THE conP‘onATIon (PG)144mm coo.
.\ I“'OUSE OF THE DEAD (15) 90min .
FALc'oNs (15) 96min .0
THE PRiNCESS DIARIES 2: ROYAL ENGAGEMENT (U) 113mm 00
POLISH POETRY AND GRIT
Miles Fielder seeks out the Jacques Derrida of modern British cinema PAWEL PAWLIKOWSKI, the writer and director of the remarkable new film My Summer of Love.
There’s a misconception that Polish-English writer-director Pawel
Pawlikowski (pictured) is a filmmaker in the realist vein. His feature debut .
Last Resort may have utilised the grim setting of an immigrant camp in the '- t: : -- . . -. i _ .. I. » ' l- -' south of England, and follow-up My Summer of Love might be adapted ' ‘ ' '
from a novel set against the backdrop of the equally grim reality of the .
Yorkshire mining towns during Thatcher’s reign, but despite that - and 1 t z" ' z -- ‘* :'
despite a decade making documentaries - Pawlikowski has spent his entire ' career eschewing the realist aesthetic. ‘I detest these gritty British films in which people shout and swear and gesticulate a lot,’ he says. ‘And the camera’s shaky, which is supposed to authenticate the whole thing.‘
If that’s the case, what in the name of Ken Loach is Pawlikowski doing accepting a Creative Arts Fellowship at Oxford titled: Realistic Genres of Contemporary Filmmaking? ‘lt’s quite a nice thing to have,‘ Pawlikowski says, ‘because the films | make are low budget and I don’t make them very often. It’s not much money, but it’s alright. Also, it makes you think more about what you’re doing. I started jotting things down: my philosophy of aesthetic and ethics. It’ll result in some kind of . . . boring book.
‘Anyway, realism is such a wide term,’ he continues, now beginning to sound like his (other) day job: National Film School tutor. ‘Cinema is total artifice anyway. The aim is never to just reflect reality - why bother making films at all? It’s always transforming reality, even with my documentaries. When I was making them I was discovering things about filmmaking, about ~ : . . ' " ~ ~ ' ~ .7 am the world. They were, in a way, really original.’ . z , 1' v : ' .° w ' " .w
Pawlikowski began his filmmaking career with the BBC’s once great 3 1" T. -' z’ : '- °' - Community Programme Unit making documentaries about born-again " ’ " ' ’ ’ ’ priests in Yorkshire, balmy Eastern European musicians, Dostoevsky’s 1-. . .. . , . great grandson and a poet who recited his poems above a burning ." '; °' ’. :: " w '- " Sarajevo. But Birt’s more commercial BBC served him ill and in the late 1 ;y:’ ' i ' ' ’1': t ' ’ nineties he switched to fiction filmmaking. .: ., ' .. i , ..
‘It took me a long time to write scripts that I could film,’ he says. ‘With , ' r; r: q ' gm ': .r: : Last Resort and My Summer of Love I wanted to create something that’s ” ' ' ‘ ’ ' ' removed from reality, I wanted the characters to be real. The idea wasn't to create a documentary realism, the idea was to make you feel you were . , , . experiencing something real, but that’s also somehow poetic and different.’ ' .' ' ' 5; ';z: ; arr, .' ’32:? :,
I My Summer of Love is on selected release from Fri 22 Oct. See rev/9w. page 46. v Err: t,- ~23" .3 ,,
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