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Marczewski explores
tricks of memory in Weiser
Polish director Wojciech Marczewski explores anti-Semitism
and the tricks memory plays in his haunting, mysterious
film Weiser, which opened at the Berlin Film Festival.
A middle-aged Pawel Heller, played by Marek Kondrat,
tries obsessively to find out what happened to
a young Jewish friend, David Weiser, who vanished
after a daring children’s experiment with
explosives goes wrong.
But in his quest to track down Weiser he is constantly
frustrated by the ways his friends remember the
explosion differently. His own memories are also
called into doubt.
Set in 1967, at the beginning of a period when
Jews that survived the Holocaust were pressured
to leave Poland after infighting within the Communist
party, Marczewski uses allegory to examine the
relationships between the 12-year-old leads.
“I’m not talking about the mad, crazy
stupid kind of anti-Semitism that you can find
anywhere and most people are against. What is
interesting and dangerous is the shadow of anti-Semitism”,
Marczewski told a news conference in Berlin.
“In my film you see it in the scene where
Weiser is beaten by his young colleagues. Pawel
represents the intelligentsia in this - he doesn’t
join in beating him, but he doesn’t help
him. He keeps a distance”, he said.
Marczewski says that while anti-Semitism is an
element in Weiser, the film that is one of 24
in the running for the Berlin festival’s
Golden Bear award is also an elegy to childhood
and lost innocence.
Brightly colored flashbacks from childhood idylls
are set against cooler colors of the present,
which Marczewski says represents the loss of sensitivity
from childhood to adulthood.
“We are less interesting as adults than when
we are kids because we lose our sensitivity”,
he said.
Marczewski is no stranger to the Berlinale. He
was awarded the Special Jury Prize in 1982 for
Shivers which was billed as a satire on Josef
Stalin’s personality cult of the 1950s but
was clearly an attack on the Communist regime.
A banner of the Solidarity trade union was unfurled
during the screening of Shivers and Marczewski
returned to Poland to find himself blacklisted
by the Communist government there.
Marczewski says the conditions imposed on film-makers
under Communism were farcical and that he has
always needed the right conditions under which
to work.
“A director has to have a special reason
to make a film. And it takes a lot of time to
make the kind of films I wanted. The law decided
that bakers baked bread and film-makers make films.
I didn’t want to take part in this farce”,
he said.
While anti-Semitism features in the film, Marczewski
said Weiser should not really be viewed as a parable
about anti-Semitism in Poland today.
“There is some anti-Semitism in Poland today
but it’s not visible. Polish society has
learned about how to deal with the problem, about
how to cooperate with Jewish culture.”
He hopes the setting in rural Silesia will help
encourage young Polish directors to make good,
low-budget or no-budget movies and not to be put
off if their films are not sufficiently cosmopolitan.
“I love the expression - which most Poles
don’t like - that we are provincial. In a
good sense.”
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