POLISH DIRECTOR: LOVE, POLITICS, FAITH

It took 13 years for Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz to get script approval from government officials to make a movie about the Hasidic Jews of Poland on the eve of World War I.

Approval for the script, which was completed in 1968, came in 1981, and “Austeria” was completed the next year. Already released in Poland, a United states distributor is being sought for the film, the 14th feature by the director who is perhaps best known for the aware-winning “Mother Joan of the Angeles.”

Although martial law (which lasted from December, 1981, to July, 1983) disrupted Poland’s film industry--not to mention other aspects of Polish life--1968 was an even worse time to get “Austeria” made.

“The Six-Day War broke out at that time, and the Polish government supported the Egyptian side,” said Kawalerowicz, 62, who was in Chicago recently for a retrospective of his films at the Film Center of the Art Institute. “So the film was politically unacceptable. Then in 1982, I filmed the script exactly as it had been written in 1968.”

Kawalerowicz, speaking with a soft but glowing enthusiasm, described “Austeria,” a film about a Jewish innkeeper and the Hasidic Jews who take refuge in his inn from advancing Cossack troops, not just as “a film about Jews.” He described it as “a Jewish film” made in a nation that bears a reputation as “a country of anti-Semitism.”

“I strove to reconstruct the world of dreams, habits and philosophical postures of the Eastern European Jewry in the face of ultimate menace,” Kawalerowicz said, noting that Hasidism was founded in the area of Poland where “Austeria” takes place, an area that also gave birth to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholom Aleichem and other Jewish writers.

“I think this film could only have been made in Poland because in Poland there still are people who remember those days,” he said.

“‘Austeria’ in a way is a payment of a debt to the Jewish nation because the Jewish culture was very much connected to the Polish culture,” Kawalerowicz added. “They were tow integrated cultures that inspired and motivated each other.”

Based on a novel by contemporary Polish author Julian Stryjkowski, “Austeria” tells of Tag, an old Jewish innkeeper who, tired of fleeing pogroms, remains at his inn one final, fateful night with the refugees.

“This is not the traditional, sentimental story that is usually told about Jews,” Kawalerowicz said.

Even after script approval, release of the film could have been held up by officials who serve, along with various directors and critics, on the commission that must give final approval to all scripts and completed films, Kawalerowicz said.

The state no longer provides all of the money up front for a film production, as it did until four years ago, Kawalerowicz said. Now it provides as little as 60% of the budget when a script is approved. “Austeria” won total financing.

Full production continued during the period of martial law, although production of TV films was cut back, Kawalerowicz said.

“The film units did not do much for television during martial law because actors and directors did not want to work for television,” he said. “But they did work for film. Now (the boycott) has ended. How long can people stop and not work?”

Eight separate film production units, each headed by a director chosen by its members, were established in 1955, and that number grew to 10. Now it is back down to eight, he explained. One unit went bankrupt, and another, Studio X, was dissolved by the government after it removed its head, Andrzej Wajda, perhaps Poland’s best-known director.

“It was purely political,” Kawalerowicz said. “The unit was considered anti-socialist,” and two of its films have not been released.

Three directors from Studio X left Poland and are now working in Western Europe, according to Kawalerowicz. And the dozen remaining directors were dispersed to other film units. This includes Wajda, who is working on a Polish-French co-production of Dostoevski’s “Possessed.” A previous Wajda film, “Danton,” also was a Polish-French co-production.

Other Polish directors also have been working outside of Poland, mostly on co-productions. But economics, rather than politics, has been responsible.

“This is for us business. Films cost three times more than they did five years ago, so it’s very necessary we make films in co-production with other countries,” said Kawalerowicz, who added that co-productions with Western countries provide valuable hard currency with which to buy highly prized Eastman color film stock.

Kawalerowicz’s next film, dealing with the theme of “a dictator without power,” will be about Napoleon’s final years on the island of St. Helena and will be a Polish-Yugoslavian-West German co-production. Shooting is to begin this year.

This has been a period when films by many Polish directors have dealt with the past. But Kawalerowicz said the universality of historical themes, rather than political conditions, has led him to repeatedly turn to the past.

“Mother Joan’ is a very old film (1960), but you can see it all the time,” he said. “The problem today is the same as it was then. The same with my ‘Pharoh’ (1965). The struggles over power and politics stay the same; they don’t change.”

Kawalerowicz’s initial problems with “Austeria” even show that a historical film can sometimes be politically unacceptable.

Following the rejection of his “Austeria” script in 1968, the director spent much of the next three years in Italy, where he directed a Polish-Italian co-production, and then didn’t make another film until 1977.

“For seven years, I did not do anything at all; I stopped believing film had a purpose,” admitted Kawalerowicz, who has made only 14 films since his start in 1952 but now apparently is getting his second wind. “I rarely make films because I only make a film when I can say something important about the problems of love, or politics, or faith.”