Andrzej Żuławski obituary

Andrzej Żuławski, who has died of cancer aged 75, was one of the rare breed of film directors who refuse to compromise their singular vision for either commercial or ideological reasons. “I don’t make a concession to viewers,” he said, “these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”

This gives the impression that his films are austere, hermetic and inaccessible. Not so. They externalise high emotions and create a violent, nightmarish world, often tipping over into grotesque humour; they have strong, though unconventional, narrative structures; and they are shot with exceptional virtuosity. But most of his films travelled around the enclosed world of film festivals, only occasionally shown to the general public.

With characteristic disdain, Żuławski commented last year that “the only thing that I cannot sustain in cinema is boredom, this terrible boredom which assails European cinemas now, and these terrible festivals. Go to Cannes, you’ll die.” Yet his most celebrated film, Possession, was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1981, and he won the best director award for his final film, Cosmos (2015), at the Locarno film festival.

Żuławski was born in the Polish town of Lwów, now in Ukraine and then occupied by the Soviets. His father, Mirosław, was a writer and diplomat, who moved the family to France, where he was Polish envoy for Unesco immediately after the second world war. They then relocated to Czechoslovakia and, finally, Poland. Żuławski studied film direction at the renowned Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris, and then philosophy at both the University of Warsaw and the Sorbonne.

While still a student, Żuławski worked as assistant to Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s most widely known director, on the Holocaust drama Samson (1961). But Żuławski’s impressive feature film debut, The Third Part of the Night (1971), set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, on which he used many of Wajda’s crew, seemed completely out of step with the films of his mentor. Wajda said: “I remember how shocked I was by this movie and how I took to it at the same time. It was certainly a new and an original voice in our Polish cinema.”

Already Żuławski’s taste for depicting the extremes of human behaviour was evident. The film contains a graphic sequence of a woman giving birth without any medical assistance, and a Nazi vaccine laboratory, where Jews and members of the resistance are exposed to typhus-infected lice. This was taken as a grotesque invention on the part of the director, though it was based on fact.

His second feature, The Devil (1972), punctuated with rape, torture, hysteria, bloodshed and sex, proved that Żuławski sometimes failed to know how far to go. Set against a snowy, war-torn landscape during the Prussian invasion of Poland in the 18th century, it was too plainly seen as an allegory of the repressive contemporary communist regime in Poland, and was promptly banned.

Żuławski moved to France, where he made L’Important C’est d’Aimer (The Important Thing Is Love, 1975) which he wrote for the German actor Romy Schneider. In her César-winning role, Schneider plays a star of erotic movies torn between two men, her husband and a photographer who tries to help her career. This febrile and painful study of three emotionally damaged people is conveyed by a restless, constantly roving handheld camera and unblinking closeups.

After its relatively successful box-office takings, Żuławski returned to Poland in 1977 to make On the Silver Globe, an allegorical science-fiction drama. But after he had finished about 80 per cent of the shooting, the authorities ordered him to abandon the picture. Luckily, much of the film was spared, and Żuławski was able to complete the film in 1988 from spare footage, and using voiceover commentary for the missing parts.

Meanwhile, on the principle that nothing succeeds like excess, he shot Possession, a visceral tale of a marriage break-up in which the couple (Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill) are possessed by demons, both literal and figurative. Notable is the sequence in which Adjani freaks out in the Berlin metro, throws herself against the walls and apparently miscarries. It is like an aria in an atonal opera.

La Femme Publique (The Public Woman, 1984) tells of a model who gets a role in a film adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, and is dominated by a tyrannical director. Cleverly teetering on the boundaries of an exploitation movie, it has been seen as obliquely autobiographical.

Another Dostoevsky-inspired film was L’Amour Braque (Mad Love, 1985), loosely and wildly based on The Idiot, uprooted to a bright contemporary Paris. It starred Sophie Marceau, in the first of four films she made with Żuławski. The other films with Marceau, with whom he had a long personal relationship and a child, were My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days (1989), La Note Bleue (The Blue Note, 1991) and Fidelity (2000). This was Żuławski’s last film for 15 years, during which time several projects were aborted.

He returned with Cosmos (2015), based on Witold Gombrowicz’s last novel, Kosmos (1965). The film was labelled a “metaphysical noir thriller”, though it was more of an absurdist comedy, in which, as usual, he pushed his cast to the limit. Żuławski shared with Gombrowicz a sense of paradox and an acute awareness of conflicts that arise when traditional cultural values clash with contemporary ones.

Żuławski is survived by three sons: Xawery, from his marriage to the actor Małgorzata Braunek, who starred in his first two features; Ignacy, from his relationship with the painter Hanna Wolska; and Vincent, from his relationship with Marceau.