My usual complaint about mainstream SF cinema is its dearth of ideas, whether they been politically satiric, philosophical or genuinely scientific. Very few films hit you with the power of their imaginative speculation to make you think and doubt. I propose five benchmark films that have stood the test of time to challenge and shake the viewer and deliver on a metaphysical level: 2001, A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Stalker, Brazil and The Stone Tape.
So now that Golem, an unseen for years, defiantly independent, SF artefact, has surfaced again I find my complaint is not that it has too few ideas but too many. I gratefully applaud Golem’s radical inventiveness but too often this meant a bewildering incoherence. But first a plot outline.
After an atomic war in 1943 a new human race is created. Doctors control the technology. One of these new humans is Pernat (Marek Walczewski) who is only a 60% success. He lives in a semi-derelict part of the city and puzzles his already alienated neighbours. Constantly observed by the doctors and interrogated by the authorities, Pernat becomes the model for a Golem-like figure (The Golem is an artificial human being of Hebrew folklore: a clay person brought to live by being baked in an oven). And Pernat’s identification number assists in animating this creature.
I stress the word animating because director Piotor Szulkin experimented, at the famous Łodz film school, with animation before shooting his first feature, Golem. In fact there are moments in Golem that for me show the influence of Polish animators like Jan Lenica and Jan Svankmajer. This doesn’t mean a cartoonish film but one that today could be adapted as a graphic novel. Yet more remarkably there are visual similarities with Tarkovsky’s Stalker that was released in the same year as Golem. Both use colour filters to create an eerie gold, green and brown palette.
Golem’s lighting (achieved by the acclaimed cinematographer Zygmunt Samosiuk) is compelling; indeed it keeps moving the film forward despite the often disconcerting twists and turns of the script. Marek Walczewski gives a very credible and beautifully understated performance. He’s a man unaware of what’s happening to him and bereft of sufficient mental faculties to do anything about it: existing somewhere between a holy fool and a controlled automaton.
Pernat encounters a series of almost Dickensian characters, especially the female doll maker and the eccentric scholar who wishes to give Pernat a book that will explain his predicament. These odd people, along with a man who looks like a replica of Pernant, keep appearing and reappearing in an arbitrary and plotless manner. What grounds the weird narrative of these lost souls is Szulkin’s funny and disturbing intercutting to scientists and politician’s discussing the Pernat case.
I love the opening sequence, when realising that they have a failed creation on their hands, a doctor announces, as if it’s his childbirth duty, that maybe they ought to give Pernat a spanking like in the good old days. Cut to today’s newspaper, stuck in Pernat’s mouth, that the doctor says he hasn’t got round to reading yet, a darkly comic moment that pulls successfully away from the grim fate of having to cope in this crazy Golem world.
Unfortunately there’s too much that’s annoyingly mystifying in Golem. The episode set in the TV studio when the reality of an audience is doubted; the interruptions of the supposedly happy members of a brass band; the doll woman sitting on the steps championing her dolls and a general confusion other whether we are watching Pernat or a copy of Pernat are paraded throughout the film in an illogical manner. Absurdism is rife and absolutely central to Golem but it never quite digs deep enough to shock but remains in a strange dismembered state. Even on a second viewing I felt an information overload. Where was Golem going?
There is a resolution of sorts but I won’t reveal it. Golem both spurts out ideas and then gnomically hides them. Some work but many don’t. A film to chew over then even though there’s less meat on the bone. A serious and uncompromising fable that risks pretentiousness yet never actually falls flat on its face. All is kept watchable by its technical skill, the central performance and a defiant desire to not be classified. That last intention I don’t mind. I just wish the film had been better scripted and idea-wise reigned in. Golem is a brave oddity: an out to lunch curiosity that equally attracts and repels. It’s great that Second Run have made it available again. Pity it didn’t overwhelm me, though it’s destined to become a cult film of sorts.
- Alan Price. [First published in London Grip]
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