It has been for the second time that I had the pleasure of contributing a booklet esay to a Second Run DVD release, after I had written about Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers (1960) last year. This time around, my piece is on Krzysztof Zanussi's Illumination (1973). You can purchase the DVD here; I include some excerpts from the essay below:
A fiercely cerebral inquiry into the nature of happiness,
truth and knowledge, Illumination
(1972) was Krzysztof Zanussi’s third feature film and remains to this day his
most adventurous one. Epic in scope yet extremely fragmented – told in jumps
and starts – it aims at nothing less than presenting an essence of a life,
while remaining as detached from it as possible. It won’t be until Peter
Greenaway’s The Falls (1980) and
Alain Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique (1980)
that narrative cinema will again come as close to resembling a gripping scholarly
essay.
(...)
Illumination
belongs to the most
fully realized period of Zanussi’s career. After more than a dozen shorts
(which included a loose Catcher in the
Rye adaptation in 1961), two feature works and the 1971 TV-film masterpiece
Behind the Wall (that could rival early
Mike Leigh in its improvised feel), Zanussi arrived at Illumination as a thirty-three year old director of international
reputation. All his primary concerns are here, just as they were first revealed
in his supreme debut feature, A Structure
of a Crystal (1969): focus on characters belonging to the academia, the
question of validity of intellectual pursuit, adversity to portraying sex,
constant sublimation of desires into the realm of the cerebral. (It’s no
coincidence that Franciszek Starowieyski’s striking poster for Illumination
represents a figure whose brain has exploded outside its skull and proceeds
to feed on itself.) Profoundly moral and deeply non-erotic, Zanussi’s cinema
treats the body as a vessel for the mind: note the detached way in which
Retman’s sexual activity in Illumination
is quickly intercut with shots of ancient statues frozen forever in their stony
coitus. In the world of Zanussi, a body truly is nothing but a mortal coil –
and his ruminations on death will result in one of his best films, The Spiral (1978).
Brilliant, multilingual, well-mannered and
well-spoken, Zanussi has successfully created a persona that made him as many
friends as enemies. There’s a great ambivalence at the core of the Zanussi
phenomenon, for he somehow managed to come off as both conservative and
avant-garde: a flamboyant fuddy-duddy if there ever was one. Smiling his wide
smile and exuding easy telegenic charm, he’s in fact extremely reserved and
alienating to young Polish audience, which he often scorns for its love of
“empty” pop culture. And yet one look at the formal inventiveness of Illumination – not to mention Camouflage (1977), the most brilliant expose
of Communist feudalism ever put on film – reveals an artist of great subtlety
of vision. Even if his later films, such as Open
Heart (2008) in which postmodern philosophy is represented as literally
lethal, can be irritating in their tone of moral superiority to the audience,
Zanussi still produces complex, searching work like Persona Non Grata (2007).
As for Illumination,
it remains a great testimony to a way of life that is first and foremost
philosophical. Franciszek cannot help but treat the reality around him in all
seriousness – it’s as if he couldn’t allow himself to be happy until the
mystery of the universe will be cracked. Until that happens, he’s in limbo:
dipping into the world now and then, dabbling in his so-called life, but
essentially detached and existing in a self-imposed exile. It’s significant
that in the final scene of the movie (often mistaken for an exhilarating coda
just because of its faux-bucolic setting), Franciszek is once again separated
from his family, as he contemplates the river with wooden debris flowing down
the stream. For all the differences in tone, Illumination would make for a perfect double bill with Joel and
Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (2009) –
another story of a bespectacled prisoner of life who longs to love the world
but would like to understand its paradoxes first.
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