It has been four decades since Andrzej Żuławski’s genre-defying Possession (1981) was released. With its tormented couple’s emotional evisceration playing out against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall, in some ways the film feels like a time capsule of a not-so-distant past. In other ways, the film feels very much of the present moment. It speaks to today’s apocalyptic mood; with the seemingly endless cycle of bad news about climate change, global pandemics and escalating geopolitical tensions, the world we live in feels laden with ambient horror. The suffocating proximity of the camera to Marc and Anna’s domestic disputes no doubt also captures something of the insular and claustrophobic feeling experienced by many amidst COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. One could be forgiven for feeling the world weariness of Heinrich’s mother, lamenting ‘The world is only what it is… Murderous, if we are the best of it.’ Notwithstanding this very real atmosphere of disenchantment (or perhaps because of it?) Żuławski’s Possession – emotionally harrowing with moments of absurd humour – continues to resonate with audiences. To discuss the film, Żuławski’s complicated gender politics, and the pernicious cultural legacy of Oprah Winfrey, I am joined by Kat Ellinger and Daniel Bird.
Alison Taylor
Alison Taylor
- Alison (Ali) Taylor teaches at Bond University, Australia. She is the author of the Devil’s Advocates monograph on Possession (LUP 2022) and Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema (EUP 2017), and is currently co-writing a book on the work of Nicolas Winding Refn for SUNY’s Horizons of Cinema series.
- Kat Ellinger is an author and film critic. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Diabolique Magazine, a disc producer for Radiance Films, and co-director of the documentary Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin (2022). She is the author of the Devil’s Advocates volume on Harry Kümel's 1971 film Daughters of Darkness (LUP 2020) and All the Colours of Sergio Martino from Arrow Books.
- Daniel Bird is the co–founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk. He directs the Hamo Bek–Nazarov Project, which is concerned with film preservation and restoration in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Recently he has co-produced restorations of Franciszka & Stefan Themerson’s Europa (1931), Stephen Sayadian’s Dr Caligari (1989) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
From Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, by Alison Taylor, in the Devil’s Advocates series (LUP, 2022).
Ali: I think it’s fair to say we’ve all dedicated a substantial amount of time to thinking about and researching Possession over the years, so I’m wondering what first drew you to this film, and what it was that compelled you to pursue it further?
Daniel: Isabelle Adjani, to be honest. I can’t remember what came first: reading a description about Possession in The Aurum Film Encyclopaedia of Horror (and the accompanying still of Adjani in the U–Bahn) or Basia Baranowska’s French poster. When I did get to see it, I was, obviously, struck by the intensity of the performances, the framing and blocking of shots (more Texas Chain Saw Massacre than Bergman), the blue look, the dialogue (yes, all the faith and chance stuff sounds pretentious, but it did intrigue me with regards to the author’s/authors’ intention), Korzyński’s soundtrack and the general Cold War apocalyptic vibe, which is now back in fashion. Thanks for everything, Putin.
Kat: I’m going to have to go ahead and look like a total philistine here but to be completely truthful because it was listed as a video nasty here in the UK. Like many other horror fans who grew up during that time, where everything was hidden away or if it was lucky enough to get an official release, more than likely cut, anything that got a place on that list instantly became grail. I cut my teeth on nasty list favourites, so after Cannibal Ferox and Evil Dead it came as a bit of a shock – a good one though! I can’t say I entirely understood the film until I was older, wiser, and had a divorce under my belt. That’s when it really hit home. I think when it comes to the theme of toxic relationships it’s one of the most emotionally truthful films ever made.
Ali: I came to the film pretty late myself. It was probably around 2007, I was working in a video shop and one day I came upon this DVD cover that had the arresting image of Sam Neill holding Margit Carstensen, her throat slit. It was so gruesome in fact that I think the managers had put a little circle sticker over the cut throat – usually this privilege was only reserved for the nipples on the front cover of our woeful collection of soft-core pornography. My exposure to Sam Neill to that point had been as the hero in Jurassic Park (1993) and Dead Calm (1989) so I just couldn’t reconcile that this guy on the cover was the same man. I had never heard of Żuławski and went into the film completely unprepared.
It really got under my skin and was just so entirely unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I was really affected by the performances, particularly by Adjani who was just on an entirely different level to what I thought performance was or could be. The emotional pitch of it also just really got to me, as bonkers as the plot is, the emotions just felt so real. It’s been a film I haven’t been able to put down since I first saw it. Twelve years later I was giggling in the BBFC archives at the classification board’s debates over whether bonking a tentacle monster counted as bestiality or not. It has been a ride! So in the course of your relationship with this film what is the thing that has struck or surprised you most?
Daniel: I think relationships with films are like relationships with people. As soon as you get to know everything about someone, they lose their appeal. Relationships that last, at least for me, always involve an element of unpredictability, something that comes with unknowability, and that’s also true of my relationship with Possession. In other words, I’ve never been able to possess Possession. I still don’t know what it is about, and I think some of that comes from a gap, a failing on Żuławski’s part, not just artistically, but in communicating whatever it is he wanted to say, if he had anything to say, which I don’t think he did, because he doesn’t understand why Anna leaves Marc. Also, she comes back to him. Forget the sound of bombs, Possession has a happy ending – Marc and Anna kiss and make up, admittedly after being shot to bits. Anna fatally shoots Marc through her own back in a blatant act of female–male Freudian penetration.
Films, like relationships, and, let’s face it, life, are best ending with a bang and not a whimper. What’s left is something that’s independent of author intentions – Possession is all sound and fury, with a floating, monstrous signifier at the centre. It captures that feeling of meaningless and nothingness that accompanies a failing relationship with not just people, but also language (unfortunately for relationship counsellors, therapists, diplomats, and even philosophers, not to mention film critics, some problems just can’t be resolved through talking or even words), and the world (that’s what depression is, where suicide is the ultimate act of disconnection).
That said, I also find Possession very funny. The chef-waiter pile-up in the cafe, the bit where Marc looks at the slice of white bread as Anna puts clothes in the fridge. The bit when Marc says ‘if I throw myself at your feet…’ and she just ignores him – hilarious. Heinrich, when he says ‘in other words, where is she’ – he’s aware of his own pretentiousness. Not to mention the gay private detectives’ ‘wives, wives, wives, wives’ – if there is to be a Possession expanded universe then those guys need their own series.
Kat: The thing that always surprises me about Possession is the same thing that surprises me about most of Żuławski’s work in that he clearly had a very complicated relationship with women and yet it’s also weirdly feminist in ways I’m not sure Żuławski would have been entirely comfortable with. Feminine rage is such a key part of the director’s films and this one is the screaming figurehead of them all. Anna is an angry woman, someone who has internalised that rage – rage as an abandoned wife, rage as a mother –and finally she lets it all out and it’s cathartic (for me at least). When are women allowed to be angry like this in cinema or in life for that matter? There are acceptable forms of girl power anger and this isn’t it. And yet to me it’s all the more powerful for it. I am always taken aback by the fact that no matter how many times I see it, I always feel catharsis. What’s more, that sense of cathartic release has only deepened as I’ve come to know the film more. It’s like doing a good workout on a punch bag, just without the sweating.
Daniel: Kat, I have difficulty accepting your assertion that Żuławski was feminist, but at the same time, I know exactly what you mean. I remember Żuławski saying, ‘why can’t women be women and men be men?’ At the same time, he characterised feminism as ‘women behaving like men’, and lamented men ‘not learning from women’.
He wrote an interesting article once for Twój styl (incidentally, all of his later books were published by a spin-off publishing house associated with Twój styl, a Polish magazine for women – he wrote a popular series of articles on famous couples – he sometimes asked me to order him English biographies as part of his research, like Donald Spoto’s biography of Lotte Lenya for his article about Lenya and Kurt Weill – these are collected in a book called We dwoje / Two of Us). It must have been the late 90s, and if I remember correctly it was called ‘My Actors’, as opposed to ‘My Actresses’. His actresses, he said, were male, and his actors, female. While Greer has been side-lined for obvious reasons, she has written about the idea of the muse not as something passive, but psychologically penetrative. Orson Welles had a similar theory, and I suspect this is not necessarily where Żuławski got it from, but it certainly rang true.
In a Cahiers Du Cinéma interview around the time of Mr Arkadin, Welles argued that the only good artists are feminine. That’s not to say that male artists are homosexual. Rather, Welles argued that intellectually an artist must be a man with ‘feminine aptitudes’. When I interviewed Żuławski about La Femme publique (1984) and he said something like he had yet to see a female director who was effective when it came to eliciting good performances, I don’t think it was as chauvinistic as it sounds – rather he was talking about the sexual aspect of directing, and the problem of a female director playing the role of a male with feminine aspects. As Welles put it, it gets rather complicated.
My response was to give Żuławski a pile of DVDs by [Czech director Věra] Chytilová, [Ukrainian–Soviet director Larisa] Shepitko and [Ukrainian director Kira] Muratova. For the record he had a lot of time for Chytilová and Muratova, and very much liked Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), but lamented her talking like ‘a stupid communist’ in [Elem] Klimov’s [short film] Larisa (1980). All this is very 2022. There’s a line in La Femme publique, when Kessling says something like he’s not ‘completely gay’. I think that’s also true of Żuławski – you have what’s become a stereotype now, typified by something like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, as if aesthetic sensibility is, as Welles says, essentially ‘feminine’. Żuławski clearly had an eye, you could at the very least imagine he would have had a career as a stylist – his films look great, in the way that, for example, Zanussi’s or Agnieszka Holland’s don’t. They’re TV, bad Polish TV, whereas La Femme publique very consciously looks at the very least like a North by Northwest (1959) with styling by Helmut Newton.
I think the reason why Żuławski appeals to so many women, despite how badly he treated them, is that he projected himself into his female characters. Would you agree? Conversely, it’s his male characters that are ciphers, they’re the ones which are badly sketched… There’s a lot more of Żuławski in Anna than in Marc, that’s for sure. In my opinion, Anna bears very little resemblance to Małgorzata Braunek. I’d say both Anna and Marc are Żuławski’s projections, but mostly Anna. I mention this simply because I think we must ratchet up this discussion – I don’t think Żuławski hated women, but he was fascinated and terrified of them.
Like Donald Trump and sharks, going by what Stormy Daniels had to say. For me, I think most misogynistic behaviour can be explained on the grounds of a complete disinterest in women and femininity. As the sole male participant, I defer to my esteemed colleagues here… I think most behaviour that could be construed as misogynistic can be explained by either an inability or an unwillingness to empathise. Sure, Adjani is a hot body writhing around in goo – but I think the reason that scene makes such an impression with people is that it taps into a fear of being taken over without consent – whether it’s by a spirit or illness. In other words, regardless of gender, you are her. Żuławski was really into archetypes, comparative religion and anthropology, especially symbolic imagery of vulvas, mirrors and circles – this, of course, is at the heart of Possession – in the doubling, the camerawork, the locations, etc.
In my opinion, there needs to be a lot more written about this aspect of Żuławski – the gay porn at the beginning of L’important c’est d’aimer (1975), the gay rape in Diabeł (1972), the gay detectives, the tendency to cast gay male leads as love interests to ingénue du jour, etc. If I was an enterprising distributor, I’d market Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) as an Almodóvar film – but a good one, like Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1989) or What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) – not as the polite, harmless middle-class John Waters-lite gay uncle he has been playing this last twenty, twenty-five years now.
Ali: This question of Żuławski and gender is really interesting because many people are horrified by the way his films treat women, but at the same time they, and particularly Possession have a huge female following. For me, Anna feels like a feminist figure in some ways – though I realise this wasn’t Żuławski’s intention – because she is treated as this woman who has a very realised emotional depth. And maybe that’s to say she feels real, more that she feels like a woman, but if you think of how lazy some writers are when it comes to female characters, who see them as a plot device as though there is no need to imagine them as having any meaningful interiority, Anna is different. Oh wow, a woman on screen that feels like an actual human – maybe I’m revealing how low my expectations are for a feminist icon… But there is something about her emotional life that feels very authentic. She has desires and fears of her own independent of Marc and Heinrich that she’s trying to understand.
I think there’s this fundamental duality here as with just about everything in Possession, though. I think I described in the book as feeling a bit like an unhinged telling of A Doll’s House on the one hand – Anna leaves her husband and child to pursue her own desires – but on the other she’s a neurotic woman who destroys the family unit. Neither of these feels to me like it explains the complexity of what’s going on but at the very least, it feels like Żuławski understands his female characters to imagine that complexity. Perhaps this is the projection of himself into them that Daniel mentioned.
As you knew Żuławski well, Daniel, I trust your judgment regarding his feelings of fascination and terror towards women, it’s just curious that the way his work translates to a lot of female audiences is perhaps in spite of these feelings. I agree with Kat wholeheartedly about the catharsis of seeing Anna’s anger. How often are women told how to be in the world? They’re too emotional, or ought to smile more, or fulfil certain expectations. And then there’s this woman on screen who just lets all of that anger rip in the most unbridled, terrifying way. It’s brilliant. Which nicely links to my next question…
Daniel: Not wishing to trample on your excellent segue to the next question, Ali, but I think that point needs underlining. We’re living through a moment when there is a kickback against the idea of the artist and artwork being separate. Seems like the author wasn’t dead after all – it keeps coming back for more, just like The Terminator. Nevertheless, I do feel, as you suggest, and as Kat’s responses proves, that you can have, let’s say, complex thoughts and feelings about, for example, women, and yet your work isn’t necessarily misogynistic. Conversely, I think we must not rule out the existence of people with wholly commendable views on, for example, women, turning out work which is, paradoxically, misogynistic. I see this a lot right now with these drives for representation – i.e. you got the gig because of your gender, not your voice – i.e. commissioners pretending to listen as opposed to listening – the silence of positive discrimination is deafening.
Obviously, I’ve never been in this position myself, but if I was a woman and was approached to bring a ‘feminine perspective’ or ‘authority’ on a gender issue, then I would probably respond like Anna during much of Possession – but I say this from a position of privilege. You can be a Nazi, run a company using slave labour, and sleep with your employees and still come out on top in history – just ask Oscar Schindler. Yes, Żuławski affected this Hemingway parody thing now and then, but, just like with Hemingway, it was perhaps an over compensation for a genuine affinity he had for women, let’s say. He did, after all, work with as many women producers as men producers, not just Marie-Laure Reyre, but also Albina du Boisrouvray, not to mention writers – Danièle Thompson, Dominique Garnier, Manuela Gretkowska, not to mention adaptations of Raphaële Billetdoux (even though she didn’t like Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours – in one interview she said something like ‘Żuławski’s pissed on my cupcake’, but that was his raison d'être), Lafayette, an unfilmed (partial) adaptation of Rachilde, etc.
Ali: Everyone knows the infamous U–Bahn scene with Anna rolling in the muck, but is there another that you feel really gets to the heart of what Possession is about?
Daniel: My favourite sequence was always Heinrich’s home movie, or rather Marc watching it – it makes perfectly clear that Anna has not just left Marc for Heinrich, but Heinrich making Marc aware that he knows all the drugs, tantric sex, new age bullshit, left-wing ideology with middle class comforts in the world won’t solve Anna’s troubles – her unhappiness is transcendental, or to use Anna’s words, it ‘pierces reality’, like cancer or madness.
Kat: The bit that always gets me is Bob in the bath. But then I read the film through my own personal experiences I guess, on a purely emotional level as blunt force trauma, a scream, composed of all the hurtful emotions attached to a bad relationship breakdown coming at you all at once – not sure what that says about me and relationships to be honest, but hey, Possession can be therapy. The kind of relationship that’s become so nasty and toxic, destructive, where everyone has just lost sight of why they were angry in the first place. Bob in the middle of it, just floating, it’s like: the kids suffer. I don’t know, I am disgustingly sentimental so that one always pierces me right through the heart. Even though he’s mostly at the sidelines, it’s Bob’s life too but nobody sees or notices him really.
Ali: Oh, don’t worry, Kat. It’s not just you! When I’m describing Possession to someone, I tell them to imagine the worst break up they’ve ever had and what that felt like, and then what that would look like on screen – not the break up itself, but the emotional expenditure. And I just hope they know what I mean, but maybe they’ve only had healthy functional relationships… Scene-wise though, I’m all about the Café Einstein blow up. It feels like a microcosm of the film for me. The expressionism of the staging of the couple at odds with the mirrors behind, the bristling tension that erupts and then becomes absurdist humour.
Moving on – Possession is Żuławski’s best known film, but it exists in conversation with an entire career of incredible filmmaking. How do you see it in relation to Żuławski’s broader authorial project?
Daniel: Clearly, Żuławski forges a stylistic association with The Third Part of the Night (1971). Also, The Devil (1972) is about a man who comes home to find his wife pregnant with his best friend as the father. L’important c’est d’aimer is also about infidelity, but from a horn dog’s point of view, not the cuckolded. On the Silver Globe (1988) is also (partly) about a guy who escapes earth because his partner has been unfaithful (and meets an actress who ‘performs’ the role of the unfaithful wife as some sort of preordained ritual – she has sex with a monster too). In short, Żuławski only ever remade the same film. La Fidélité (2000) is another film about how faithfulness is just as awful as unfaithfulness – the jealous husband has an affair with a transexual before dying of congenital heart failure and reappearing as a ghost to absolve his wife, who is now a nun, the sound of a motorbike at the very end suggesting that she can now, finally, consummate her relationship with the guy she is attracted to. Cosmos (2015) is about a guy who falls in love with a girl, her guy hangs himself, and the new guy and the girl set off for a new, and probably disastrous, relationship as actress and screenwriter. It’s a happy ending too, even though we know deep down it’s going to end like Summer with Monika (1953). La Femme publique is a commentary about getting performances out of actresses, like Adjani.
I don’t know how Żuławski would have handled #MeToo. I guess he’d remind people that he called out Weinstein before it was fashionable, and probably accuse the entire industry of being populated by self-centred, subservient and sycophantic hypocrites, always putting their own careers before anyone and anything else. L’Amour braque (1985) is, ultimately, like Dostoevsky, about the problem of ‘good’, and how, paradoxically, the right, the just, the selfless, often makes things worse (think, for an example, of a missionary screwing up an indigenous tribe, or an effort to decolonise that results in a bloodbath) – this, of course, is a very conservative way of thinking. I think critics today are troubled with the idea that you can be both conservative and avant-garde. It’s not conservative in the Roger Scruton sense, but conservative in the sense of someone cynical of the fallout from misguided idealism. Żuławski was born into Nazism, grew up during Stalinism and lived through capitalism – of course he was going to throw up when some Western intellectual lectured him on how everything would be better if we adopt Maoism, or socialism in its Trotsky form. He saw [critic Slavoj] Žižek as a clown, in the tradition of Diogenes, not someone to be taken at face value or even, perhaps, seriously.
Kat: I think this comes back to what I was saying about feminine rage and Possession also appearing all over his other films. As an entire thesis they work under the heading: Mad Love; where men quite often literally want to possess women, and women break down under the mental stress of it all, after remaining unfulfilled in some way or another. I see Żuławski as a romantic in the truest sense: love in his films is doomed, it’s hurtful. It’s like the line in The Third Part of the Night: ‘I can’t be close to you without suffering.’ Some people can’t be apart but they can’t be together either, so instead they just tear each other to bits – or at least in one of his films eat their obsession in a cannibalistic rite. But there’s something very earnest underneath it all. Something pure that speaks to the need to be loved. Outside of his early work, the political level in some of those films, as a filmmaker working within the Soviet Bloc, I think they fit nicely into the entire canon of French existential romance that had its heyday in the seventies, or films like The Night Porter (1974) where love is a form of spiritual decay. But like I said, I am terribly sentimental about things.
Ali: It’s now been four decades since Possession was released, and it continues to gain new audiences. What is it about this film that endures, do you think?
Daniel: I think we are living through a profoundly self-centred age, where socialism is dead and all the remains is the signification of selflessness (take, for example, the recent Australian TikTok video of the kid giving flowers to a woman and uploading it as an act of kindness and the woman in question quite rightly expressing her feeling of being exploited). Self-expression is everything, real dialogue (whether it is conversation, debate or screenplays) is nothing. All there is, is just discourse on the left and diatribe on the right. Everything is, ‘for me’, and ‘my truth’. Thanks for nothing, Oprah. Possession is the perfect film to express oneself or rather through. Had a bad day? Crack open that U–Bahn freakout meme on Twitter. Boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t get you? Post a picture of Anna on Insta and say you’re just like her.
In all honesty, the scene in Possession that says everything about Żuławski is the café one when Marc goes nuts. Żuławski could never quite understand why someone might not possibly be interested in him – he was, after all, the most handsome, the most talented, the most intelligent… and yet, why do they keep leaving me? In other words, for all his profound intelligence, erudition and, above all else, charm, he was emotionally stunted. The world, however, has caught up with him. We are a generation of emotional retards. We have a right to everything, and when we don’t get it, we scream. On social media. It’s unbearable. I think this aspect of the film, and it’s only one aspect, is what resonates with most people. Regardless of gender, we all identify with Anna – beautiful, mysterious, misunderstood, the angelic slut – we forgive her emotional incontinence, because that’s who she really is, her true self, she’s being authentic, fuck what everyone else thinks, who cares about their ears going deaf with all the screaming, the broken furniture, etc. That sounds cruel, ruthless and horrible, I know. It is also, of course, a provocation. Much like Possession.
Kat: I agree with Daniel, there is an emotional purity to it, which we can all relate to. That said, I see a hell of a lot of women who discover the film and it resonates so much for them. Obviously Kier-La Janisse’s seminal book House of Psychotic Women (which just had a tenth anniversary reprint) had a lot to do with this, in putting the film front and centre of her project and with good reason – Anna’s madness to me is like the filmic equivalent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in many way. In the depths of complete madness and hysteria, stripped away of all ego, both women are entirely free. I think we’ve all had moments where we’ve felt like rolling around on a subway floor just screaming and smashing our shopping up. I know I have.
Daniel: Kat, on that subject of a relatable feeling of wanting to roll around on the floor; there was a moment during the press conference of Cosmos in Locarno when Żuławski referred to R.D. Laing. I remember, back in the 90s, Foucault was all the rage, but Laing was treated as some sort of dated countercultural remnant, along with the Anti-Psychiatry movement as a whole (that was my general impression). You couldn’t move for discarded paperbacks of The Divided Self, Reich or Janov’s The Primal Scream. I don’t know about Reich or Janov, but maybe one could say Laing has had a bit of a resurgence in recent years, and I think his very brutal conception of interpersonal relationships, which seem to be born out of his own clinical depression, not helped by alcoholism and a Cold War way of thinking (i.e. we’re not fighting only because we’re frightened of what the other will do). It seems like a good lens when it comes to looking at Possession.
Ali: That’s a really interesting point about the self-centredness of today and the self-expression through social media. It makes me think of the moment when Marc sees Heinrich’s home movie of Anna. In context, it’s this piercing insight into Anna’s interiority, an articulation of how she feels that cuts through the chaos of Marc and Anna’s fights and speaks to him (and us) directly. It’s like this film is an artefact that reveals Anna, and watching her on screen is a necessary part of that revelation. But how could you make a scene like that now and have it carry that meaning? People are always filming themselves, the idea of someone speaking into a camera about their feelings has become banal. If anything, the culture of living through images speaks more to the artifice of experience as even something as ordinary as breakfast is perceived as an event to be fashioned for an audience on Instagram.
I remember thinking how odd it was in the Herzog documentary Grizzly Man (2005) when Tim is recording himself talking about the majesty of bears and then runs to reset the camera so he can do it again with a bandana. But that’s the culture now. He was just ahead of his time. Forget the male gaze, it’s like social media has everyone perceiving themselves through the eyes of others. No wonder the world is so anxious. I think Possession, though, has this emotional honesty, or purity, as Kat said, that speaks so directly to what if feels like to be a human. It’s direct because it’s so extreme, but part of that honesty is that we’re not used to seeing conveyed on screen, then or now.
Daniel: Isabelle Adjani, to be honest. I can’t remember what came first: reading a description about Possession in The Aurum Film Encyclopaedia of Horror (and the accompanying still of Adjani in the U–Bahn) or Basia Baranowska’s French poster. When I did get to see it, I was, obviously, struck by the intensity of the performances, the framing and blocking of shots (more Texas Chain Saw Massacre than Bergman), the blue look, the dialogue (yes, all the faith and chance stuff sounds pretentious, but it did intrigue me with regards to the author’s/authors’ intention), Korzyński’s soundtrack and the general Cold War apocalyptic vibe, which is now back in fashion. Thanks for everything, Putin.
Kat: I’m going to have to go ahead and look like a total philistine here but to be completely truthful because it was listed as a video nasty here in the UK. Like many other horror fans who grew up during that time, where everything was hidden away or if it was lucky enough to get an official release, more than likely cut, anything that got a place on that list instantly became grail. I cut my teeth on nasty list favourites, so after Cannibal Ferox and Evil Dead it came as a bit of a shock – a good one though! I can’t say I entirely understood the film until I was older, wiser, and had a divorce under my belt. That’s when it really hit home. I think when it comes to the theme of toxic relationships it’s one of the most emotionally truthful films ever made.
Ali: I came to the film pretty late myself. It was probably around 2007, I was working in a video shop and one day I came upon this DVD cover that had the arresting image of Sam Neill holding Margit Carstensen, her throat slit. It was so gruesome in fact that I think the managers had put a little circle sticker over the cut throat – usually this privilege was only reserved for the nipples on the front cover of our woeful collection of soft-core pornography. My exposure to Sam Neill to that point had been as the hero in Jurassic Park (1993) and Dead Calm (1989) so I just couldn’t reconcile that this guy on the cover was the same man. I had never heard of Żuławski and went into the film completely unprepared.
It really got under my skin and was just so entirely unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I was really affected by the performances, particularly by Adjani who was just on an entirely different level to what I thought performance was or could be. The emotional pitch of it also just really got to me, as bonkers as the plot is, the emotions just felt so real. It’s been a film I haven’t been able to put down since I first saw it. Twelve years later I was giggling in the BBFC archives at the classification board’s debates over whether bonking a tentacle monster counted as bestiality or not. It has been a ride! So in the course of your relationship with this film what is the thing that has struck or surprised you most?
Daniel: I think relationships with films are like relationships with people. As soon as you get to know everything about someone, they lose their appeal. Relationships that last, at least for me, always involve an element of unpredictability, something that comes with unknowability, and that’s also true of my relationship with Possession. In other words, I’ve never been able to possess Possession. I still don’t know what it is about, and I think some of that comes from a gap, a failing on Żuławski’s part, not just artistically, but in communicating whatever it is he wanted to say, if he had anything to say, which I don’t think he did, because he doesn’t understand why Anna leaves Marc. Also, she comes back to him. Forget the sound of bombs, Possession has a happy ending – Marc and Anna kiss and make up, admittedly after being shot to bits. Anna fatally shoots Marc through her own back in a blatant act of female–male Freudian penetration.
Films, like relationships, and, let’s face it, life, are best ending with a bang and not a whimper. What’s left is something that’s independent of author intentions – Possession is all sound and fury, with a floating, monstrous signifier at the centre. It captures that feeling of meaningless and nothingness that accompanies a failing relationship with not just people, but also language (unfortunately for relationship counsellors, therapists, diplomats, and even philosophers, not to mention film critics, some problems just can’t be resolved through talking or even words), and the world (that’s what depression is, where suicide is the ultimate act of disconnection).
That said, I also find Possession very funny. The chef-waiter pile-up in the cafe, the bit where Marc looks at the slice of white bread as Anna puts clothes in the fridge. The bit when Marc says ‘if I throw myself at your feet…’ and she just ignores him – hilarious. Heinrich, when he says ‘in other words, where is she’ – he’s aware of his own pretentiousness. Not to mention the gay private detectives’ ‘wives, wives, wives, wives’ – if there is to be a Possession expanded universe then those guys need their own series.
Kat: The thing that always surprises me about Possession is the same thing that surprises me about most of Żuławski’s work in that he clearly had a very complicated relationship with women and yet it’s also weirdly feminist in ways I’m not sure Żuławski would have been entirely comfortable with. Feminine rage is such a key part of the director’s films and this one is the screaming figurehead of them all. Anna is an angry woman, someone who has internalised that rage – rage as an abandoned wife, rage as a mother –and finally she lets it all out and it’s cathartic (for me at least). When are women allowed to be angry like this in cinema or in life for that matter? There are acceptable forms of girl power anger and this isn’t it. And yet to me it’s all the more powerful for it. I am always taken aback by the fact that no matter how many times I see it, I always feel catharsis. What’s more, that sense of cathartic release has only deepened as I’ve come to know the film more. It’s like doing a good workout on a punch bag, just without the sweating.
Daniel: Kat, I have difficulty accepting your assertion that Żuławski was feminist, but at the same time, I know exactly what you mean. I remember Żuławski saying, ‘why can’t women be women and men be men?’ At the same time, he characterised feminism as ‘women behaving like men’, and lamented men ‘not learning from women’.
He wrote an interesting article once for Twój styl (incidentally, all of his later books were published by a spin-off publishing house associated with Twój styl, a Polish magazine for women – he wrote a popular series of articles on famous couples – he sometimes asked me to order him English biographies as part of his research, like Donald Spoto’s biography of Lotte Lenya for his article about Lenya and Kurt Weill – these are collected in a book called We dwoje / Two of Us). It must have been the late 90s, and if I remember correctly it was called ‘My Actors’, as opposed to ‘My Actresses’. His actresses, he said, were male, and his actors, female. While Greer has been side-lined for obvious reasons, she has written about the idea of the muse not as something passive, but psychologically penetrative. Orson Welles had a similar theory, and I suspect this is not necessarily where Żuławski got it from, but it certainly rang true.
In a Cahiers Du Cinéma interview around the time of Mr Arkadin, Welles argued that the only good artists are feminine. That’s not to say that male artists are homosexual. Rather, Welles argued that intellectually an artist must be a man with ‘feminine aptitudes’. When I interviewed Żuławski about La Femme publique (1984) and he said something like he had yet to see a female director who was effective when it came to eliciting good performances, I don’t think it was as chauvinistic as it sounds – rather he was talking about the sexual aspect of directing, and the problem of a female director playing the role of a male with feminine aspects. As Welles put it, it gets rather complicated.
My response was to give Żuławski a pile of DVDs by [Czech director Věra] Chytilová, [Ukrainian–Soviet director Larisa] Shepitko and [Ukrainian director Kira] Muratova. For the record he had a lot of time for Chytilová and Muratova, and very much liked Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), but lamented her talking like ‘a stupid communist’ in [Elem] Klimov’s [short film] Larisa (1980). All this is very 2022. There’s a line in La Femme publique, when Kessling says something like he’s not ‘completely gay’. I think that’s also true of Żuławski – you have what’s become a stereotype now, typified by something like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, as if aesthetic sensibility is, as Welles says, essentially ‘feminine’. Żuławski clearly had an eye, you could at the very least imagine he would have had a career as a stylist – his films look great, in the way that, for example, Zanussi’s or Agnieszka Holland’s don’t. They’re TV, bad Polish TV, whereas La Femme publique very consciously looks at the very least like a North by Northwest (1959) with styling by Helmut Newton.
I think the reason why Żuławski appeals to so many women, despite how badly he treated them, is that he projected himself into his female characters. Would you agree? Conversely, it’s his male characters that are ciphers, they’re the ones which are badly sketched… There’s a lot more of Żuławski in Anna than in Marc, that’s for sure. In my opinion, Anna bears very little resemblance to Małgorzata Braunek. I’d say both Anna and Marc are Żuławski’s projections, but mostly Anna. I mention this simply because I think we must ratchet up this discussion – I don’t think Żuławski hated women, but he was fascinated and terrified of them.
Like Donald Trump and sharks, going by what Stormy Daniels had to say. For me, I think most misogynistic behaviour can be explained on the grounds of a complete disinterest in women and femininity. As the sole male participant, I defer to my esteemed colleagues here… I think most behaviour that could be construed as misogynistic can be explained by either an inability or an unwillingness to empathise. Sure, Adjani is a hot body writhing around in goo – but I think the reason that scene makes such an impression with people is that it taps into a fear of being taken over without consent – whether it’s by a spirit or illness. In other words, regardless of gender, you are her. Żuławski was really into archetypes, comparative religion and anthropology, especially symbolic imagery of vulvas, mirrors and circles – this, of course, is at the heart of Possession – in the doubling, the camerawork, the locations, etc.
In my opinion, there needs to be a lot more written about this aspect of Żuławski – the gay porn at the beginning of L’important c’est d’aimer (1975), the gay rape in Diabeł (1972), the gay detectives, the tendency to cast gay male leads as love interests to ingénue du jour, etc. If I was an enterprising distributor, I’d market Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) as an Almodóvar film – but a good one, like Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1989) or What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) – not as the polite, harmless middle-class John Waters-lite gay uncle he has been playing this last twenty, twenty-five years now.
Ali: This question of Żuławski and gender is really interesting because many people are horrified by the way his films treat women, but at the same time they, and particularly Possession have a huge female following. For me, Anna feels like a feminist figure in some ways – though I realise this wasn’t Żuławski’s intention – because she is treated as this woman who has a very realised emotional depth. And maybe that’s to say she feels real, more that she feels like a woman, but if you think of how lazy some writers are when it comes to female characters, who see them as a plot device as though there is no need to imagine them as having any meaningful interiority, Anna is different. Oh wow, a woman on screen that feels like an actual human – maybe I’m revealing how low my expectations are for a feminist icon… But there is something about her emotional life that feels very authentic. She has desires and fears of her own independent of Marc and Heinrich that she’s trying to understand.
I think there’s this fundamental duality here as with just about everything in Possession, though. I think I described in the book as feeling a bit like an unhinged telling of A Doll’s House on the one hand – Anna leaves her husband and child to pursue her own desires – but on the other she’s a neurotic woman who destroys the family unit. Neither of these feels to me like it explains the complexity of what’s going on but at the very least, it feels like Żuławski understands his female characters to imagine that complexity. Perhaps this is the projection of himself into them that Daniel mentioned.
As you knew Żuławski well, Daniel, I trust your judgment regarding his feelings of fascination and terror towards women, it’s just curious that the way his work translates to a lot of female audiences is perhaps in spite of these feelings. I agree with Kat wholeheartedly about the catharsis of seeing Anna’s anger. How often are women told how to be in the world? They’re too emotional, or ought to smile more, or fulfil certain expectations. And then there’s this woman on screen who just lets all of that anger rip in the most unbridled, terrifying way. It’s brilliant. Which nicely links to my next question…
Daniel: Not wishing to trample on your excellent segue to the next question, Ali, but I think that point needs underlining. We’re living through a moment when there is a kickback against the idea of the artist and artwork being separate. Seems like the author wasn’t dead after all – it keeps coming back for more, just like The Terminator. Nevertheless, I do feel, as you suggest, and as Kat’s responses proves, that you can have, let’s say, complex thoughts and feelings about, for example, women, and yet your work isn’t necessarily misogynistic. Conversely, I think we must not rule out the existence of people with wholly commendable views on, for example, women, turning out work which is, paradoxically, misogynistic. I see this a lot right now with these drives for representation – i.e. you got the gig because of your gender, not your voice – i.e. commissioners pretending to listen as opposed to listening – the silence of positive discrimination is deafening.
Obviously, I’ve never been in this position myself, but if I was a woman and was approached to bring a ‘feminine perspective’ or ‘authority’ on a gender issue, then I would probably respond like Anna during much of Possession – but I say this from a position of privilege. You can be a Nazi, run a company using slave labour, and sleep with your employees and still come out on top in history – just ask Oscar Schindler. Yes, Żuławski affected this Hemingway parody thing now and then, but, just like with Hemingway, it was perhaps an over compensation for a genuine affinity he had for women, let’s say. He did, after all, work with as many women producers as men producers, not just Marie-Laure Reyre, but also Albina du Boisrouvray, not to mention writers – Danièle Thompson, Dominique Garnier, Manuela Gretkowska, not to mention adaptations of Raphaële Billetdoux (even though she didn’t like Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours – in one interview she said something like ‘Żuławski’s pissed on my cupcake’, but that was his raison d'être), Lafayette, an unfilmed (partial) adaptation of Rachilde, etc.
Ali: Everyone knows the infamous U–Bahn scene with Anna rolling in the muck, but is there another that you feel really gets to the heart of what Possession is about?
Daniel: My favourite sequence was always Heinrich’s home movie, or rather Marc watching it – it makes perfectly clear that Anna has not just left Marc for Heinrich, but Heinrich making Marc aware that he knows all the drugs, tantric sex, new age bullshit, left-wing ideology with middle class comforts in the world won’t solve Anna’s troubles – her unhappiness is transcendental, or to use Anna’s words, it ‘pierces reality’, like cancer or madness.
Kat: The bit that always gets me is Bob in the bath. But then I read the film through my own personal experiences I guess, on a purely emotional level as blunt force trauma, a scream, composed of all the hurtful emotions attached to a bad relationship breakdown coming at you all at once – not sure what that says about me and relationships to be honest, but hey, Possession can be therapy. The kind of relationship that’s become so nasty and toxic, destructive, where everyone has just lost sight of why they were angry in the first place. Bob in the middle of it, just floating, it’s like: the kids suffer. I don’t know, I am disgustingly sentimental so that one always pierces me right through the heart. Even though he’s mostly at the sidelines, it’s Bob’s life too but nobody sees or notices him really.
Ali: Oh, don’t worry, Kat. It’s not just you! When I’m describing Possession to someone, I tell them to imagine the worst break up they’ve ever had and what that felt like, and then what that would look like on screen – not the break up itself, but the emotional expenditure. And I just hope they know what I mean, but maybe they’ve only had healthy functional relationships… Scene-wise though, I’m all about the Café Einstein blow up. It feels like a microcosm of the film for me. The expressionism of the staging of the couple at odds with the mirrors behind, the bristling tension that erupts and then becomes absurdist humour.
Moving on – Possession is Żuławski’s best known film, but it exists in conversation with an entire career of incredible filmmaking. How do you see it in relation to Żuławski’s broader authorial project?
Daniel: Clearly, Żuławski forges a stylistic association with The Third Part of the Night (1971). Also, The Devil (1972) is about a man who comes home to find his wife pregnant with his best friend as the father. L’important c’est d’aimer is also about infidelity, but from a horn dog’s point of view, not the cuckolded. On the Silver Globe (1988) is also (partly) about a guy who escapes earth because his partner has been unfaithful (and meets an actress who ‘performs’ the role of the unfaithful wife as some sort of preordained ritual – she has sex with a monster too). In short, Żuławski only ever remade the same film. La Fidélité (2000) is another film about how faithfulness is just as awful as unfaithfulness – the jealous husband has an affair with a transexual before dying of congenital heart failure and reappearing as a ghost to absolve his wife, who is now a nun, the sound of a motorbike at the very end suggesting that she can now, finally, consummate her relationship with the guy she is attracted to. Cosmos (2015) is about a guy who falls in love with a girl, her guy hangs himself, and the new guy and the girl set off for a new, and probably disastrous, relationship as actress and screenwriter. It’s a happy ending too, even though we know deep down it’s going to end like Summer with Monika (1953). La Femme publique is a commentary about getting performances out of actresses, like Adjani.
I don’t know how Żuławski would have handled #MeToo. I guess he’d remind people that he called out Weinstein before it was fashionable, and probably accuse the entire industry of being populated by self-centred, subservient and sycophantic hypocrites, always putting their own careers before anyone and anything else. L’Amour braque (1985) is, ultimately, like Dostoevsky, about the problem of ‘good’, and how, paradoxically, the right, the just, the selfless, often makes things worse (think, for an example, of a missionary screwing up an indigenous tribe, or an effort to decolonise that results in a bloodbath) – this, of course, is a very conservative way of thinking. I think critics today are troubled with the idea that you can be both conservative and avant-garde. It’s not conservative in the Roger Scruton sense, but conservative in the sense of someone cynical of the fallout from misguided idealism. Żuławski was born into Nazism, grew up during Stalinism and lived through capitalism – of course he was going to throw up when some Western intellectual lectured him on how everything would be better if we adopt Maoism, or socialism in its Trotsky form. He saw [critic Slavoj] Žižek as a clown, in the tradition of Diogenes, not someone to be taken at face value or even, perhaps, seriously.
Kat: I think this comes back to what I was saying about feminine rage and Possession also appearing all over his other films. As an entire thesis they work under the heading: Mad Love; where men quite often literally want to possess women, and women break down under the mental stress of it all, after remaining unfulfilled in some way or another. I see Żuławski as a romantic in the truest sense: love in his films is doomed, it’s hurtful. It’s like the line in The Third Part of the Night: ‘I can’t be close to you without suffering.’ Some people can’t be apart but they can’t be together either, so instead they just tear each other to bits – or at least in one of his films eat their obsession in a cannibalistic rite. But there’s something very earnest underneath it all. Something pure that speaks to the need to be loved. Outside of his early work, the political level in some of those films, as a filmmaker working within the Soviet Bloc, I think they fit nicely into the entire canon of French existential romance that had its heyday in the seventies, or films like The Night Porter (1974) where love is a form of spiritual decay. But like I said, I am terribly sentimental about things.
Ali: It’s now been four decades since Possession was released, and it continues to gain new audiences. What is it about this film that endures, do you think?
Daniel: I think we are living through a profoundly self-centred age, where socialism is dead and all the remains is the signification of selflessness (take, for example, the recent Australian TikTok video of the kid giving flowers to a woman and uploading it as an act of kindness and the woman in question quite rightly expressing her feeling of being exploited). Self-expression is everything, real dialogue (whether it is conversation, debate or screenplays) is nothing. All there is, is just discourse on the left and diatribe on the right. Everything is, ‘for me’, and ‘my truth’. Thanks for nothing, Oprah. Possession is the perfect film to express oneself or rather through. Had a bad day? Crack open that U–Bahn freakout meme on Twitter. Boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t get you? Post a picture of Anna on Insta and say you’re just like her.
In all honesty, the scene in Possession that says everything about Żuławski is the café one when Marc goes nuts. Żuławski could never quite understand why someone might not possibly be interested in him – he was, after all, the most handsome, the most talented, the most intelligent… and yet, why do they keep leaving me? In other words, for all his profound intelligence, erudition and, above all else, charm, he was emotionally stunted. The world, however, has caught up with him. We are a generation of emotional retards. We have a right to everything, and when we don’t get it, we scream. On social media. It’s unbearable. I think this aspect of the film, and it’s only one aspect, is what resonates with most people. Regardless of gender, we all identify with Anna – beautiful, mysterious, misunderstood, the angelic slut – we forgive her emotional incontinence, because that’s who she really is, her true self, she’s being authentic, fuck what everyone else thinks, who cares about their ears going deaf with all the screaming, the broken furniture, etc. That sounds cruel, ruthless and horrible, I know. It is also, of course, a provocation. Much like Possession.
Kat: I agree with Daniel, there is an emotional purity to it, which we can all relate to. That said, I see a hell of a lot of women who discover the film and it resonates so much for them. Obviously Kier-La Janisse’s seminal book House of Psychotic Women (which just had a tenth anniversary reprint) had a lot to do with this, in putting the film front and centre of her project and with good reason – Anna’s madness to me is like the filmic equivalent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in many way. In the depths of complete madness and hysteria, stripped away of all ego, both women are entirely free. I think we’ve all had moments where we’ve felt like rolling around on a subway floor just screaming and smashing our shopping up. I know I have.
Daniel: Kat, on that subject of a relatable feeling of wanting to roll around on the floor; there was a moment during the press conference of Cosmos in Locarno when Żuławski referred to R.D. Laing. I remember, back in the 90s, Foucault was all the rage, but Laing was treated as some sort of dated countercultural remnant, along with the Anti-Psychiatry movement as a whole (that was my general impression). You couldn’t move for discarded paperbacks of The Divided Self, Reich or Janov’s The Primal Scream. I don’t know about Reich or Janov, but maybe one could say Laing has had a bit of a resurgence in recent years, and I think his very brutal conception of interpersonal relationships, which seem to be born out of his own clinical depression, not helped by alcoholism and a Cold War way of thinking (i.e. we’re not fighting only because we’re frightened of what the other will do). It seems like a good lens when it comes to looking at Possession.
Ali: That’s a really interesting point about the self-centredness of today and the self-expression through social media. It makes me think of the moment when Marc sees Heinrich’s home movie of Anna. In context, it’s this piercing insight into Anna’s interiority, an articulation of how she feels that cuts through the chaos of Marc and Anna’s fights and speaks to him (and us) directly. It’s like this film is an artefact that reveals Anna, and watching her on screen is a necessary part of that revelation. But how could you make a scene like that now and have it carry that meaning? People are always filming themselves, the idea of someone speaking into a camera about their feelings has become banal. If anything, the culture of living through images speaks more to the artifice of experience as even something as ordinary as breakfast is perceived as an event to be fashioned for an audience on Instagram.
I remember thinking how odd it was in the Herzog documentary Grizzly Man (2005) when Tim is recording himself talking about the majesty of bears and then runs to reset the camera so he can do it again with a bandana. But that’s the culture now. He was just ahead of his time. Forget the male gaze, it’s like social media has everyone perceiving themselves through the eyes of others. No wonder the world is so anxious. I think Possession, though, has this emotional honesty, or purity, as Kat said, that speaks so directly to what if feels like to be a human. It’s direct because it’s so extreme, but part of that honesty is that we’re not used to seeing conveyed on screen, then or now.