An image from Lech Kowalski’s ‘Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?’
Last week I saw the most creatively radical documentary I have ever seen, East of Paradise (2004) by Lech Kowalski. It breaks every convention of story development. The first half of the film is made up of an interview with Kowalski’s mother, about the horrors she experienced as a young girl at the end of the Second World War, in Russian-occupied Poland. Then he cuts to a medley of his own films of junkies on the New York underground scene, filmed over the last couple of decades. And what’s the link? The extreme. That becomes clear in the film, towards the end. Kowalski was here in Montreal for a retrospective of his films at the Cinémathèque Québecoise and had a chance to elaborate. To Kowalski life is real when you’re at the extreme limits of what can be tolerated, and that is what throws light on the rest of our existence. He explained how the horrors his mother had experienced set a sort of standard against which, it seemed, all his own experiences had to be measured. This led him to search out, in his own life and work, some extremely harsh realities. So in a sense, the totally unorthodox structure of his film was totally logical. At the discussion after the film the son of a holocaust victim talked about how he totally identified with this psychological dilemma, and brought up the question of a ‘survival gene.’ Kowalski totally agreed, he had received that also from his parents. After all they had been through to survive, he would not have the right to waste his own life, to become one of those junkies you see dying of overdose or AIDS in his own films.
Lech Kowalski [Photo: Jocelyne Clarke]
Kowalski believes that we are in a ‘post-documentary era’ where reality is too complex to be dealt with in an ordinary film, especially since film production and distribution are largely controlled by vested interests who are set against free creativity and analysis. He has created a web site called Camera War TV to create a new kind of documentary experience. I think this is a great concept, even though I found some of the films on the site less than impressive.
A fascinating encounter. And during the coming month we will have the time to see more of Kowalski’s films. D.O.A.: A Right of Passage (1980), Born to Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie (1999), Gringo: The Story of a Junkie (1987), Rock Soup (1991) and two films on Eastern Europe: The Boot Factory (2000) and On Hitler’s Highway (2002).
There is an excellent interview with Kowalski [in French] on the Cinémathèque’s web site.
P.S. I am sure you saw the British clip on YouTube about Susan Boyle, the ‘unattractive’ woman singer whose performance brings down the house in a resounding victory over prejudice (represented by the attitudes of a talent-show jury). A wonderful little film with important issues, suspense, a terrific main character, excellent character development, a surprising turn-around, an uplifting outcome, reminiscent of classical stories like the ugly duckling and Cinderella. What more can you ask of a doc?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
Thanks to Jorge Bustos-Estefan for help with this blog.
Thats great. Im not sure how old this post is but anyways.. I have been looking all around for this film and for info it is almost impossible to find Kowalski’s films in the u.s. I own D.O.A.,Gringo, Rock Soup and Born to Lose. I would love to see East of Paradise next. Thanks for posting.