How to be moral

Thinking back about how my "Lawnswood Gardens" (about Zygmunt Bauman) turned out, I am reading his conversations with Peter Haffer.

Zygmunt Bauman: Making the familiar unfamiliar: a conversation with Peter Haffner. 
 (Zygmunt Bauman: Das Vertraute unvertraut machen: Ein Gespräch mit Peter Haffner. ) 

I am struck by the part about moral responsibility.  Here is how I understand what Bauman means:

Everything we do influences others.  We need to take responsibility for our responsibility.  In our existential dimension we are moral creatures.  Morality begins when we meed the other.  Since there is no easy way to determine the outcome of our actions we always face ambivalence. 

In the past the way to handle that ambivalence was to follow religion.  A bad deed or a bad decision was softened by the notion of sin and the subsequent penance. 

Nowadays, the rational world disposes off with the notion of sin.  The place of sin is taken by fault.  Judiciary became a response to fault. 

Traditional ethic required submission to the rules.  Modern ethic requires that each of us assumes responsibility for our deeds.  We have to decide what’s good and bad on our own. 

A moral action should not be conducted with a goal in mind.  In moral issues there is no (systemic) pressure because morality assumes free will. A moral deed can't be calculated, should be spontaneous and not thought out through.  Morality is innate. 

Levinas says that asking “why should I behave this way?” are the sighs of the end of morality.  Longstrup says that even if a certain rule assumes doing good, obeying it doesn’t make the action moral.  Moral actions have to spring from free will.  Morality belongs to the kingdom of uncertainty.  

Bauman is amazed by the fact that Levinas and Longstrup although coming from and working in radically different circles, came up with the same notion regarding spontaneous value of moral actions.  Longstrup says that Jesus couldn’t have formulated christian ethics because had he done that he would have created conformists and not moral creatures. 

(here I hesitate: isn’t the Bible a set of moral rules, haven’t Jesus tough how to live morally?  Or are the Bible rules for the weak while the true moral action has to spin from an individual assessment?  If so, there would be something scary and potentially dangerous in it - going in the direction of Nietzsche) 

Lawnswood Gardens online

 " Lawnswood Gardens"

  A ghetto bound tram on the streets of Warsaw.   

I have created a VOD vimeo page that will have a few of my productions.  The first is a documentary about Zygmunt Bauman.
 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lawnswoodgardens

Bauman and the Cross of Valor

“Lawnswood Gardens”, 

a portrait of Zygmunt Bauman

As Marlan Warren, a screenwriter for my teaching reading video series “The Reading Planet” wrote in one of its episodes - “Don’t knock ignorance till you've tried it!” The line comes form a Lethard, an inhabitant of a planet Lethargia, where everybody hates reading.

Back on the planet Earth:

The frame above is from a 2011 documentary I made about prof. Zygmunt Bauman a giant world class intellectual figure of the past several decades, who for the current political regime in Poland became the archenemy. They claim that Bauman received the Cross of Valor, the highest military honor in Poland, for his work in the military communist internal security forces.

“Lawnswood Gardens” makes clear the Cross of Valor was given to Bauman for his participation in a May 1945 battle against Germans. Since 2012 the film has been shown a dozen times in Poland on television (Planete +.) Wikipedias (English and Polish) also correctly identify the 1945 origin of the medal. Yet, many still attack Bauman with the misinformation about the source of his military honor. Clearly for some ignorance is politically more useful than knowledge.

The meeting

It turns out that a modest project which I produced as a byproduct of “Lawnswood Gardens” found its way to the independent existence.  This Sunday in Wroclaw, Poland there will be a public meeting between two giants of Polish culture: the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the sculptor Miroslaw Balka.  Both are the subject of “The meeting”, the video I made three years ago with the aim to describe the starting dynamics of an encounter between the two creators.  The idea was to explore complexities of any intellectual encounter and in particular those that happen between the two specific intellectuals who are intrigued be their respective takes on reality.  

This video will have its premiere during the Wroclaw event, which is to promote the Bauman/Balka book - a collection of their conversations.   I made “The Meeting” for National Center for Culture which organizes the event and is also the book publisher. 

I am glad “The meeting”, conceived as a sketch has been considered worthy a public presentation.   If anyone is going to attend, please let me how it went. 

The event details are at http://www.nck.pl/artykuly/100840.html

The Bauman’s Window

Before the screening of “Lawnswood Gardens”

organized by Polish Sociological Society

and Warsaw University Students Association

A panel discussion afterwards. Prof. Nina Kraśko - the moderator,

Paweł Kuczyński - director, Andrzej Chrzanowski - co-producer,

Piotr Rejmer - head of post-production.

“The film is brilliant. (...)

There is no such thing as a Bauman school.

However, there is a Bauman window”.

- Prof. Monika Kostera, Ph.D.

This comment refers to two elements of the film. The first comes from an informal talk where prof. Bauman’s says (in Polish):

“I don’t think I am going to leave behind something like the Bauman school for example, because in order to form a school of thought, you have to discover a method which distinguishes this school, and then any person who wants to do a Ph.D. has to prove that he can use this method adequately. This to me seems like schooling in conformism and in following a recipe, like unexperienced cooks who surround themselves with cookbooks and know (to add) 5 grams of that, 10 grams of that, here 5 minutes boiling, there 6 minutes etc. I’ve never created anything like that. What’s more, I think something like that would be against the sprit of the humanities.”

the second is a quote from “Modernity and the Holocaust”:

“...(the analysis) showed beyond reasonable doubt that the Holocaust was a window rather than a picture on the wall. What I saw through this window I did not find at all pleasing. The more depressing the view however, the more I was convinced that if one refused to look through the window it would be at one’s own peril.”

While filming I considered exploring views from various places where the Baumans lived and naming the film “The Bauman’s window”. Even though I abandoned this path something from that concept must have filtered through into the final version.

photos by Anna Polańczyk

The independence of ideas, part one.

The “I” is frequently too loud to hear that which wants to reach us.

Therefore the message falls on our ears deafened by the screaming ego.

On the other hand the realization of non-personal origination of ideas is often a road to individual recognition and personal greatness. Ironically, it is stepping away from the “I” that tends to build it. The trailblazers who humbly realize that ideas are not theirs achieve rightfully deserved admiration by showing us new vistas.

Two masters in their respective and very different games come up with quite similar conclusions regarding the origination of ideas:

“.... the process (of generating ideas), to a large degree, is in my opinion spontaneous, it has its own mechanism, its own logic. Like Levi Strauss put it beautifully: ‘I don’t think my thoughts but my thoughts think themselves”. - Zygmunt Bauman in “Lawnswood Gardens”.

“Ideas are the strangest things because they suddenly enter into your conscious mind and you don’t know really where they come from - where they exist before they were introduced to you. They could mean something, or they could just be there for you to work with. I don’t know.” - David Lynch in “Lynch on Lynch”.

It is something to consider when, enveloped in drunken hubris, we claim that ideas are “ours”.

Lawnswood Gardens

"Lawnswood Gardens"

directed by Pawel Kuczynski

written by Pawel and prof. Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska

Last night we had a premiere screening of “Lawnswood Gardens” - a documentary portrait of professor Zygmunt Bauman. The hero himself attended, which as normal in case of his public appearances, attracted a crowd eager to meet him. We felt bad that the theater management had to turn people away due to the safety regulations.

Earlier in the day "Gazeta Wyborcza", a leading Polish newspaper, run an announcement calling the film “a comprehensive and insightful portrait of an eminent scholar, who grants the camera an unusually close access.”

Prior, culture.pl, the official site of the cultural program of the polish EU presidency has published the following write up:

"Lawnswood Gardens" is a 53-minute film portrait of Bauman, who serves as one of the main representatives of Polish intellectual thought. The core of the film is based on Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska's brief visit to the Professor's home at Lawnswood Gardens in Leeds in the spring of 2010. The film includes archive materials and other interviews, exploring the links between Bauman's "Modernity and the Holocaust" and "Winter in the Morning", a diary from the Warsaw Ghetto written by the Professor's wife Janina Bauman, who passed away in December 2009.

The film also includes a conversation with artist Mirosław Bałka about his "How it is" exhibition at the Tate Modern and the Professor's response to Bałka's work, providing a sociologist's perspective on art.

The film also features the Professor's friends from Leeds: Anthony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, as well as Aleksandra Jasińska-Kania, Nina Kraśko, Jerzy Wiatr and Vaclav Havel. Bauman's daughter, painter Lydia Bauman, served as the artistic consultant on the film.

The film was realized thanks to the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the National Centre for Culture and ZAiKS.

The full text of the write up is linked below (one correction in the director’s bio: my philosophy study lasted only one year)

culture.pl

Original impulses

Technologies in music conducting and documentary filmmaking.

Kai Bumann, a German conductor working in Poland, when describing his method stresses the importance of understanding the original impulse for a given music composition. Before conducting a particular piece he wants to know how its composer saw the word. For Bumann music is closely connected with philosophy and theology. Finding the impulse that preceded a given score becomes the basis for the conductor's work. For example, sometimes during these searches he arrives at “deep layers of sorrow.”

Seeking the original impulse is a noble and elegant technology of any interpretive craft. Can the same be applied to a documentary filmmaking? Not always, seems to me.

I’ve made a few film portraits that indeed were based on what at that time I perceived were the initial impulses forming the lives of their heros. Among others, “Philosopher’s Paradise” was based on such approach, so was “Red with Black”. The latter was obvious and easy since Henryk Musiałowicz speaks straight about his artistic turmoils. “Philosopher’s Paradise” (although favorably received by critics and viewers and accepted by its hero) left me concerned because my approach forced a spiritual diagnosis of the inner core of a philosopher, who to many (including himself) is a hard core materialist. Was I really allowed to force my POV on an image of another person? To this day I remain hesitant about my directorial choice in this film.

The above reflections were perhaps one of the few reasons why my latest project - “Lawnswood Gardens” - purposely stays away from any kind of (be it metaphysical or historical) investigating of its hero, instead it focuses on an attempt to render emotions connected with my meeting with Zygmunt Bauman. Granted that the word “my” is dangerous in this above context. Yet, there seems to be a qualitative difference between uncovering somebody’s initial impulses and reporting one’s own reaction to this person.

Does it mean that a conductor could be more free exploring his “heros” (composers) than a filmmaker exploring his screen subjects? Perhaps we are approaching here a wall of a documentary filmmaking. The wall of humbleness toward one's own limited understanding of others and of respect toward their complexities and vastness. Another wall would be potential harm that a film could inflict upon its heros -one of the reasons Kieślowski abandoned the documentary form.

It’s possible that I am just splitting hair here. It’s possible that a certain arrogance (of vision) is necessary to make documentaries. Perhaps this never easy maneuvering between one’s own perception and understunding of its potential dangers is the hardest element in a documentary film directing.

Who sees the farthest?

24th of November. A screening of 22 min. from
“1 Lawnswood Gardens: the world according to Zygmunt Bauman”
Directed by Paweł Kuczyński,
written by Paweł Kuczyński and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska

After the screening Zygmunt Bauman entered the hall to meet the crowd. The discussion, including Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska and Tomasz Majewski, was devoted to the Bauman's just published book "Between moment and beauty. About art in the racing world" (in Polish). The panelists agreed that the artists are like army forerunners while philosophers are the troops who come afterward when the field has been scanned and recognized. I kept silent on the issue however would like to ad here my two cents:

Bauman himself with the visceral, emotional reaction that his work produces proves that the rational observation and reasoning can be emotionally satisfying and a true forerunner of the approaching times, a profound opener of meaning and sense. (Which are the qualities of great art.)

Secondly, perhaps the pre-visual and pre-conceptual domain is the common source of power and creativity in any discipline. Perhaps the veil from which true talent gets its flow is common to sculptures, philosophers, musicians, dancers, writers etc. Those who are able to drink from it directly and who have the capabilities to pass it to us use specific of “art” or “thinking”, or “life”. Perhaps the source is the primary and the same to all, while the language via which it gets communicated is secondary.

And so one more time (at least in my mind) it turns out that it is not "what tools" but "who" that's the most important when seeking meaning, sense and comfort in our common journeys on this planet.

Photos by PK.

A Zygmunt Bauman documentary film update

Prof. Zygmunt Bauman during the Gloria Artis Medal ceremony.

Photo by Pawel Kuczynski

On November 19th. Bogdan Zdrojewski, the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Poland presented prof. Zygmunt Bauman with a Gloria Artis Golden Medal. The ceremony included a 22 min. of selected scenes from a documentary “1 Lawnswood Gardens: the world according to Zygmunt Bauman”, the project produced and directed by yours truly.

The same selection from the film will be included in two public appearances by prof. Bauman during his stay in Poland:

22 of November, Monday. Poznań. Teatr Ósmego Dnia

24 of November, Wednesday. Łódź. Muzeum Sztuki MS2

Words and images

a scene from a book “Winter in the morning”
written by Janina Bauman
Nina Chrzanowska as “Janina”
director Pawel Kuczynski

An upcoming documentary on Zygmunt Bauman will include a few scenes from “Winter in the morning” by Janina Bauman. The book inspired “Modernity and the Holocaust”, hence an attempt to explore the relationship between the two titles: the Warsaw Ghetto memoir and the ground breaking sociological treatise.

In staging the “Winter” scenes we wanted to pay tribute to the written word. At the same time we knew that the exact presentation of that which the off screen voice reads would result in a mere illustration. This would diminish both worlds and images and produce a lame scene.

While playing with the footage it became clear that any slight gap between the voice and the corresponding images would open up the scene, allowing for some air. It would trigger the imagination and make the perception active.

Perhaps such “non illustrative” approach is healthy not only when one has to join a text off screen with its visual representation but also when any text, any script has to be manifested visually.

That would mean that a goal of a narrative visual storytelling is not to show the content but to trigger imagination so it can enter the content.

The shot above by Andrzej Belina Brzozowski. Some "making off" material from the production is here.

Disturbing sociology

"Modernity and the Holocaust' by Zygmunt Bauman says that the Holocaust was a direct result of both modern technology and bureaucracy which in themselves tend to disarm and corrupt ethics. Therefore our current contentment and closing the books on Holocaust as something evil that happened in the past and belongs only there is dangerous. The very foundations of the ways we organize ourselves as a modern society are pregnant with demoralizing tendencies, that, if met with right conditions, can (easily!) explode in mayhem, inhumanity and unspeakable evil.

Some learned scholars argue to what extend this gloomy vision of ourselves is correct. I think that unfortunately it not only unveils our darkest potentiality, but in a very scary way announces something. Let's pray that the announcement has to do with the way we ought to process the past and analyze the present. However, what if it is also the announcement of something approaching. Something real.

The book shows how a complex matter of mass murder aiming to exterminate the entire nation was possible by diluting, shifting and obscuring moral responsibilities of the individuals involved. In short, how a truly unspeakable became possible by breaking it down into smaller, acceptable steps.

Not us, not here, not now - you'll say. Really? Are our social choices fully ethical? Don't we accept hypocrisy, cynicism and blatant lies because the system (elected officials, media, science, experts) absolves us from the immediate responsibility? Don't we swim in conformity, even though we know that things are not right?

On the record: it was the Germans who did it in the 30s and the 40s. Yes, the ship was turned around, yes the bankers could care less, yes the peasants were oblivious, yes some helped the murderers, but it was the Nazis and other assorted Germans who did it. No ifs, no buts, no excuses. Or if you want a more hardcore version see my entry on "Inglorious Basterds" ("Remake of "Basterds" needed" - the tragic memory label.) I still stand by it.

Yet, the Bauman's disturbing analysis makes the past calamity more contemporary than we would want it to be.

Therefore on a certain level it is justified to ask:

What are we really involved in this time?

Reading Bauman

In the November blog post on zygmuntbauman.pl (only in Polish) the author of the “Modernity and the Holocaust” writes about one of his favorite authors, Albert Camus.  The phrases jump out:  

“absurdities of our lives which we continue to make daily consciously or not”, “impenetrable mystery of human nature”, “ambiguity and ambivalence (...) perhaps defining attributes of a (truthful) portrayal of human plight (...) should not be sacrificed for the sake of logic and clarity."

I get it all and see how it could be applied to a film structure, or to the development of a screen character. But that's just the beginning. Then comes a paragraph that opens the flood of challenging questions:  

“Several years ago I was asked by an interviewer ‘to summarize my concerns in a paragraph. I could not find a better shorthand description of the purpose of a sociologist's effort to explore and record the convoluted paths of human experience, than a sentence borrowed from Camus: “There is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first”.

This sentence is breath taking for its audacity, strength and the enormous mind fire it evokes. “Beauty” comprises narrative craft, aesthetic choices, storytelling values. “Humiliated” are the weaker ones, those who, by being minorities, oppressed or otherwise not fitting the mold, should not be subjected to the tyranny of the majority. Another words: a healthy democracy. If we serve our communities as politicians or storytellers we should be sensitive to both “beauty” and “the humiliated”. That's however is not sufficient. Bauman rises the bar higher: 

“Camus has shown (...) that ‘taking sides and sacrificing one of those two tasks for (apparently) the sake of better fulfilling the other would inevitably end in casting both tasks beyond reach. Camus placed himself, in his own words, “half way between misery and the sun” 

Does it mean that for a politician being aware of the aesthetic is not enough? That an entertainer cannot forget the ethical in his craft? It seems to say even more: Our duty is to be equally attuned to the ethical as to the aesthetic. One cannot be realized without the other.
This would indeed be a wonderful world: no vulgarity in politics, no carelessness toward the other in entertainment. Further the note enters complex territories of acceptance, rebellion, resignation and revolt. The entry, titled: “Albert Camus Or: I rebel, therefore we exist,” ends with the admonition against tyranny always ready to rise from behind good intentions of “admirable pursuits”.

This chilling reminder of the dangers of “solutions” blends in my mind with the earlier urging for the merger of the ethical with the aesthetic. I remain puzzled as the questions twirl around: Is it practically doable? Are we ready for such a high level of self awareness? Doesn't this part of our entertainment which is sick, violent and immoral diffuse the dark forces so that they don't enter the social sphere? Or does it simply add fuel to the fire?  

How in practice shall we navigate between “the beauty" and "the humiliated”? Perhaps the real “Bauman’s challenge” is more complex than I would initially want it to be.

Never enough

A voracious appetite for understanding, for communication, for seeing, for changing things, for living. Getting up after a hard knock and going again. Regardless of set backs. With empathy for those who failed. With silence when needed and a laud cry when required.

The above could be a snapshot of several individuals I have met. Intellectuals. Politicians. Activists. Artists in art or life. Those with "names" and those known only to a few around them. All passionate. All courageous. All inspiring.

Recently I found an expression of this attitude in The Guardian's profile of Zygmunt Bauman (written a few years ago by Madeleine Bunting). Here it goes:

“The real pessimism is quietism - not doing anything because nothing can be changed, argues Bauman: "Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better. [My role] is to alert people to the dangers, to do something. 'Don't ever console yourself that you have done everything you could, because it's not true,' says the philosopher Levinas, who believed that you recognized a moral person as someone who does not think he or she is moral enough. That is also how we recognize a just society - a just society castigates itself that there is not enough justice in our society."

A watercolor demon of the past (1)

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

What is the facial expression of the above figure? Is it fear or focused concentration? Is the figure's body language that of horror and stepping back or rather of getting ready to step forward?

The prevailing way of reading the image comes from the following text: "There is a picture by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. In it, an angel is depicted who appears, as if trying to distance himself from something that he stares at. His eyes and mouth gape wide, his wings are stressed to their limit. The Angel of History must look this way; he has turned to face the past. Where we see a constant chain of events, he sees only a single catastrophe incessantly piling ruin upon ruin and hurling them at his feet." - Walter Benjamin, “On the concept of history”, 1940

Benjamin had more than enough reasons to see the world in such terms. Nothing was making sense around him, the horror was closing on Europe and on him personally. (Shortly after writing these words he committed suicide on the French-Spanish border, while trying to escape to America.)

Seventy years later, some still see this image through the Benjamin’s glasses to illustrate the unpredictability and cruelty of History to us. Recently in “The Art of Life” by Zygmunt Bauman, (2008) I have found a more balanced approach: (My translation from a Polish edition) “People of that epoch, like the Angel of History, from the Paul Klee’s painting, with its memorable commentary by Walter Benjamin, stared in horror at the past and present cruelties. Terrified by what they saw - the sea of blood and human suffering - they were escaping into the past. The force of rejection was stronger to them than the force of attraction. It was not a vision of a happiness that pulled them toward the future, it was rather a sight of pain and misfortune that pushed them away from the past.” (This quote appears in the context of commenting on the ideas of Jean-Claude Michea)


Encouraged by Bauman's clear distinction between the past and the now, I wonder how can we honor and respect the cry of the victims without giving power to their persecutors. Don’t we need to constantly dust off our metaphors? How can we remember, yet not allow the horror of the past to rule over our present? I also wonder about the "angelic" aspect of the figure Paul Klee drew. Was it an angel or a demon? What should it be to us?

How would Bauman direct?

“The Human Condition” by Rene Magritte,
the favorite painter of Zygmunt Bauman,
whose latest (in Polish) is “Life in contexts.”
(Interviews by Roman Kubicki and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska)

Reading this book is like taking part in a complex, profound and fast paced conversation of quick minds. Therefore my reaction is most likely full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings. Yet I see this "book meeting” as an important “directing lesson.” Here’s why:

Bauman considers mystery the most important in art. He says that a great painting has to have a mystery that has “a life-sentencing quality” because (as I understand it) the mystery is unescapable and ever present. To the Professor, art should “show unusual in what we consider usual.”

Visual arts play a strong role in the craft of this visionary thinker (and a recognized photographer, although he downplays this part). In his texts there are references to painters, performers, motion picture directors. For example: to Bauman some Bergman films are more telling than many sociological treatises. Discussing his own biography Bauman admits to the big role of a blind chance in his life and brings up Kieslowski’s “Blind chance” as an illustration of such mechanism.

“Life in contexts” shows a search for the proper visual metaphor for our confused and confusing times. As if the golden solution to our sociological and philosophical ignorance lies in assigning the proper image to our chaotic world. Once we get this image-reality connection right we will understand who we are and what’s going on. It would be a mighty elevation of a role of the visual. And a painful downplaying of the might of the abstract.

As if the abstract strives to embrace the visual or emerge from the visual. Is there an assumption that “down deep” in a pre-linguistic order of things the essence of what both the abstract thinking (sociology, philosophy) and the visual doing (paintings, films) try to articulate is one?

Recent sociology has worked with various metaphors to describe its field. Bauman brings up additional images. Desert and liquid. The last term he used several times in the titles of his books (“Liquid Life”, “Liquid Love”, “Liquid fear”.) However his metaphors are not only static. When discussing a model for morality he talks about “caressing” as a model of ethical behavior toward the other. To caress is not to conquer the other but to validate her (the professor clearly means a human interaction beyond gender, an interaction in social and ethical terms. It is my linguistic clumsiness that makes it gender specific here). So, to caress a being is to “document’ her own independence and the importance of the caressed to the caresser. Bauman writes that caressing best represents the intentions of Emanuel Levinas, whose work is devoted to praising “the other.” With all wonderfulness of this metaphor, we also have to be careful, warns the professor. Too much or misguided “caress” can degenerate and bring out a “mamma boy” in us.

To Bauman there are not simple solutions to anything, no ready recipes, no “auto pilot” mode. Freedom in life constantly requires from us the nerves of steel, reasoning and self-reflection. So what consequences could all that have to the craft of the narrative visual storytelling? Well, for example:

No banality in showing the visible.

Reverence to what’s “out there”.

No close-ended thesis (no truth as oppression.)

Less ontological vulgarity (as in “that’s how it is!)

No superficial rendering of events and characters.

Attention (to details.)

Respect (to mystery.)

Empathy (to us all.)