Forthcoming: Golem

[What A Disgrace]

Radiance's newsletter confirms this as forthcoming from Second Run

[MichaelB]

To clarify, this is the 1980 film Golem by Piotr Szulkin.

[DeprongMori]

I’ve just watched Golem from the Vinegar Syndrome box set Apocalypse Tetralogy, and now I’m curious to see his nine earlier short films that precede Golem. (I’m including the 40-minute Bewitching Eyes from 1977, which would seem to be a good folkloric match, along with The Gal and the Fiend, to Golem.)

As neither the Vinegar Syndrome box nor the Radiance box contain them, do we have any information on whether they will be included in this Second Run release of Golem?

Are there other good sources for these short films?

[swo17]

As I commented in the Radiance thread, there's one in the Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation

[ryannichols7]

As neither the Vinegar Syndrome box nor the Radiance box contain them, do we have any information on whether they will be included in this Second Run release of Golem?

Are there other good sources for these short films?

considering Second Run's usual knack for including short films, I wouldn't be surprised to see this inclusion

[therewillbeblus]

They usually include one or two, but I doubt we're getting nine - hopefully there isn't overlap with the Radiance shorts and they stick to unreleased material

[MichaelB]

Although the Polish rightsholder would no doubt be only too happy to license them twice over, there's absolutely no chance of them overlapping with the Radiance shorts.

Why would Second Run pay good money for something that they already know is getting a UK release?

[therewillbeblus]

I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I feel like this has happened recently where a boutique label will license the already-available shorts on a mirror release vs. new ones. Specific examples are escaping me though. I guess I'm not always assuming every label is up-to-date with their cousins' extras, or considering them when producing a release. Helps to keep expectations in check

[swo17]

Like how Eureka matched Arbelos' special features for Son of the White Mare or how BFI did the same with Funeral Parade of Roses. Though in those cases the different labels were serving different markets

[DeprongMori]

Although the Polish rightsholder would no doubt be only too happy to license them twice over, there's absolutely no chance of them overlapping with the Radiance shorts.

Why would Second Run pay good money for something that they already know is getting a UK release?

Unless I misread it, all of the shorts on the Radiance End of Civilization box set are ‘complementary’ shorts, and *not* by Szulkin. This gives Second Run a lot of latitude on what they include. I will likely double-dip.

Hoping there might be some last minute additions to the Radiance set as it currently looks like there’s little inducement for me to swap out my VS set for it, despite my strongly favoring Radiance as a label.

FWIW, I did manage to find Szulkin’s Bewitching Eyes streaming. Not sure about the legitimacy of the site, but I’ll check it out tonight.

[therewillbeblus]

This was my first Szulkin, and I loved it - a kind of Alphaville sci-fi noir if shot by Gilliam doing his best Fellini impression. There are plenty of narrative and visual motifs obfuscated, likely in order to serve the more reflexive theme of surrogate disorientation. Szulkin is tough to pin down - sometimes lucidly supplying the meaning behind what he's doing, and other times mystifying his audience with cheeky Naked Lunch-esque surrealism, which is probably the best point of comparison. Like that film, even when confused I didn't get the sense that any internal logic was being forsaken, and the dystopian dark comedy was stimulating divorced from the sociopolitical and literal narrative constructs woven in or elided. A 90-minute blast of eccentric novelty, holding its ground in a familiar sandbox.

[What A Disgrace]

Pre-order up at Rarewaves, set for a Feb 17 release. No further info.

[MichaelB]

It's not exactly a secret (or, I imagine, a surprise) that I'm recording a commentary for this one, although it's been delayed by a deeply unwanted bout of laryngitis.

I recorded the first minute anyway to send to Second Run to explain why I wouldn't be hitting my deadline, and they were very sympathetic. Not that they had much choice; it was either get a commentary delivered on time but sounding like that, or having to wait until I got my voice back – although I've got most of it back now, and hopefully all of it before too long.

I think I can probably also get away with confirming that this will be just one of several extras, and that the others don't overlap with any existing Szulkin releases.

UPDATE: Nedoflanders over at the other place has said "I know for certain that Michael Brooke has recorded a commentary for this release". If only that were true, I'd be able to put my feet up in the run-up to Christmas!

[Nedoflanders]

UPDATE: Nedoflanders over at the other place has said "I know for certain that Michael Brooke has recorded a commentary for this release". If only that were true, I'd be able to put my feet up in the run-up to Christmas!

As a sometime lurker to these parts, let me start my first post by apologising for falsely assuming it was in the can and end it by giving a big resounding D'OH!

[MichaelB]

It was a perfectly reasonable assumption, and in fact it should have been in the can by now!

And hopefully will be by this time next week - my voice isn't up to it just yet, but every day's seen fresh progress.

One nice thing about this commentary is that it's the first of my three Szulkin commentaries to be fuelled by the massive book-length interview Życiopis (2012), which was so thoroughly OOP that I'd given up all hope of getting a copy (and believe you me, I tried!) - I imagine it had a very small print run and purchasers were very keen to keep hold of it. And then after the first two commentaries had already been published it popped up on the Polish equivalent of eBay a few months ago, and I bribed the seller to reconsider his "no international shipping" policy.

[ryannichols7]

It's not exactly a secret (or, I imagine, a surprise) that I'm recording a commentary for this one, although it's been delayed by a deeply unwanted bout of laryngitis.

I recorded the first minute anyway

wow, no one said you had to do it in character!

glad you're feeling better, and cannot wait for the track as always. glad we have a release date for this at last too

[MichaelB]

Short films have been confirmed as supplements.

(The number is not nine, but it's not one either.)

[What A Disgrace]

Rarewaves identifies the shorts as One, Two, Three (1972), Everything (1972), A Sketch In Six Parts (1973), and Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI (1977, ironically).

[swo17]

Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI (1977, ironically)

This was included in the essential Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation collection, where it was credited to 1976. Presumably it was in fact copyrighted in 1976 but didn't manage a screening until the next year, at the Krakow Film Festival

[ryannichols7]

truly love that this will be as complimentary as possible to the Radiance box. hoping for a Michał Oleszczyk or Daniel Bird visual essay/interview about the shorts to compliment MichaelB's commentary on the main feature

[MichaelB]

A Sketch in Six Parts is believed to contain Krystyna Janda's film debut, a mere four years before she was catapulted to local megastardom in Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble.

Janda and Szulkin had been close friends since their student days at the turn of the 1970s, which is why she was happy to appear in his first three features even though they were interspersed with far higher-profile work.

[What A Disgrace]

The official specs:

• Golem (1979) presented from a 2K restoration by Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF), Poland, supervised by director Piotr Szulkin and sound engineer Nikodem Wolk-Laniewski.
• An all-new audio commentary by writer, producer and Polish cinema specialist Michael Brooke.
• Four of Piotr Szulkin's early short films, presented for the first time anywhere on Blu-ray:
- One, Two, Three (Raz, dwa, trzy, 1972)
- Everything (Wszystko, 1972)
- A Sketch in Six Parts (Szkic do sześciu części, 1973)
- Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI (1977)
• Booklet featuring essays by Michał Oleszczyk and Tomasz Kolankiewicz.
• New and improved English subtitle translation.
• UK premiere on Blu-ray.
• Region free Blu-ray (A/B/C)

[MichaelB]

Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI (1977, ironically)

This was included in the essential Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation collection, where it was credited to 1976. Presumably it was in fact copyrighted in 1976 but didn't manage a screening until the next year, at the Krakow Film Festival

Stuff like this always drives me up the wall (speaking as someone with a professional need to make decisions like this all the time), especially because different people apply different measures - some go by copyright date, some by premiere date, and some by first commercial release date.

For instance, Golem was completed by mid-1979 but had to wait until early 1980 for a release - but I personally think of it as a late 1970s rather than an early 1980s film. Which might sound like trivial nit-picking, but in this case 1980 was a pretty pivotal year in Polish history, and while Golem was released a few months before the great Solidarity upheavals and the subsequent brief thaw in cultural policy, calling it a 1979 film rather than a 1980 film makes this obvious without needing footnotes.

And it's very much a product of the late 1970s - one of the info-nuggets that I dug up was that Szulkin managed to get it greenlit thanks to a splendid piece of opportunism on his part - when Deputy Minister of Culture Janusz Wilhelmi controversially pulled the plug on Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe in mid-1977, Szulkin was genuinely worried that his feature ambitions had been strangled at birth (since he was clearly an artistic fellow traveller), and when Wilhelmi was promoted to Minister of Culture in January 1978, that made his prospects even bleaker. But, less than two months later, Wilhelmi died in a plane crash, and Szulkin calculated that it would take the government a week to appoint a successor and another week for that successor to get acclimatised to the job, and that it was also very likely that said successor would wish to make his own mark on the ministry by effectively starting with a clean slate. So Szulkin wrote Golem in ten days flat, and submitted it for approval, calculating that his timing would put it near the top of the new minister's in-tray. Amazingly, this worked, and it was in production by the following winter.