Into the darkness
The staggeringly complex work of Polish director Agnieszka Holland is characterized by contrasts: period films speak of the present, great history is reflected in intimate portraits, and the external gaze she casts on her homeland reveals above all its innermost self.
Agnieszka Holland was born in Warsaw in 1948; the then-recent past and Stalinist present are inextricably woven into her own family history. Holland’s Catholic mother was active in the resistance during the war, and the parents of her Jewish father were murdered in the ghetto. When Holland was 13, her father died by falling out of a window under circumstances that were never fully clarified (though it’s known that it happened in the presence of the secret service) – a motif that recurs several times across her filmography.
At some point, she chose the movies as her form of art and found Czech cinema to be the most modern. At the age of 17, she went to Prague, experienced the 1968 “Spring” as a student, and was arrested for her solidarity with the protests. Years later, she translated Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” into Polish, a novel in which a young woman begins her career as a photographer during the suppression of the uprising. Holland herself returned to Poland completely changed from these experiences and started working in theater and television.
For her first feature ›Provincial Actors‹ (1979), she shot additional scenes that were only intended for the state censors. The trick worked – even though the film itself was about censorship. In the summer of 1980, Solidarność brought about a political thaw, and Holland made ›Fever‹ (1981), a period film about the Polish struggle against the tsar. She won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale, but in Poland the tide turned again and the film was banned by the censors. Her third directorial work ›A Lonely Woman‹ (1981), a merciless critique of socialism, was not released at all. In December 1981, while the director was in Sweden presenting her debut, martial law was declared in Poland, forcing her into exile in France. She would never again live permanently in her home country. She did reconstruct contemporary Warsaw in a Parisian studio, however, for her film ›The Priest Murder‹ (1988), about the murder by the Polish authorities of Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Solidarność supporter. The first of three works featuring actor Ed Harris, this film is at once a passionate plea for freedom and a harsh portrait of the circumstances under which it is lost.
Holland’s early films in particular can be unsparing. Not only do revolutions fail, but faith, hope, and love fail alongside them. Stories end in murder and suicide. But Holland doesn’t leave it at that, she reaches back in time, into the darkness. She made three films about the Holocaust: ›Angry Harvest‹ (1985) in German, ›In Darkness‹ (2011) in Polish, and in-between these two films, ›Europa, Europa‹ (1990), in which the horror of war is reflected in the face of a 14-year-old.
Together with English-American casts, she went further back, to the late 19th century. The children’s film ›The Secret Garden‹ (1993), then ›Total Eclipse‹ (1995) with the young Leonardo DiCaprio, and finally the Henry James adaptation ›Washington Square‹ (1997) deepen Holland’s themes: a child’s view to loveless adults, fragile artist biographies, and the struggle against reactionary conventions.
The most significant film to date among her late work could not be more contemporary: ›Green Border‹ (2023), a reckoning with European refugee policy. Holland was celebrated upon the film’s world premiere at Venice and won seven (!) awards. And yet, the film was subjected to a brutally disparaging campaign by the Polish state and even compared to fascist propaganda. Evidently, the battle for the past, present, and future of Poland – and Europe – is far from over for Agnieszka Holland.
