I must admit I couldn’t immediately memorize the faces, names and functions of the Polish officials introduced at the beginning of Tomasz Wolkski’s 1970. And even if I could, I wouldn’t have known what the precise status of the ‘Deputy Chief of Internal Military Service’ was in communist Poland.
But I did remember the Minister of Internal Affairs – whom we later see calmly finishing a meal before answering panicked reports of widespread strikes protesting dramatic price hikes announced by the government just days before Christmas. To finish eating first sounds like a ridiculous way to demonstrate your dominance in the pecking order, something a comedy writer might think of, but we have it on tape: these telephone calls between Polish dignitaries have been preserved, and Wolski (who won the Jury Prize for ‘most innovative medium length film’ at last year’s Visions du Réel with An Ordinary Country) uses large excerpts of preserved audio to great effect.
But although Wolski has sound, he has no images. That’s why he uses puppets – it’s the puppets’ faces that are introduced at the beginning (not until the end credits do we get to see the corresponding photographs, which they strongly resemble). There is some stop-motion animation, mostly motivated by sounds which were picked up by the recordings: fingers drumming, a desk lamp being repeatedly turned on and off in a distracted gesture, or the aforementioned eating sounds.
Usually the puppets don’t move at all, or only the camera moves, but slightly. It’s impressive how well that works: the lovingly recreated (and dramatically lit) office spaces of the era, with their desks, chairs, cups, floors, curtains and ashtrays – and lots of swirling cigarette smoke – combined with the grey clothes and faces of the officials are enough to ground the documentary soundtrack in a believable visual reality.
On the other hand, Wolski had access to an enormous amount of silent black-and-white footage of the strikes, both from the side of the workers and from the militia and military who were apparently accustomed to documenting (and archiving) their actions. Here, it’s the sounds that get added. It’s a well-known technique which, if done well, often works wonders: by synchronising realistic sound effects of streets, cars and passers-by to what is happening on screen, the distance between then and now almost disappears. It is how you make old silent film come alive – see the black-and-white images in Peter Jackson’s WWI-documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), whose vivid sense of presence owes much more to the added sound effects, I am sure, than to the much-vaunted (but rather bland) digital colourization and 3D conversion. Audio is more immersive than video.
In one of the telephone conversations it is suggested the Finnish consul, who had been spotted photographing the riots and was on his way to leave the country, could have a “car accident”, after which his camera and briefcase could be removed. Given this fact, and the fact that after 1970 the regime had plenty of time to try and get rid of material, it’s amazing how much footage has survived.
Maybe one or two shots of marching militia are inserts from another date, but the massive crowd scenes (reports mention up to hundreds of thousands of protesters) and specific graffiti on walls and trams leave little doubt that these shots are actually from the eight days of this increasingly tense and violent confrontation between disgruntled workers and a government for whom, if we listen to their conversations, negotiation or compromise was never an option. It was simply unthinkable that workers would protest their government in a socialist state, let alone that foreign ears would hear about this. It’s a similar situation to the 1962 protests in the Russian city of Novocherkassk, recently recreated in Andrei Khonchalovsky’s fiction film Dear Comrades! (2020), whose bloody suppression was indeed successfully hushed up for decades.
If you look at the amounts of ammunition, soldiers, tanks and even planes used by the Polish regime, and the number of dead and wounded, the message is clear: this was a ruthless suppression of unarmed and, certainly in the beginning, peaceful protesters by a dictatorial regime. But watching the film, I was nudged into another direction.
The premise of 1970, as described in the press material, is ‘a story about a rebellion but told from the perspective of the oppressors’. The only people we hear in the film are the authorities, calling each other with increasing nervousness and confusion. The point of view of the workers only comes to us through a few signs and banners; there are close-ups of faces which do provide short flashes of empathy, but nothing recurring, no personalities that we follow throughout. The workers form an anonymous mass; instead, we are continuously confronted with the question the officials ask themselves: what should we do now?
At first, there is hesitancy in using violence. But when we hear panicked reports of a burning building, where protesters, we are told, are preventing the rescue of people still inside, even tearing down ladders that were put up, and we are asked what those on site should do now, and pressured into deciding immediately, we are forced to at least consider using force to disperse the crowds. At that moment, we have entered the minds of the officials.
If Wolski would have used this fascinating material to create a more traditional narrative, adding voice-over and intertitles for historical context and factual information about dates, times and numbers of protesters and troops, that would have most probably resulted in a solid documentary.
By choosing to tell it from the point of view of the officials, with their limited information and time constraints, 1970 has become something much more confronting. At the end, there is still no doubt about the evil that has been perpetrated. But it has been deepened by a sense of how such a thing could happen. And how maybe we, ourselves, if we had been in their place at that time, could have been a cog in that repressive machine.
Poland, 2021, 70 minutes
Director Tomasz Wolski
Production KIJORA
Producer Anna Gawlita
Script Tomasz Wolski
Cinematography Tomasz Wolski
Editing Tomasz Wolski
Sound design Igor Kłaczyński, Marcin Lenarczyk
Sound Marcin Lenarczyk
Music Bartłomiej Tyciński, DJ Lenar (Marcin Lenarczyk)
Animation director Robert Sowa
With Kazimierz Świtała, Tadeusz Pietrzak, Ryszard Matejewski
