Kolski, Jan Jakub

(1956-)

   One of the most important and the most original film directors who emerged during the post-Communist period. Trained as cinematographer at the Łódź Film School, Kolski began his career directing short films, including the prize-winning The Most Beautiful Cave in the World (Najpiękniejsza jaskinia świata, 1988). Since his well-received mainstream debut in 1991, The Burial of a Potato (Pogrzeb kartofla), he made a number of highly original films such as Pograbek (1992), Johnnie the Aquarius (Jańcio Wodnik, 1993), Miraculous Place (Cudowne miejsce, 1994), The Sabre from the Commander (aka Legacy of Steel, Szabla od komendanta, 1995), and The Plate Player (Grający z talerza, 1995). In 1998 he won the Festival of Polish Films with The History of Cinema Theater in Popielawy (Historia kina w Popielawach).

   Kolski's slow-paced films are characterized by their fine cinematography (by Piotr Lenar) and stylized acting, particularly from Franciszek Pieczka, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Mariusz Saniternik, and Grażyna Błęcka-Kolska (the director's wife). The direct political references present in The Burial of a Potato disappear from his later works, replaced by metaphysical meditation and folk wisdom combined with a unique version of lyricism and humor. During the early stage of his career, Kolski was interested in oversensitive, weird, and marginalized rural characters whose worlds are limited to their village and end with the horizon. His prolific nature and his obsession with the private world led inevitably to a certain mannerism. Writer-director Kolski (all scripts are his own) favored the same picturesque landscapes and characters and dealt with the presence of the religious/supernatural element in the lives of his down-to-earth yet unique characters. Johnnie the Aquarius, a film portraying a village thinker who discovers his unusual ability to "control" water, which under his power is no longer constrained by the laws of gravity, arguably contains the essence of Kolski's stylized, poetic, perhaps magical, realism. Kolski's unusual story employing stylized dialogues and songs commenting on the action has no equivalent in Polish cinema—it has the appeal of a chromolithograph, of "primitive poetry," and of a philosophical folktale in the spirit of Witold Leszczynski's celebrated The Life of Matthew (1968). In recent years, Kolski has been trying to broaden his oeuvre. In 2002 he directed a film about the Holocaust, Keep Away from the Window (Daleko od okna), based on Hanna Krall's short story, and adapted Witold Gombrowicz's novel Pornography (Pornografia, 2003). His most recent film, Jasminum (2006), however, returns to the poetics of his early films.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof