Sight&Sound - 04.2020

38 | Sight&Sound | April 2020

VACLAV MARHOUL THE PAINTED BIRD

are seen through the horrified eyes of a child, a

not uncommon narrative strategy – Andrei Tar-

kovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Lajos Koltai’s Fateless

(2005) are other distinguished regional examples). Ján

Kadár and Elmar Klos’s The Shop on the High Street (1965)

does something similar, but their victim is a befuddled old

woman (Oscar-nominated Ida Kaminska) whose ‘crime’ is

to be Jewish when the Slovak authorities were enthusias-

tically collaborating with the Nazis. Tellingly, there’s only

one briefly glimpsed swastika: the film’s dominant op-

pression symbol is the double-cross of the Hlinka Guard,

the Slovak People’s Party militia charged with enforcing

‘Aryanisation’ policies that at the time (1942) went further

than equivalents in Germany itself.

There’s a simplistic tendency to think of the blood-

lands’ victims as a monolithic group, but films like Ag-

nieszka Holland’s In Darkness (2011) and Wojciech Smar-

zowski’s Volhynia (aka Hatred, 2016) stress that Jews, Poles

and Ukrainians had as many differences as similarities

• indeed, Holland insisted that an initially English-lan-
  guage project be presented in Polish, Ukrainian, German

and Yiddish in order to reflect this. Often as viscerally ex-

treme as The Painted Bird, Volhynia is one of the cinema’s

most vivid recent depictions of how communities that

have intermingled for centuries can swiftly become

mortal enemies when given appropriate ideological

impetus. Similarly, Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath

(2012) deals with the topic of active participation in anti-

Semitic atrocities by Poles as well as Germans, a subject

that the present Polish government has recently made

virtually taboo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ryszard Buga-

jski, director of the memorably confrontational Interro-

gation (1982), went to his grave unable to raise funds to

dramatise the Kielce pogrom of 1946, the deadliest attack

on Jews since WWII, and whose perpetrators were Poles.

Marcel Lozinski’s queasily gripping Kielce documentary

Witnesses (1987) accrues much of its Shoah-like power by

dint of interviewing actual participants.

At the end of The Painted Bird, Marhoul urges the viewer

to sit through the end credits, to process what they’ve

just seen while listening to the film’s only non-diegetic

music: Israeli composer Naomi Shemer’s ‘Horchat Hai

Caliptus’. Petr Nikolaev’s Lidice (2011) offers a similarly

moving accompaniment to the end credits in the form

of a parallel roll-call of real-life women bearing the first

name Lidice, a tradition that began in Catholic countries

(especially in Latin America) after 1943 as a means of

keeping the village’s memory alive, and which persists to

this day. Many of the films mentioned above end in utter

despair, with the protagonists either dead (sometimes by

suicide) or faced with lifelong post-traumatic stress disor-

der, so any attempt, no matter how fleeting, to create an

upbeat ending that doesn’t seem gratuitously forced or

sentimental offers at least a crumb of comfort.

The Painted Bird is released in UK cinemas on 27 March

VACLAV MARHOUL ON

THE PAINTED BIRD

GESTATION

I read The Painted Bird

before I worked on

Tobruk [2008], and

when I finished that I

started to think about

my new project, and The Painted Bird

came to me as a boomerang. It hit my

head all the time, but I didn’t believe

that an unknown Czech director could

buy the rights. Warren Beatty tried

to get The Painted Bird. He was a very

close friend of Jerzy Kosinski – they

wrote the screenplay for Reds [1981] –

but Kosinski never agreed. He said he

would trust only two directors: Buñuel

and Fellini. So I checked the rights,

which are with the Spertus Jewish

Institute in Chicago. I wrote them a

letter, and didn’t expect any response.

But they responded, and in 2009 I came

to Chicago and they interrogated me –

that’s the correct expression – for more

than an hour: “What is the mission

of the book? What is the message of

the story? What would you like to

say?” And I always read this book as

being about the three most important

things in life: good, hope and love.

PRODUCTION

For four years I tried to finance this

movie, and it was a nightmare. Every

year I went to the [European Film]

Market in Berlin and to Cannes and I

met so many potential co-producers

who said, “No, no, never. It’s a harrowing

story, no English language, black and

white: forget it.” But finally, after four

years, I put it together as a co-production

with the Czech Republic, Slovakia and

Ukraine. Then it took one-and-a-half

years of principal photography and

ten months for the post-production.

A CHILD’S EYES

Most of [the scene in which the

labourer’s eyes are gouged out] is

different in the book. [In the film] the

boy really loves the labourer,

and goes to give him the

eyes because he believes

that maybe he will put

them back in and will see

again. At that moment

he’s quite naive. I read a

very good book: Resilience,

by the French child

psychologist Boris Cyrulnik.

He is describing children in a crisis

moment, like in concentration camps

and war, and paradoxically the children

are in much better condition than the

adults because they have two big

advantages. First, they do not remember

much. Second, children cannot plan the

future. We know what should happen

in the next ten years, but children are

just living day to day and hour by hour.

So the boy is simply falling, deeper and

deeper through the dark, but he doesn’t

know. We know the dark’s there, but he

doesn’t. That’s horrifying for me, not the

scene with the eyes.

INFLUENCES

Three films have been very influential.

If you remember the scene in Andrei

Rublev [1966] where the Mongolians

are going to murder all those people

in the forest. It’s very similar when my

Cossacks are attacking the village. [The

shot of the naked Ludmila, a woman

who has been ostracised from her

village] is the same shot, where she’s

crossing the meadow, that’s in Marketa

Lazarová [1967]. I did this with full

respect to Frantisek Vlácil, because he

is one of the most wonderful, biggest

world directors that ever existed. And

the third film is by Elem Klimov, Come

and See [1985]. In terms of the camera

and editing, it’s not so special, but the

story and the fact that Klimov didn’t

make any compromises was wonderful.

And I tried to show my respect to

Klimov’s work [by casting that film’s

lead actor] Alexei Kravchenko.

THE ENDING

In the book, I didn’t really like the

ending. His mother stays alive, his father

stays alive, they have another child, he

has a small brother, and he breaks his

arm. And finally he’s going somewhere

in Switzerland, in the mountains, he’s

skiing and the avalanche is coming.

I thought so much about how to

finish my movie without the

sentiment, just simply to

send a signal of hope.

And after so much

thought I found the

solution that he will

write his name on the

window of the bus. I

was so happy, and said,

“Well, yes, that’s it.”

‘ For four years I tried to finance it,

and it was a nightmare. I met so

many producers who said, “It’s

harrowing, no English language,

black and white: forget it”’