Marcel Lodzinskista
Kieślowski to fiction, and Łoziński found new ground in Poland’s unspoken history. These films will not be seen in DocPoint’s retrospective this year, but I will mention two examples: the 1988 film Świadkowie (“Witnesses”) that deals with the butchering of Jewish war survivors by the Polish in Kielce in 1946, and Las Katyński (“Katyn forest”), completed a year later, in which the families of Polish officers that were murdered by the Soviet secret police NKVD in spring 1940 visit the execution sights, where the bodies of the thousands that were shot on political grounds lie.
Teaching young documentary directors is an area where Kieślowski and Łoziński are almost on par. Kieślowski established a university media department in Katowice, where he taught for over ten years. Lozinski was involved in establishing the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing in Warsaw. He is in charge of studies in documentary film directing. It is hard to find a young or middle-aged documentarist in contemporary Poland who has never studied under Kieślowski or Łoziński.
And finally, when I am asked which Łoziński film I like the best, the answer is short and simple: 89 mm from Europe (1993). The distance between the wheels of a passenger train coming from the West is changed, because the gauge will be 89 millimetres wider, when the journey continues east from the Belarusian city Brzesc. Work goes on as if nothing unusual were happening, and the workers look gloomy. Western tourists peek out from the windows of the passenger carriages. This is the border between East and West – between Rome and Constantinople. Finland, too, is 89 millimetres away from Europe.
Still from "89 mm from Europe" by Marcel Lozinski. Polish Film Institute has published a dvd box with documentary films of Marcel Lozinski.
Jarmo Jääskeläinen
