Irritated by the critics referring to him as a mere sci-fi filmmaker, Szulkin himself called his genre “asocial fiction”, pointing to his dismay at the modern society’s destruction of community, which is by no means confined to communism. In fact, Szulkin’s work can be read as well as criticism of media-driven consumerism, and is not that far away from the world depicted in David Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis”. What’s more, the director’s contempt for television is so massive, Szulkin sees is as the single most destructive force in history of human communication (In “War of the Worlds…”, a TV set is referred to as „box of excrement in living color”, which makes Newton N. Minow’s classis “vast wasteland” speech sound almost like a praise).

It is both ironic and cruelly appropriate that, following the fall of communism in 1989 (which his films both foreshadowed and fostered), Szulkin failed to reinvent himself in capitalist Poland, working mostly for Polish TV’s equivalent of Play of the Week (where he staged a remarkable version of Bertold Brecht’s “The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui” in 1997). Following the 1991 disaster of “Femina” (a misguided exploration of female sexuality, notable solely for the image of Joseph Stalin floating in mid-air as an object of bottled-up desire), he completed only one feature film: an adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s iconoclastic classic, “Ubu Roi” in 2003. First conceived in the early 1990s as a violent barb against the media antics of president Lech Wałęsa and the general disillusionment with what became of Poland after 1989, the film was ignored by the audience and seemed outdated even before it opened.

As for Szulkin himself, he became something of an embittered Proust-like recluse, not moving much from his cork-lined apartment and speaking openly of his disdain towards the direction both Poland and the world seem to be headed. In a way, one of his early shorts still remains his single most emblematic work: in “Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI” (1976), we witness an apple being slowly crushed by an inexorable movement of a press, the ensuing pulp ultimately replaced with a rotten apple – all this accompanied by two vastly differing renditions of Händel’s “Hallelujah”. What Szulkin seems to be saying is that there is no escaping destruction or decay – and that the only grace to be found in this world is that borne of heavy pressure, the way his favorite characters of Albert Camus novels sometimes succeeded in doing.

Polish Filmmakers NYC, co-programmed by Michał Oleszczyk, will present two films by Piotr Szulkin in an upcoming series. “War of the Worlds: Next Century” will be screened at Tribeca Film Center on 25 March at 7pm. “O-bi, O-ba: The End of Cilvilization” will be presented on at Columbia University on 27 March at 7pm, followed by a discussion hosted by Michał Oleszczyk. For more details, follow Polish Filmmakers NYC on Facebook.