The Circle

“The Return” (1972), Jerzy Kucia’s debut, was a “horizontal” journey, an intimate impression about a man who returns for a moment to the world of his past, “The Lift” (1973) – a “vertical” journey, a collage of thoughts, memories, dreams of a man who is in a lift, and “The Circle”, a circular journey. The camera moves around its vertical axis, returning to the same scenes in which small changes have appeared, often in the far background. The construction assumption – incredibly simple, the realisation – extremely difficult. In Jerzy Kapuściński’s program “Other Cinema” the artist, when commenting the TV projection of “The Circle”, says: “For me the technique was not very important, that is it doesn’t matter what technique I use as long as it shows the situation I want to present. I even wanted the audience not to recognize the technique, but to go as deep as possible into the story, the drama, to understand this language which is – in my opinion – not so simple.” “The Circle” is a kind of continuation of Kucia’s earlier films and a notice of his future films. The director confirms this observation. In a conversation with Monika Wysogląd in “Film” (nr 31/1986) he confesses: “Sometimes I think that maybe I am lowering the level, because I have plunged into a creative tunnel (…) constantly the same one. I have however done this on purpose. It is very easy to make diverse films, much harder to make those which come from a common genesis. I have many ready scripts, but I only want to realise some of them – those, which have a connection with my earlier films, which descend from them. For example “Reflexes” came from “The Circle.” When I was making “The Circle”, I already knew that I would also make “Reflexes”, moreover I knew that they would resemble each other, because they would stem out of a motif from “The Circle.” The opposition between nature and civilization is successfully continued by Kucia in his later films: “The Parade” (1986; prizes in Oberhausen, Warna, Kraków, Zamość), in which harvest time brings back memories and reflections, as well as “Through the fields” (1992; prizes in Szanghaj, Huesca, Kijów, and Kraków), a poetic impression about the passing of time, where a trip through the fields is accompanied by images from the past, of close people, dreams. The logic of the precedence of events in these films is substituted by a logic of memory. Jerzy Armata