The Watcher and the Watched

The Polish film poster for A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE (1988)

A lonely nineteen-year-old boy watches his neighbor Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) through binoculars as she moves about her apartment across the courtyard in her underwear. Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) has been spying on this alluring older woman for almost a year and he has his routine down to a fine science, which includes setting his alarm clock to go off at the time she comes home from work so he won’t miss a thing. He soon graduates from binoculars to a telescope he stole from a local school. He also calls her up occasionally on the telephone but never has the nerve to say anything. His obsession, however, has come to the point where he requires more direct contact and so he begins to manipulate some face to face encounters with Magda through his work as a postal clerk and a milk delivery man for the apartments. While this basic premise for Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Krotki Film o Milosci (English title: A Short Film About Love,1988) sounds like the set-up for a creepy voyeur thriller in the vein of Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), or Peeping Tom (1960), the movie that unfolds goes in a completely different direction, depicting two lonely souls – one cynical, the other naïve – who forge a unique connection through unlikely circumstances.

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Trance State

The Polish film industry is not exactly famous for its contributions to the science fiction genre but there have been a few novel exceptions over the years. Piotr Szulkin’s O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985) and Andrzej Zulawski’s On the Silver Globe (1988) are among the more renowned titles although they are much closer to art house/avant-garde cinema than accessible commercial entertainments for the movie-going public. Much more audience friendly but even more obscure is Medium, a fascinating blend of science fiction, murder mystery and the occult, which has slowly developed a cult following since its original release in 1985 (It can be streamed on Youtube with English subtitles).

The Polish film poster for Andrzej Zulawski’s ON THE SILVER GLOBE (1988)
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