Sci-Fi Visionary: Piotr Szulkin Celebrates Certainly One Of Poland’s Most Revolutionary Filmmakers

Sci-Fi Visionary: Piotr Szulkin Celebrates Certainly One Of Poland’s Most Revolutionary Filmmakers

“An Eastern European Ridley Scott… the cultural commentary of Szulkin’s oeuvre is universalist… their future is our now.” – Ela Bittencourt

“The Polish ‘cinema of anxiety’ soars from this globe within the work of Piotr Szulkin… the films thrive on imaginative eyesight and sociological absurdity.” – Steve Dollar, Wall Street Journal

Movie at Lincoln Center is very happy to announce Sci-Fi Visionary: Piotr Szulkin, a retrospective celebrating one of Poland’s many filmmakers that are revolutionary September 6-8.

A director, screenwriter, novelist, theatrical manager, and painter, Piotr Szulkin regularly faced censorship through the Polish Communist regime for the belated ’70s and very early ’80s for their unabashedly governmental works. Szulkin’s profoundly imaginative movies can be considered as existential stories, absurdist parables, or premonitions about modern society’s hostility and also the evils of totalitarianism. Drawing from 20th-century philosophy and Polish medieval literary works through speculative fiction, noir, and grotesque allegories, Szulkin masterfully wielded the shoestring budgets afforded him to produce shockingly iconoclastic technology fiction movies. Referred to as “the undiscovered Fritz Lang of 1980s Mitteleuropa” (Michal Oleszczyk, RogerEbert.com), Szulkin made movies which were rarely seen outside of their indigenous Poland but which continue steadily to resonate with chilling truths about humankind, drawing eerily prescient parallels to the present worldwide governmental environment.

Among the biggest retrospectives of their strive to date, Sci-Fi Visionary: Piotr Szulkin provides an array of new electronic restorations and brought in movie prints. The show showcases each of Szulkin’s features, including their audacious cult classic Golem , usually considered a precursor to Blade Runner ; The War associated with Worlds: Next Century, a reimagining for the H.G. Wells novel as well as an indictment of mass media’s impact on civilians; O-Bi, O-Ba: the finish of Civilization , which follows the residual survivors of a nuclear apocalypse from their dire situation; Szulkin’s exploration of female sexuality in the increasingly delirious and erotic Femina ; the dadaist Ga, Ga: Glory to Heroes , which follows a prisoner aboard a penitentiary spaceship as he is sent on a mission to a police state hell planet; and Szulkin’s final film, King Ubu , based on the 19th-century Albert Jarry play, a brutal commentary on contemporary Poland in the aftermath of the Communism Szulkin criticized throughout his career as they wait for a mythical Ark to save them. Also, the retrospective will emphasize Szulkin’s quick movie work, like the folklore-inspired morality play Dziewce z ciortem and also the documentary Working Women .

Presented in collaboration utilizing the Polish Cultural Institute ny.

Arranged by Florence Almozini and Tyler Wilson.

Tickets go on sale Thursday, August 15 and therefore are $15; $12 for pupils, seniors (62+), and people with disabilities; and ten dollars for movie at Lincoln Center users. Save with all the purchase of three seats or even more.

Acknowledgments: Polish Cultural Institute Nyc; Daniel Bird

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS All tests happen in the Walter Reade Theater (165 western 65th Street) unless otherwise noted.

Femina Poland, 1991, 35mm, 84m Polish with English subtitles After her husband leaves for a long company trip and her mom dies, a coolly detached, bourgeois housewife (Hanna Dunowska) embarks on an outre carnal odyssey searching for intimate satisfaction, leading her into increasingly deranged, sinister realms as memories from her childhood mingle with fever-dream seductions. Equal components coming-of-age nightmare, softcore satire, and surrealist cantata, Szulkin’s delirious erotic fantasia unfurls in a nonstop rush of indelibly uncanny images—from a free-floating apparition of the lusty Joseph Stalin to a couple of shockingly randy puppets—as it savages faith, their state, together with notion of the family that is nuclear.

Preceded by: brand brand New electronic renovation Working Women / Kobiety pracujace Poland, 1978, 6m U.S. Premiere Stylized with dramatic interiors and a distorted framework rate, this very early documentary miniature from Szulkin illustrates six sequences of solitary, repetitious work. Saturday, September 7, 4:30pm Sunday, September 8, 8:00pm

Ga, Ga: Glory to Heroes / Ga, Ga – Chwala bohaterom Poland, 1986, 35mm, 84m Polish ukrainian dating club with English subtitles Resistance is useless in Szulkin’s stunningly nihilistic satire that is dystopian. In the next where life on the planet has grown to become therefore wonderful that only prisoners are employed for the dangerous company of area research, poker-faced intergalactic inmate Scope (Daniel Olbrychski) is delivered on a apparently condemned objective to an uncharted earth. Upon his arrival, he discovers some sort of curiously just like a dilapidated, postapocalyptic world, where he’s welcomed because of the populace as being a “hero,” an ignominious honor, he quickly learns, that is included with a most fate that is barbaric. Using the film’s properly nonsensical name from the babble of their child child, Szulkin provides a bleakly acerbic commentary from the absurdity of life in an authorities state. Friday, September 6, 4:30pm Saturday, September 7, 8:30pm

Brand brand New electronic renovation Golem Poland, 1980, 92m Polish with English subtitles in certain dystopian future, boffins try to produce an innovative new, flexible battle of people. a apparently ordinary item associated with work, the genetically engineered Pernat (Marek Walczewski) is susceptible to round-the-clock monitoring as he goes about their life amidst drab bloc architecture that is soviet. Szulkin’s bold function first, styled in sepia tones and dramatic illumination, is known as a precursor to Blade Runner , but its name additionally looks back once again to a more ancient misconception of creation and morality.

Preceded by: brand brand New electronic restoration The Gal and also the Fiend / Dziewce z ciortem Poland, 1976, 14m Polish with English subtitles U.S. Premiere Szulkin stages a morality play about a sinful woman’s encounter using the devil, set to your Polish ballad of the identical name and imbued with folkloric imagery. Friday, September 6, 6:30pm Saturday, September 7, 2:00pm

New restoration that is digital Ubu / Ubu krol Poland, 2003, 90m Polish with English subtitles U.S. Premiere According to Alfred Jarry’s late 19th-century, proto-Dada political satire Ubu Roi , Szulkin’s last movie is definitely a crazy, carnivalesque commentary on post-Communist Poland by which drunken degenerate Ubu (Jan Peszek) seizes control of the monarchy in a supposedly “democratic” takeover (their signature policy: universal free beer) and then institute his very own absurdist, tragicomic reign of terror. Upgrading Jarry’s iconoclastic eyesight with a new dosage of dark, post-Soviet cynicism, King Ubu is an incendiary summative statement from an musician whom devoted their profession to lobbing grenades in the equipment of totalitarian governmental corruption. Sunday, September 8, 6:00pm

brand brand New restoration that is digital, O-Ba: The End of Civilization / O-bi, O-ba – Koniec cywilizacji Poland, 1985, 88m Polish with English subtitles What stays of mankind post–nuclear apocalypse is restricted up to a squalid underground bunker where survivors toil desperately to uphold the final vestiges of civilization. They have been spurred in by their fervent belief in a fabled Ark which will deliver them from their residing hell—a misconception propagated by the powers that be, and distribute, in component, because of the increasingly disillusioned smooth (Jerzy Stuhr) as he tries to push away collapse that is total. Doing work in an expressionistically grimy, grey- and blue-toned palette, Szulkin crafts a shattering existential parable concerning the false claims of politics and religion that plays away like a Sisyphean journey into madness. Saturday, September 7, 6:30pm Sunday, September 8, 4:00pm

Brand brand New electronic restoration The War regarding the Worlds: Next Century / Wojna swiatow – nastepne stulecie Poland, 1981, 96m Polish with English subtitles focused on both H. G. Wells and Orson Welles, Szulkin’s followup to Golem starts utilizing the Christmastime takeover of Poland with a band of hyperintelligent, bloodthirsty martians (played by silver-painted dwarfs in puffer jackets) who enlist hapless tv newscaster Iron Idem (Roman Wilhelmi) once the sound of these 1984 propaganda machine that is-esque. Nevertheless when Iron dares to stop message, he makes an enemy also more than the aliens: the state itself. Released in the same way Poland was being plunged into martial legislation and instantly prohibited, The War of this Worlds: Next Century is a disturbingly prescient allegory of energy, control, and news manipulation in a world that is post-truth. Friday, September 6, 9:00pm Sunday, September 8, 2:00pm

August 6, 2019