Talk:Lech Kowalski

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This huge slab of text appeared one day. Copyvio? Who knows. Stevage 01:41, 3 February 2009 (UTC) In some way, Lech Kowalski has always been ahead of his time, or at least-if we take a look at his classic works, such as DOA: A Right of Passage (1980) or Gringo (1984, a.k.a. Story of a Junkie), they are simply here, present, contemporary, but actually far ahead into the future of films, where happiness and suffering are possible, hon-est, as important parts of what people call life, and still ever-so-rarely do... And even the fact" that now, when he is dedicating his films to distant past, he is being "dis-covered" even by those who probably never would have seen Gringo as a matter of principle, even that has its own logic. Not a simple one, but Kowalski was never afraid of such ambivalence, on the contrary, he always tried to look for it and usually found it. Lech Kowalski was born in 1951 in London, where his family fled. What they fled from is explained in the first half of the film East of Paradise (2005) by his mother, Maria Werla Kowalski. As a child, Kowalski came to the USA. His family moved to a small industrial town Utica (N.Y.) where, just like in England, he never felt at home-up until the age of ten his English was, apparently, quite bad. Polish –the language of his parents and their whole world-was much closer to him. At the age of thirteen Kowalski got a second-hand Super-8 camera, at the age of fourteen he made his first film, The Danger Halls (1965), about high school and the horror of conformity. He tried to escape conformity by go-ing 'to New York, 'to the School of Visual Arts, where he met one of his biggest role models, Shirley Clarke. The part of East of Paradise about the mother is usually compared to Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), although it seems the point of reference is actually Clarks's Portrait of Jason (1967.), where an Afro-American bisexual and a male prostitute opens up his soul to the camera, without much additional editing by the author. Another one of his role models at that time was Tom Reichman, who is nowadays known only by jazz aficionados thank to the great documentary Mingus (1968); Reichman could be an important role model for Kowalski: he was thought of as genius, he be-came famous as a master for all genres, he used to make porn movies as industrial movies, and in mid-70s he took his own life-the first of many people to have died too soon, who left some mark in Kowalski’s work. Kowalski himself also had his first experiences as a professional filmmaker by making porn movies: the mob allegedly financed and Kowalski made them; allegedly, they're lost... and, once again allegedly, they were so dark, depressing and rough, completely focused on the body and its fragility, that one had to ask himself who could have masturbated to such films? But that is how New York porn movies looked like in those years: paranoid and depressing, made under con-stant supervision, with a catholic feeling of guilt running through them, which was typical for the local culture and wasn't of religious nature; one of such works is the loops of Violence-what more is there to be said with such a title? Porn movies, by definition, are necessarily documentaries as well "and that is why documentaries about porn actors are always productively conflicting. Kowalski in his "first real" films, Sex Stars (1977) and Walter and Cutie (1978), takes a look at the everyday life and the lifestyle of the lumpen proletariat. Soon after punk stormed into New York and Kowalski was there. He saw and recognized the theme of his life: from DOA: A Right of passage to The Boot Factory (2002), the first part of his trilogy, The Fabulous Art of Surviving, a.k.a. The Wild Wild East. His work constantly (or even solely) revolves around punk culture in all its brutal beauty: Rough sounds, torn clothes-only the boots had to be solid, for defense -mountains of drugs, as well as the aware-ness of its own repulsiveness. When Kowalski made a film about homeless people, Rock Soup (1991), even that was punk. Actually, everything he's ever made is punk-he is Romuald Karmakar's step-brother. A part of this ethos is that there are no genre boundaries, there is only an at-titude towards people for whom it doesn't matter whether they are "acting" or they are simply "there", because they are always both, and it is always about being the opposite of the opposite, about partnership, about being there-one is never alone. Solidarity is what it is all about. East of Paradise, the third and final part of the trilogy The Fabu-lous Art of Survival, is the highlight of his work so far: an autoduography which takes us to the core of his work: hon-est compassion. With his film The Boot Factory, did Kow-alski return to his family's homeland? Not quite, because it isn't his homeland, or is it? Anyhow, he went to Poland, where his film DOA: A Right of passage and there he met members of a Polish punk band, who work in a boot factory. Their work is so successful, that they have enough time to listen to all punk records, starting with the commercial ones. The second part, On Hitler's Highway (2002), is a road-movie in the first person singular. We see people by the end of the highway, outsiders of all kinds-there, in the past, in their consciousness and mem-ory, the history of constantly destroyed Poland becomes visible, as well as Kowalski's attempt to make a relation-ship with that country. Finally, East of Paradise is the story about the 20th century told by two characters, Kowalski and his mother. The film is, as usual, structured in a very simple way: first the mother talks in front of the camera, since there are no images to accompany her story, then Kowalski, through off narration, talks about images from his early days of film making, creating new images behind them, which we can't see, but have to take a stand. Which might sound paradoxical only to those who can't stand Kowalski's ambivalence, to those who want to run away when they should stay, who don't want to look when they should. Enough of running away, we shall finally stay.

By Olaf Möller'

== Anger, passion, survival ==

Inseparable as they are from the filmmaker’s biography and from the places, the people and the ideas he chanced on, discussed and shared over a life’s time, Lech Kowalski’s films are like alarms sounded before the world. They are the vivid sign of a soul’s interior dismay which, since it travelled from London to the state of New York and later from there to Paris, has always been feeling stateless and undirected. In fact Kowalski’s filmmaking, although wavering in time and space, from New York’s porn industry, the punk clubs, the black ghettos, the tent cities and the memories of the heroes on the underground music scene during the Seventies, to Poland after the fall of the Wall and the U.S. after 9/11, is indeed aimed at one target: the heart, the soul and the spirit of its very auteur, which reflects the hearts, the souls and the spirits of the people whose beleaguered lives and painful memories he portrays. The real starting point, literally the mother-scene, as we find out in the last, amazing East of Paradise (2005), is the tragedy experienced by Kowalski’s mother, an old lady of Polish origins called Maria Werla. During World War Two, when she was a girl, Maria was deported to a Siberian gulag: a story of abrupt uprooting and hard survival that deeply marked Maria’s and her future family’s fate, and which, from the “egoistic” point of view of Kowalski’s filmmaking, gave origin to her son’s artwork or rather the grief in which his artwork is rooted. His mother’s deportation, like a blame that he unintentionally shoulders, affects his personal history, his film production and his way of looking, questioning and interpreting the world. His camera, be it 16 or 35mm, analogue or digital, observes and records reality with the passion of a man who is one with the artist and who digs up in the world the remainder of a personal story of grief, violence and injustice which has become universal. Kowalski is a pure filmmaker using cinema like an extension of his own heart and soul. He does not disguise the real, rather he thoroughly examines its body, materiality and substance. In fact the very body of his characters and the locations he explored become the real protagonists of his cinema: Dee Dee Ramone’s tattoos in Hey! Is Dee Dee Home? (2003), his mother Maria’s face in East of Paradise, the needle holes on John Spacely’s arm in Gringo (1984), the run-down houses of New York ghettos, Johnny Thunders’ wasted face in Born to Lose (1999) or Aukai Collins’s stump in Camera Gun (2003) and the roads of the Polish inland in On Hitler’s Highway (2002). The body is a medium to convey a deeper meaning and a vehicle establishing a correspondence between the filmmaker and the characters of his films. With Dee Dee Ramone, for instance, rather than an interview, the director conducts a subtle dialogue proving the tie between two people who survived their glorious days: the rock star’s tattoos tell us the story of his life while Kowalski gets through the borderline separating onscreen from offscreen space, by stepping in shot and feeling himself part of the same story. According to Kowalski, his main characters are mirrors reflecting his own image or, sometimes, devices allowing us to go into ourselves and into the reality we observe. His affinity with the characters isn’t always as good as with Dee Dee Ramone, the punk guys and the shoemakers in The Boot Factory (2000) or his alter ego John Spacely-Gringo; on the contrary, the distance that he takes critically and emotionally toward Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders and Aukai Collins reveals that his production is made of doubts and fears, anger and clearness of mind, becoming even more painful and genuine when it explores the dark side of a personality in comparison with the others. On the contrary, when Kowalski becomes a character in the film, no longer metaphorically, but explicitly, as in East of Paradise, his involvement is complete. The first person narration of his mother’s tale (the origin of everything and blood-related empathy) moves on the first person performed by the filmmaker who comments on the images of his own filmography. Style-wise, the film equals the stream of consciousness’s sense of fleetingness and immediacy, with new edited material from Walter and Cutie (1978), D.O.A. (1981) and Gringo shaping his thoughts and becoming the “lines” of a visual poem, which opens up new truths about a man’s past and about his “being in the world”. Kowalski’s cinematographic medium is all-embracing, impudent and ruthless: his camera encompasses and feeds itself. It overtly reveals itself though its language and its technical and narrative ploys. The cinema is there to record Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s self-destructive delirium, to film Gringo’s fixes, to witness the descent on Earth of Johnny Thunders, the “fallen angel”, and even to test the workings of memory and time through the re-editing of existing sequences. The time dedicated to finalize Born to Lose – started in 1991 and made up of new images and rushes shot in New York until 1982 and then presented in many different versions between 1999 and 2001 – proves the fact that Kowalski employs filmmaking like a living, versatile body, seeking new and unusual perspectives. The editing, the angle and the ellipses elaborate reality to find a meaning that is there on the screen and was previously out in the world, which yet only Kowalski’s eye and films are able and want to see. In this respect, his documentary approach takes on a dramatic and almost narrative structure and a measured, yet surprising suspense that, little by little, through observation, care for details and waiting, transforms these bodies bearing the signs of time, exhaustion and poverty into symbols of suffering, torn-out souls. Kowalski’s theoretical approach is connected to the individual’s tangible dimension, to his physical nature and his needs as a member of a community or only as a human being of his time, to such an extent that it embraces a spiritual dimension, which transcends the individual and opens up to the community, if not to the universe. From Gringo’s black ghettos and Rock Soup’s tent cities (1991) as well as from the punk rock stars’ self-destruction comes out the counter-history of American ideology, a cursed deformation of the man of the street’s myth; the entrepreneurship of the young, asocial punks in The Boot Factory gives birth to a viable alternative to cultural homologation; whilst the biography of Aukai Collins, white, American, converted to Islam and made into a jihadist combatant in Afghanistan and Chechnya discloses the wraith of alienation inside the very heart of democracy. Still today, although “the fucking mainstream” – to use his own words – is raging, Kowalski questions the meaning of every man’s life in relation to his time and social context. His wandering memories of the underground period represent a journey in search for the universal meaning of that historical moment. Such research doesn’t aim to highlight the role played by New York Dolls or Ramones’ music in History (The Hall of Fame takes care of that, and on a few occasions Kowalski worked for it), but to identify once again the trends of one’s time, the bottom-up thrust of the popular soul, the hollow and loud cry of a whole generation. The presence of death hovering along the streets of New York and inside “the best minds of a generation” is the only certainty: death features in the title of the movie about Sex Pistol’s tour, D.O.A., i.e. Death On Arrival, and it’s the source of the destructive anger of the punk movement; death strikes the heroes of an era, Johnny Thunders and Dee Dee Ramone, and makes us think of their loss with melancholy; death that Gringo injects in his veins, which, in spite of everything, doesn’t sweep away the excitement of everyday life down in Lower East Side. As On Hitler’s Highway’s miserable landscape and humanity demonstrate by showing men and women lost in an endless plain, Kowalski’s production is set after the bomb, in a time where life is nothing more than struggle for survival. Its strength lies in the fact that from this sense of death and destruction the hope for a life in common is born. At present time the protection of one’s rights by the tramps of Rock Soup and the expression of one’s identity by the punks of The Boot Factory, while in the past the recalling of New York’s underground as a creative and self-destructive, yet mostly antisocial movement, become the expression of an attitude of resistance. Against the society, against this society and in favour of those who are part of it as defectors, outcast and intruders, step by step, film after film, memory after memory, Kowalski keeps on making his hideously sincere and self-critical movies. They are a long, incessant session of self-consciousness involving himself and those around him; a “trench” filmmaking, bleeding like living flesh burnt by the bullets of a camera gun, sending out to the world calls for help in order to bear out, once again and forever, the need for a sense of emotional closeness and common belonging to our fellow creatures.

by Roberto Manassero

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