He and a few other filmmakers walked a fine line between expressing sentiments in a way the government would approve and telling the whole truth about how they felt, only to have their work banned and unseen by the public.
Creating a film that the government approved of yet still sent a message took a certain kind of precision. Zanussi had this precision, said Padriac Kenney, director of the Polish Studies Center.
“Zanussi is a big name in Poland,” Kenney said.
Now, Zanussi will be coming to the IU Cinema on Friday to lecture students on his movies and his career spanning more than 60 years.
Zanussi studied physics and philosophy at the college level in Poland before eventually turning to filmmaking. He graduated from the Lodz Film ?Academy in 1966.
Since the beginning of his career, Zanussi has directed 79 films and been involved as a writer for 63 productions, according to IMDB.
Zanussi is also a board member of the European Film Academy and has received numerous distinctions and awards.
While Poland’s dictatorship during the 1970s wasn’t malicious and violent, it did force people to make compromises between their practical goals and their personal values, Kenney said.
“Those compromises are really kind of soul destroying,” he said.
Kenney said an example of this would be choosing between being a journalist, a practical profession and giving up your faith or maintaining your faith but not being able to get any job besides factory work.
“He takes the time to find complex moral dilemmas and then allows his characters to work through them,” Kenney said.
He said this kind of confinement plagued ?intellectuals seeking more powerful positions.
“This is the kind of world that people were trapped in,” he said.
Zanussi created a series of films known as “The Cinema of Moral Disquiet” that wasn’t meant to oppose the current lifestyle but instead to explore these traps and see how people grapple with them, Kenney said.
“This is what Zanussi tried to get at– what do those experiences look like?” he said.
Kenney said Zanussi recognized that these conflicts were not completely black and white.
“His characters are people who are really struggling,” he said.
Zanussi is still directing films and those films are still addressing moral issues, Kenney said.
The only thing changing is the type of struggle with which the characters are dealing.
Kenney said people leave the cinema thinking about the character’s ?decisions.
“The films have this sort of close-up view of human nature,” he said.
But it isn’t just a character’s private life that gets addressed, Kenney said. Zanussi is interested in the intersection between public and private lives.
“They’re forced to face the consequences of their private beliefs in the public world,” he said.
Kenney said he saw Zanussi speak in a packed auditorium in Poland 25 years ago. Seeing a filmmaker talk about his work was a great experience for him.
Along with the lecture, the IU Cinema showed “The Illumination” this past Saturday and will be showing “Camouflage” at 6:30 p.m. today and “The Constant Factor” at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Kenney said.
All of these films are a part of the “Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” series.
“This is the biggest guest to come from Poland to IU since President Lech Walesa came,” he said.
