Piotr Szulkin at Spectacle in New York - the first major US retrospective

Two years after packing the house during our Eastern Bloc Apocalypse series, the remarkable work of Piotr Szulkin returns to Spectacle.

Criminally under-appreciated outside of his native Poland, Piotr Szulkin has hardly achieved cult status, even as other giants of Polish cinema (Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Wajda) get their due with retrospectives at respected theaters and museums. Born in Gdansk in 1950, Szulkin got his start at the State Higher School of Directing in 1975, producing animations, short documentary, and musicals. Working as a director, screenwriter, and novelist, his films occupy space on the bleaker fringes of the late Soviet period. His work stretches well into the 2000s, but it’s his dystopian “tetralogy”—four rarely screened science fiction films about the apocalypse produced in the twilight of Polish communism—that have been sought after by cinephiles for the past 30 years. Spectacle is proud to bring these films together for the first time as a major US retrospective.

Dismissive of the Polish critical establishment’s labeling of his work as sci-fi (he prefers the term “asocial fiction”), Szulkin’s vision of the apocalypse in the tetralogy is deeply rooted in the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain. Political violence, martial law, pervasive propaganda, and civilian apathy are the texture of his morbid future, set in worlds where humanity has been hobbled under the pressures of state control. Shot on spartan budgets in a gritty, expressive style, the films are wildly imaginative and inventive, even as they mine the depths of wasted potential and human exploitation for allegories of life under the 1980s Polish regime.

Spectacle: 
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