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Marek Koterski _________________
Poland (1942- )
Film director (also of documentaries) and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright. He was born in Krakow on 3 June 1942. After the war he moved to Wroclaw with his parents and elder brother. He graduated in Polish studies from Wroclaw University, where he also took a course (though never completed it) in art history. He was the literary manager and a reciter of the student theatre Teatr Poezji "Sylaba", published academic reviews and essays, for example in "Poezja", "Odra", "Zagadnienia rodzajów literackich", "Litteraria", "Roczniki naukowe Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego", "Konfrontacje". His literary debut was a short story about the death of Zbigniew Cybulski, ZACZERPNAC DLONIA / SCOOPING WITH THE HAND, published in 1967 in Wroclaw's "Pomosty" youth anthology.
Having gained experience as an assistant to the director couple Krystyna Skuszanka and Jerzy Krasowski, Koterski founded his own experimental Teatr Otwartej Sceny / Open Stage Theatre. After graduation he was an assistant lecturer at the Literary Theory Department, working with Prof. Jacek Trzynadlowski under whose supervision he had written his master's thesis ("Drama Versus Theatre"). However, he gave up an academic career and a PhD scholarship to France and, influenced by his first great love, Ela, came to Warsaw in 1966, where both tried (unsuccessfully) to pass their entrance exams to the faculty of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts (ASP). For a year he was an unenrolled student in the painting studio of Prof. Eugeniusz Eibisch, and he also tried to enrol for theatre directing at the State Higher School of Theatre (PWST). At the advice of his friend, cameraman Edward Klosinski, he enrolled at the film school in Lódz in 1967 (graduating with honours in 1977). He made a number of short and medium-length films at the Wytwórnia Filmów Oswiatowych (Educational Film Studio), but only debuted as a feature film director after forty, having been an assistant on other people's films for many years. Perhaps that is why he strictly follows the rule that he only directs his own texts (also in the theatre). He usually writes them in the form of a play which he then adapts into a film script. His plays have been published in "Dialog": SPOLECZNOSC / THE COMMUNITY (No. 3, 1986), ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE / INNER LIFE (No. 8, 1986), NIENAWIDZE / I HATE (No. 5/6, 1991), KOCHAM / I LOVE (No. 11, 1997), NAS TROJE / THE THREE OF US (No. 2, 1998), DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO (No. 8, 2000). Four of Koterski's plays (DZIEN SWIRA, DOM WARIATÓW / THE HOUSE OF FOOLS, ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE, NIENAWIDZE) were also published in book form ("Dzien Swira", Swiat Literacki 2002) and were nominated for a NIKE LITERARY AWARD in 2003. Marek Koterski has published a few feature articles entitled "Zapiski psychopaty" / "Notes of a Psychopath" in "Kino" monthly (01-03 and 05, 1994).
A member of the Karol Irzykowski Studio's Artistic Council (1988-1989), one of the founders of the Theatre Authors Society (TAT), the first organization for playwrights in Poland. His play ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE / INNER LIFE was translated into German by Karolina Bikont ("Innenleben") and published in "Anthologie Polnischer Dramen der Gegenwart" (Wydawnictwo ADiT, 2000).
Koterski's film which won the greatest number of awards is still DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO - the script was based on the director's play of the same title. Koterski wrote the play in thirteen-syllable verse for a Television Theatre competition and won one of the main prizes. More awards followed, including the Golden Lions at the 27th POLISH FILM FESTIVAL in Gdynia (2002), and a year later the annual Award of the Minister of Culture for film. In 2005 DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO received the Don Quixote award from the Polish Federation of Film Discussion Clubs for the best Polish film of the past season. The director received a "Wielki FeFe" / "Great FeFe" award for life achievement at the FELLINIADA Festival (Warsaw, 2004).
Though Marek Koterski belongs to the generation of directors of the "cinema of moral anxiety", his protagonist has never tried to improve reality, he has always been too immersed in the world of his own neuroses, fears, and frustrations. In all the films this is practically the same person, the director's alter ego - Adam/Michal Miauczynski, getting older with every film (he is 33 in the debut DOM WARIATÓW / THE HOUSE OF FOOLS, and 66 in WSZYSCY JESTESMY CHRYSTUSAMI / WE'RE ALL CHRISTS), an educated man trying to get by on a meagre salary. He lives in a block of flats alone or with his ex-wife, always pining for ideal love, the kind from "The Master and Margarita", and he's quitting smoking tomorrow. He is a bundle of nerves who curses his fellow men, a failure who has excessive ambitions but cannot carve out a career for himself, an insomniac and numeromaniac.
Marek Kondrat, who played Miauczynski in three films, described him as a monster who branded him for life.
"Koterski told me his character couldn't be played, you had to be him. He stood me up on a very thin blade, from which you could either fall or be cut in half. With him, grotesqueness and genuine drama commune through a very thin wall, because that's what our life is like. I was made aware of this once by a taxi driver who had seen 'Day of the Wacko' and the film reminded him of a real situation. The car in front of him had hit a cat. The poor animal was writhing in convulsions while a group of people stood around it laughing at its weird movements. That taxi driver captured the essence of Marek's film." (Marek Kondrat was interviewed by Katarzyna Janowska and Piotr Mucharski, report from a meeting of the "Goscie Gazety" / "Guests of Gazeta" club, Gazeta Wyborcza 3 June 2006)
This is how Koterski himself described Adam:
"A clumsy and despondent though actually quite nice Polish whiner and loser who is more a product of events than their creator, almost as passive as Oblomov, but full of grudges against life." (Rzeczpospolita 1-2 April 1995)
Before Adam was born, though, in 1975-86 Koterski made a number of documentaries for Lódz's Wytwórnia Filmów Oswiatowych (Educational Film Studio - WFO). They, too, were devoid of any journalistic flair, and often had theatre as their subject.
"Our films were different from those made at Warsaw's WFD (Documentary Film Studio), they were film impressions more than social films," said the director, talking to Katarzyna Bielas. He added: "With my very first documentary (…) I felt a growing conviction that a documentary was a creation, and a creation dishonest in its truth in the sense that by definition the viewer expected a print from life. Meanwhile, the greatest classics of Polish documentary filmmaking made repeated takes." (Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 November 2002)
His last short films for the WFO were staged. But it was not till his feature films that Marek Koterski touched on what was the most important to him - family trauma, personal problems. At first he approached them in all seriousness. It was not until PORNO and NIC SMIESZNEGO / NOTHING FUNNY that he added irony and a quirky sense of humour, ultimately achieving a tragicomic effect in DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO.
Asked about his debut, he has always insisted that it took place after a year of absolute collapse, when he had thought to end his artistic career because he'd had enough of being an assistant director and didn't see himself as a documentary filmmaker. One night, smoking a cigarette in his sleeping home, he felt something sit on his shoulder and literally start dictating DOM WARIATÓW / THE HOUSE OF FOOLS. He called this "an accumulation of trauma". The screenplay was finished in three weeks. The director gave the part of 33-year-old Miauczynski (the name originated from the fact that when Koterski asked his mother for anything, she'd reply: "Stop meowing") to Marek Kondrat. His father was played by Tadeusz Lomnicki, who suggested during rehearsals that Koterski play all the parts in turn. The director admits this had its therapeutic significance, and that his films serve to chase away the demons that haunt him: an unhappy childhood, a failed marriage, his missed first love, obsessive ambitions, addictions.
How much of Koterski is there in Miauczynski? One could give countless examples of autobiographical themes - some are offered by Koterski himself, for instance when he casts his son in the role of Adam's kid. He consistently applies the principle that "to talk about yourself you have to leave all your embarrassment at home". In DOM WARIATÓW / THE HOUSE OF FOOLS, which reflects the sick atmosphere in his family (he compares it to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"), even the set design is taken straight from the Koterskis' villa in the Biskupin district of Wroclaw.
In NIC SMIESZNEGO / NOTHING FUNNY Miauczynski is an assistant director, and his film's title is the same as Marek Koterski's debut story (ZACZERPNAC DLONIA / SCOOPING WITH THE HAND). The hero of AJLAWJU travels by train between Lódz and Wroclaw, following Koterski's familiar route (Ela, the first and greatest love whom he recalls in all his films, was from Wroclaw, he was studying in Lódz). The director admits to an obsessive ambition, rather like Miauczynski's, instilled in him by his mother.
"I always wanted to be someone, I dreamed of success all my life. As a teenager I even started a notebook with my name on it and the title 'Selected Works'. I never wrote anything in it," the director said in Lagów during the LUBUSKIE FILM SUMMER in 2006.
According to Tadeusz Sobolewski:
"His life-writing is feigned exhibitionism. The author of 'Day of the Wacko' reduces himself to absolute mediocrity so that everyone can recognize themselves in his hero." Sobolewski believes "we have not had such a consistent filmmaker in Polish cinematography since Kieslowski." (Gazeta Wyborcza, 20 April 2006)
What does the director have to say?
"From the start I feed on myself as I build this character," he admits. "I have not experienced everything that Adam experiences, though. And I think Adam and I are becoming more and more different. However, Adam is a convenient medium for expressing my pain, fear, shame." (from an Internet chat at Onet.pl on 24 June 2002)
The most apt description seems to be the one the director quoted from Marek Hlasko when DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO premiered - true fabrication.
Having settled accounts with his toxic family in DOM WARIATÓW / THE HOUSE OF FOOLS, in ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE / INNER LIFE Koterski analysed the failed marriage of two people who don't care about each other. He portrayed Miauczynski as an aggressive "tower block vampire" hurting his wife and immersed in a world of unfulfilled erotic fantasies. After that, he did an about-turn.
"At the press conference in Gdynia after 'Inner Life' was screened, I was asked if this was my way of dealing with film. I replied it was my way of dealing with one film, while the next one would be a box-office hit." (Film, No. 12, 1998, speaking to Krzysztof Demidowicz). And further on: "I was fed up with saying: look, my film is so wise, so ambitious, why does it only get one copy. … If I hadn't taken a risk at some point, I would still be stuck in 'Inner Life'. Flattered by the critics, I would have been the prisoner of one film."
This was how PORNO came to be made, featuring seventeen erotic stories about Adam with all his hang-ups. The critics sniffed, audiences stormed the cinemas.
"There's a lot of the educated man in me, but also of the cook. I like listening to Beethoven but I am often moved by Polish disco music," he confided to "Super Express" (28 November 1996)
His next films, NIC SMIESZNEGO / NOTHING FUNNY and AJLAWJU, were attempts at marrying the educated man and the cook. The misalliance did not fully satisfy anyone. Cezary Pazura, who played the main role in both comedies, did away with Adam's educated face, turning him into a clown winking at the audience: "I'm a loser, but a nice guy." Young audiences enjoyed NIC SMIESZNEGO / NOTHING FUNNY, but language purists were upset by the amount of vulgar language, and admirers of the "early Koterski" - by the humour straight from Bavarian erotic comedies. Interestingly, there was just as much filthy language in DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO, but its function was much clearer. It's worth noting at this point that Marek Koterski, a Polish studies graduate, experimented with the language of his film characters from the start of his career in feature films. It's not even that Miauczynski can never remember whether to say "isn't" or "ain't", which reflects his indecisiveness in life. The other people use colloquial language to one another, often getting the word order wrong in sentences. Koterski first noticed the differences between the spoken and written word when writing down almost a thousand pages of interviews with the heroes of his documentary SPOLECZNOSC / THE COMMUNITY. In his next documentary, POLSKI BOHATER WSPÓLCZESNY / THE CONTEMPORARY POLISH HERO, he realized the great extent to which we were prisoners of verbal clichés and ready-made banal expressions. The dialogue in Koterski's films is sometimes suffused with an artificiality which covers up the emotional void between the characters. The swear words mentioned earlier are probably the only sphere of authenticity in the communication between the characters.
Andrzej Wajda mentioned that during a session at his film school devoted to the "hero of our times", one young filmmaker noticed such a hero in two films - Pasikowski's PSY / PIGS and Koterski's DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO.
Miauczynski had stopped being perceived as a performer of weird gags. A lot of the credit is due to Marek Kondrat, who turned Adam into a contemporary citizen Piszczyk (incidentally, Andrzej Munk's ZEZOWATE SZCZESCIE / BAD LUCK is Marek Koterski's favourite film).
Ewa Mazierska sees Miauczynski as being close to someone like Harvey Pekar, the well-known American Jewish author of autobiographical comic books in which he describes his failed everyday life with bitter humour. ("Marek Koterski, czyli rzecz o braku harmonii" / "Marek Koterski, or about the lack of harmony" in: "Marek Koterski", Filmoteka Narodowa, October 2006). The director himself also thinks laughter, irony, absurdity are like a handrail he holds onto as he goes through life. The other handrail is idealism, which demands that he make only his own original projects - he directs his own texts in the theatre, turns them into film scripts, and transfers them to the screen.
Other people also like to take on Marek Koterski's plays. ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE / INNER LIFE was the 1989 theatrical debut of Anna Augustynowicz at the Wojciech Boguslawski Theatre in Kalisz; she later directed two one-act plays by Koterski, KOCHAM. NAS TROJE / I LOVE. THE THREE OF US (based on AJLAWJU) at the Teatr Wspólczesny in Szczecin (1998). Jan Bratkowski directed the same one-act plays at Warsaw's Teatr Ochota (2000). The monodrama NIENAWIDZE / I HATE was very popular among theatre directors, being produced at the Teatr Bagatela in Kraków (dir. Krzysztof Orzechowski, 1991) and the Wanda Siemaszkowa Theatre in Rzeszów, to name just two. Tomasz Man, who directed DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO at the Witold Gombrowicz Municipal Theatre in Gdynia (premiere 17 February 2006), admitted that to him this play was on a par with KARTOTEKA / THE CARD INDEX. Interestingly, Kalina Zalewska made the same comparison almost ten years ago in "Twórczosc" (8/1988) with respect to ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE / INNER LIFE.
What will happen next to the everyman created by Marek Koterski? After WSZYSCY JESTESMY CHRYSTUSAMI / WE'RE ALL CHRISTS, in which he saved his hero from his addiction and gave him hope thanks to filial love, will the director turn the camera away from himself and point it at others? After all, this is the seventh feature film in the career of a director who, like Miauczynski, admits to suffering from numeromania. And seven has always been a special number in his life.
Filmography (major films only):
1984 DOM WARIATÓW / THE HOUSE OF FOOLS
Awards:
1985 - Wojciech Wiszniewski Award (from journalists) for "the most promising creative personality" and an award for best directing debut in the full-length feature category at the "YOUTH AND FILM" KOSZALIN FILM MEETINGS; a Laurel award from "Radar" weekly.
1986 ZYCIE WEWNETRZNE / INNER LIFE
Awards:
1987 - a special mention from the jury and an award from the Province Board of the Polish Socialist Youth Union in Slupsk for best film at the "YOUTH AND FILM" KOSZALIN FILM MEETINGS; "Warsaw Mermaid" award from the Film Critics Club of the Association of Polish Journalists for best feature film; Gdansk Silver Lions for Marek Koterski as director and Bronze Lions for editing for Miroslawa Garlicka at the POLISH FILM FESTIVAL in Gdynia.
1989 PORNO
1995 NIC SMIESZNEGO / NOTHING FUNNY
1999 AJLAWJU
2002 DZIEN SWIRA / DAY OF THE WACKO
2006 WSZYSCY JESTESMY CHRYSTUSAMI / WE'RE ALL CHRISTS
Awards:
SOURCE: Malgorzata Fiejdasz,
November 2006, www.culture.pl,
© Copyright by Adam Mickiewicz Institute
ARTICLES
Mazierska, Eva. "Domesticating Madness, Revisiting Polishness: The Cinema of Marek Koterski." Journal of Film 56 (2004): 20-35
Mazierska, Eva."Cinema in Hard Times: Individual, Families and Society in Polish Contemporary Films." Canadian Slavonic Papers 46 (2004): 401-417.
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