[In the essay below, Dasko provides an overview of Konwicki's filmmaking.]

Tadeusz Konwicki's filmmaking adventure, now well into its fourth decade, is not a common scenario. While film directors frequently cross over into literature, if only to coauthor a screenplay, few novelists are ever offered a chance to stand behind a camera. In neither craft is Konwicki a journeyman; in fact, his accomplishments as a writer place him firmly in the august circle of those European men of letters whose voices ring with unchallenged spiritual and artistic authority. Yet, time after time, he would continue to reach beyond his traditional, verbal universe and seek to express himself within the world of the visual.

Konwicki's arrival into the international film community could not pass unnoticed; while he had previously written two screenplays of no special merit, his directorial debut, Ostatni dzien lata (The Last Day of Summer), unexpectedly took top honors at the 1958 International Short Film Festival in Venice. A Polish film critic remembered a decade later, "They sent the worst print available, and the credits didn't even get translated. There was no advertising of any kind and nobody had any information about this film."

The tersely scripted drama synthesized the elements of Europe's existentialist torment of the late Fifties: the scars of a not-so-distant war and the fear of a nuclear future. Shot in stark black and white, it featured only two characters, both unnamed. Curiously, of all the films he was to later direct, Ostatni dzien lata remains Konwicki's only truly universal work, unburdened by cultural symbols and historical references only Poles are able to decipher.

Throughout the sixties and early seventies, Konwicki's literary and film endeavors were generally homogeneous: to a large extent, his films from that period are a visual exposition of his literary projects. Like the novels, the movies reflect the author's own biography and Poland's tortured history. In fact, the leitmotivs within three of Konwicki's films from that period are clearly traceable to the subplots within his seminal 1963 novel A Dreambook for Our Time.

Both as a novelist and as a filmmaker, Konwicki believes in being defined by one's past and origins. Thus, he repeatedly and obsessively recalls Poland's Eastern Borderlands, where he spent childhood and adolescence. World War II, in which he fought with the underground resistance movement, against first the Germans, then the Russians, and, equally important, the complex years of postwar Stalinist Poland.

The three films Konwicki directed during that period, Zaduszki (All Souls' Day, 1961), Salto (Somersault, 1965), and Jak daleko stad, jak blisko (So Far and Yet So Near, 1971), are a commentary on the complex fate of his generation. Critics agree that events from his own biography play a major and recurring role in all three pictures. The same visitors and episodes from the time long gone repeatedly intrude into the present; the past, a shadow one cannot outrun, continues to explode in memories of life's crucial events. As Konwicki commented in a 1985 interview, "There are perhaps no more than five or six important moments in anyone's life."

With each subsequent picture, Konwicki's plots appear less and less linear, the structures more meandering, the protagonists harder to name and define. Because all of his heroes are evocative of the director himself, they too continue living in constant awareness of the past, sharing the nightmares and demons Konwicki is unable to leave behind.

In Zaduszki the two principal characters, a man and a woman, find their ability to love each other crippled by recollections of tragic, youthful love affairs they each experienced during the war. In Salto the memories of a wartime execution are no longer flashbacks but appear as a series of nightmarish dreams, edging closer and closer to reality. In Jak daleko stad, jak blisko, his last film of the series, Konwicki freely transcends the limits of time and space. Orthodox Jews from a pre-Holocaust shtetl populate 1970s Warsaw; the protagonist, perhaps the director's alter ego, moves through the city dressed impeccably in a shirt and tie but with a partisan's submachine gun concealed underneath a Harris-tweed sportcoat. As one Polish critic points out, Konwicki's films are the last requiem for a world that has gone out without a farewell yet is kept alive by the process of artistic narrative.

Since the mid-sixties, Konwicki has made his voice heard with clarity and strength on the side of Poland's fledgling opposition movement, in which intellectuals play a prominent role. This resulted in his films being only grudgingly allowed into distribution in the state-owned theater network; Jak daleko stad, Jak blisko, hailed by film critics as his finest, received hardly any public screenings at all. Consequently, Konwicki's popularity as a director never really matched his status as a writer. His elitist movies were never destined to become major box-office hits, although Salto and Jak daleko stad, jak blisko developed a cultlike following among Konwicki's army of aficionados.

During the late seventies, Konwicki no longer submitted his books to Poland's official publishing houses, and several of his novels were brought out by underground publishers. This meant an automatic ban on any independent film work in a severely censored, government-sponsored industry. It was only after the emergence of Solidarity that Konwicki was able to return to filmmaking.

In the eighties Konwicki no longer adapted his own original material but instead brought to the screen two important works belonging to the canon of Polish literature. In 1982 he directed Dolina Issy (The Issa Valley), based on Czeslaw Milosz's semi-autobiographical novel. Like Konwicki, Milosz grew up in the Wilno region, now Lithuania but before World War II a part of Poland's Eastern Borderlands, which were ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944.

Loss of the Borderlands, a territory over which the Poles fought innumerable wars for half of their recorded history, has left a deep, unhealed wound in the Polish national psyche. A nonsubject in communist Poland, it nevertheless reverberates throughout Konwicki's entire literary output. Dolina Issy, a dark film of extraordinary beauty, combines Konwicki's narrative skill with Milosz's poetic vision of a mystical world suspended in an almost pagan past, oblivious of the storms blown in by the twentieth century.

Konwicki's most recent picture Lawa (Lava, 1989), is a screen adaptation of Forefathers, a nineteenth-century drama by Adam Mickiewicz, which to Poles remains a patriotic icon of unparalleled magnitude. Mickiewicz's work depicts Poland under the Russian rule during the nineteenth century; Konwicki's Lawa, produced during the final months of communist rule in Poland, carried both a message of hope and a powerful historical analogy.

Konwicki has said repeatedly that he is tired of making films and has no plans to return to directing. Still, his books continue to attract other filmmakers. In 1985 Andrzej Wajda filmed Kronika wypadków milosnych (Chronicle of Love Events), with Konwicki himself appearing in the movie. Konwicki's 1985 political novel, A Minor Apocalypse, is presently being filmed with an international cast by Constantin Costa-Gavras.

Konwicki is a symbolist, and the subject of his narrative is individual memory. He offers no happy endings and, usually, no solutions to the moral dilemmas his protagonists face. Unquestionably, he is an artist of splendid technical skills. Yet it isn't the sheer technique but rather his ability to make the most individual, subtle, and private experience relevant to the collective that has brought Konwicki his fame.