Andrzej Zulawski and Possession (Film Program note)

“Bring me back my beautiful beast.”

This is what Marlene Dietrich said at the end of Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast. In the movie, the heroine falls in love with a furry, velvet-eared, and sad-eyed beast. At the film’s climax, the beast is turned into a conventional hero, indeed, the French matinee idol, Jean Marais. Dietrich lamented the beautiful beast’s disappearance from the film.

Sometimes, the creature is better than the hero.


A Divorce and Revenge Porn

Adolf Rudnicki was a Polish Jew and survivor of the concentration camps. He was famous in Poland for his holocaust novels, particularly The Merchant of Lodz. Rudnicki was married to an artist named Barbara Baranowska. Rudnicki coined the term epoca piecow (“epoch of the stoves”) to describe the Holocaust era in his native country – that phrase remains widely invoked. Baranowska was much younger than her novelist husband and she was unfaithful to him. She left Rudnicki and married her lover, the Polish film maker, Andrzej Zulawski. The marriage failed and Zulawski and Baranowska divorced. Zulawski, then, married an actress, Malgorzata Braunek. They had a child, a boy Xawery. (He was five years old when his parents separated). Braunek was unfaithful to Zulawski and the subsequent divorce involved allegations of violence and child neglect. Braunek’s boyfriend, whom she later married, was a Zen Buddhist and a sort of mystic – under the influence of her lover, she became a Zen practitioner herself. The parents contested custody of their son. The proceedings were intensely painful to Zulawski and, even, today he describes the situation in highly emotional terms.

The story of Zulawski’s collapsing marriage with Malgorzata Braunek and their divorce affords the basis for Possession (1981). Zulawski has described the film as autobiographical and, even, documentary in many respects. Uncharitably considered, Possession might be viewed as an expensive (2.4 million) and particularly vivid form of “Revenge Porn.” This is a species of bad behavior in which a spurned lover posts to social media embarrassing video or digital images of his ex-girlfriend. These images may include nude shots or, even, compromising sexual footage. The purpose of Revenge Porn is to expose the ex-girlfriend (most practitioners of this form are male) to shame and ridicule. Zulawski’s commentaries on Possession are crystal clear on this point: Anna is a portrait of his ex-wife, Bob stands in for the director’s small son, and Heinrich represents his wife’s lover. Dismissively, Zulawski notes that Anna, as shown in the film, is “much more intelligent than (his) ex-wife.” He makes the same remark about Heinrich, a character that Zulawski says that he “loathes.” (Zulawski describes his wife’s Zen buddhist lover as a particularly reprehensible example of the Polish “counter-culture”, a sort of hippie or flower child as well as a vicious seducer.) The misanthropic Zulawski says that he doesn’t like working with children – “I respect them too much,” he asserts, “unlike actors whom I do not respect at all.” In light of the extreme nature of his films, Zulawski says that he worked with a child-actor on only one occasion, Possession, because the presence of the boy in the context of love-triangle was “actual, what really happened.” (Remarking on the little boy’s performance, Zulawski says that the best performers are dogs, but children are a close second – although “you have to get everything on the first take. The second take, which is less instinctive, is always no good.”)

Most spurned husbands don’t get the opportunity to show their counterpart on film murdering their wife’s lover. Zulawski, however, stages the death of Heinrich in a way that is particularly degrading – he drowns the poor bastard in a toilet bowl in a sleazy tavern – “I did it that way because I hated Heinrich,” the director notes. Similarly, most aggrieved ex-husbands don’t have more than two million dollars budget to post video-nasties under the category of “my crazy ex-wife” showing the woman copulating with a gooey tentacle monster or miscarrying a fetal octopus in a pool of pus on the floor of a subway tunnel.


Zulawski

Andrzej Zulawski was born in 1940 in Lvov, then Poland but now located in the Ukraine. His family was distinguished: both his great-uncle and father were well-known novelists. Zulawski’s little sister died of starvation during the war. When asked about the apocalyptic subject matter of many of his films, Zulawski says: “I don’t notice it. I was born in an apocalypse.” The war killed all of his extended family – grandparents, uncles and aunts all perished. Zulawski remarks: “It was some kind of miracle that I survived.” When his parents divorced, Zulawski moved with his father to Czechoslovakia where he was raised. Zulawksi, then, emigrated with his family to Paris where he attended film school. Returning to Poland after his education, he worked as an assistant to the grand master of Polish cinema, Andrezj Wajda, initially helping the famous director with his historical film about the Napoleonic wars, Ashes (1965). Zulawski served as personal assistant to Wajda through 1970, working with him on four or five movies. It was while employed by Wajda that Zulawski saw a performance of a theater-piece by Jerzy Grotowski, the avant-garde Polish theater director. Although Zulawski denies the influence of Grotowski on his own films, echoes of Grotowski’s techniques and style are ubiquitous in the film maker’s work – and Zulawski has acknowledged that Grotowski’s theater work deeply affected him.

While working on Wajda’s holocaust movie, Landscape after a Battle (1970) Zulawski met Malgorzata Braunek (who was in the film) and married her. They had a child, but divorced in 1976. Zulawki’s first film The Third Part of the Night (1971) was made for the Polish National Film Production Company. (Braunek is in the movie). The film involves Nazi atrocities, a young man who joins the resistence, and encounters what seems to be Doppelgaenger of his wife who was killed by the Germans. While working in a typhus hospital, where the hero is serving as a test subject in lice studies, the protagonist sees someone who looks like himself dying painfully. This reconciles the hero to his past. Although the film is reputedly difficult to follow, it received respectful reviews and afforded a basis for Zulawski making his next movie, The Devil (1972). This picture is a wild historical fantasy involving a young man’s pact with a mysterious stranger. The movie is set in 1790 and involves a lurid sequence of orgies, near-incest, murders, rape, and castration. All of this mayhem is accompanied by poetic, metaphysical dialogue. The movie is highly regarded today but in 1972 the picture could not be released – most likely the picture couldn’t be released under any economy or regime. Zulawski says bitterly that Polish authorities “imprisoned” the film. It dropped into obscurity and was not re-released until 2007 when a DVD version was issued.

Zulawski moved to Paris and made The Most Important Thing: Love in 1975. The film, an inside view of French show-business, was a huge success. The movie’s leading lady, Romy Schneider, was awarded a Cesar (the French equivalent of the Oscar) for best actress. Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish director, has highly praised this movie and dedicated one of this pictures to Romy Schneider’s performance in the film. On the heels of the movie’s success, Zulawski was emboldened to return to Poland where he began work on his magnum opus, an adaptation of his great uncle’s science fiction novel On the Silver Globe. Zulawski spent two years working on this film, shot at a variety of location in East Germany, on the Baltic sea, and in Poland and the Ukraine. The movie is a lavishly produced story about intergalactic explorers for are marooned on the “silver globe”. They film their exploits on the planet where they are trapped with video cameras. Ultimately, the colony succumbs to religious mania. The sole survivor of the massacres on the “silver globe” becomes a Messiah figure and, ultimately, leads an uprising of oppressed people on another planet. Polish authorities were intensely suspicious of the film and appalled by Zulawski’s budget overruns and profligate shooting style – parts of the film were shot in the high Tatra Mountains, a Silesian salt mine, and the Gobi desert in Mongolia and the final cut was reputedly planned for 3 and ½ hours. While the film was being edited, Polish censors impounded all known prints of the film and its outtakes and destroyed them. The censors dug a hole and buried all of the film’s complex and stunning costumes; the sets were not only struck but burned to the ground. Remarkably, a partial negative survived and the movie was reconstructed (with still shots for missing sequences) in 1988. The picture was premiered to great acclaim. I have seen the movie which runs 168 minutes even in its incomplete form – it is incomprehensibly confusing, shot in an intentionally disorienting manner, and features wild-eyed expressionistic acting. The players mouth lines that sound as if they were written by Hegel – large chunks of the movie’s dialogue is unbearably complex and poetic. I found it impossible to understand what any one was saying and couldn’t detect a story in the film’s spectacular and surreal imagery. (When Martin Scorsese saw the picture, he was astonished and reportedly said: “How many billions did that cost?” – although the film wasn’t expensive by Hollywood standards, it was the most costly Polish film ever produced up to that date.)

Dismayed by his treatment in Poland, Zulawski returned to Paris where he had previously enjoyed success and good box-office receipts. He pitched an autobiographical film about his divorce but the money-men were lukewarm. Zulawski, then, went to Hollywood and lived in Los Angeles for a couple years. There, he pitched his divorce film to various Hollywood production companies also without success. One afternoon, he had lunch with an executive of Gulf-Western (Paramount). He told the man he wanted to make a horror film about “a woman who fucks an octopus.” The executive told him that he was crazy but that the company would authorize a small budget (by Hollywood standards) for the picture – Zulawski was given two million dollars and a free hand to make the movie. The result is Possession (1981). (Zulawski who is poor historian gives, at least, three versions of this story. As far as I can tell, the director is a self-aggrandizing inveterate liar. The movie was, in fact, produced by a Parisian film company using French money. The scenes in Berlin were subsidized to some extent by the Senate of Berlin which Zulawski regards as the “co-producer.”)

Possession proved to be an unmarketable picture – it’s too artistic and slow for horror fans and too horrific for the art house crowd. Nonetheless, Isabel Adjani was acclaimed for her performance in the picture and was awarded a Cesar for her acting. (She also won a best actress award at Cannes; Possession was shown in competition with Wajda’s Man of Iron, a political film about the Solidarity movement in Gdansk and Zulawski’s picture lost to the movie made by his old mentor.) The movie did reasonably well in Paris but was denounced as incoherent and the work of a mad man everywhere else. In Britain, Possession went straight to video – it was reviewed as a particularly demented form of “video nasty.” The film, in the director’s cut running 122 minutes, was edited to 81 minutes for showing at southern Drive-Ins and 42nd street “grind houses” in the USA. If the film is confusing and difficult to understand at 122 minutes in the director’s cut, one can only imagine the chaos on-screen in the horror film version hacked down to two-thirds of the director’s final form footage. Possession was the kind of calamity that would have ended most film maker’s career, but, in fact, Zulawski was resilient and he persevered.

1984's The Public Woman, a free adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Demons, was a modest success in Paris where the film was produced. It could be marketed as a erotic thriller and made enough money for Zulawski to direct Mad Love, another modestly budgeted film that could be packaged as an erotic suspense movie. (Zulawski married his leading lady Sophie Marceau, making four films with her – the relationship ended in 2001). Mad Love failed commercially. My Nights are more beautiful than your Days, featuring bizarre rhyming dialogue, was released in 1989 – it was met with incomprehension. Zulawski then made a film adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov – the film sank without a trace. All of Zulawski’s films were shot economically on small budgets – after the debacle of On the Silver Globe, none of these movies had shooting schedules lasting longer that 35 days and all, including Boris Godunov which required complex post-synchronization of its sound-track, were edited in less than 9 days.

By this point, Zulawski was a persona non grata in the international film industry. Although he had trouble getting films financed and produced, he traveled widely and served on many juries at international film festivals – his name still had significant cachet, particularly in light of the rediscovery and re-release of his film maudit, On the Silver Globe. Little is reported about Zulawski’s 1991 movie, The Blue Note. In 1996, he managed to produce Szymanka (The Shaman) a film about an anthropology student who takes his studies a bit too literally – he uses mushrooms to induce hallucinations. The experiment goes too far and he gets his brain eaten by his girlfriend. The film was written by a radical Polish feminist who admired Zulawski’s work with his actresses. Fidelity (2000) is a reimagining of Madame de Lafayette’s 17th century novel The Princess of Cleves – true to form, Zulawski puts some cannibalism and organ smuggling in the film. The movie was reasonably well-received and won some peculiar awards – first place at Romance Film festival and a technical prize, Best Steadicam Shot. Zulawski’s last picture Cosmos is a surrealist venture based on a well-known novel by the great Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz – it was made in Portugal and was the first film that Zulawski was able to finish in the fifteen years following Fidelity. The picture was premiered at the Locarno film festival and received respectful reviews. By this time, Zulawski was dying of cancer. He died in Warsaw on February 17, 2016.

Photographs of Zulawski show a young man who is stunning beautiful. As an old man, he was handsome with a great head of silver hair. Beginning in 2007, Mondo Video began releasing Zulawski’s back catalog of films. Zulawski aided with the restoration of the films and contributed witty and amusing, if somewhat pretentious (and deceitful), commentaries to several of the pictures.


Sam Neil

Sam Neill was first known outside of his native Australia for his work in Gillian Armstrong’s My Beautiful Career (1979). Possession was his second film and, of course, his performance, although eccentric is noteworthy. He played the son of the Devil in The Omen, Part Three (1981) and has been in a number of successful Australian and New Zealand films including The Piano and A Cry in the Dark as well as more recently Children of the Revolution. He is most famous for his performances in the Steven Spielberg franchise Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequels. Neill has been in British TV (Peaky Blinders) and auditioned for the part of James Bond after Roger Moore’s retirement – he lost out to Timothy Dalworthy. He was in The Horse Whisperer, The Hunt for Red October, and a host of Hollywood pictures. Zulawski in his commentary says that it was a pleasure to work with Neill because of his professionalism and intelligence – “he is very literate man with whom you can discuss anything,” Zulawski says on the commentary to Possession. Like many successful actors, Neill was afflicted with a stutter when he was a child and says that he has never wholly defeated this ancient enemy.


Isabel Adjani

Isabel Adjani (now 64) is the daughter of a Berber emigrant to Paris and a German-speaking mother who never really learned to speak French. She was raised in modest circumstances – her father worked as a mechanic in garages in the Paris suburbs. From age 12, she was recognized as a great beauty and began acting professional in films when she was 15. Adjani became internationally famous as a result of her starring role in Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. In that film, Adjani plays the formidable daughter of Victor Hugo who conceives an obsessive love for a man who is not her equal – she idealizes the object of her passion so intensely that when he comes face-to-face with him in the end of the movie, she doesn’t recognize the man to whose worship she has devoted her whole life. Adjani was only 19 when the movie was made in 1975 – no less a critic than Pauline Kael pronounced her acting “prodigious.”

Werner Herzog recognized the ethereal, somewhat unworldly aspect of Adjani’s beauty and cast her as Lucy Harker in his remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu. She is exceedingly spooky in that 1979 film, a movie in which she has sexual intercourse with the loathsome vampire to save her lover, Jonathan. Adjani won the Cesar award for her double role in Possession. At the time of the making of Possession, Adjani’s marriage with the cinematographer, Bruno Nuytten, was collapsing. Adjani had a small son with Nuytten and Zulawski mercilessly exploited the resemblances between the actress’ private life and her role in the film. Zulawski implies that Adjani cuckolded Nuytten by having a casual affair with him – it’s not clear whether this is true. In any event, Zulawski recalls that Adjani was a diva and difficult to manage on the set. He says that she treated her husband, who was shooting the film, with “savage cruelty.” Adjani later divorced Nuytten and began a fifteen-year long relationship with Daniel Day-Lewis (with whom she has a daughter).

Zulawski says that Adjani was a consummate actress in all aspects of her life. On the set of Possession, she developed an allergy to the green contact lenses she had to wear when playing the part of her good persona, Helen, the virtuous elementary schoolteacher who always appears in white in the film. Zulawski saw Adjani in the make-up room. Her entire face was red and puffed-up and her eyes were almost swollen shut; she looked “hideous.” Zulawski told Adjani to “knock it off” and that if she wasn’t willing to shoot that day he would “kill her.” (The film was made on a very tight schedule.) Adjani called him some names and, then, appeared on the set fifteen-minutes later resplendently beautiful. (True to form, Zulawski gives different versions of this story which sounds like it is derived from similar anecdotes told by Werner Herzog about Klaus Kinski. In the most elaborate version of the story, Adjani is inspired to disobedience by a homosexual make-up artist who whispers to her that the contact lenses “disfigure” her beautiful face. Zulawski gleefully imitates the make-up man’s fey manner, tells us that he can recount the story because “he’s dead anyway from AIDS,” and, then, explains that he pinned the actress behind a heavy door and said he would crush her to death if she didn’t agree to appear wearing the contact lenses.)

Adjani refused to watch “rushes” of the footage in which she appears in Possession and said that she regarded the entire movie as “emotional pornography – it shows things that should not be shown on film.” When she saw the finished film, Adjani attempted suicide. Zulawski dismisses the attempt as “acting” – she sliced into herself “only a couple of millimeters,” he comments dismissively.

Adjani has had a long and very successful career. She is the only French actress to have been awarded five Cesar Best Actress awards – in addition to Possession, she won the award for the 1983 One Deadly Summer, a huge hit in France (the synopsis suggests its kind of erotic thriller). She won her third Cesar for Camille Claudel (1989), a feminist picture in which she plays Rodin’s long-suffering assistant and mistress who was a great sculptor in her own right – this movie was directed by her ex-husband Bruno Nuytten. Another Cesar was awarded to her for her work in Patrice Chereau’s lavish historical epic, Queen Margot (1994) and, finally, was given the Cesar for her appearance in a feminist comedy Skirt Day (2009).

Adjani is politically active. She engaged in a well-publicized controversy with the Pope over birth control. She signed a petition defending Roman Polanski, with whom she had worked, when he was ordered extradited to the United States for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. She publicly opposes vaccination. She has made only one film in the United States, Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978). She appeared in that movie because she though Hill was “an heir to the American action tradition exemplified by Howard Hawks” and admired his picture Hard Times (1975).

A photograph taken at the Cannes festival in 2018 shows her still preternaturally youthful and beautiful.


Carlo Rambaldi

As a precondition to Gulf-Western’s financing package, Zulawski had to agree to use the services of Carlo Rambaldi, a very famous and successful effects director who specialized in devising “creatures.” (Although Zulawski makes this claim, it is suspect – in fact, the Parisian production company put up the money and other witnesses say that the Polish director was so impressed by Ridley Scott’s Alien that he contacted H. R. Giger, who conceived that film’s monster, and tried to hire him. Giger was busy but referred Zulawski to his assistant Carlo Rambaldi.) Rambaldi who was born in Italy in 1925 was renowned for his work on Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1975) and his design for the extensor mandibles in the grisly mouth of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Rambaldi was thought to be “bankable” in his own right and the film was pitched to the financiers in Hollywood as a special-effects driven monster movie, something on the order of Alien. Rambaldi was an international figure – he worked with Fellini and, then, Mario Bava on a number of gory Giallo crime films produced in the ‘sixties. He also “cut his teeth” on devising creature-effects for sword and sandal films made by Cinecitta including a number of the Hercules fantasy pictures.

Rambaldi did some exquisite drawings for Zulawski and contrived a wonderful monster for the film. He arrived in Berlin where the movie was under-production, the afternoon before the creature effects were scheduled to be shot. Zulawski met with him and recalls that Rambaldi had brought a suitcase containing a man-sized pink lubricated “condom” that he intended to use as the monster’s skin. During their first meeting in Berlin, Rambaldi said that he thought he could get the monster ready for the camera in about two weeks – he mentioned that he had been on the set with Spielberg for Close Encounters of the Third Kind for about a month, working with second-unit directors to make test shots and configure the lighting to show the aliens in their best, and most plausible, light. Zulawski was horrified. He told Rambaldi that all the creature shots had to be completed in the next two or three days – “I don’t have a Hollywood budget,” Zulawski told him. At first, Rambaldi was distressed and said that he was defeated – “there is no way I can get this monster ready for you tomorrow.” Zulawski demanded that he perform and Rambaldi suddenly rallied – “I’m an Italian,” he said, “not an American and we Italians are resourceful.” Rambaldi with his assistants worked all night and got a version of the monster ready for shooting the next morning – the creature is made from glue, melted film-stock, and scotch tape. Rambaldi worked around the clock on these effects for the next forty-eight hours and the shots required for the film were completed. (Of course, today there would be no monster at all, just some CGI effects and a green screen.) Rambaldi’s monster is “practical” – that is, a real puppet. When we see the monster writhing on the bed, the creature is operated by technicians hiding inside the mattress and physically wiggling the creature’s tentacles. “Why does it have tentacles?” someone asked Zulawski. He responded: “It’s a monster. Monsters have tentacles.”

Rambaldi is most famous for E. T., the extra-terrestrial, 1982's cute cousin to the creature in Possession. He died in 2010.

(It’s obligatory to note that Zulawski’s account of his work with Rambaldi is highly tendentious and partly untrue. Zulawski seems defensive about the appearance of the monster. In fact, Frederic Tuten, who worked as co-writer with the director on his script – the film was written and shot in English and, then, dubbed into French – remembers that he counseled Zulawski to keep the monster out of sight. Zulawski seemed to agree and the script was written with the creature mostly off-screen. But Zulawski, who spent some time in Rambaldi’s shop in Los Angeles, was, in fact, fascinated by the monster – in my view the revenge porn aspects of the movie are incomplete without the “money shot” of Isabel Adjani having coitus with the creature. Rambaldi came to Berlin with “five caskets” full of creature parts since the monster is shown in different stages of its development at different times in the film. The French producer recalls opening the caskets for the Berlin customs agents who were shocked at their contents. The “condom” monster as Zulawski derisively calls the creature is shown in one shot – it is penis-shaped with little green eyes. Zulawski claims that he scoffed at the monster when he first saw it: “I wanted the thing to suggest genitals, not to simply be something you might find in your underpants,” he says. But photographs show him gleefully examining the “condom” monster in LA and so his contention that the creature’s appearance surprised him is disingenuous.)


Marget Carstenson

Marget Carstenson is a German actress with an impressive resume. She worked extensively with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and has the starring role in that director’s extraordinary The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). She was part of Fassbinder’s repertoire company and appeared in many of the director’s most famous films, particularly those made for TV – she stars in the mini-series length Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972) as well as in the 16 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). She is also famous for playing the part of the wife in Fassbinder’s profoundly sado-masochistic Martha (1974). Cartenson was used to working with abusive directors – no one was worse than Fassbinder – and, so, she had no difficulty with Zulawski. Zulawski calls her character “a fool” and “ a naive idiot.” Cartenson remains active in the German cinema to this day.

Heinz Bennett

Heinz Bennett plays the role of Heinrich. Bennett was a stage-trained actor employed by the repertoire company of the Schiller Theater in Berlin. His expressionistic performance is one of the remarkable things in Possession. Zulawski claims he had to remedy Bennett’s “rather stiff acting style” that the director blamed on the performer’s background with the conservative and staid Schiller Theater.


Bernhard Wicki

Bernhard Wicki was cast in the film and one day of footage was shot with the actor. Then, Zulawski rewrote the script to eliminate the role. Wicki was a prominent post-war German film director, best known for his movie The Bridge (1959), a picture about a group of German school-boys conscripted to defend a bridge in the waning hours of World War Two. (The results are predictably tragic.) Wicki was an alcoholic, according to Zulawski (whose credibility is often suspect) – he says Wicki was drunk from dawn to dusk, hadn’t learned his lines, and was all wrong for the part anyway. So Zulawski simply scrapped the role.

Originally, Wicki was cast as Abe, Anna’s previous husband. This role was a reflection of the fact that Zulawski’s erring wife had earlier been married to a Jewish novelist and holocaust survivor much older than her. In its first conception, the film begins with a prologue in which Abe tells an anecdote about a Russian count whose wife betrayed him by taking a lover. The Russian count set about writing a novel about the woman’s betrayal in which the wife is portrayed as fat and ugly – her lover is revealed as a bumptious dimwit. The Russian count was not satisfied with his first draft of the story and so he rewrote the text again and again. The book became longer and more complex. Although the book first was told from the perspective of the aggrieved and betrayed husband, the novel shifts perspective and, finally, is narrated from the point-of-view of the adulteress, who has now become witty and beautiful. Of course, the Russian count is Leo Tolstoy and the book in Anna Karenina (“Anna” is the name of the adulteress wife in Possession as well). In the film’s original script, Abe was cuckolded by Mark. Mark, then, marries Anna and Abe remarries another much younger woman. A curious remnant of this backstory remains in Possession – in the penultimate sequence on the steps, a young blonde woman mysteriously appears. This is Abe’s wife as originally cast. Abe is no longer in the movie, but his young wife serves the role as necessary witness to the carnage at the film’s end.


Jerzy Grotowski

Zulawski denies being influenced by Jerzy Grotowski. But this seems disingenuous. Zulawski forces his principal players (Neill and Adjani) into dimensions far beyond conventional acting. He seems to manipulate the actors into disconcerting and naked self-revelation. Further, compared to a typical Hollywood production, Zulawski’s performers act with their whole body – every scene in the film shows gestures and collisions between the actors that we most associate with fight scenes or sexual encounters. In a Hollywood production, people act with their voices and,only when they fight or make love, deploy their bodies as a physical resource. Zulawski directs his actors to continuously perform with their whole body. Consider the scenes in which Mark confronts Anna’s lover, Heinrich. Heinrich caresses Mark and sinuously dances around him. Then Mark tries to strike him, Heinrich deploys a double handed karate chop and, then, draws back into praying mantis or Tai chih position. Later, when Heinrich is disoriented by the notion that there is another lover in the triangle (the creature in the decrepit building on Sebastian Strasse), he staggers around in delirious circles like a blind man. Anna is a sleepwalker, somnolent until she furiously strikes out with electric knife or broken bottle – she seems almost catatonic, a zombie but with fiercely coiled energy. Of course, Anna’s startling and discomfiting scene in the U-Bahn in which she wildly gulps air, smashes food to particles against the wall, and, then, squats to miscarry a monster on the concrete is less like movie acting and more a species of wild performance art. Zulawski’s use of the actor’s entire body and full register of their voices, from weird wails to whispers to enraged shrieks seems directly indebted to the theater of Jerzy Grotowski.

Grotowski was a Polish man of the theater born in 1933. In the late ‘fifties, Grotowski founded his Poor Theater. This ensemble used limited sets and costumes – the actors were directed to simulate with their own bodies any properties that were required. Grotowski’s most famous production in Poland was Akropolis, a work in which his actors mimed scenes from classical mythology while building with concrete blocks a crematorium around the enclosed audience. This was followed by a work that many regard as the greatest piece of theater mounted in the 20th century, Grotowski’s adaptation of Calderon’s The Constant Prince. Grotowski spent one year working with the leading man playing the Prince who is subjected to torture and martyrdom in the work. It is said that Grotowski altered the entire appearance and physical habitus of this actor, bending him into an uncanny and terrifying figure on stage. This was followed Grotowski’s adaptation of Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, a show that was performed to great acclaim in the United States.

For the next five years, Grotowski worked on his magnum opus, Apocalypsis cum Figuren – the work illustrates images of the end of the world in scripture. At the same time, Grotowski obsessively rehearsed a presentation staging the Four Gospels – this last work was never publicly shown. Apocalypsis cum Figuren was staged in 1969. Grotowski was 36 years old. The theater work was his last production. For the next 13 years, Grotowski traveled the world studying theater traditions in non-Western countries. On occasion, he engineered or devised spontaneous happenings – the best documentation of these ephemeral works, called “bee-hives”, is Andre Gregory’s account of working with Grotowski (whom he does not identify by name) in My Dinner with Andre (1981), a film that is the exact antithesis of the Polish director’s techniques. Grotowski returned to Wroclaw, Poland where his theater works had been staged in 1982 – the Polish regime threatened him with arrest and, so, he sought asylum in the United States. With the help of Andre Gregory, asylum was granted and Grotowski moved to Manhattan – he taught for a year at Columbia, but, then, drifted into what are called “paratheatrical” studies. In effect, Grotowski worked with actors in a context that would have to be characterized as therapy – he applied Jungian depth psychology to his subjects and worked as a sort of shaman and healer. Later, he was able to return to Poland where he died in 1999.

Grotowski’s most influential theory was that of “total act” performance. Stanislavski, a theorist of theater widely influential in the early 20th century, imagined actors as preparing for their role by asking innumerable questions about their characters – questions that could not be answered from the text, but to which the actor would devise responses to guide his or her performance. What was Macbeth’s relationship with his mother? Where does he keep his money? Who was the person most influential in his childhood? What were his sisters like? What is his religion? Shakespeare doesn’t answer these questions, but Stanislavski felt that a profound performance of the role could only be achieved if the actor had rehearsed in his mind these questions (and many, many more) and attempted to imagine responses. Grotowski felt that Stanislavski’s method as expressed in his manual An Actor Prepares created a kind of schizophrenia: the actor was to don a mask foreign to himself and conceal his identity and personal concerns under that mask. By contrast, Grotowski advocated that an actor strip himself naked, depart from his own persona and discover within his own heart the archetypal character equivalent to the role he is performing. The player entrusted with performing Lady Macbeth doesn’t study medieval texts and Shakespearian performance practice to prepare for the role. Rather, Grotowski asked his performers to reveal nakedly the “Lady Macbeth” within themselves. Grotowski’s premise was that each of us contain multitudes (to cite Whitman) and that embedded within our psyches, and unique to each of us, are the archetypes of Faust, Hamlet, or Lady Macbeth. There is an aspect of our own soul that responds to these roles – acting is to open up that part of the soul and reveal it in an encounter with the audience. This encounter is transactional – the woman who shows herself in full disclosure as ferocious, ambitious, cruel, the opposite of maternal, a woman warrior accesses the Lady Macbeth within her own psyche and, then, in an encounter with the audience, a sort of transaction, reveals that figure or archetypal persona. The notion is to find the archetype for the role within the actor’s own psyche and, then, display that archetype in a relationship with the audience.

(Andre Gregory was profoundly influenced by this theory and his productions of The Masterbuilder by Ibsen and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya were filmed only after rehearsal periods exceeding one year in each case.)

As an adjunct to this practice, Grotowski advocated “Extended Vocal Technique” – this was another device to remove actors’ inhibitions and lead them to an inner truth correlated to the role that they were playing. Extended Vocal Technique involves teaching actors to use their voices as musical instruments. Grotowski’s player were urged to yodel, ululate, scream and growl. They acted in falsetto or used buccal speech (nonlaryngeal speech that sounds like Donald Duck). Sometimes, Grotowski had his actors inhale helium and, then, declaim their lines. He taught them the ancient Ainu practice of Rekuhkara in which two actors face one another, make a tube from their conjoined hands and, then, bellow into each other’s vocal cavities. Grotowski’s actors shriek, whisper, sing, rap, use Tuvan throat singing etc.

In Possession, Adjani is not acting the role of a woman who fucks an octopus. She is disclosing the part of her soul that would desire to do such a thing. Neill is not acting jealous – he is accessing the deep wellsprings of his own male rage and jealousy that he must ordinarily conceal.


Production Notes

Zulawski shot the movie with very wide angle 150 to 180 mm lenses. These lenses can not be used to selectively focus on a single narrow part of the frame – rather, these lenses yield an image with all parts equally in focus. Zulawski claims this requires very careful set decoration and composition to keep subordinate parts of the image from becoming unduly important to the viewer. The wide-angle lenses were necessitated by the extremely cramped quarters in which the film was shot. The two apartments are very small. The first floor apartment on Sebastian Strasse was only 16 feet from the wall and East German security forces engaged in close surveillance of the production. Many scenes had to be shot with from outside windows since the apartments were simply too small to accommodate the actors and equipment – the cameras and technicians were mounted on scaffolding set outside the building’s windows. Zulawski seems to have regarded the close presence of the Wall as a factor that induced tension in cast and crew and that contributes to the brooding sense of doom in the film. In several special effects sequences, Zulawski’s stunt men risked crashing through barriers and into East Germany, a mistake that would have had dire consequences for everyone involved.

The movie’s creature sequences and exteriors were shot in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood already dominated by Turkish immigrants. In fact, both apartments were homes where Turkish families were living. Zulawski’s wide-angle lenses would have scrupulously recorded any other figures on the streets where the exteriors were shot by the Wall. Accordingly, he had to persuade the Turks to stay indoors when he make his exterior shots. He did this by a simple expedient, telling the Turks that he needed their help because he was poor, even poorer than them, and that he didn’t have a Hollywood budget and required that they go indoors for the fifteen minutes when he was shooting outside. Zulawski worked very quickly and he got the shots that he needed – grim, empty streets under a forbidding sky.

The infamous Berlin U-Bahn scene was shot at three a.m. when the subways were inactive for the night. It was bitterly cold and Zulawski didn’t really direct Adjani’s seizure-like performance. He told her to “fuck the air.” Adjani did the shot on the first take but someone thought that, perhaps, a crew member’s foot was in the image. (This turned out to be a untrue.) A second take was made but it was less effective. Zulawski said that Adjani did what she had to do, performing admirably in the cold while sprayed with “sticky stuff.” But he remarks that he doesn’t find the shot exploitative. These actors are paid “millions to do this sort of thing,” Zulawski explains. (But Adjani, by Zulawski’s own admission, was paid “next to nothing”, “chicken-feed” for this movie. At the time, she picture was shot Adjani was deemed a liability because of her hot temper and diva-like behavior working on other movies. After threatening to kill her, Zulawski said he had no trouble with the actress.) Zulawski describes Adjani as being literally “possessed” in this sequence and that she was like a “voodoo priestess” possessed by one of the “divine horsemen”. He calls the effect “shamanistic” – Adjani is acting by revealing something hitherto concealed within her. “She deliver herself wholly to the camera.”

Zulawski is a great proponent of the Steadicam, although that technology didn’t exist when the movie was made. Many of the shots required complex track systems on which to mount the moving camera. A number of shots, including the subway sequence, are hand-held.

A crew of cheap Yugoslavian stunt men were on-set. They wanted to prove themselves to Zulawski by plunging off buildings or diving down flights of steps. One man showed his prowess by repeatedly banging his head on the wall. Zulawski says that these stunt men were staggering drunk at all times.

Zulawski revered John Ford. Ford developed a way of shooting that rendered his films largely exempt from studio interference. Ford never shot “cover” and tried to get the scene lensed in a single master take. He was careful to not create excess footage that could be used to re-edit his films. Zulawski mimics this approach to film making for two reasons – it saves money (Zulawski calls himself an exemplar of “poor man’s moviemaking) and, second, he began his career working in Poland where his films were subject to censorship. Therefore, he tried to make his movies in a way that prevented authorities from re-cutting and readily censoring his films. (This technique backfired on him in On the Silver Globe, the most expensive Polish film made to that date. The picture is conceived as an organic whole and shot in long takes to repel censors. But the film was so organically complete and so seamless that the Polish authorities couldn’t figure out how to salvage any part of the movie and, so, they simply suppressed the whole thing.)

Zulawski tells a good story about Ford. He was shooting in Monument Valley when there was blizzard. The production was shut down for eleven days. A producer was sent from Hollywood to confer with Ford about the delay. Ford said that he was behind schedule by about 11 days or fifteen pages of script. Then, he pulled out the script and ripped 15 pages from it – “there,” he said, “problem solved.” Zulawski claims he did something similar by eliminating Bernhard Wicki’s subplot from the beginning of Possession.


Bergman and Lars von Trier

Although Possession is remarkable for its often baffling combination of horror and intense psychodrama it is not unprecedented. The film can be correlated to certain other movies that it resembles to some degree. Always self-promoting (even in old age), Zulawski claims for the film a radical uniqueness that it doesn’t really possess.

Ingmar Begman, under the influence of Strindberg’s Dance of Death, produced Scenes from a Marriage (1973), a six-part made-for-Tv movie. The film involves adultery committed by both husband and wife (played memorably by Liv Ullmann and Erland Josefson) – the Swedish version is 260 minutes; it runs 167 minutes in the cut for the American film version. The picture involves horrific scenes of violence, extreme and scathing dialogue, and the last episode, “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World” has a title a bit like a horror film. The movie is a harrowing experience, autobiographical in form, and, certainly, seems to have influenced Zulawski. Other films by Bergman, also exploring the collapse of sexual relationships and mental illness, are explicitly indebted to horror films – consider the sea of floating corpses in Shame (1968), the nightmare scenes in Hour of the Wolf (1968) in which the lead character plucks out his own eyes, the schizophrenic fusions and fissions in Persona (1966) in which two women merge and become one another, and the scenes of self-mutilation in Cries and Whispers (1972) -- the heroine cuts her vagina with a piece of broken glass.

The absurdly extreme imagery in Possession is mirrored in several of Lars von Trier’s movies. In Melancholia (2011), a woman’s depression and incipient madness is mirrored in apocalyptic effects – the moon, symbolizing depression, literally slams into the earth. Anti-Christ (2009) involves a grieving couple who blame one another for the accidental death of their child – the husband and wife retreat to a remote cabin in the woods where they commit spectacular and mutilating acts of sexual violence. The effect is a bit similar to the scene in Possession in which both characters saw at themselves with an electric knife.

Of course, Possession also is related to the genre of films called “Body Horror” or “Biological Horror” movies. The Canadian director, David Cronenberg, made a number of films evincing deep and potentially pathological anxiety about the human body. Cronenberg has been called “the King of Venereal Horror”. His films include Shivers (1975) about a stomach parasite that causes “a combination of aphrodisiac and venereal disease effects” so as to induce primal orgies. In 1977's Rabid, the porn star Marilyn Chambers plays a woman afflicted with a tumor under her armpit that contains a deadly phallic stinger. The Brood (1979) involves a woman who gives birth to murderous deformed dwarves from a “psychoplasmically induced external womb.” These films culminated in The Fly (1986), possibly the most excessive and disturbing of all biological or venereal horror films and, later, the more subtle, but equally distressing Dead Ringers (1988), about twin gynecologists who develop special tools for working with “mutant women” – in fact, it’s a story of madness and obsession.

It is no coincidence that much of this work arises from the period between 1975 to 1990, a time when a strange, hitherto-unknown, venereal cancer plagued the world. This was the epidemic of HIV AIDs that assassinated a generation of Gay men and threatened to make the human body, the image of God, a site of virulent anxiety and horror.


The Political Allegory

Zulawski’s hatred from the Communist regime was uncompromising, indignant, and outspoken. In his commentary on the film, he equates Communism with pure evil. Zulawski says that if his budget had been greater, he would have filmed the freshly formed body of the new Mark hovering over the Wall, seeing goodness on one side and total evil on the other. Communism made men into something monstrous – it was a hideous excrescence on political history. Zulawski equates his ex-wife’s adultery with the betrayal of human nature committed by the Polich Communist regime. The monster is the nightmare thing that the Communists have made, something that has detached itself from ordinary reality, and become a hideous self-sustaining creature that no one can control any longer. Notwithstanding Zulawski’s vehemently expressed repulsion for Communism and the monsters that it creates, he was, of course, raised within the system and taught to revere its principles. Similarly, Zulawski would have to concede that he once loved his now despised ex-wife, that she was once dear to him, and very extravagance of his present hatred measures the degree of his previous affection for her. Accordingly, the film is fundamentally ambivalent – the figure of betrayal is beautiful and remains desired by the filmmaker. Mark seems to love Anna without reservation even as he similarly hates her.

Frederick Tuten, the New York writer who worked on the script with Zulawski, was summoned to Berlin to help with the rewrites required when the subplot involving Abe was eliminated from the film. Tuten recalls that Zulawski took him to East Berlin for an afternoon. Tuten remembers the excursion with unmitigated horror. “I went into East Berlin, a leftist,” Tuten says. “I returned a moderate.”


Some interpretative thoughts

Critics regard the film’s delirious moving camera and its wildly expressionistic acting as literally “deranged.” Critics in the early 80's denigrated Possession for its hysteria. The film is now considered a cult movie. Writers in the last ten years have tended to admire Possession for its swooning film technique.

But what does it mean? Clearly, the film is about jealousy, “the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds upon.” (Iago in Othello... and note that Portia in Merchant of Venice refers to jealousy as “green-eyed.” It’s no accident that dopplegaengers spawned by jealousy in Possession have brilliant green eyes.) Sexual relations are productive. A man and woman’s intercourse may produce a child. Here it produces a monster. The monster is the third element in the triangle – at first, we think that the triangle is constituted by Mark, the CIA spy (Neill’s character), Heinrich, the Zen Buddhist lover, and the spy’s wife, Anna. But, in fact, her betrayal of the spy (a man whose whole existence is predicated on betrayal) creates the real triangle – the inhuman embodiment or materialization of psychotic jealousy represented by the creature.

Here are some propositions:

1. Freud tells us that the object of love is “over-valued” (uberschatzt) – we read this in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905 - 1915). We don’t need to agree with Freud’s arguments as to why this happens – of course, he ascribes this commonly known phenomenon to a regression to infantile sexuality. All that is necessary for our analysis is to recognize that this phenomenon occurs. The object of love is imagined as physically perfect, morally impeccable, and intellectually superior.

2. The German lover, Heinrich, sends Anna a card telling her that when he visited the Taj Mahal, he saw one-half of the face of God. Anna is the other half. This is a radical overvaluation of the object of desire;

3. Freud argues that the object of love will be tainted by the bestial spasms of physical intercourse. Thus, the lover must debase the object of his desire to possess her. This leads to degradation of the object of desire, something Freud calls Dirnenlieb (“whore love”). Again, we don’t need to follow Freud’s unconvincing arguments as to why this happens – we only need to note that in actual human relationships, the “madonna or whore” syndrome is often at play. A woman is a madonna until we have sex with her – then, she becomes a whore;

4. Mark imagines Anna having sex with Heinrich. He despises Heinrich and regards him as an amoral and vicious animal. Thus, Mark’s jealousy results in his imagining that Anna is capable of copulating with some sort of awful monstrous creature.

5. If Anna sexually desires a monstrous creature, she is herself a monster – thus, she gives birth to monsters.

6. Freud imagines male sexuality as being unstable – the lover fluctuates between regarding the object of his desires as Madonna or whore. This produces an either/or dilemma that is fundamentally insoluble, a “knot” of the kind Laing identifies as producing schizophrenia. The Catch 22 is that by having sex with the Madonna, the object of love becomes degraded to a whore (with whom emotionally satisfactory sex is impossible). Freud thought that this either/or dilemma resulted necessarily in impotence, an inability to perform sexually;

7. Subsequent commentators on Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality note that by positing the “either/or” dilemma, the psychoanalyst ignores an earlier discovery made in his epochal 1900 text The Interpretation of Dreams. In that book, exploring the “dream-work”, Freud proposes that for the unconscious mind the “either/or” theorem of “exclusivity (either this or that)” doesn’t exist. The unconscious always substitutes the copula, that is an “and”, for “either/or” propositions.

8. Thus, Anna becomes both Madonna and Whore. She is both “object of desire” and the consort of horrible deformed monsters. She is both the mother of the little boy, Bob, and the mother of the monster representing the thing she has produced with Mark, the gooey, hideous betentacled creature that embodies jealousy;

9. Ultimately, Mark’s mind can’t bear the juxtaposition of Madonna with whore. He fissions his wife into a Madonna figure (but with green eyes – Helen, the virtuous teacher) and a whore (Anna, the cruel teacher who fucks an octopus).

10. Mark’s production of two female figures from his wife is evidence of his own increasing schizophrenia. Mark’s schizophrenia is documented in the progressive deterioration of his physical environment, the clutter and debris that takes over his apartment. (This motif derives from Polanski’s horror film Repulsion made in 1965 and starring Catherine Deneuve.) At the end of the movie, Mark has also divided into two figures, one of them with green or blue alien eyes demonstrating his origin in the protagonist’s insane jealousy.

11. Walls are necessary. The wall keeps the capitalist West (virtuous, gentle and artistically free) from being contaminated by its opposite, the Communist regimes in the East. Berlin is where this division between two types of political being is made manifest. Both sides of the Wall imagine the political system on the other side as being nightmarish and monstrous. But the Wall keeps the two polities from destroying one another.

12. Walls are necessary in metaphysics as well. We need to keep God’s mercy and grace and goodness separated from the Devil’s cruelty, determinism, and evil. But as the film progresses, the wall separating Good from Evil (God from Devil) collapses – God becomes synonymous with the monstrous creature. Good and Evil, God and the Devil are dissolved into a single apocalyptic presence;

13. The film’s color-scheme is icy blues and jaundiced yellows. It can be demonstrated that blue represents goodness and love; yellow represents bilious jealousy and hatred. Blue and yellow combine to make green, that is, the green-eyed offspring of jealousy.

14. Jealousy is an unstable combination of obsessive love and obsessive hatred. Again, the wall has broken down separating states that sanity requires that we keep apart from one another.

15. In the end of the film, Mark (a figure who has penetrated the porous border between East and West) is associated with the catastrophic collapse of the walls by which we retain sanity. Green-eyed Mark demands to be let into the apartment. Bob recognizes that he is a monster and no longer his father – he screams that the man should not enter the apartment. At that moment, the walls symbolically collapse in the apocalypse: we hear bombs and jet planes screaming across the sky as the wall falls apart, East merges with West in a final desperate battle, God and the Devil are one, love and hatred dissolve into a single monstrous creature. “Either/or” collapses into a chaotic “both/and”.


The power of Zulawski’s film is to find implicit in a casual instance of adultery the end of the world. The collapse of a deeply felt relationship is like the end of days. It seems unimaginable that anything can survive the turbulence of feelings in which love disintegrates into divorce. Of course, Zulawski’s film is profoundly ridiculous and absurd. But when we love and hate, we are ridiculous and absurd beings.

Possession means to physically “possess” – that is, to take hold of the object of our desires. But it also means to be “possessed” literally by literally powers.


Zulawski’s commentary

Zulawski provides a detailed, if often wrong-headed commentary on the movie. He seems to locate the source of the disturbance in the world entirely in Anna and her betrayal. Remarkably, he seems generally unable to come to terms with the fact that Mark has gone completely insane as well. Although Zulawski seems to understand that Mark is crazy on some level, he can’t really ascribe actual insanity to his protagonist. Thus, his analysis of what he thought he was doing in making the film is curiously blind to Mark’s complicity in his wife’s madness and the fact that the husband has gone totally mad by the end of the movie. Zulawski ascribes rational motives to Mark which are not visible on-screen. Indeed, one account of the movie might be that the crazy person initially predominant in this folie a deux is Mark. It may be that Mark’s obscene jealousy precedes Anna’s adultery – as in Shakespeare’s great and obsessive studies in jealousy, perhaps, it is the man’s fear of being cuckolded that, in fact, provides the motive force for the adultery that, ultimately, transpires – or is perceived to transpire. Anna is not alone in her madness. Mark, perhaps, is crazier than she is.


Zulawski says --

Zulawski says: If a film lacks morals, this absence will be decisive. My films are moral.

Zulawski says: The evolution of film is toward a camera-penis that penetrates a woman. Fortunately, this was early accomplished. We call this pornography. Pornography brought film development to an end and freed us to do other thing with the medium.

Zulawski says: Life is a struggle between the Devil and Angels.

Zulawski says: Film comes from a simple vision: We are all unhappy.

Zulawski says: Communism evacuates from the body politic something evil that begins to live on it own. Anna imposes her madness, her reality, on her husband like Communism imposed its false reality on those living in Communist countries.

Zulawski says: Cinema is acting, doing. Speaking is just radio.

Zulawski says apropos commercial films: Nothing wants to bite anymore. Films want to lick.

Zulawski says: The staircase in the end is Jacob’s ladder. It leads from earth to heaven. After wrestling the angel, Jacob is given the ladder. All the staircases in my films are Jacob’s ladder.

Zulawski says: Mark has been away spying in Bulgaria or Rumania. That’s what the detail of the pink socks means. Anyone from the Communist bloc would immediately recognize this reference – I’m talking about a tyrant who thinks he is hip and modern because he wears pink socks. I don’t expect audiences not raised under Communism to understand this reference but this would be immediately apparent to a Pole. I’m not making the movie for Western audiences.

Zulawski says about Possession: It took 28 years for this film to find an audience. Recognition softens old age. It’s better than being bitter.