Kinematografika: Wojciech Has, or cinema before death

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:

I remain motionless for hours, attempting not to think not to feel any desire.

The experience of the void fails, however, and the insomniac soon begins reminiscing. Such remembering, too, is a ghostly affair, and the experience of being haunted by the past will soon enough turn into haunting the city imprinted with memories. The insomniac already haunts the film: with his voice (all narrators are ghosts, and his third-person introduction sounds like an ironic eulogy), with his breath (blowing out the candle -- a fleeting allusion to Macbeth and what the flame represents), and with his shadow.

Here is the haunted, nearly half a minute long, still-frame sequence, in which we can see the candle go out and the shadow obscure objects on the writing table:

The protagonist "materializes" out of his breath and shadow, and, as if to reassure himself that he is alive, he touches the "familiar objects" with his hand; and their firm resistance undoubtedly brings some relief. Then he walks over to the mirror. Rather than give the comfort of his living appearance, the mirror stirs further anxiety:

At times a peculiar look comes over my face, and provokes the grim thought: "This man will soon be dead."

The entire film, which takes place within the span of a single day and the following night and morning, is a haunting, a familiar repetition, a revisited routine: the same conversations with the wife; the same street; the same uninspiring students; the same lectures... The professor observes his own life as if from outside, and either refuses to participate in it or repeats the well-rehearsed gestures: delegates his lecture to his assistant; has occasional outbursts of frankness; or submits to the daily ritual of greeting his daughter, to his wife's chatter, to the family dinner... etc. His plans for "tomorrow" are made half-heartedly and aren't likely to be realized.

The day's routine is increasingly interrupted, as when a glass surface starts to crack, first showing a small blemish, then a fracture, then a web of cracks indicating that the glass will soon shatter. The cawing of crows and the noise of time -- clocks' ticking or chiming -- heard more and more distinctly, disrupt the train of thought, reminding of the passage of time and of the natural cycles of life and death.

The film, too, is "interrupted" -- by an imperceptible event: the death of a bird. This cut is the heart of the film. Yet who sees it? Can the professor discern what is going on amidst the dead foliage? The camera cuts from the shot of the professor's eyes, raised upwards, to the tree; then swoops down to the ground, following a bird's of prey rather than human eyes. How was this sequence shot? Was it something fortuitously caught by the camera man? The death of a bird appears as a secret within the film, its secret center. Only the viewer and the filmmaker, the one and the other haunting the film, silent and unobserved, are witnesses to this event.

The entire film tends toward this moment and returns to it. Regards croisés: the professor's and Katya's glances intersect across this secret space of the film, set outside the narrative and inaccessible to those characters whose imaginations are entirely confined to it.

First, the clip:

The professor has just escaped the family dinner, as "unpleasant to describe as it was to swallow." The amateurish music, produced by his daughter and her friends, breaks off and picks up again, repeating the same fragment. The professor makes a tour of the room, unsure which way to turn. In a moment of silence, the ticking of the clock can be heard, the creaking of the floorboards, and then the sound of the glass being set on the table. The concert starts off again. The professor sits down in a chair, with his back to the camera. The musicians play a false note and pause once more. The professor turns around, sets down his glass: these two gestures mark his withdrawal into his own thoughts. He walks up to the window. (The window is a recurring motif in the film, and its frame often divides the frame of the film). The window allows for an escape from the deadened interior, into a new intensity of the life outdoors. Or yet: "is this what afterlife is like? Like looking through a window?" Or yet: "there is a life outside, inaccessible to the me who is watching it, who had already spent his own life and will never live another." Or yet: "look, there is a life going on out there, unaware of my life inside; it will go on after I'm dead, and care no more or less for me than it does now; out there, I am already, have always already been forgotten."

The exchange of glances across the center of the film is no more a dialog between Katya and the professor than was the succession of their off-screen voices at the very beginning of the film. Katya said as much: "We speak two different languages." The professor confronts his own mortality as an ill-fated exile from life; Katya confronts the immortality of art and her own lack of talent as an exile from art. Yet their tragedy is in a sense similar: they are both denied the full intensity of life -- that sort of intensity as is represented in the agony of a bird.

The center of the film is cinema itself. Life transformed into art. Life in the throes of death. "There is no actor who could play your part," Katya tells the professor. She discerns something in him so "authentic" that it could not be represented; in other words, in him she discovers the bird. There is no "art" that could immortalize it; rather, there is a part of life that is already art and that is also destined to die (and perhaps it is its singular, ephemeral character that makes it art).

The same musical motif which accompanies the agony of the fledgling in the garden, returns at the end of the movie. The professor has left his house in order to travel to another town at his wife's request; instead, quite spontaneously, he takes a room at the inn across the street where he had stayed as a student. He rests in an unmade bed, with iron frame like a bird's cage. The extreme close-ups of his face, his hands crossed like wings across his forehead, and stirring gently... evoke the bird.