Crew
Director – Piotr Szulkin, Screenplay – Tadeusz Sobolweski & Piotr Szulkin, Inspired by the Novel The Golem (1913-4) by Gustav Meyrink, Photography – Zygmunt Samosiuk, Music – Zygmunt Konieczny & Jozef Skrzek, Production Design – Zbigniew Warpechowski & Janusz Wlasow. Production Company – Zespol Filmowy Perspektywa.
Cast
Marek Walczewski (Pernat), Krystyna Janda (Rozyna), Joanna Zolkowska (Miriam), Wieslaw Drzewicz (Miriam’s Father), Mariusz Dmochowski (Holtrum), Krzysztof Majchrzak (Rozyna’s Brother), Anna Jaraczowna (Old Woman)
Plot
Scientists have discovered how to create artificial life. Pernat is interrogated by police but then released. Returning to his apartment, Pernat deals with the strange neighbours as he tries to slot back into regular life.
Piotr Szulkin (1950-2018) was a Polish film director. After several short films, Suzlkin made his feature-length debut with Golem. He then went onto likes of War of the Worlds – Next Century (1981), a satiric take on H.G. Wells; the post-holocaust film O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985); and Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986) concerning humans landing on an alien world. Into the 1990s, with works such as Femina (1991) and the satire King Ubu (2003), Szulkin abandoned genre material, if not filmmaking altogether.
Golem is a film I had heard about for years without ever finding a copy. And so it was with fascination I found a copy on YouTube. It was not long into the film before disappointment began to sink in in a big way. What I expected from the descriptions and based on Piotr Suzlkin’s other works was a work of future dystopianism or social satire. At the very least, the opening intro and reference to the legend of the Golem led you to expect a film about artificial people such as clones or androids.
However, what you get with Golem is anything but that. As the film opens, Marek Walczewski is interrogated by the authorities. There is a Kafka-esque sequence where he goes to property impound to get his coat back but due to a bureaucratic error is forced to accept one that doesn’t fit with the threat left that a lot worse could happen.
The rest of the film follows Marek Walczewski as he returns to his dingy apartment and dealings with his landlord who wants him to repair a watch, the girl next door and her father who wants to repurchase a book the father sold, and a girl at the local convenience store. Hardly anything happens. The film is just Marek Walczewski and his encounters with these slightly eccentric characters. Everything is shot in a bottle green light and surrounded by heavy shadow.
To my thinking this does not meet my definition of what makes a science-fiction film. A science-fiction film should engage with its concept – it should be about what it means to be an artificial person. Instead, what we get could be a dreary slice-of-life Polish drama about an anonymous man that has no SF elements at all. We get mention of artificial people at the start but it is not clear what this means – whether we are talking about androids or clones – and certainly none of this impacts on the story in any way. Some commentators have taken this to mean Marek Walczewski is one such artificial person but this is not clear from a watching of the film.
Certainly, Golem has nothing to do with Golems, which are creatures from Jewish folklore made of clay that are brought to life, or any of the previous versions of the story most notedly the silent German films The Golem (1914) and The Golem (1920). That said, the film does credit Gustav Meyrink’s classic novel for inspiration. However, in the film here, golem seems to stand for some kind of artificial person but the analogy seems to end there. There is a reference to being made of clay at one point but that is the nearest the film gets to any golems.
Full film available here (no subs)