Dear fellow travellers,
Marek is driving. “You’ve probably heard this,” he says, weaving between the traffic on a wide boulevard somewhere on the edge of the city centre. “But people call Łódź the Manchester of Poland. It is because of our history. Because of our factories and our textiles.”
Marek pauses, and thinks for moment,
“Not so much our football teams… they’re not very good. And as for our music…”
This narrative becomes clearer as we explore the city together. We discover its mix of red-brick industrial heritage, remnants of the Communist rebuilding following the devastation of war, and the empty open spaces reminiscent of many places that shrunk with the decline of manufacturing without quite working out what was to come next.
Marek continues, as our progress through taffic stutters: “Okay. So, no Manchester United. Or The Smiths. But we have something else.” Another of those characteristic Marek pauses.
“It’s why I came here in the first place, back in the late 1990s. Most people couldn’t understand why I wanted to move here. This city was dying. It was ugly. It was dangerous. It’s got a lot better since then, but that was the reputation. I didn’t care though. Łódź had the film school. People who graduated from here went on to make great art. To go to Hollywood. To win Oscars. It’s why people know Łódź, if they know Łódź at all. The Manchester of Poland? Okay. But also Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Zbigniew Rybczyński and others.”
We complete our journey through the remnants of 19th-century tenement housing, Communist-era apartment blocks and the surviving factory complexes now reimagined as shopping malls, exhibition spaces and cultural centres. History told in city’s buildings, their layout and in Łódź’s abandoned spaces.
“Do you know Władysław Reymont?” Marek asks, as he drops me off at my hotel. “He wrote a book called The Promised Land. It’s incredible. People are sick of it, because they have to read it in school. But they have to read it in school because of how important it is. And this book… It links the factories to the film. This evening, I will show you.”
With a wave he is gone.
Reymont’s novel, which tells the story of the rapid industrialisation of Łódź in the second half of the 19th century, helped its writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924, a quarter of a century after it was published. Just over fifty years later, Łódź Film School alumnus Andrzej Wajda directed the film version, which would be voted by the Polish Museum of Cinematography in 2015 as the greatest Polish film of all time.
That evening, Marek takes me to the newly opened National Centre for Film Culture (NCFC), who are hosting a “long night” event that allows visitors to explore the film exhibition, cinemas and screening rooms, studios and workshop spaces long after darkness has fallen on the city.
The NCFC is part of the sprawling EC1 complex, once the city’s first power station and now also home to the Centre for Science and Technology, Planetarium and the Centre for Comics and Interactive Narrative. As so often, during my short time in the city, it is a lesson in how places and spaces can reimagine and reinvent themselves to find a new future within walls built for something else entirely.
The exhibition inside the NCFC takes us on a journey through Polish cinema, but it is the sections on Wajda and The Promised Land where I linger. Even watching snippets on a small screen in a crowded exhibition space, it is possible to recognise the genius of the filmmaker and the power of the story being told. And as I watch I become ever more conscious of where it is that I am watching it; not only the physical place, but this moment in time, almost exactly a century after the man who wrote the book had won his Nobel Prize.
A film made in the 1970s, in Communist Poland, about events from half a century before, now being shown in an old industrial building in a city that has been shaped and reshaped, for better and for worse, by industrialists and town planners, by bombs and guns; by tides of history and politics and economics, and all then captured by generation after generation of young people who are drawn to this place in order to tell their stories of the world and how they understand it through the lens they held up to it.
We walk out into the night, heading back towards Piotrkowska, the main commercial street of the city and its lively heart, hoping to find somewhere open for one last beer. At the bottom of the street we step into a bar that is part of Off Piotrkowska, a former cotton mill that now houses bars, restaurants, shops, studios and creative organisations. As we say cheers, I reflect with Marek on the fact that all the parts of this remarkable day are linked to each other. Each of the places in the city and the tales they contained.
“Sure,” he says with a shrug. ‘The factory, the book, the film, the power station, the exhibition and back to the factory again. A journey through time and space. And all the beats of the story are there. Just like in a good movie.”
Paul Scraton
