36 | Sight&Sound | April 2020VACLAV MARHOUL THE PAINTED BIRDis revealed in the last scene, but otherwise the
film’s atrocity exhibition is conducted at a strictly
local level. And in this the film encapsulates the experi-
ence of living in what historian Timothy Snyder calls
“the bloodlands”, stretching from central Poland to east-
ern Russia and incorporating Ukraine, Belarus and the
Baltic States, which from 1933 to 1945 experienced, to
quote Snyder “mass violence of a sort never before seen
in history”. The 14 million victims were mostly native to
that region: Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians
and Balts, very few of them wearing military uniform,
and while the perpetrators were often loyal to either Hit-
ler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, sometimes they
were driven by more ancient enmities.
It was widely assumed that Kosinski’s novel was set
in the author’s native Poland (exacerbated by the erro-
neous initial impression that it was autobiographical),
but the text never specifies the location and the ethnic-
ity of its pre-teenage protagonist is similarly vague: his
non-Aryan physical features let him pass for either Jew
or Roma, and he’s constantly ‘Othered’ by people look-
ing for an easy excuse for persecution. Kosinski’s novel
was written in English, but despite casting Harvey Keitel,
Barry Pepper, Julian Sands, Stellan Skarsgård and Udo
Kier, Marhoul presents the film’s sparse spoken content
in Interslavic, a pre-existing artificial language based on
Slavic grammar and vocabulary, but impossible to local-
ise beyond a generic ‘Eastern Europe’. For similar reasons,
Marhoul filmed in several countries: Poland, Slovakia,
Ukraine and his native Czech Republic.
In attempting to depict the experience of living in
the bloodlands, The Painted Bird joins a number of films
that present a more localised and historically specific
study of individual atrocities, in the process present-
ing filmmakers with numerous dilemmas about how
best to balance the need to at least give an impression
of the full horror without justifying accusations of sen-
sationalist wallowing. As Marhoul puts it: “How will we
realise what is good and what is not? If we do not know
the evil, we can’t find the good. It’s a complicated ques-
tion for me. I suppose that my film doesn’t provide any
responses to the audience. Each in his own way has to
understand the story. This is quite important because I
am still trying to find out myself. So many questions, but
no clear answers.”
On the whole, perhaps because of the comparative
lack of prurient interest that led to things like the 1970s
Nazisploitation phenomenon (Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS,
1974; SS Experiment Camp, 1976), the films that place
the Eastern European experience front and centre usu-
ally pass the tact test. Marhoul intended from the outset
to shoot in black and white, taking his cue from Steven
Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), in turn inspired by An-
drzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990), which saw the Polish master
return to black and white for the first time in decades. In
The Painted Bird, cinematographer Vladimír Smutny’s
gravely beautiful black-and-white images recall two as-
pects of the work of Don McCullin – the unflinchingly
blunt images of conflict, and the vast, empty landscapes
that the great war photographer turned to in later years.
Interviews with McCullin often touch on similar topics
to those that Marhoul raises about the ethics of depicting
human beings in a state of extreme violation.
Marhoul applies similar tact to individual set pieces.THE MISFORTUNES OF WAR
Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn (2007,
right), Elem Klimov’s Come
and See (1985, below right),
and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s
Childhood (1962, below)‘ How will we realise what is good
and what is not? If we do not
know the evil, we can’t find the
good. It’s a complicated question.
I’m still trying to find out myself’