剧情介绍
An essay by Rafal Marszalek:
Pills for Aurelia - Who needs a doctor?
The average cinemagoer knows little about the filmmaker Stanislaw Lenartowicz. Born in 1921, he served in the Polish Home Army during World War II in the Vilnius District where he was arrested and sent to a Soviet forced-labour camp. After the war he studied Polish and Wroclaw University and directing at the Film School in Lodz. He graduated in film studies in 1953, a low period for Polish culture. He made several educational films in the first few years of his career, but the man who was one of the greatest talents in Polish cinematography did not make use of his great abilities. Few of his feature films stood the test of time and ideological changes, although he definitely could not be counted among the so-called regime artists.
Cinema was Lenartowicz's great passion. However, when artists were completely dependent on the communist authorities, this passion was a sentance; if they could not live without filmmaking, they had to include elements in their films that would satisfy their providers. A typical example is Lenartowicz's The Last Days of Peace (Pamietnik pani Hanki), a satire on the pre-war upper classes. Such concessions not only prevented such films from being as good as they should have been, but they led to a lack of style coherence and misrepresented the meanings of the films. Ironically, during social and political turbulence, these concessions constituted ambiguous "evidence" against their authors.
Today Giuseppe in Warsaw, sometimes shown on television, seems to be the best-known film of Lenartowicz, who first attracted attention in 1956 with his Winter Twilight (Zimowy zmierzch) that tried to break the barriers of social realism with a more poetic style. Giuseppe in Warsaw is a well-made comedy that draws attention to an important generational aspect of the filmmaker's work. The ability to perceive the comical aspects of even the starkest reality was one of the most characteristic traits of the group of artists from the war generation. This is worth noting because the works of many filmmakers and screenwriters from the generation of Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski and Tadeusz Gajcy are unintelligible or seem coarse if not viewed from the context of the artistic consciousness of those born in the 1920's. Pills for Aurelia is a typical example of the film which is completely unintelligible without considering the context and the political power distorting the message of that generation.
This political pressure fused many ambiguities into Pills for Aurelia. The adopted neorealist convention (the result of the heavy influence of Italian neorealism which was very popular at that time) was impossible to follow when the story referred to events that could not be discussed openly. One of the film sequences introduces slightly surrealistic features from the borderline between the real world and a dream; however, this does not solve the problem of talking about something regarded as taboo. Such was the character of all attempts at expressing the deepest truths about the war generation. The Gordian knot of Polish culture was how to create a real story about Home Army soldiers and redevelop the viewers respect for them without the possibility to show even the slightest historical truth. It is hard to blame filmmakers for having been unable to cut this knot - especially if they were to later persecuted for "spreading lies" about who were heroes and who were not.
"Heroes lie at the cemetery"