Kopalnia
Poland, 1947, black and white, 10 mins
Made the same year as Jerzy Bossak and Wacław Kaźmierczak’s The Flood (Powódź), The Coal Mine is a similarly wordless study, this time of miners in action. Using high-contrast lighting, boldly-defined compositions and intensely, almost aggressively rhythmic editing, writer-director Natalia Brzozowska creates something that both harks back to the great Soviet silent films and anticipates the similarly energetic output of British industrial-film maverick Geoffrey Jones. It’s an exhilarating piece of work whose mining-disaster narrative seems almost irrelevant when set against its propulsive visual and musical drive.
It’s structured in three movements, a slowish middle section bookended by two others that are much more rapidly cut and scored. In the first, a group of miners descends into the pit, casting evenly-paced shadows on the coal trucks as they walk past them prior to boarding their train (wheels, rails, the flash of the pantograph). Once they’re installed in place, Kazimierz Serocki’s score becomes more rhythmic, accompanied by a recurring visual motif of the coal being shaken onto a conveyor belt that will underpin the film right up to the final montage. Whether digging or drilling, the men work stripped to the waist, and much is made of the contrast between their flesh and the rather less malleable materials that they’re extracting.
Just when the film seems to have settled into a hypnotic routine, something happens – following an anxious glance at a flickering flame (presumably a harbinger of disaster), the miners start running for the exit – but in the process, some coal is dislodged, bringing one of the pit props crashing down, knocking a hapless miner to the ground. This leads into the film’s mid-section, in which alarm bells ring, and a rescue team is summoned, their progress intercut with images of a group of mostly black-clad woman mounting a vigil outside the mine while waiting for news, their poses echo the image of a statue of the Virgin Mary that both opens the film and recurs here.
But then the conveyor belts restart and we return to the regular rhythms of the earlier sequence, though images of the injured miner, his arm in a sling, intercut with the women’s vigil, emphasises the human cost of the miners’ productivity in a way that the first section ignored. The injured miner’s face is shown in close-up, intercut with out-of-focus flashbacks of him exulting in his earlier drilling prowess. However, the show must go on, and the other miners are soon back at the coalface, keeping the conveyor belt running, business very much as usual.
I know next to nothing about director Natalia Brzozowska (1915-88), and my regular databases are no help: the BFI acknowledges her existence but lists no titles, the IMDB has just one, and even Filmpolski.pl only lists seven, made in two clumps of activity (1946-8, then 1958). She wasn’t the only female film director working in Poland at the time – her much better known contemporary Wanda Jakubowska was a year away from making The Last Stage (Ostatni etap), one of the world’s first Holocaust films. Brzozowska wasn’t anything like as lucky – according to a tantalisingly brief note that accompanied the film’s screening at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in 1995, The Coal Mine‘s “formalism” was considered dangerous, and the film languished in the vaults for half a century. Which may at least partly explain the hiatus in Brzozowska’s career.
On the other hand, composer Kazimierz Serocki (1922-81) went on to be recognised as a significant figure in Polish contemporary music, though the score to The Coal Mine was one of his earliest works, written shortly after he graduated. Later, he would join forces with fellow composers Tadeusz Baird and Jan Krenz (both of whom also wrote film scores, notably for Andrzej Munk) to form the composers’ union Group 49, and Serocki and Baird also founded the Warsaw Autumn contemporary music festival, which continues to this day.
- Director/Script: Natalia Brzozowska
- Camera: Andrzej Ancuta
- Lighting: Julian Zwierzyński
- Music: Kazimierz Serocki
- Production Manager: Donat Bilski
- Production Company: Film Polski