Ludzie z pustego obszaru
Poland, 1957, black and white, 15 mins
One of the most immediately striking aspects of Kazimierz Karabasz and Władysław Ślesicki’s second collaboration is that they’ve clearly devoted a lot of thought to the nature and purpose of what they were attempting. Whereas many of the films made in the first year of the ‘black series’ (1955-56) attacked specific situations and/or institutions, often aggressively and/or sarcastically (for instance, Look Out, Hooligans!/Uwaga chuligani!, 1955; Warsaw ’56/Warszawa 1956; The Lublin Old Town/Lubelska starówka, both 1956), People From An Empty Zone is far subtler in its anatomising of what the commentary admits has gone beyond a mere phenomenon to create a very real social problem.
The problem in question is the boredom and disaffected detachment of the younger generation, the first to lack an adult or teenage memory of World War II. These characters would soon become familiar in such films as Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960), Roman Polański’s Knife in the Water (Noż w wodzie, 1962) and especially the mid-1960s Polish films of Jerzy Skolimowski (who also scripted the Wajda and Polański titles), but in 1957 Karabasz and Ślesicki were exploring new territory for postwar Polish cinema, which had traditionally preferred its youngsters to match various socialist archetypes that had very little connection with reality on the ground.
The film begins with a series of shots taken around Warsaw’s Praga district. A moving camera (there’s no attempt to disguise that it’s shooting from a car, and no need: this is exactly what passing drivers would see) observes various groups of young men hanging out in small groups. The commentary says it’s easy to single them out, as they have a certain posture, the same bored, expressionless faces – yet there’s nothing especially menacing about them either. The narrator is as intrigued as we are: who are these people, and why do they spend most of their time on the street?
Off camera, an assignation is arranged, and the film crew meets them at one of their standard meeting points, just below a military statue (there are several cutaways to statues like this, as if they’re rebuking their descendants). But they’re not especially forthcoming, saying (also off camera) that many of them still go to school and that some are thinking about jobs. They consider themselves to be independent adults, but complain about lack of money and the difficulty of finding suitable accommodation. As to why they have so much time on their hands, it’s because learning is difficult and unnecessary and work is not always profitable, so why do either? Zośka goes home from a day on a sweet-wrapping production line to an almost identical aural backdrop as her mother operates her sewing machine: the point is made by the cut.
Instead of the carefully staged and structured set-pieces that make up the films of their contemporaries, Karabasz and Ślesicki continue down the road they’d already started to explore in their earlier film, offering only brief wisps of narrative content. A woman’s handbag is found in the river, and then a corpse, presumably its owner. Accident, suicide or murder? We’re not told. A visibly drunk woman laughs, revealing that several front teeth are missing: was she a victim of violence, did she slip and fall, or did she miscalculate when trying to open a bottle with her teeth? Again, not a clue. Boys swap erotic photographs in an abandoned boat that’s been left to rust on land by the Praga port before going to spy on an actual tryst in the undergrowth (this echoes a similar sequence in Karabasz and Ślesicki’s earlier Where The Devil Says Goodnight/Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc). “Things happen that nobody wants to talk about, and the militia comes as a last resort,” says the narrator: these people keep themselves to themselves, their faces constantly watching, their expressions betraying nothing.
Just past the halfway mark Karabasz and Ślesicki start asking the expected sociological questions: did they leave their parents too early, did they have bad experiences at school (repeating a year, for instance), or did they simply pick the wrong job, souring their views on work as a whole? It’s clear that part of their disillusionment with the world stems from their realisation that all they’d been told about the value of school and work was a pack of lies: they learned little and got less stimulation, and didn’t even notice the supposedly pivotal transition to adulthood. They dream of escape, but rarely do anything about it except go to the cinema for the temporary variety. The only time they show signs of life is during a wild rock’n’roll-fuelled party, heavily lubricated by alcohol (“They want to kill the boredom and emptiness in one go”) – but this, of course, is the thing that ‘society’ objects to, as a montage of scandalised headlines reveals.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the film’s hesitancy when it comes to reaching firm moral judgements is the fact that it has no onscreen title, and the phrase “people from an empty zone” is only uttered near the very end of the film, given only a slight emphasis in the middle of a sentence. (Presumably audiences of the time wouldn’t necessarily have been aware of, or registered, the title of the supporting documentary short when they saw it in cinemas). As for identifying the causes of this “empty zone” and suitable panaceas, Karabasz and Ślesicki leave it up to the politicians: their job is to show, not prescribe.
The end result is a film that’s quite different in tone from most of the other core ‘black series’ titles: it still has elements of social criticism, but it also looks forward to the far less didactic films that Karabasz and Ślesicki would go on to make, both together and individually. It also marks another stage in the creative partnership between the directors and cinematographer Stanisław Niedbalski, whose deceptively casual, largely hand-held work was already becoming a crucial element: it’s the tiny, seemingly trivial cutaways, enhanced by Helena Białkowska’s well-judged editing, that give People from an Empty Zone a curious potency that remains to this day.
- Directors: Kazimierz Karabasz, Władysław Ślesicki
- Camera: Stanisław Niedbalski
- Editor: Helena Białkowska
- Sound: Halina Paszkowska
- Music: Zbigniew Jeżewski
- Text/Narrator: Tadeusz Łomnicki
- Production Manager: Adam Wieluński
- Production Company: WFD
The film is included on PWA’s Polish School of the Documentary: The Black Series double-DVD set (Region 0 PAL). On a par with most of the other transfers on this disc, the source print is occasionally a bit battered, but it’s all perfectly watchable. The subtitles are conscientious enough to translate onscreen text as well as narration, so I can forgive numerous typos.