Nieciekawa Historia (107", 1983) by Wojciech Has
The theme of departure was already treated by Has in his Pożegnania (Partings, 1958) and Rozstanie (Farewell, 1961): the willed or fated separation from a lover, a milieu, a lifestyle... In Nieciekawa Historia (Uneventful Story), based on Chekhov's Boring Story, Has returns to his obsession with the non-event to explore the imperceptible fracture in a man's life, that moment which dislocates the perception of time, not instantly, but in its wake, so that the origin of the change is like a vanishing point in the perspective of memory.
Departures, farewells, the war, loss, and the death of another are turning points and points of no return marking human lives. The thought of one's own death, however, disturbs chronology, locating the impossible event both in the future, as something yet to come, and in the past, as something that has always accompanied one -- as a shadow. Nieciekawa Historia is, among other things, a portrayal of attitudes before death. A cinematic memento mori.
The movie opens with a long tracking shot of a bourgeois interior. The stillness of the furniture; the half-empty dining table with a silver tea set and an unfinished piece of cake on a porcelain plate; oil paintings hung on the walls covered with faded wallpaper; and the opening credits resembling gravestone inscriptions, evoke death and the denial of death. The accumulation of objects anchors their owner in life; at the same time, it is a burial hoard. The hour is "the dead of night," or rather those last minutes before the break of dawn when ghosts may yet come and go. The faint autumn twilight signals both birth and decline. The only thing that "stirs" in that calm is the clock. And then, an off-screen voice speaks:
If I were asked to name the essential element of my existence, I would answer without hesitation: sleeplessness.
The back-and-forth movement of the pendulum (wahadło) puns on the speaker's lack of hesitation (bez wahania, "without sway," that is "dead certain"), and suggests the contradiction between the measured (rhythmical and calculated) time and the relentless timelessness of insomnia. If death is an eternal sleep, sleeplessness is by no means its opposite. On the contrary, as described by the disembodied voice, it is an exercise in death. The waking of the insomniac is an impossible wake over his own corpse:
