Notowałem: 28.2.2018
FilmPolski (dobre streszczenie wszystkich 3 przypadków)
Sprawa miała się podobnie jak z obejrzanym przed niespełna miesiącem Amour: widziałem Przypadek przed laty i zapamiętałem jako wybitny. Gdy więc dostrzegłem, że pokazuje go TVP Kultura, skorzystałem z okazji.
Oczywiście nie sposób dzisiaj odebrać ten film tak samo jak w czasach przed rozpadem komuny. Nawet kiedy oglądałem go po raz pierwszy, w czerwcu 2004, pamięć o tamtych czasach była na tyle świeża, że przeżywałem go bardziej emocjonalnie.
Jako dzieło sztuki film nadal imponuje. Skróciłbym jedynie rozwlekłe sceny erotyczne w części trzeciej. Jak bardzo zmieniła się moja wrażliość na ten film najwyraźniej odczuwałem oglądając sceny religijne, kiedy to Witek zbliża się do kościoła. Jak diametralnie inaczej jawił się nam wtedy polski kościół katolicki! Wtedy otwarty, rozumiejący i odważny, dzisiaj szowinistyczny, obskurancki i zachowawczy. Kościół jako jego ludzie i instytucja niewiele się pewnie zmienił. To inne warunki zewnętrzne spowodowały, że twarz kościoła wtedy tworzyli inni z nim związani ludzie niż ci, którzy robią to teraz. Kościół jako obiekt przypadku w kieślowskiej wykładni? No, nie całkiem, bo tutaj - w zależności od przypadku - chodziłoby o wydobycie cech stojących we wzajemnej opozycji do siebie. W filmie Witek jest jak skała: bez względu na warunki, zawsze ten sam.
Część pierwsza podobała mi się najbardziej. Być może jej przewaga nad prawie równie świetną częścią drugą polegała na obsadzie aktorskiej: Łomnicki, Zapasiewicz, Gajos - całą trókę zaliczam do moich ulubionych. Ostatnia, najkrótsza nowela, pozbawiona jest dramatyzmu charakterystycznego dla dwóch pierwszych, ale jest równie ważna ze względu na dopełnienie katalogu postaw, które zajmowali w tamtych czasach uczciwi młodzi ludzie. Na co się decydowali zależało często właśnie od tytułowego przypadku.
TVP pokazała zrekonstruowaną cyfrowo wersję, ze scenami pierwotnie wyciętymi przez cenzurę, która w porównaniu z oryginałem miała jeden ubytek: spośród usuniętych fragmentów nie udało się odnaleźć tylko jednago: sceny bicia Witka przez milicjantów na dworcu w drugiej części. Zostało to w filmie zaznaczone. Ciekawą w tym kontekście jest uwaga jednego z recenzentów.
Szukając śladów tego filmu w moim /xp2/www/helps/dziennik.txt zauważyłem, że Martin Scorsese włączył ten film do swojej listy klasyki polskiego kina.
Skopiowane z: /xp2/www/silva-rerum/przypadek.txt
I won't repeat here how the film opens, because I copied appropritate fragments from external reviewers, below. It is late 1970s in Łódź where Witek is a medical student. His father dies leaving him a puzzling message: "Już niczego nie musisz." Witek takes a leave of absence from his studies and hurries to the station to catch a train to Warsaw. This is how all 3 different stories begin. See below the episode with a coin.Nie zdołałem wtedy napisać streszczenia trzeciego przypadku. Jest opisany w FilmPolski.
In the first version Witek catches the receding train. He gets into a conversation with an unknown elderly man who invites him to stay in his Waraw apartment. Werner is a Party activist who was imprisoned during the Stalin times and was released only after Gomulka took over. He seems to be a decent man who believes in the Party, but not blindingly. He is aware of many tragedies and errors, and if he decides to suggest to Witek that he might consider joining the Party, he does it in a very subtle way, leaving the decison entirely to Witek. He hands him a business card of his old friend, Adam, who is a much higher Party official. Both Werner and Adam were in love with Krystyna, but because Adam was released earlier, he not only got an influential position in the Party, but also took Krystyna. After several days of deliberations Witek decides to turn to Adam. The first conversation they have indicats that Adam is a cynical apparatchik, but the young Witek doesn't yet see it. As one of his first assignments he is dispatched to a center for treating drug abusers somewhere in the province to quell a strike which the lower personnel started after the Party replaced the doctors there with its own cronies. Witek succeeds to free the hostages locked up in a cage. Back in Warsaw he meets his old love, Czuszka. They warm up their affair. She is involved in underground activities, in particular in distributing illegal literature. In one of the conversation with Adam, Witek mentions this. Few days later, while Witek and Czuszka are walking together, undercover agents arrest Czuszka and let Witek go once they examine his papers. Mad as hell, Witek storms into Adam's office and beats him up. He waits until Czuszka is released from Rakowiecka and tries to explain, but she treats him as a traitor. The last scene is at the airport where Witek joins a group of young party activists. They are to travel to Paris. The trip is called off, however, because strikes are breaking out all over Poland. The plane leaves without them - the very same one which crashes at the end of the third episode.
In the second version, Witek fails to catch the train being stopped by a railway station guard. A fight ensues, Witek is arrested, and then sentenced to a community work. During this work he befriends Marek who initiates Witek into dissident circles. The cell of which he becomes a part is led by a crippled priest, Father Stefan. Under his inluence, Witek, who until now was an atheist gets baptized and takes religion very seriously. Witek works in an underground printing shop. One day he is to deliver money to certain woman who is part of the distribution network of clandestine literature. He arrives there just moments after secret agents have ransacked the apartment. However the lonely woman who lives there is not scared at all. She explains to Witek that she is not afraid because, according to her doctors she should have been dead many years ago. Hence she treats life as a gift. At a Jacek Kaczmarski's concert which Witek organizes in his aunt's apartment, he meets a school friend, a Jew who emigrated to Denmark with his entire family in 1968. His sister Vera and Witek fall in love, but Vera has to leave soon. Witek spends the last frenzy night with her and as the result doesn't open when his colleague from the printing shop knocks at the door. When he finally goes there, he finds a desolated place and one of his colleages waiting for him. He lets Witek understand that because he was not to be found at the night when the place was raided, everybody believed him to work for the secret police. In dispair Witek turns to Father Stefan who doesn't condemn him and tries to explain how difficult the situation is. Stefan suggests that Witek travels to Paris and spends some time there to calm down. When he tries to get all the necessary papers he is told that he can get them but only under the condition that he would be an informer. Witek refuses decisivly.
Fragmenty recenzji wynotowałem w tym samym czasie również do: /xp2/www/silva-rerum/przypadek.txt
Blind Chance opens to a dissociated close-up shot of an anxiously screaming seated passenger named Witek.
His films also deal with the interplay of morality and freedom. Is freedom the absence of morality, or does morality bolster freedom?
Blind Chance opens with a ten-minute series of seemingly unconnected scenes. A body is dragged along a hospital floor, smearing a bloody wake. A young boy says goodbye to his friend who is immigrating to Denmark. An older lad walks with his girlfriend as someone shouts lewd encouragement from a passing car. A young male medical student makes eye contact with his classmate who is physically upset by an autopsy. He asks her why, and she replies that the woman being autopsied was her elementary school teacher, whom she hated. Lastly, the same young man answers a phone. It's the hospital. His father has died. His last words were to tell his son that he is "under no obligations."
Despite the three drastically different paths his life takes, Witek is essentially the same person. His morality is consistent and his behavior in each environment argues for respect and love for everyone. In each scenario, things go wrong, and in each scenario Witek is presented witha ticket to France, a symbol of escape from his duties. Duties should be derived from our morality, Kieslowski believes. The American political and ethical thought has de-emphasized duties and set freedom as a polar ideal. The Western ethos does not prescribe moral obligation; it trumpets individual freedom and isolates that freedom from duty.
Fate, while it plays an important part in the direction his life takes, does not necessarily change a person's character. Witek remains intrinsically the same person yet in adapting to each situation he couldn't be more different - being either a Communist Offical or an underground anti-party activist. Kieslowski's great trick is to make each of these possible outcomes perfectly natural and believable eventualities. The director's other great achievement with the film is that he doesn't make one outcome more beneficial or ideal than another.
Being centered around the political situation in Poland during the late 70's can make the film a bit difficult and it does sometimes distract viewers from what the film is all about. Blind Chance is not a political film - although Kieslowski did have problems with the censors (the film, made in 1981 wasn't shown until 1987) he wasn't particularly bothered by cuts that were requested, because they were nothing to do with the point he was making. It's about making a choice - being true to oneself and one's nature while adapting to whatever situation presents itself. "Everything is important except politics" Kieslowski once said and that is illustrated here. Witek can work for the Communist Party or work against them and it doesn't matter - it's not about which side fate or an accident of birth places you on - it's what you do when you are there that counts.
The influence of Blind Chance is apparent in films such as Peter Howitt's lightweight treatment of the theme in Sliding Doors (1998) and in the rather more kinetic Run Lola Run (1998) by German director TomTykwer, who would go on to direct Heaven (2002), a Kieslowski script filmed posthumously after the director's death in 1996. Kieslowski himself would use many of the devices he tried out here in his Dekalog series - characters from different stories crossing paths in different circumstances and at the end of his Three Colours Trilogy where fate, circumstance and accident draw the characters from each of the three films to a surprising finale. Blind Chance was where several Kieslowskian techniques and themes were first explored and the effect is just as powerful. The Artificial Eye release of Blind Chance, like all their other Kieslowski releases, is exemplary in terms of quality, presentation and extra features.
[ TBK: I liked the previous 3 comments very much. They came from the same review. ]
As Witek runs madly for the train, he knocks into an older woman who drops some change. One coin rolls to the foot of a scruffy-looking man, who picks it up and buys himself a beer. Like the two-franc coin that will seem to stick to Karol's palm in White, this coin might symbolize chance - or fate. [TBK: I loved this little scene, the face of the guy who was buying his lucky beer was great.]
In retrospect, the film opens with the primal scream if Witek a moment before his plane crushes. Images of the past flash before his eyes - except, perhaps, for the first shot in the hospital corridor: while it might be the scene of his birth (the shot is repeated when he describes being born to Czuszka), it could also be the scene of his death. [TBK: It is interesting to note that even A. Insdorf, the author of a book on Kieslowski's cinema doesn't make the historically most plausible association: these bloody bodies being dragged in the hospital corridor are the victims of Poznan unrests in June 1956, Witek's birth date.] [ From: Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinama of Krzysztof Kieslowski ]
