Cinema
Illumination
Iluminacja
Krzysztof Zanussi · 1973
Synopsis
Franciszek Retman leaves his small town of Pułtusk and enrols in physics in Warsaw, convinced that this science will give him clear answers about the order of the world. As a student, he becomes involved with Agnieszka; on holiday in the Tatras, he is struck by the death of a mountaineer friend and meets Małgorzata. As she is expecting a child, he marries her and, to support his family, suspends his studies: he works in a factory making medical equipment, then agrees, for pay, to take part in research on dreams in a psychiatric clinic.
Context
Written by its director and produced by the Tor group, the film was shot in four months, photographed by Edward Kłosiński to music by Wojciech Kilar, with Stanisław Latałło in the lead role. It mixes fiction with interviews with real scholars, and opens on the philosopher Władysław Tatarkiewicz, who explains the sense of the word inherited from Saint Augustine. The editing was long: a hypnosis scene was removed, the medical scenes judged too naturalistic, a brain operation and an autopsy, were censored, and the censors forced the abandonment of the thread about March 1968, of which allusions remain. Shown at Locarno in August 1973, it was released in Poland on 23 November and in France on 16 October 1974; the Polish intelligentsia welcomed it with enthusiasm.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and a half in Polish, built like an essay: the fiction is interrupted by interviews with scientists and by scientific documents.
Prizes and reception
Golden Leopard, International Critics' Prize and Ecumenical Jury Prize at Locarno in 1973; Special Jury Prize at the Polish Film Festival in Gdańsk in 1974.
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