Sloping Fields

Poland1970documentary20'Pokaz specjalny (2018)

Slesicki’s last documentary is no doubt one of his best. In its blend of poetry and sociology the film poignantly sums up his whole artistic path, on which these two storytelling styles have always intertwined. The film is a symbolic final of the achievements of the Polish Documentary School of the 1960s. Disillusioned with the socio-political situation in the country, the next generation of documentary filmmakers will show the Polish reality from a completely different angle. The working title of this film was “Staszka’s Wedding”. The scenes of a wedding ceremony and party of Jan Gardon and Stanislawa Maslanka are weaved in with scenes of mountain villagers engaged in their daily routines. The wedding customs and joyous revelry are mixed in with moving scenes of the hardships that living in the mountains entails. All this is set in a stunning scenery, which Slesicki never fails to accentuate. This contrasting imagery, such as the gaiety of the wedding guests, the beauty of the highland landscape and the ordeal of everyday struggles, is what makes the film so powerful. The images of daily life were combined with short monologues by the inhabitants of Zaczerczyk (this is where “The Mountain” was filmed a few years before). The soundtrack also contains some logical songs. In the screenplay to the film director wrote, “By suggesting a film about Zaczerczyk we would like to depart from journalistic documentation that is a trait of the Documentary Film Studio. The topic lends itself to an impressionistic story as a simple and coarse as its content, in the style of folkloristic naïve realism.” The genesis of “Sloping Fields” can be traced to an unfinished film project entitled “The Cow”. Its elements can be found in a short but intense scene of delivering a calf in a small mountain barn. In her film entitled “Silence” in 1997, Malgorzata Szumowska made a reference to the style of Wladyslaw Sleciscki’s short films by including a similar scene.