dwutygodnik - strona kultury

BY Paweł Soszyński

In her debiut film Małgorzata Dziewulska takes on a challenging task: revising Grotowski’s discourse via the main advocate of the discourse, Ludwik Flaszen

Grotowski ← Flaszen, dir. Małgorzata Dziewulska. National Audiovisual Institute, 2010.

There’s a scene in Małgorzata Dziewulska’s documentary
Grotowski ← Flaszen in which Flaszen, wearing a ribbon hat, a jacket, and creased trousers, strolls along the bridges that stretch across the canals of Wrocław, like Aschenbach in Visconti’s Death in Venice. He describes a humid, foggy Wrocław, not unlike Thomas Mann’s Venice.

Death, passing, and forgetting – inextricably linked with a lack of understanding – all appear in the film’s somewhat importunate opening scene, where the clockwork in a church spire, like the machinery in a film projector, measures out the time during a historic recording of The Constant Prince, presented here in its silent version, with no soundtrack. Dziewulska composes her film out of afterimages, shreds of discourse, tropes, legends and conjectures, and speculation cut short in the most electrifying, unorthodox moments. Hardly anyone talks about Grotowski in such a manner, and hardly anyone can. The reception of his work has thus far consisted of reconstructions of his thoughts and synopses of his plays. Assuming a thoroughly opposite approach, Dziewulska multiplies inconsistencies, tracks fissures, and explores the variety of ways in which we talk about Grotowski.

Grotowski is presented as a theatre director with close ties to the body, the concrete, and structure, but also as a devotee of the esoteric, an aspiring mage (“Who wouldn’t want to be a Mage?” Flaszen asks). His is the theatre that longs for contact with people and yet abhors crowds, a theatre reserved for a select audience (“an elite venture”, as Flaszen describes it). Esoterica, magic, elitism – these words have been deprecated and deconstructed in every possible manner in contemporary theatre. The question about the communicativeness of the Laboratory Theatre is presented in the documentary as a multi-layered issue, one that finds refinement, if only in the intellectual sense, as Dziewulska’s images lose themselves in their intrusiveness and stagedness (such as the aforementioned clock, and one scene where Flaszen is interviewed over a videoconferencing setup); the question of communicativeness also applies to the most fundamental quality of the theatrical medium: its fleetingness, its incidental nature, the fatal disease inherent in the medium (which is why the theatre revels in the subject of death).

Grotowski has left us his archives, and what is left of his theatre are more or less apt descriptions of his plays and technically imperfect film recordings, as well as a handful of pictures. “We’re inundated with dead human voices, voices coming from speakers.” This diagnosis of the contemporary audiovisual world, expressed by Flaszen and intended as a contrasting image to the participatory, active, and live theatre of Grotowski, also describes the heritage of the Laboratory Theatre (precisely the paradox emphasized by Dziewulska). When Flaszen talks about the Great Dialog of International Theatre (his capitals) that went on between him and Grotowski at a train station bar, he is also talking about the dialog of dead voices. To us, these voices are dead; they are like the murmurs collected by spiritists in empty rooms and long-abandoned homes.

Grotowski continues to haunt us – quite literally, in the case of this film. His spirit protests the shooting of the documentary, interfering with the cameras, and attempting to drown out Flaszen’s story by possessing an electric drill (why not?). It’s an obvious reference to the theatrical legend about the curse of Grotowski that falls upon all who disobey him, and Dziewulska’s document would certainly not be approved of by Grotowski, at least the Grotowski that has been captured and imprisoned, like a genie, in the canonical discourse. The truth, as I see it in this film, is that the famed Acropolis Hall at Wrocław’s Market Square and the Grotowski Institute founded in this “hallowed” hall is nothing more than a religious souvenir stand. What’s worse is that these souvenirs are theoretical and intellectual.

In the final scene of the documentary, we see Flaszen as he watches The Constant Prince projected onto an enormous outdoor screen in Wrocław’s Market Square, a few dozen meters from the former location of the theatre. He doesn’t hide his indignation, and he’s probably not the only one. I find the view just as sad. But after a moment of sadness there comes reason. This elite theatre, Dziewulska seems to be telling us, will either be interpreted through contemporary discourses, or (and I’m afraid this is the case) it will die, sighing to the ghost of Tadzio, in whom Aschenbach saw “the poets’ annunciation of the birth of the gods”, a view shared by the interpreters of Grotowski.

translated by Arthur Barys