An excerpt from the booklet essay by Tomasz Kolankiewicz

Piotr Szulkin is one the most mysterious and separate Polish filmmakers. While his colleagues worked on the social dramas focused on day-to-day existence and dilemmas of life in the PPR [Polish People's Republic] within the so-called ‘cinema of moral anxiety movement’, he created the most unique, auteur-driven science fiction films not only in Poland but in the entire Soviet Bloc - and gave us some of the most pessimistic reflections on humanity. One might call his films a moving image of depression and social despair.

In his early years Szulkin wanted to be a painter. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts [Akademia Sztuk Pięknych] in Warsaw (and where he met Krystyna Janda – a star of many of his films and a great Polish actress – Andrzej Wajda’s muse who startled the world with her performances in his Man of Marble [Człowiek z marmuru, 1976] and Interrogation [Przesłuchanie, 1982] by Ryszard Bugajski, a role that won her the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival). He wanted to study film because as he said he already knew how to paint, but cinema was a mystery to him. He also considered studying philosophy but at the time he was applying for university the philosophical studies were closed (due to post-March 1968 student strikes and political turmoil). He ended up at Łódź Film School – the home of many generations of post-war Polish filmmakers. He started training as a director of photography, but soon he realised that he wanted to direct. He was an outsider. He experimented with animation and documentaries in search of his artistic voice. Main topics: the absurdity of daily routines, and Sergei Parajanov-like fairytale folklore experimental short film adaptations of classical Polish literature. He used a variety of techniques, ingenious framing, experiments with sound. He gets noticed immediately and puts himself on the map.

At this time he starts thinking about what should be his feature debut. Bożena Janicka (a prominent Polish film critic and an editor of the Polish section of Film magazine at the time) introduces him to a promising young literature and film writer Tadeusz Sobolewski (an upcoming star of the magazine at the time, now one the most important and established Polish film critics and writers of all time). Szulkin had always been a bookworm, even though his imagination was strictly that of a painter not a writer, he was an eager and acute reader. So was Sobolewski, a graduate of Polish Studies at the Warsaw University which were, and still are, mainly focused on literature and literary theory. As mentioned in Lifewrit (Życiopis), a colossal book-length interview with Szulkin by Piotr Kletowski and Piotr Marecki focussing on his life and works, both young men shared a similar love of literature. Sobolewski was friends with Miron Białoszewski, a great and extraordinary poet, playwriter and actor. And it was Białoszewski who gave Sobolewski a copy of Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem, a book that Sobolewski then suggested to Szulkin as a possible inspiration. Now a somewhat forgotten pre-Kafkaesque novel written in Prague between 1907 and 1914 and first published as a book in 1915, Der Golem is a mysterious esoteric tale rooted deeply in the occult, Kabbalah, and most of all in the old legend of a clay man – ‘The Golem of Prague’ as described by Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Meyrink’s work is one of the strangest of its time: H P Lovecraft described it as one of the best examples of Jewish folklore-inspired weird fiction and called it ‘the most magnificent weird thing I've come across in aeons!’. But the book is so much more than just weird fiction. There is only one catch: it’s quite unapproachable. Divided into sections (some of them written during the author’s mental breakdown), it misguides the reader, changes the tempo, uses dreamlike analogies, and duplicates characters. Meyrink was an eager student of the occult, he was interested in theosophy, Kabbalah, Christian Sophiology, Eastern mysticism and Tarot: all these mesmerisms take control of the plot, turning the narrative into a labyrinth-like structure where we are not certain whether the characters are asleep or awake. Szulkin got lost in this maze. He told Sobolewski that he could not comprehend the story, he couldn’t grasp it. They started working on the script together: Sobolewski reading a chapter of the book then describing it to Szulkin, who then put it into his own words. Szulkin used Meyrink’s book quite freely: he changed the characters names, combined them, and most of all tried to define its essence, which was a philosophical riddle about our true identity, and combined it with his reflections on his day-to-day struggles in a communist reality of PPR in the late 1970s. Szulkin prepared a novella and started looking for a way to put it on screen. [...] Szulkin builds his team: the script is prepared together with Taduesz Sobolewski, the DoP is Zygmunt Samosiuk, an experienced man with a track record having lensed films by Andrzej Wajda, Walerian Borowczyk and Janusz Majewski; set designer Zbigniew Warpechowski, an outstating artist and a scenographer, and a pioneer of performance art in Poland; music by prominent and established composers Zygmunt Konieczny and Józef Skrzek, and editing by Elżbieta Kurkowska (who went on to edit all of Szulkin’s films). The tarot is laid out. And the first card in Szulkin’s deck is The Hangman, of course.

Tomasz Kolankiewicz's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.