanity to man and the contrast between the powerful and the poor is present in both the United Kingdom and in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - but the latter is in an utterly different world of brutal inhumanity. Agnieszka Holland makes the point that during the Great Depression, many Western idealists, seeing the human suffering around them, looked to Stalin and the USSR as the future - how wrong they were.

Having watched the film in Kinoteka (within the Stalinist Palace of Culture), I stepped out into the colossal marbled hall outside the screening room, amid its massive columns and high ceilings and felt as if I were back in the movie; the purpose of Socialist-Realist architecture was to oppress through scale.

Three nights in a row I had nightmares which touched on this film. I commend it thoroughly, despite some shortcomings.

This time last year:
The Earth is flat

This time two years ago:
50th Anniversary of the Fiat 125p

This time three years ago:
Fidel Castro's death divides the world

This time four years ago:
London to Edinburgh by night bus

This time six year ago:
The Regent's Canal, London

This time eight years ago:
An end to the entitlement way of thinking

This time nine year:
West Ealing - drab and sad end of town

This time ten years ago:
To Poznań by train

This time 12 years ago:
Late autumn drive-time 

Pawlikowski's Cold War - a short review

Talented musician falls for aspiring artiste - the relationship is stormy, on-off over the years; she makes it big, he makes it big, they split up, get back together, will it last this time?

Is this La La Land? Are we in New York New York?

Director Paweł Pawlikowski retells an old story Polish-style, black and white, set in the darkest days of communism. The screenplay that Pawlikowski co-wrote with Janusz Głowacki (refer here and here) draws deeply on the experiences of exile of both men, of leaving communist Poland for the artistic world of the free West. Best known for his Oscar-winning film Ida (2013), the bulk of Pawlikowski's work was created in the UK. (I was surprised to learn that From Moscow to Pietushki with Benny Yerofeyev, made in 1990 shortly before Yerofeyev died, had been directed by Pawlikowski - Paul Pawlikowski as was).

For me, the prism of the fictional state song and dance ensemble Mazurek portrayed in the film, based on the real-life Mazowsze, has a strong family connection. Below: not a still from Cold War, but a photo taken by my father...

My father's brother, Zdzisław Dembiński, was a member of Mazowsze in those post-war years, the first violinist in the orchestra. The early scenes in Cold War, showing how the ensemble was recruited (and why) and how they were trained, and their overseas trips, were based on fact. As such, my uncle toured the world with the ensemble - as the film showed, at first only to fraternal states in the 'camp of peace' (ie the Soviet bloc), later, after the thaw that followed Stalin's death, to other countries around the world, extending People's Poland's soft power through folk music and dance across the capitalist West.

It was in 1958, when Mazowsze played at the Brussels Expo, that my father met his brother Zdzich for the first time since the Warsaw Uprising. My father (left) with Zdzich (holding violin case), the tour bus behind them.

Zdzich was arrested by the Gestapo shortly before the Uprising began, and sent to Auschwitz. The Germans noted that he was a violin player - his lucky break - and as such he was transferred to a less-notorious camp that had a prisoners' orchestra. And so he survived the war.

Later, in the 1960s, Mazowsze played London, at the Royal Festival Hall - which we went to see when I was a boy. We had all the Mazowsze records (The Polish Song and Dance Ensemble Vols. 1-4, Wujek Zdzich is seen on the cover of Vol. 2); my parents would play the records a lot, so I ended up knowing all the songs, several of which are used in the film's soundtrack. The familiarity helps.

This 1951 documentary about Mazowsze is worth watching on a number of levels; not least to see how communist propaganda made its way into every aspect of life and art. The Polish countryside, collectivised, its past idealised, its folklore harnessed to the purposes of the Socialist Fatherland.



Cold War is about the madness of love - how it drives people to commit irrational and desperate acts. It also shows the brutally callous nature of the communist system, how it exploited people's weaknesses and subsumed the individual to ideological imperatives.

Cold War won Pawlikowski a Best Director award at this year's Cannes film festival. Will it win an Oscar, as Ida did? Personally, I doubt it - the film is indeed very good, but for me I was not haunted by it as a whole although the premise is strong and a great many shots will stay with me. In particular the scene where rock'n'roll explodes into the global consciousness. Above all the atmosphere, the klimat of time and place, were brilliantly portrayed (somehow easier to achieve in black-and-white than in colour).

This time three years ago:
"Extreme weather events are now a feature of the British climate"

This time five years ago:
Cheaper public transport for Varsovians

This time six years ago:
Swans on ice

This time seven years ago:
Cars 

This time eight years year:
What's the English for kombinować?

This time nine years ago:
The demographics of jazz

This time 11 years ago:
A day in Poznań

DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING

Britain had Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979). Ireland had Father Ted (1993-98). Father Ted had The Passion of St Tibulus (1995) And now, in 2018 Poland has Kler, a film destined to have a similar long-term effect on how the established church is perceived in the country.

In the first week since it was released, Wojciech Smarzowski's film Kler has broken box-office records in Poland, with 1.7 million people going to see it, beating the previous record (another Smarzowski film, Wołyń).

I went to see Kler so as I could have my own opinion on a controversial and divisive subject. Given how the cinemas were selling out of tickets, I went to the Multikino in Złote Tarasy during my lunchtime and saw an amazing sight. The guy at the desk asked me about choice of seats, showing me a computer screen, almost all sold out except the front four rows and a few odd seats on the sides. As I stared at the screen, seats kept getting bought online with the speed of a computer game. Incredible.

The Friday evening audience was young - mainly corporate types at the end of the working week. From beginning to end the room was almost silent, especially as the audience filed out at the end. Colleagues at work who also saw the film earlier reported a goodly smattering of the fifty-plus demographic.

Across Warsaw's cinemas, Kler will be playing this Sunday a total of 176 times. Eight cinemas feel the need to start screening the film as early as 10am. Had Kler failed to resonate with the general public, it would have not been the box-office success it is. Clearly the film is meeting some form of social demand. On the British Isles, the established churches have been attacked with comedy. Gentle comedy, in the case of Father Ted. Laughter, not anger. Is Kler an angry film?

I think not. It carries a weight of sorrows; individual redemption and excruciatingly painful memory; it shows the danger of the Church hierarchy engaging in politics - and business, it shows the entrenched position of the Church in rural Poland. Is the portrait realistic? I feel that everything shown in the film has its basis in real life, but the film concentrates too many disparate strands (alcoholism, paedophilia, corruption, luxury, hypocrisy, Church-state relations), each one meriting a separate film. But then the success of Kler lies in the fact that many viewers recognise this composite portrait as being realistic.

As for the film itself; I don't believe that Polish cinema has as yet mastered the art of joined-up storytelling. There are too many threads that are difficult to follow; too many questioned unanswered, requiring a discussion afterwards (not necessarily a bad thing). As an art-form, the movies have their own meta-grammar, consisting of shots and edits, which decent story-boarding (done from start to finish before the first frame has even been shot) generally solves.

The offer for adolescents in Poland's small rural town often boils down to under-aged drinking and mischief or more wholesome activities laid on by the parish. Church-going in big cities is far lower than in the countryside; it is a useful exercise to compare the experience of Ireland to the prospects for the Church in Poland. Whereas 91% of Irish Catholics went to mass once a week in 1973, by 2011 the percentage of weekly church-goers had fallen to 30% (18% in Dublin).

Is the same pace of decline inevitable in Poland as it urbanises and its economy develops?

If the reaction caused by this film prompts the Polish Catholic church's hierarchy to open up about sex abuse cases over the decades, then no; if the church entrenches, digs in and blasts away at its perceived enemies, then yes.

This time two years ago:
Britain's Conservatives turn their backs on economic liberalism

This time five years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi - Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time seven years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction 

This time eight years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time ten years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development (How right I was!)

Three-oh-three times two

All of a sudden, two films on the same historical subject turn up on the cinema screens at the same time... Hurricane (in Polish 303 Bitwa o Anglię) and Dywizjon 303 - Historia prawdziwa (in English 303 Squadron - the True Story).

Bit of background: 303 (Polish) Sqn was the top-scoring RAF unit in the Battle of Britain. The contribution of Polish pilots in this and the other Polish fighter squadron taking part in the battle (302), or spread around other non-Polish units, was extremely significant. After Great Britain, Poland supplied more pilots to the Allied side than any other country, with New Zealand in third place.

So which is the better film? Snap judgment: Hurricane is better scripted, a story better told, but Dywizjon 303 has by far the better aerial combat sequences, which form the centrepieces of both films. The Battle of Britain was a decisive event in WW2, marking the end of Hitler's ambitions to conquer the United Kingdom. Both films share the same story arc, beginning with the squadron's formation and initial scepticism and niechęć of the British authorities towards the Polish flyers, through to their success in combat and media fame to their shabby treatment after the war.

The publicity machines for both films have been going full-out for several weeks. Dywizjon 303's poster irked me, with the 'O' in the middle of 303 being coloured white-red-blue - what should have been the blue-white-red of the RAF roundel. Every colour in the wrong position. Which suggested that historical detail is not going to be observed in what is claimed to be a true story. (Who in the film studio let this poster through? It shrieks 'ignorance'.) The claim is that the film is based on wartime best-seller Dywizjon 303 by Polish journalist and author, Arkady Fiedler. I have the book (16th edition from 1974, signed by the author even) and have read it several times, yet the film is a far cry from the book.

Hurricane is better scripted, it is tighter, with no extraneous back-stories (like Dywizjon's pre-war scenes from Dęblin flying school and a bizarre scene in 1938 Austria). Hurricane shows death in the face; death by drowning, death meted out by Germans to Polish civilians, ever-present death, there at every turn throughout the war. [The scene where a Daily Mail reporter gets a punch in the face from a Polish pilot will no doubt raise a cheer in British cinemas!]

The biggest mystery in Dywizjon for me is the character of 'Jones' (Andrew Woodall). A British man in army (not air force) uniform, driven around in a Rolls-Royce, trying to honey-trap Polish airmen through his attractive assistant 'Victoria Brown'... What's all that about? What are the writers of Historia prawdziwa trying to say? These two characters are not in Fiedler's book; are they cyphers? Are they trying to represent the duplicity of the British establishment or something? 'Jones' and 'Brown'. Entirely superfluous.

Both films show the initial strained relations between the battle-tested Polish flyers and their British superior officers. The four non-Polish officers, Group Captain Stanley Vincent, Squadron Leader Ronald Kellett and Flight Commanders John Kent and Athol Forbes are portrayed well, as they quickly come to appreciate the Pole's bravery and skills in combat.

On the ground, Hurricane comes across as the more realistic of the two films. Locations, sets, props (in particular the vehicles - Dywizjon's production team rustled up a bizarre selection of cars and trucks). Both films depict an England that starts at the White Cliffs of Dover, contains pubs, bit of countryside, London, and just over there to the right, Northolt aerodrome.

In the air, the crucial fight scenes, Dywizjon is so much better. The strain, on pilot and aircraft is visible, audible. The battles are more tense, realistic. (There's one moment in Hurricane when a Heinkel He-111 bomber is hit, and its glazed nose explodes in a fireball, as though the plane's fuel tank was located in the bomb-aimer's position.) As well as computer-animated sequences, there's also the strange introduction of post-war colour footage (from the 1969 film Battle of Britain?) of Spanish-built Heinkels and Messerschmitts (easily identifiable to avgeeks due to their deep-radiatored Rolls-Royce Merlin engines).

So which to see - Hurricane or Dywizjon 303? I'd recommend watching this 45-minute long Channel 4 drama documentary from the 2010 series Bloody Foreigners, called Untold Battle of Britain.



This tells the story extremely well - and it seems that both Hurricane and Dywizjon 303 draw on this far more than on Arkady Fiedler's book. I'd recommend watching the Channel 4 story first (or, if you've seen the two 303 films already, watch this now!).

The definitive book on the subject for non-Polish readers is For Your Freedom and Ours: The Kościuszko Squadron - Forgotten Heroes of World War II, by Lynne Olson & Stanley Cloud (William Heinemann, London). If it's not on your bookshelf, it should be.

Finally, when in London, visit the Polish War Memorial outside Northolt airport.

This time two years ago:
Kępno's intriguing station

This time four years ago:
Thoughts occasioned by the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of WW2

This time five years ago:
A green light for consumer spending

This time seven years ago:
Procrastination - is it the same as laziness?

This time nine years ago:
Remembering the outbreak of WW2

Comic Strip Presents The Hunt for Tony Blair - review

Laughter, they say, is the best medicine - Nostalgia's pretty good too. Weave the two together...

I watched Comic Strip Presents The Hunt for Tony Blair (2011) on Saturday, and since then, I've rewatched it a few times - it's just that good. It works on so many levels - political satire (crude, but hilarious), an exercise in nostalgia (the soundtrack! the cars! the lighting!), lush cinematic orchestral score, funny dialogue, quality screenwriting and directing...

For my readers who don't know the Comic Strip Presents, this well-established British comedy series goes back over 35 years to the days when Channel 4 was launching and fresh young comedy was much in demand. Through my 20s I'd be watching series after series, the comedy of my generation. While output is flagging (just three specials since 2010), quality clearly isn't.

The soundtrack was selected to evoke the period encompassing the years 1958-1962  (with one outlier, Herman's Hermits' I'm into Something Good, 1965). Conjuring up my earliest childhood memories of the BBC Light Programme - songs by Adam Faith, Helen Shapiro, Billy Fury, Max Bygraves - and the orchestra of Norrie Paramor. A well-chosen soundtrack is crucial for creating the period mood - what's happening here is fascinating, because the Blair era is being physically shunted back 40 years - the cars, the clothes, the props and of course the music are taking us back to the 'never had it so good' times of Harold Macmillan. The mix of the soundtrack and the cars of the era on an appropriately dressed set sent me blissfully back.

Comic Strip regulars Nigel Planer, Rik Mayall, Jennifer Saunders, Robbie Coltrane, Peter Richardson (who co-wrote and directed this episode) are present as are Harry Enfield and John Sessions - in other words, an all-star cast is about to entertain us.

Steven Mangan's portrayal of Tony Blair (prime minister from 1997 to 2007) is comically convincing. Unrelentingly optimistic and self-justifying, even in the darkest moments, Blair's breezy, first-person voice-over commentating the action provides an extra layer of comic surrealism. The Blairisms come thick and fast, laid on with a trowel directly from his autobiography, A Journey.

The final shot begins by referencing the opening of Sunset Boulevard - Tony Blair floating face-down in water -  before the final twist (literally) as the dead Blair turns over to float on his back, hands behind his head, with a smug, self-satisfied smile on his face. Also heavily referenced is the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock version of The Thirty-Nine Steps, all music hall and steam trains.

For me, the biggest laughs came from watching Jennifer Saunders playing Margaret Thatcher in the style of Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. When Tony Blair enters Baroness Thatcher's mansion, she's watching films of her speeches and the victorious British armed forces in the Falklands, while her butler Tebbit (played in John Sessions in the style of Eric Von Stroheim) runs the projector. Jennifer Saunders had played Margaret Thatcher in a Hollywood style in a previous Comic Strip episode (GLC: The Carnage Continues), but this performance is superb.

Peter Richardson does a splendid George W. Bush playing a mafia boss, leaning on Tony Blair to support him in the Iraq War, aided by a brutish Donald Rumsfeld.

Another comic high spot comes when Tony Blair runs into a drunken socialist (Ross Noble) in a railway compartment "Come on Tony! Let's hang the bankers from the lamp posts! Let's get the workers out on strike!" "Well, if you'd read my book, you'd know that I'm not really a socialist" "You're the man that stole my party! TORY Blair! TORY Blair!" "Just shut your drunken left-wing mouth!" Little did Peter Richardson realise in 2011 that just a few years later, it would be the extreme left-wing end of the Labour party that would be in opposition to a hapless, hopeless Tory government.

Filmed in black and white with low-key lighting, foggy streets of old London town (well, Devon, actually), The Hunt for Tony Blair is, I think, one of the greatest of the Comic Strip Presents shows, up there with The Bullshitters, A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques, Five Go Mad in Dorset, Bad News on Tour and More Bad News. Watch it here:



This is political satire done as a surreal conceit; you can get away with much in this format. Now, imagine for a while something done like this in Poland, about a Polish politician - say, Donald Tusk. Can you imagine it being as witty, as sharply done as this? British humour is an essential part of the nation's soft power, the ability to mock oneself

This time two years ago:
Lux Selene

This time five years ago:
David Cameron, Conservatism and Europe

This time six years ago:
Citizen Action Against Rat Runners

This time seven years ago:
Moni at 18 (and 18 months)

This time eight years ago:
Building the S79 - Sasanki-Węzeł Lotnisko, midwinter

This time nine years ago:
My return to skiing after an eight-year break

This time ten years ago:
Moni's 15th birthday

Loving Vincent - review

This a remarkable film, on a number of counts, and must be seen.

It is the first animation to be made up of oil paintings - 65,000 frames based on 853 oil-on-canvas paintings, photographed to make the feature-length film, the work of over 100 artists. Each one either took a Van Gogh painting as a starting point, or created a new image based on his style (perspective, brush-strokes, colour work) and made them move. The visual result is amazing. The viewer is transported into a world of Van Gogh's paintings come to life; an other-worldly, a dream-like departure from reality into the painter's point of view.

Loving Vincent explores mental illness and its link with artistic greatness. Truly great artists are rarely neurotypical. Van Gogh suffered from multiple mental disorders, including Asperger's syndrome and schizophrenia. He was an obsessive-compulsive painter, resulting in a prolific output. Like his brother Theo, Vincent was also suffering from syphilis, not surprising given the ubiquity of prostitution in late 19th century France. The ever-changing mental state of the artist is a thread running through the film, commented upon by many of the film's characters, most of whom he had painted in real life.

The film's narrative is presented as a whodunnit, with one of Van Gogh's subjects, Armand Roulin, tracing his final weeks, meeting other people from Van Gogh's life (and other subjects of portraits) to establish the circumstances of his death. This has puzzled historians for decades. The fact that the gun used was never found, nor were his painting materials on the day, and the deathbed confession of a local man who claimed to have taunted Van Gogh (though never shot him), provides a pretext for investigation. The film faithfully shows the different theories surrounding Van Gogh's death, leaving them open to the viewer's interpretation.

Seen through the eyes of the lazy, alcoholic son of the local postman from Arles than Van Gogh befriended (and painted), it is also a story of redemption. Armand Roulin's mission (to deliver a final letter from the dead Vincent to his brother Theo), changes his life for the better as he realises that Van Gogh was far more than a madman. Armand travels to Paris, then on to Auvers-sur-Oise, where the artist spent his last few months. Here he hears differing accounts of Van Gogh's life and death.



Some great insights into human creativity emerge. The character of Dr Gachet, who treated Van Gogh and who understood him well, is portrayed as a failed artist who recognises the genius within his patient, whose frustration at having tried and failed at odds with Van Gogh's natural talent. And Gachet's daughter, who notes that Van Gogh had incredible powers of observation, able to see nature in the smallest detail, and record it. The film, likewise, has great depth and insight.

Another film of recent years springs to mind - Mr Turner, with Timothy Spall in the title role as the great British artist. Again, what makes the film work is the dissection of the artistic drive - and the fact that J.M.W. Turner was not a neurotypical individual.

This Polish-British co-production brings out the best features of both nations; Polish deep work harnessed to British team work. The ability to focus intensively for long periods of time, coupled to the networking abilities of organising cross-disciplinary skills from the worlds of film finance and art. Co-written and co-directed by Hugh Welchman (Oscar for the 2006 animation Peter and the Wolf, made in Łódź) and accomplished animator, Dorota Kobiela.

Loving Vincent represents the best of Europe. A Polish-British film about a Dutch painter who lived and worked in France. The jam-packed cinema in Warsaw suggests this film will do well commercially as well as critically. More than a biopic, it is a work of art in its own right, inspired by a great story of human artistic endeavour, a journey deep into the creative mind.

This time four years ago:
UFO credibility test

This time five years ago:
Junction ready for road to unbuilt sports centre

This time six years ago:
Park nad Książecem - Vistula escarpment, beautiful autumn

This time nine years ago:
Obama wins US presidential election

Wes Anderson's Central Europe: The Grand Hotel Budapest

Moni has long been a huge fan of the works of director-screenwriter Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Darjeeling Express), so his latest film, The Grand Hotel Budapest, was one to see. Set mainly in flashbacks to 1932, in the Republic of Zubrowka , an Anglo-Saxon invention equating to Anthony Hope's Ruritania or the Marx Brothers' Freedonia, employing a blend of Germanic, Slavic and Hungarian-sounding place names.

The film itself is a delightful confection, beautifully shot, pleasing on the eye. And it's laugh-out-loud hilarious, its humour deriving from witty dialogue, situation, slapstick and sight gags in equal measure.

Wes Anderson's vision of Central and Eastern Europe, its physical appearance and its bloody 20th Century history is of particular interest. His visual depictions of Zubrowka (its currency, the Klübeck), were marvellous; the faded grandeur contrasting with its imperial splendour, the cobbled streets, the misty mountains, snow-covered fields; and the history with its social inequalities, jackbooted invasions, ethnic cleansing, and a communist takeover.

Bearing in mind that 80% of Americans don't know where Ukraine's borders are (something they have in common with Mr Putin), Wes Anderson's childlike knowledge of this part of the world is intriguing. We're playing with stereotypes here, as did Sacha Baron-Cohen with Borat's Kazakhstan.

As a teenager growing up in West London, then later as a student in Warwickshire, I too had a fascination with that same atmosphere. I could have placed that Mitteleuropäische klimat within a wide arc from Mazovia to Moravia, from Silesia to Pomerania, memories of travels to Poland through Czechoslovakia as a child in the 1960s, driving at night along cobbles through walled mediaeval towns; shuttered windows, turreted roofs, tramlines, unfamiliar signs, funny cars, militia men with lollipop sticks, steam trains and a pervasive smell of low-octane petroleum.

A film I must see again, although I must confess while a delight for the eye and the funny bone, not one with much depth to it. So much effort went into the sets, the costumes, the artwork - a bit more could have gone into the scriptwriting to make the audience ponder...

Towards the end of the jailbreak sequence, and during the entire ski chase sequence, I found myself feeling that I'm not learning anything here - it's not like spending 90 minutes with the Coen Brothers. But it's not the characters nor the story that I'd go to see The Grand Hotel Budapest again for, nor to look for some message; rather I'd return for that splendid and rather playful depiction for a world that has vanished. We can still pick up echoes of it in Poland, as I did this very morning in Wrocław, getting off the night train on my way to chair a conference...

Just arrived at Główny station. Główny [pron. GLAU-nee] is the capital of Breslavia.

Tramlines at dawn. Time to find a bank and change my Klübecks.

Work goes on to preserve the character of 19th Century Breslavia

This time last year:
Warsaw 1935: a 3D depiction of a city that's no longer with us

This time two years ago:
Cats and awareness

This time four years ago:
Why did this happen?

This time five years ago:
Britain's grey squirrels turning red

Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil, and the state of EU cinema

A worthy film, one that should be seen rather than one that wants to be seen. This EU-funded bio-pic of German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt is interesting on many planes, but it does not in itself make for a good Hollywood-style cinema-going experience.

But see it you should, if you follow this blog. There are some deep questions at the very heart of it - which I won't go into immediately - they are not ladled out thick as they would be in Hollywood, they are left embedded within the film's structure for you to ponder on the day after, or the day after that.

Hannah Arendt, the Jewish student and lover of Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party a few months after Hitler comes to power. She flees Nazi Germany for France, only to interned by the Vichy regime; she manages to escape and make it to America, where she has a glittering career as an academic philosopher. In 1962, after Adolf Eichmann is captured by Israeli special forces in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem for trial, she volunteers to cover the proceedings for New Yorker magazine.

What emerges (eventually) from her coverage of Eichmann's cross-examination proves to be sensational. Firstly, this Jewish woman who herself managed to escape the Holocaust, relates that Eichmann is not the incarnation of evil itself, rather a petty bureaucrat whose entire raison d'etre was to carry out orders; a small cog in a large machine who had subsumed himself into it because he had no mind of his own, a man who desperately needed to belong. Secondly, this Jewish woman dared suggest to the world that had the Jewish communities across Europe been less well organised, fewer Jews would have died, as the Judenrate collaborated with the Nazis to a certain extent, drawing up deportation lists for them.

These conclusions she reached watching the Eichmann trial, which the film shows us, cutting from colour to the original black and white footage of the actual event; the witnesses breaking down emotionally, and Eichmann's detached observation of his own trial that would lead to his inevitable death by hanging.

The film shows the shock that the publication of the serialisation of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil had stirred up in 1960s America. Ostracised by her fellow Jews, academics and intellectuals, she felt obliged to defend herself to her students, the penultimate scene in the film.

Today, Hannah Arendt's narrative of Eichmann and the Nazi genocide machine stands the test of time; it is the evil of an ideology based on hatred that managed to conquer a nation that turned small, weak men, followers, into mass-murderers on an industrial scale. They merely wanted to fit in, to be accepted, by following orders, even if it meant inhuman barbarity unprecedented in human history. The role of the Judenrate is still a contentious issue for Holocaust scholars.

The film toggles backward and forward between German and (American) English; the academic world of America in the 1960s, with cocktail parties where groups of Jews would converse with one another in German - not Yiddish nor Hebrew - is nicely shown, with shades of Mad Men. Hannah (who died aged 69 of a heart attack) was a heavy smoker, as were many of the other characters; her husband Heinrich Blucher, is shown smoking heavily and over-eating and having an aneurism.

Was Hannah Arendt a heartless, haughty intellectual, looking down at eastern European Jewry as being unsophisticated and disorganised? Or was she looking at the Holocaust from a different point of view altogether - that of a philosopher rather than as a survivor?

It is an interesting film that thinking people should see, and ponder upon and question. It is not entertainment in the Hollywood sense. It is something that the European Union would like people to see, and as such it has subsidised the production to a large extent. This is not something the USA believes in. Historical films that further the American narrative are financed by people who would like to make money out of it - be they Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon) or John Wayne (Green Berets, The Alamo)

Europe, however, has a darker and more complex narrative. And so the EU feels the need for it to be discoursed using public money. With public money comes looser scripting and direction. We see touches of it in Hannah Arendt - the three Princeton academics who persecute her after her articles are published - indeed many of the secondary actors are wooden and two-dimensional.

And indeed it was in Princeton, where Hannah Arendt lectured before her death in 1975, that a young Joel Coen studied philosophy; it is interesting to ponder whether he took classes with her (his senior thesis being about Wittgenstein). Worth noting that Arendt's last book, published posthumously, was entitled The Life of the Mind - recall the scene in the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink where 'Madman' Mundt is running through the flaming hotel corridor repeating "I'll show you the life of the mind".

And there's Stanley Milgram, the American Jewish psychologist from Yale, who knew Hannah Arendt... Inspired by her account of Eichmann 'only following orders', he came up with the famous Milgram experiment, in which volunteer students were ordered to give massive electric shocks to fellow students - up to 450 volts - to see how much pain people could inflict on other people if they were told to do so. Milgram's name carries through to the Coen Brother's A Serious Man; Don Milgram, Larry's lawyer.

Somewhere between Hollywood and Europe lies the cinema of the Coen Brothers; intellectual, academic, yet entertaining; replete with the wisdom of life, funny, quotable.

Their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, is out any day now, so I'll be off to see that before too long.

This time last year:
Snow scene into the sun

This time two years ago:
More winter gorgeousness

This time three years ago:
New winter wear - my M65 Parka

This time four years ago:
Winter and broken-down trains

This time five years ago:
General Mud claims ul. Poloneza

This time six years ago:
Just when I thought winter was over...

Papusza: a key to understanding the Roma issue

With Britain in a state of unease about the full opening of its borders on 1 January to Romanians and Bulgarians, the question of Roma (or 'Gypsies' if you are not of the politically correct persuasion) has come to the fore in the UK media. Romania and Bulgaria are home to the largest Roma populations in the EU, and the opportunity for them to travel freely to the UK strikes fear into the heart of every right-thinking Daily Mail reader - and many others.

For most European citizens, the idea that a nomadic ethnic group several million strong that still exists to this day by begging and busking is difficult to comprehend.

Here in Poland (with a low percentage of Roma within its borders compared to Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic or the aforementioned Romania and Bulgaria), some enlightenment has come in the form of a film and a book. Though both have the same title, Papusza, they are entirely different works, though both about the same subject -  the Gypsy (she disliked the term 'Roma') poet, Bronisława Weis.

The book is by Angelika Kuźniak, is a reportage based on interviews, letters and published materials, interspersed with excellent photographs (the best by Jerzy Dorożyński, for the ethnographical museum in Tarnów, taken in the early '60s as the decision to settle Poland's Gypsies was taken). Below: my favourite photo from the book - a tabor (convoy of caravans) winds through a poor Polish village, 1963 (click to enlarge).

The film - made by husband-and-wife team Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze - is beautifully shot in black and white and tells basically the same story, though with minor differences. The film took six years to make - most of the time spent in painstakingly researching the subject to achieve a true story that looked authentic on screen. We travel from pre-war Wołyń to post-war Gorzów Wielkopolski, touching upon the Porajmos - the Roma holocaust in WW2. Like the book, the film was meticulously researched. Below: a still from the film. Many of the scenes are carefully framed tableaux, set against beautiful Polish countryside.

Papusza was clearly a powerful voice in 20th Century Polish poetry; her writing was no primitive folklore but multi-layered, intense and deeply original. The film mirrors this beautifully. The scene showing Papusza's birth, in a forest; a young woman is lying in the undergrowth, calling for her mother... in the foreground, things are stirring... a thousand butterflies? No... it is the wind picking up fallen leaves - a magical scene.

The natural beauty of the forests, the streams, the sky, the wild animals; I think that Papusza, like many poets, was born with a form of synaesthesia - cross-sensory hypersensitivity to stimuli which in her case would be readily transformed into words.

A second factor marking Papusza as outside of the ordinary was that she refused to take illiteracy as her predestined condition. As a child, she taught herself to read, aided as we see in the book and in the film by a Jewish shopkeeper. Her family would try to stop this foolishness, tearing up scraps of newspaper from which she was teaching herself.

And then there was the coincidence which brought her into the public eye. Jerzy Ficowski, a Polish writer and former AK soldier, hiding from the communist security services in the late 1940s, just happened upon her tabor (group of caravans travelling together). Meeting Papusza, he recognised her rare talents; they kept in touch; she sent him poems which he translated and had published in Polish literary magazines. The great Polish poet Julian Tuwim persuaded Ficowski to publish a major work on Poland's gypsies, which appeared in 1953. This book caused Papusza a great deal of grief, as it was believed that she had betrayed to Ficowski the secrets of Gypsy laws and customs to the gadzios - everyone who was not Roma.

Papusza was ostracized and lived apart from her people until her death in 1987, having endured several spells in mental hospitals.

The book and the film show Roma life in realistic terms - the superstition, the patriarchal nature of their society (Papusza is shown to have been bought as a 15 year-old bride by a man 22 years her senior, who was often abusive towards her), the way that Gypsy women and children would go into towns to beg, tell fortunes and steal what they could (chickens, sweets, purses). The men would earn their way by playing Gypsy music (very well shown in the film) and horse-trading; then drinking (always vodka), while pouring scorn on the settled lifestyle that revolved around work. Women do the work - the washing, the feeding, the child-care - after a long day's begging or chiromancy in the gadzio towns. Education was frowned on; a waste of time.

And yet much of lyrical beauty of a bygone way of life  is captured in Papusza's poetry and in the film. Poland's Gypsies were forcibly made to settle by the communist government in 1965 after a long campaign to encourage voluntary settlement.

While the book and the film go a long way to increase understanding of the Gypsy way of life, they do not offer any solution to the problem - of a people that do not wish to be integrated into mainstream society, yet needs that society in a parasitical way for alms, and now increasingly, EU money.

Below: Roma beggars abuse people's sympathy and basic human kindness. A girl, around 17 or 18, hoiks her three year-old daughter /sister /niece from one tram to another, extracting alms from the soft-hearted. Really, this is no way to support ones' family. Photos taken two months ago.

Below: limping with a crutch, or (again on the tram routes up and down Puławska much favoured by Roma mendicants) falling to one's knees and pathetically singing a tuneless song. We don't need no education, indeed. What is society to do? It's not so much of a problem in Poland (most Poles are too stony-hearted and inured to Roma ways), but Britain fears that scenes such as these will suddenly become commonplace after 1 January.

The Roma remain their own worst enemy. Denying their own children a right to education (many of the beggars are of school age) perpetuates their plight, retarding them further in comparison with a society that's rapidly getting richer and ever more technologically enabled.

These problems could be seen from the outset of Papusza's story, the pre-war scene where a Gypsy encampment is burnt down by a group of Poles taking revenge for a beating one of them received from Gypsies he'd insulted at a local tavern; the Jewish storekeepers taking extra care of their merchandise when the Gypsy women and children came to town begging. The situation has hardly changed in a hundred years, yet the gadzio community has moved from agriculture via industry to an IT-driven economy while the Gipsies are still reliant on begging.

I thoroughly recommend the book and the film, and suspect that the film will go on to have a great career in art-house cinemas around the world for its lyrical beauty and profound story. Below: the final shot of the film. One to see.

This time three years ago:
London travel notes - from Luton to Ealing

This time four years ago:
Silent and Unseen - at your bookshops now
(today, sadly, long out of print)

This time five years ago:
Rat-run absurdity