This is a review of Shivers (Dreszcze) directed by Wojciech Marczewski - one of the three films in the Second Run box Polish Cinema Classics volume III. It is extremely good but not great - as a movie; it is not a cinematographic masterpiece. It is well acted, well written, directed with a sure hand and definitely holds your attention. The teenage actors - particularly the main character - are so natural and unaffected, nothing false about them. Wonderful performances. In the extras there is an interview with the director, who explains how he deliberately used low quality Eastern block film for the sake of authenticity (though better film was available when he made the film in the early 1980s), and the camera shots were also deliberately clumsily composed in the manner of 1950s Polish movies. Similarly the editing is poor - on purpose: there is one point in the film where there is actually a couple of seconds of blank screen between shots. Fascinating that he should have gone to such lengths to replicate the epoch he was portraying.
However, in contrast to its perhaps limited merits as cinema, as a portrayal of totalitarianism and indoctrination Shivers is chillingly excellent. The film is about a communist party summer camp where the kids are indoctrinated in a very subtle way. There is no bullying, only indirect coercion: just very astute manipulation of young people who, it is hoped, will go on to become party members, cadres. Their vanities are tickled, their susceptibilities exploited, their mistakes skilfully manipulated to build up loyalty to the party: the camp fulfils its purpose magnificently in perverting their sense of reality so that they end up communist clones. And as Marczewski explains in his interview, he was actually sent to one of these camps as a teenager, so what he is describing is very much based on fact.
I regret that I did not see this movie with others (I am at the time of writing locked down outside Madrid in the covid epidemic) and so I cannot discuss it with other people, particularly my better half (who is locked down inside Madrid). It is a film you need to analyse and mull over, because the process of indoctrination is of paramount importance, especially today with the rise of populism. How far was communist indoctrination in the 1950s the same as the present day rightwing indoctrination of rednecks in the United States? In both cases people are made to believe in a fantasy, and a dangerous aggressive fantasy at that. In America (and Britain) today it seems that people are indoctrinated by very conservative media and it is very successful mass indoctrination - enough to elect a lunatic president in the USA (and an opportunist mountebank as prime minister in Britain). I think the commies in Poland probably had it harder: they had an uphill battle in the face of widespread Polish anti-Russian feeling and the Catholic Church (the film has fascinating examples of the communists taking swipes at Christianity, but not really daring to confront religion head on); and it would seem that the communists in this summer camp were only trying to create a small elite loyal to the party, perhaps having given up the attempt to convert the Polish masses. Leninism in any case was always modelled on a small elite party which would control everyone else (unlike the Nazi party, to which 35% of the German population belonged). And indeed its lack of popular support proved to be a fatal weakness of communism, both in the Soviet Union and its colonies: it was never a mass movement. The very failure to indoctrinate the Polish population as a whole permitted this film to be made: Marczewski's script was initially rejected by the party bureaucrats, but they gave it the green light when Solidarity - a genuine mass movement - burst on the scene; and then once martial law had been declared and Solidarity put down they tried to repress the movie again.
So, full marks for this extraordinary study of the strategies totalitarian regimes use to gain control of people's minds. And I hope other reviewers will continue the debate on the significance of totalitarian indoctrination and point out things that I have missed.
