 | Noir sur Blanc
Warszawa 2004
© Sławomir Mrożek
118x105
298 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7392-001-3 |
|
Sławomir MrożekHow I Became a Film-maker, Varia, t.2
About the author
Besides the theatre, Mrożek’s true, but short-lived passion was film. He wrote the screenplay for Island of Roses (1975) on contract for German television studio ARD and a year later it was directed by Franz Peter Wirth. This strange, poetic and atmospheric tale about an island where an old man, a man and a boy, all tempted by the same woman, guard what’s left of the great history of the Rosicrucian order, as the avid noose of modern civilisation gradually tightens around them, is worth careful reading, especially nowadays. The film was not a commercial success, and probably no one expected it to be, but it did encourage the producers to continue their collaboration with Mrożek. This time the offer also involved directing.
That was how Mrożek’s next two films, which he wrote and directed, came into being, Amor (1977) and The Return (1978). At first sight completely unalike, they do in fact have something in common: a certain atmosphere of tension arising from war, which is either literally present (in Amor) or imminent (in The Return). Moreover, the boy from Island of Roses is just like the young hero of Amor. All three films are imbued with a stifling, invisibly threatening atmosphere of inner and outer constraint that finds a complicated, yet fascinating outlet in sexuality ambiguous, longed for and impossible all at once.
After this short-lived German adventure in cinema Mrożek never went back to film. He admits that he found directing extremely absorbing (he has staged several of his own plays at various European theatres); however, it’s not easy for a talented amateur to get by on the great professional battlefield of the modern film industry.
Mrożek’s encounter with the wide screen ended with the screenplay Declarations, a short piece written for French television in 1981.
Like everything Mrożek has written in his mature creative life, these film scripts, published in this latest volume of his Varia, are superb, not just to listen to or watch, but also to read. The concern for a craftsman’s honesty that Mrożek always insists on as the basis for gaining his reader’s respect, means that even in plainly practical texts like these he observes the iron rules of Good Writing. Which, quite apart from their quality, is an extra encouragement to straight reading of these scripts.
Tadeusz Nyczek
(An extract from the preface)
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