BD 72 Jerzy Skolimowski: Walkover, Barrier & Dialogue 20 40 60 + Short Films

[MichaelB]

Schorm is also one of the lead actors in The Party and the Guests.

[ryannichols7]

I didn't get to comment on when this was officially announced - but "wow" is indeed the correct reaction. the fact that these posts date from 10 years ago (and there are others elsewhere suggesting Second Run release Skolimowski's early work) is a very nice "dream come true" moment for Second Run. I'm assuming that Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska did a new subtitle translation for each of these, as was alluded to before?

three years in a row Second Run have gone for an exciting boxset to close the year. I was worried the Ben Rivers set (which I'm also excited for!) was gonna be it for the year and we'd have to wait longer on this. getting Dialog 20-40-60 and the shorts is icing on the cake. plus more love for Peter Solan and Zbynìk Brynych, each of whom I've seen one film from so far and absolutely loved (not coincidentally the two Second Run have put out on Bluray - Before Tonight is Over and especially ...And the Fifth Horseman is Fear, the latter going in the all time canon). can't wait to see the specs on this!

amazing how we, assuming we get all the shorts, went from having none of Skolimowski's Polish work on BD to all of it in the span of a year, thanks to the BFI and now Second Run. I was going to watch the Rysopis/Hands Up! disc but will now wait until I can survey all of these together

[swo17]

Bariera's great, everyone should watch it right now!

[MichaelB]

I'm assuming that Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska did a new subtitle translation for each of these, as was alluded to before?

I believe Michał Oleszczyk has given them a going-over, and he's amply qualified.

And yes, the conscious intention behind this project was to fill in all of the gaps in his Sixties Polish career, from the earliest Łódź film-school shorts up to Dialog 20-40-60 (technically Czechoslovak rather than Polish, but I doubt anyone's minded to quibble).

The only thing missing now is the 1967 cut of Hands Up!, which I believe the BFI tried to get for their Skolimowski double-bill package, but came up against an unexpected rights problem. (But the 1981 cut is Skolimowski's preferred version.)

[ianthemovie]

three years in a row Second Run have gone for an exciting boxset to close the year.

I'm putting in my request now for an Apichatpong box for December 2024, with restored versions of Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours.

My long-shot wish, though, would be a Czech fairy-tales box, to include Karel Kachyna's Little Mermaid and a Blu-ray upgrade of Three Wishes for Cinderella alongside Herz's already-released Beauty and the Beast.

[Aunt Peg]

I know this is a long-shot, not just for Second Sight but any physical media distributor, but I'd love to see a restoration of Skolimowski's completely wacky comedy King, Queen, Knave (1972). David Niven, Gina Lollobrigida & John Moulder-Brown are all a hoot is this crazy one of kind film.

[sabbath]

I know this is a long-shot, not just for Second Sight but any physical media distributor, but I'd love to see a restoration of Skolimowski's completely wacky comedy King, Queen, Knave (1972). David Niven, Gina Lollobrigida & John Moulder-Brown are all a hoot is this crazy one of kind film.

Run! Run! Run!

[MichaelB]

The one that really is worth restoring is Success is the Best Revenge from 1984, whose UK rights seem to be permanently in limbo (Skolimowski famously lost his house over its financial failure), but it was a co-production with Gaumont, so fingers crossed that they might get round to it. (It’s in English, so there won’t be any language issues.)

Out of all Skolimowski’s British films, this is the one that comes closest to the freewheeling spirit of his 1960s Polish films, but I’m not sure mid-Eighties audiences knew what to make of it. Put it like this, it certainly shouldn’t be anyone’s first Skolimowski!

[MichaelB]

(For the record, Skolimowski has pretty much disowned The Adventures of Gerard, King Queen Knave, Torrents of Spring and Ferdydurke. Perhaps not insignificantly, they’re all literary adaptations, and Skolimowski’s generally much happier working with his own original material - although The Shout is a major exception; he ranks that film very highly indeed, as well he should.)

[What A Disgrace]

December 11

• Walkover and Barrier presented from new 2K restorations by Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF), Poland.
• Dialogue 20 40 60 presented from a new 2K restoration by the Slovak Film Institute.
• Introductions to Walkover and Barrier by Polish cinema expert Michał Oleszczyk.
• Audio commentaries on Walkover and Barrier by producer and film historian Michael Brooke.
• Jerzy Skolimowski's rarely seen early short films, newly remastered in HD: The Menacing Eye (Oko wykol, 1960); Little Hamlet (Hamleś, 1960); Erotyk (1961); Your Money or Your Life (Pieniądze albo życie, 1961).
• Booklets with new writing on the films by filmmaker, author and Polish cinema specialist David Thompson.
• New and improved English subtitle translations.
• World and UK premieres on Blu-ray.
• Region-free Blu-rays (A/B/C).
+ MORE TBC

[swo17]

[MichaelB]

This would have come out in 2009, as per the start of the thread, but I'm afraid it took me 14 years to come up with the commentaries. Sorry about that.

[zedz]

We understand: you had to wait for the technology to become available.

[MichaelB]

Actually, joking aside, Skolimowski is an absolute bastard to record commentaries for.

Ironically, my shorter commissions like Walkover and Diamonds of the Night turned out to be the toughest ones, and for very similar reasons - calculatedly slippery and elusive films like that are hard to do scene-specific commentaries for anyway, and I was trying not to repeat myself more than was strictly necessary. So with Diamonds, I couldn't say very much about Jan Němec's career because I knew it would be covered in the booklet courtesy of my reprinted essay from the original DVD release, and with Walkover I was trying not to repeat too much of what I said in my video piece on the BFI edition of Identification Marks None and Hands Up!, thanks to my strong suspicion that there'll be a massive overlap between purchasers of that release and purchasers of the Second Run box.

(A small amount of repetition is unavoidable - I could hardly not mention Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers at all when it's the other Sixties film in which Skolimowski plays a washed-up boxer! - but I don't tell the story of how Skolimowski got involved with it in anywhere near as much detail.)

[MichaelB]

Incidentally, with regard to the subtitles, when I was sent a copy of the latest version of Barrier for mixing/syncing purposes I was delighted to note that "sword" had been changed to the correct "sabre" (the spoken word is clearly "szabla" rather than "miecz"), and confirmed with Second Run that that was the kind of tweaking that Michał Oleszczyk did. And this stuff matters more than you might think, because the fact that the protagonist ends up in possession of an actual Polish sabre rather than a run-of-the-mill sword is surprisingly important.

(Thanks to a helpful close-up of its handle, I was even able to identify it as a Żeleźniak, a cavalry sword manufactured at the time of the 1919-20 Polish-Bolshevik War - I don't know if this was a deliberately subversive touch on Skolimowski's part, since mentioning that particular war, like the 1940 Katyń massacre, was absolutely taboo in Poland at the time, or whether the props man merely obtained it after being asked to get hold of a Polish sabre, but stuff like that is commentary gold!)

[brundlefly]

Actually, joking aside, Skolimowski is an absolute bastard to record commentaries for.

Hope that right out of the gate you launch into an explanation of how this transition between the first two shots in Walkover was accomplished. I find myself staring at it on a loop and getting lost every time in that combination of train car jostle and zoom out.

GIFShow

[headacheboy]

I wasn't certain what to make of Skolimowski when I saw EO (I'm a bit ashamed to say I'd seen nothing of his work prior to that). Then I saw the three films on Criterion Channel and I found him very interesting. But what absolutely blew my mind was the BFI set that just came out. I loved that set! Since Second Run is probably my favorite boutique label, I'm quite excited for their set of his work. But seeing that shot brundlefly posted, I'm even more excited for this Second Run set. (And as a huge fan of MichaelB's commentaries I'm right there with brundlefly: how the hell did he do that?)

[domino harvey]

I’ve seen some of his other works and was indifferent at best, but Walkover and Barrier were two of my biggest discoveries last year, and this release is hopefully going to shoot them (back?) into the canon where they belong. There are so many moments that elicit similar awe, especially the incredible timing of the long motorcycle/train shot in Walkover

[MichaelB]

As for how the hell he did that, I've gone over that shot endlessly, and in high definition, and I think it genuinely is a single shot, albeit one planned and executed down to the micron. It's not the only shot like that in the film, although it's particularly startling on account of it being the first.

Here's the relevant bit of the commentary:

And there he is – Jerzy Skolimowski himself, but before I focus on him I want to draw attention to the first of the film’s many rug-pulling moments, in this case when it turns out that up to now we’ve been watching a reflection in a large mirror, and that Elżbieta Czyżewska's character was presumably looking at herself one final time before deciding to end it all, a detail that’s all the more poignant for the fact that our realisation of this has been delayed.

[What A Disgrace]

$42.99 on DiabolikDVD.

[brundlefly]

As for how the hell he did that, I've gone over that shot endlessly, and in high definition, and I think it genuinely is a single shot, albeit one planned and executed down to the micron. It's not the only shot like that in the film, although it's particularly startling on account of it being the first.

Here's the relevant bit of the commentary:

And there he is – Jerzy Skolimowski himself, but before I focus on him I want to draw attention to the first of the film’s many rug-pulling moments, in this case when it turns out that up to now we’ve been watching a reflection in a large mirror, and that Elżbieta Czyżewska's character was presumably looking at herself one final time before deciding to end it all, a detail that’s all the more poignant for the fact that our realisation of this has been delayed.

A question for next time, then. The idea that it is a single shot is tantalizing given how many intricate long takes there are in this, and I love how he has an angled mirror carried in front of him when he’s at the baggage check counter, as if he’s commenting on the previous shot amidst the ongoing flurry of moving furniture.

But if it’s a single take and just a mirror reflection, how do we see the full length of the train and then jump into the car behind Andrzej? That jostle and zoom could hide some things, and before I’d wondered if he was wiping with the mirror frame as it’s pulled across. Someone couldn’t hand the camera off through the window without appearing in the reflection. The angle of the mirror makes space unclear, but it doesn’t look like the width of the car interior and Andrzej’s action precisely match his mirrored image. It also looks to me like the Elżbieta Czyżewska character isn’t reflected, just standing with her back to the mirror and looking into the lens; when she ducks out it looks like there’s a flash of fixed glare against the moving train in the mirror behind her, though that could just be digital noise. (At least on the Scorsese box blu.)

Skolimowski uses projection screens later in the apartment scene; though I have to think it’s too bright to do that on location, could this half-block train station street be a set? Boundless resources make it all easier: Then, we’re just staying in the interior train car (which may instead be a fake front that gets driven or pushed across the set when “the train” starts moving again) while they roll the projection footage behind Czyżewska. She ducks out, and we hold on that until the train jostle happens. Zoom out as they pull the frame away and start the live part of the scene.

[MichaelB]

The film’s budget was minuscule - in fact, the primary reason why he shot such long takes was that his shooting ratio was something like three to one, and he found this more efficient than shooting master shots and multiple angles etc. So you can very safely assume that the station was NOT a set - in fact, I’m not sure that anything was shot in the studio.

Poland basically had no tradition of highly personal experimental auteur cinema outside short documentaries and animation, so feature-length exceptions like Walkover and Tadeusz Konwicki’s The Last Day of Summer (1958) had to be made on tiny budgets or not at all. Skolimowski had access to things like cranes that were presumably owned by the Syrena Film Unit, so could pull off more ambitious shots than the average micro-budget director, but nothing he’s said about the film suggests that his resources were anything other than ultra-limited. It’s only when Walkover became a substantial critical and festival hit that people were prepared to take a chance on a bigger budget (and indeed belatedly release his shot-at-film-school first feature) - hence the noticeably more expensive Barrier, which has several major local stars.

[MichaelB]

Excerpts from the commentaries for Walkover and Barrier.

[brundlefly]

Looking forward to hearing these in full and hoping someone was standing by with an oxygen tank at the end. (Haven't seen Barrier so did not sample that clip.)

[ryannichols7]

I'm assuming that Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska did a new subtitle translation for each of these, as was alluded to before?

I believe Michał Oleszczyk has given them a going-over, and he's amply qualified.

And yes, the conscious intention behind this project was to fill in all of the gaps in his Sixties Polish career, from the earliest Łódź film-school shorts up to Dialog 20-40-60 (technically Czechoslovak rather than Polish, but I doubt anyone's minded to quibble).

The only thing missing now is the 1967 cut of Hands Up!, which I believe the BFI tried to get for their Skolimowski double-bill package, but came up against an unexpected rights problem. (But the 1981 cut is Skolimowski's preferred version.)

I remember you made a post awhile ago mentioning Skolimowski was wanting to do his own subs, but Oleszczyk is certainly qualified to do so! if anything, I'm actually really surprised there's no new interviews with Skolimowski on this set- since you've done quite a few with him before Michael, maybe you can inform whether he's a fan of talking about his older work or not? I actually have no clue of this answer. otherwise, this box is obviously amply loaded