by Pyzik, Agata
All this to the accompaniment of the melody of the sardonic music box, deriding the characters. The queasy, sickly and morbid ditty owes a lot to Polish Jazz and Komeda’s deliberately frantic notes, or the soundtracks to Lenica and Borowczyk’s animated films like House or Labyrinth, or Polanski’s Cul de Sac with its fucked up organ melody in a false key, just as the cheap soundtrack to horror movies. They all belong to something that could be called a Polish surrealist tradition, similar to the experimental Czech cinema. But its driven synths are another issue entirely, taking from the italo disco frenzy of the era, Giorgio Moroder’s Munich Machine.
The genius of Possession is that it’s at least three films at once. On the surface it is a horror movie, if slightly metaphysical, a giallo with images terrifying beyond comprehension, with a monster, cannibalism, blood, forbidden sexuality, macabre murders, corpses etc. On another level it is a marital break-up drama, much in the style of many Bergmans, like Scenes from a Marriage or From the Life of the Marionettes, with spouses self-harming, humiliating, and tearing each other apart. But that still wouldn’t explain why they act the way they act, at least if we won’t accept the rule of exploitation: there’s no rules, and a plot of no plot. Here, there definitely is a plot, and it develops with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Because another level of this drama is a political movie, set in the key city of international secret services and a scene of ideological war. Anna and Mark may live the relatively privileged life of expats, in their nice low rise modernist flat, but are still subject to increasing alienation and isolation, harassed by men of mystery in ridiculous pink socks.
Trouble with sexuality pervades the whole film – woman’s sexuality, the murder of a homosexual couple, Anna’s previous lover ridiculed as an amateur of tantric sex and martial arts, and all this finalizing in a third world war subplot. The early 80s were the era of a ‘second Cold War’ entering a new phase, a nuclear crisis which could lead to World War Three, which is implied by the final carnage between the secret services and the aftermath. Extremely theatrical, like a lot of the rest of the film, it’s very much in the ‘postmodern’ style of the French Neobaroque. For me, Possession is one of the most prophetic movies for the 1980s, predicting the Polish Martial Law of the 1981 and the great depression that followed.
Żuławski’s genius was to see the personal drama as political, and the visceral and the sexual as coming from the social and political oppression. Incredibly stylish, haunted with beauty and austerity, it’s a world torn between Marx and Coca-cola (with Anna in one scene smashing the portraits of the classics of Marxism) and Żuławski is not necessarily a Marxist. The choices of many in that generation, and later - which they made as soon as capitalism entered Poland - wore serious traces of reacting over a trauma. Still, Żuławski remains a Romantic: revealing that love is the darkness, against the common, desexualized, sanitized convictions within capitalism.
Berlin serves here as a House of Fear, but at the same time, a threshold of Europe – not many dare to go further east. You’re not in real danger, but close enough to feel it. If you’re a foreigner, then you only feel the thrill of it. Often in Żuławski we have the situation of a house or a family unit, isolated drastically from the rest of the world, which contrasts with the upheaval and the dissolution of the world around them. there’s a war going on and people slaughtered, but we rather watch the main characters’ anguish about their wife’s death or infidelity, families plagued with incest and self hatred. It bears a strong resemblance to a compulsive ritual, an acting-out of a traumatized subject. “Zulawski” must’ve seen something there in Lvov and never forgot it. His family torn apart there, he re-enacts it in every film, seeing it behind every atrocity, and as egocentric as it may be, it’s also visionary: to see the nations fall within the destruction on the basic, human level.
The 1980s was the time of a real nuclear danger with its double dip Cold War, raising to the extreme the anxieties of an already paranoid popular culture. An example of a B class even if enjoyable punk-Cold War paranoia exploitation flick is Decoder (1984) by the mysterious Muscha, boasting the participation of several icons of the underground: Christiane F. pairs with William Burroughs as two junkies in hallucinatory, abandoned dystopian Hamburg. Unusually not set in Berlin, this punky Gotham City is managed by criminals, putting the citizens into a trance through a poisonous muzak. This is interrupted by a rebellious DJ working for the corpo (played by FM Einheit from Einstürzende Neubauten), who works on an anti-muzak formula, which instead of pushing into submission, politically activates and radicalizes the youth. The riots emerge on the street of every German town.
Acted with lovely bored sulkiness by Felscherinow, then also a punk icon, with a brief career as an underground singer with the single Wunderbar produced by Alexander Hacke from Einstürzende Neubauten, it displays various radical political groups, including the Temple of Psychick Youth, staring all day at the Brion Gysin Dream Machine, over which hypnotized activists plot destruction. What’s omnipresent is the destroyed space, trash and sleaziness of Hamburg – here a fallen city, dominated by prostitution and corporations, seedy bars & peepshows, where people eat horsemeat burgers. Soundtracked by arguably the sleaziest and most hedonism-devoted synth pop duo in history, Soft Cell, the only group too cool for Berlin namechecking, with ‘Seedy Films’ (with the phrase Sleazy people in seedy City) as a main theme, from Non Stop Erotic Cabaret. Sex is here a hard currency, but sex understood as the metropolitan perverse filth rather than eroticism in a more titillating sense. You can look, but don’t touch.
Fear in the Western World
Riding Inter-City Trains
Dressed in European Grey
John Foxx for Ultravox, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1977)
If the invention of ‘youth culture’ was so dependent on capitalism, was there ever possible a youth culture that came from somewhere else? The first answer is right – this culture was an extension of Romanticism, where the cult of youth, death, free love, truth, emotional intensity and political radicalism were turned for the first time into a position which radically opposed the accepted, general order. Therefore we have the ‘New Romantics’, a youth culture born during the difficult time of the second Cold War. The Soviet Bloc was then everywhere again: it was in kitschy Hollywood films, Hunting for Red October, it was in mainstream pop, Elton John’s Nikita and Sting’s dreadful ‘Russians Love Their Children Too’ (wonder if he knew that 30 years later he’d be good friends with the daughter of the absolute ruler of Uzbekistan, turned from Soviet Republic into a personal despotism). From the New Romantics several Cold War movements exploded, like Neobaroque film in France. Luc Besson’s Subway or Nikita are perfectly transitive Cold War films, made up all from international spy plots, criminal big capital, shot in flamboyant, ultra-modern urban areas, made up only of dizzily colorful 80s fashion and crazy car chases.
2.7 Sucked into the miasma of the East. Isabelle Adjani in Żuławski’s Possession gravitates towards the Wall.
The weird aesthetic space that emerged between the neoliberal space opening in the late 70s, means that commodified subcultures become an ersatz of a political emancipation from the past which is no longer available. Subculture replaces political engagement which, for different reasons, can’t be expressed politically (the Bloc for the suppression of dissent and in the West for its dependency on the market). Tension arises. A closer look at the art production after the war will show how it was America, not simply everything west of the Iron Curtain, that served as ‘West’. America was the ‘unconscious’ behind all the artistic movements or subcultures, even if by the force of negation, regardless if in Western or Eastern Europe. So feared that in post-punk and some new romanticism it found the fiercest, most refined critics. Especially intense in this matter was the early Ultravox, with John Foxx. Their second album Ha! Ha Ha! is fuller of angry exclamations of fear and loathing for Western civilization than any other record of that era; with the typically Burrougsian/Ballardian vis
ions of deadly, decaying Western cities full of savage scenes of murder, sex and violence, with evil high-rises populated by corrupt politicians, and all this to noisy, angular punk. Each song screams of this paranoia, voicing the fears of the Western world: of the Bloc and the Third World rising, the cold Bloc freezing the West, not alive, but not quite dead yet, a zombie, the character moves between atrocities, “Divine Light, chemicals, Warhol, Scientology (Artificial Life)’. In Hiroshima Mon Amour the title is at the same time a yearning for a delightful self-annihilation (longing cheerfully for the whole thing to burn) and of course expressing the real nuclear fears people had during the Cold War. Last but not least, it’s a confession of a film-buff, boasting his love for the famous Alain Resnais film with Emmanuelle Riva, controversial for levelling her trauma at losing her German lover during the occupation (paid for by shaving her head and a public disgrace) with the tragedy of Hiroshima, where she cures her trauma through passionate sex with a Japanese lover. Through this, it reveals a perfect, dandy-like combination of self-hatred and style. And of course, how better this style can be displayed than by a Weimar-suit dressed Kraftwerkian traversing the continent.
Kraftwerk made train journeys not only fashionable again – they brought train-crossing a wholly new mythology. For the UK musicians and scenesters the experience of trains had to be necessarily also an experience of Europe. This way, Europe and trains and the strange thrill of it (borders, passport controls, forbidden lands) made them again what they used to be to the revolutionary Russian artists. Just as Constructivists, by design, and filmmakers by preparing newsreels, like Dziga Vertov or Viktor Turin of the Turksib, (1929’s pioneering documentary on the great Soviet train-systems, which made the industrialization of the gigantic country possible (Turkmenistan-Siberia)) participated in the preparation of propaganda trains. Some of that excitement of travel got into the bloodstream of the synthetic/techno/pop sound of the era.
The later Ultravox, with Midge Ure, made of the famous Conny Plank-produced 1980 album Vienna a real catalogue of Cold War obsessions: from the sentimental, but meaningful title song (the video purporting to be the formerly four occupations-divided European dream-city was shot in Covent Garden), the man of mystery Mr X or the Western Promise, all cut in punishing, aggressive synths. What else was this to suggest rather than ‘the East is coming”?
2.8 This means nothing to me!..Oh Vienna! Midge Ure mourns the lost Europe in the golden Ultravox! album of the same title
This Soviet-mania persisted in Ure’s previous band, the notorious Visage, known for the best outfits and the best hits in the industry. Steve Strange’s biography is often silent on political matters, but this Tory felt moved by the Russian motifs sporting, among a thousand others, the look of a Russian Cossack or muzhik. The Cold War was in the air, but what else was the color grey was in their biggest hit Fade to Grey if not for the sake of the concrete? Strange wanted to be anything but grey, yet within the relentless, Moroderesque Germanic blasts from the synthesizer, they perfected the plastic look from the future of the endless Cold War (as in their cover of ‘In the year 2525’ as the biggest “machines think for you” Orwellesque nightmare). Damned robots don’t cry, yet the pathos of ‘Night Train’, the weird affection towards the mechanized and the Russian kitsch in ‘Moon Over Moscow’, with male choirs and Cossacks doing Kalinka. They could pair with the Leningrad Cowboys, whose trilogy by Aki Kaurismaki was equally the most ridiculous and the greatest of Cold War epics.
They say that if you can make up a city, you can make up a world. Each city has its legends, and for the mythology of postpunk and New Romantic, three cities only really mattered. The still going railway, whose stations read like a history textbook: the Berlin-Warszawa-Moscow express, used to map the phantasmagorical geography of the Eastern Europe of the mind, which was made in equal part of ashes and of brocade, death and glamor. As if via a cybernetic radio, small islands of people were communicating with each other. We will try to visit all three of them here.
If post punk had a father and a god, it was David Bowie. Our man, partly as a result of the galloping drug addiction, depression, world-weariness (“world” here being the West, America, that scared the shit out of him), and a taste for history, he is looking for a place of refuge to save his precarious life. He looks towards the east – he had travelled there before, to Moscow in 1973, and he took a train back from there to West Berlin. When he travelled there again in 1976 with Iggy Pop, ‘they saw towns still pockmarked with bullet holes and a landscape scarred by unrepaired bomb craters; drawing alongside a goods train in Warsaw, they witnessed a worker unloading coal piece by piece in the gray, freezing sleet.’
By this time Brian Eno, his collaborator, was already working with Cluster in Dusseldorf, who had worked with Neu!, who in turn were once members of Kraftwerk. ‘Autobahn’ was a novelty hit in 1974, and their perfected look of Constructivist Robots lands among the stunned Europe. Neat, disciplined, glamorous Robotniks looking as if they just came from the heroic Socialist Realist canvases, they expressed a longing for the lost Europe, wanting to reclaim Germany’s past from the Nazis. The red and black of their clothes were the primary colors, the colors of the spiritual Goethean palette, for de Stijl, Bauhaus, the Constructivists and the Nazi Flag. Fascinated with the idea of mechanical ballet by the painter and Bauhaus theatre designer Oskar Schlemmer, combining to the same degree the spiritual and mechanical, and by Meyerhold’s theatrical ideas of biomechanics, Kraftwerk built a bridge between the early hopeful, ambitious modernity of Weimar and the dispirited, broken post-60s reality, when cars, highways, speed of life, computers and robots became a natural part of our existence. The obsession this era has with the mechanical, controlled man evoked the fears of totalitarianism and the state control just as a deeper fantasy of human efficiency. The measurement of the body, of its possibilities, was at the start of the technological revolution, and organization. It was a dark echo of the Golem, puppets, Karel Capek’s robots, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the real source of post-punk imagery, although of deeply dubious politics. Punks, a lost generation betrayed by history, were obsessed with it, despite claiming a lack of any interest in the past. Their obsession was a fantasy within the late capitalist, increasingly post-Fordist society, where efficiency was already beginning to be replaced with dubious financial capital. The mechanized organism was a Fordist obsession, and found its sickly, glam repetition in Klaus Nomi, a Bavarian former pastry maker, who discovered an operatic countertenor in himself. In the famous Saturday Nigh Live performance with Bowie in 1979, they channel the German avant-garde, dressed in Sonia Delaunay-inspired bombastic dada-suits, with exaggerated inflatable arms and legs, Bowie using also a puppet and a communist China blue suit with a Mao-Collar, but equipped with a skirt.
2.9 Is it NY or is is Moscow. New Wave hipsters haunted by Soviet aliens in Liquid Sky, 1983.
With the political crisis approaching, the post-boom generation, as if feeling that history was going to strike back again, took on the task of performing painful historical exorcisms on themselves. They lived as if it was the 20s, 30s, 50s or 60s, and yet they lived inevitably in the present. They knew Constructivists from art schools, and saw Ballets Russes’ designs. Hence the sad pierrots and cosmonauts, able workers and 50s Soviet beauties among the new romantic crowd. There was the end of history and there was no future. In the dying industrial town of Cleveland, Ohio, the young members of DEVO imagined they lived in “1920s Central Europe” and constructed Hugo Ball-like costumes from rubble; OMD, Spandau Ballet, Joy Division, all were dressed as if in homage to the builders of a better socialist freedom. They were all looking east, but not to the demonic Bloc, but rather its threshold. Germany, via its brilliant development in electronic music, via Stockhausen, stimulated by other centers of electronic music, including Warsaw, was a laboratory, a window, from which you could comfortably observe the history behind the barbed wire, but safe enough not to get bruised by it. Kraftwerk provided a sound, but the Wes
terners were only guests on the Trans-Europe Express. It was Bowie who put the elements together. Bowie, a model postmodernist, someone who built his life and art out of the artificial, the fabricated, who went though pop art, comic books and Brecht, needed the necessary frisson of the real, which he found in Berlin, Warszawa and Moscow. There, you had no art of style to be consumed, but the burden of history, that could be tracked on the gigantic spaces of consuming emptiness and morbid austerity. Berlin was a relatively safe option, a city of vice and excitation. As we saw, he was the wall against which Christiane F. and her drugged, prostituting young friends were projecting their saccharine dreams that never came true. Berlin was, like any other big post war metropolis raised from ashes, a scene of “modernity’s failure”, with the decaying tower block estates, like Gropiusstadt, which for Christiane is in turn everything she fears and hates. Christiane F., who after the publication of her memoir became a figure with a cult following, although she never managed to completely drop her addiction, later debuted as a singer, with the gleefully sleepy Wunderbar single, co-produced with members of Einstürzende Neubauten.
As ever, Warszawa, the place, had to be satisfied by this cult, but received a niche fame from the Bowie track. Later Joy Division couldn’t decide whether they should call themselves Stutthoff, Auschwitz or Warsaw, while sporting shaven looks of the camp victims. The enduring image of the East was still the one from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. When the said year finally came, both Poland and the UK were in the middle of crisis.
A Totalitarian Musical
