A second “bonus” disk of the Criterion edition of “Knife in the Water” includes eight shorts (of a total of fifteen listed in IMDB) Polanski shot from film school in 1957 until he made “Knife in the Water” in 1962. Oddly, the insert brochure does not list them (only the chapters of the feature film; there is also an essay by Peter Cowie).
The first two, “Murder” and “Teeth Smile “are very short, completely silent, student films. Their subject matter — murder and voyeurism — relate to the concerns of later Polanski films, but not particularly to “Knife in the Water,’ in which the youth avoids spying on the woman changing clothes.
The rest have jazzy soundtracks, but not dialogue. The most interesting one and the one that seems to me most to prefigure Polanski’s enduring theme is “Break Up the Dance,” an exercise in semi-verité in which Polanski arranged a dance and invited a Warsaw gang to crash it. The mayhem that follows looks very real, and apparently was.
“The Lamp’ is an exercise in style (macabre destruction: a doll repair shop burning picturesquely). In contrast, When Angels Fall, at least until the silly ending references in the title, has not only atmosphere, but a story —- the life an old woman who is an attendant in a male restroom. The point is that she had a life, and even passion, tragedy and experiences of wars, and was not always the blank she appears to be. The flashbacks are in color, her current station is shown in black-and-white. Some things also happen in the present-day, black-and-white microcosm of the rest room, including a furtive sexual encounter.
The other later ones are comedies, albeit theatre of the absurd/ theatre of cruelty. The two men of “Two Men and a Wardrobe” are equals. Carrying a bulky piece of furniture does not make for a division of labor. Though one thinks of Oliver Hardy commanding Stan Laurel around,” Two Men and a Wardrobe” is dialogueless. However, there is violence and domination, and hopes are crushed. A gang of four attacks the two and after the leader knocks out one man, he has the scrawniest of his followers (Polanski himself) beat up the other. Polanski said the film “was about the intolerance of society toward somebody who is different.”
Carrying around a large piece of furniture makes the men stand out; they are welcomed nowhere, and eventually hammered down, but my interpretation is that no one wants the wardrobe. The hopes of the two men that they will be rewarded are dashed, and they are eventually set upon. I guess it could be argued that they are attacked for standing out, but if that was a political statement against an officially egalitarian regime (but one with the kind of class differences on display in “Knife in the Water”), it was excessively indirect. The cruelty of humans is also shown in stoning a cat.
The other two have a male master and a male servant. “Mammals” has no discernible point. I guess it is supposed to be slapstick (“pure cinema”), but it is far more primitive in conception and execution than Hollywood silent comedies of the 1920s. It is almost entirely shots of one man pulling a small sled with another man on it as falling snow obscures the picture.
The short film with the most direct resonances with “Knife in the Water “is “The Fat and the Lean,” a 15-minute portrait of a lean, barefoot, raggedly dressed servant (played by Polanski) who jumps around a lot, and his master (André Katelbach, who later appeared in Polanski’s “Cul de Sac”), a fat man who only leaves his rocking-chair on the lawn when the servant tries to escape to Paris (invariably failing). For a while, the servant is tethered to a goat. It is mildly entertaining, but there is a quantum leap from the shorts to “Knife in the Water.” It has aspects of being an exercise in style, too, but is an accomplished film about real-life conflicts.
©2003, 2018, Stephen O. Murray
japaneseculturereflectionsblog 