Szulkin, Piotr
Entry updated 31 August 2026. Tagged: Author, Film.
(1950-2018) Polish film director and screenwriter, theatrical director and author, one of the most distinctive visionaries of Central European sf Cinema, best known for his quartet of mostly philosophically pessimistic, allegorical sf films, open to interpretation, written, directed, and produced during the twilight of the communist era. Szulkin's oeuvre is characterized by a claustrophobic atmosphere, crude grotesque aesthetics, and a relentless metaphorical critique of an oppressive totalitarian state, its manipulative media, and societal conformism, making him, along with the literary works of Polish Sociological SF authors, a distinctive anti-system voice within the Eastern Bloc.
Even though he began his career with animation, short documentaries, poetic and musical impressions, as well as both stage and Television Theatre productions, Szulkin rose to prominence with his first sf feature film, Golem (1979) – a loose, futuristic adaptation of both the Jewish legend and Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel. Set in a bleak, Post-Holocaust world recovering from nuclear devastation, the film's true philosophical sting lies in inversion: Pernat, the artificial "improved" citizen, displays more kindness, decency, and humanity than the actual humans around him – an unsettling development for the scientists who engineered him to be pliable, not compassionate. Szulkin uses this reversal to suggest that under a system built on conformity and control, authentic Irreducible Humanity survives only where it is not supposed to – least of all in the "real" people who have already been hollowed out by the state. The film established Szulkin's signature visual style: sepia and yellow-and-green-toned cinematography, disintegrating urban landscapes, and a pervasive sense of entrapment, where the claustrophobic, smog-filled outdoors feel indistinguishable from oppressive prison interiors.
His subsequent work, Wojna światów – następne stulecie (completed 1981, released 1983; vt The War of the Worlds: Next Century), is dedicated to both H G Wells and Orson Welles, but radically subverts the alien-Invasion trope. Instead of a military conflict, the arrival of Martians is immediately co-opted by an authoritarian government to impose a state of emergency, staging a fake friendship with the aliens while brutalizing its own populace. Due to its strong anti-propaganda message, the film, completed by the end of 1981 – that is, before martial law was introduced that December – was initially blocked from distribution and reached cinemas only in 1983. It became a national success. Scarred by nearly 40 years of Soviet-imposed totalitarianism and the shock of martial law, the Polish audience immediately saw the film as a metaphor for their own condition. They recognized on screen what they had long felt intuitively: that the state was an alien parasite aimed at their exploitation, and the media was merely the instrument used to cover it up and mask the grim reality of their everyday lives.
Szulkin's next film, O-bi, O-ba. Koniec cywilizacji (1985; vt O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization1985), is arguably his most despairing vision and one open to multiple interpretations. Apparently last human survivors of a global nuclear World War Three huddle in a decaying, freezing subterranean vault (see Keep) known as the Dome, shielding them from the lethal radioactive winter outside, sustained only by the state-manufactured myth of a rescue vessel known as "the ark". After witnessing the collapse of this Dome, the protagonist boards a makeshift hot-air balloon, looking down to see his own figure standing alone on the snow, and throws his bundle down to his Doppelganger, who takes the luggage and walks away, leaving the audience in uncertainty as to what has just happened. Was the balloon escape the last spark of the dying illusion? Is he the Last Man on the Ruined Earth?Applying a cold, blue-hazed, expressionistically grimy palette and featuring stark industrial production design, the film creates a stifling, theater-of-the-absurd atmosphere closer to existential nightmare than conventional action-oriented post-apocalypse and as such it can be read as the mirror of 1980s Poland, where empty official promises and propaganda of the late Cold War became the façade behind which the truth of the collapsing system was hidden.
The conclusive film in this science-fiction tetralogy, Ga, ga – chwała bohaterom (1986; trans as Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes), is perhaps the most demanding in terms of interpretation. It shifts its satirical focus toward a slightly cynical take on heroism, examining humanity's loss of faith encoded in the repetitiveness of empty rituals, where genuine Religious meaning has been replaced by the brutal logic of reality television. The story follows Scope, a prisoner on a penitentiary Spaceship who is sent on a mission to a remote planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) with a single objective: to plant a flag on its surface and claim it in the name of humanity. However, upon his arrival, he discovers that the planet suspiciously resembles Earth. He is greeted with overwhelming adulation and immediately elevated to the status of a hero. This manufactured worship serves a sinister purpose: the society's ultimate form of ritualistic entertainment (see Crime and Punishment) is the spectacular, televised execution of these imported "heroes" in a massive stadium. To facilitate the spectacle, the newcomers are actively encouraged by the authorities to commit hideous crimes so they can be legally sentenced to death by public impalement. Yet Scope stubbornly refuses to participate in this macabre ritual, despite being systematically coerced by the authorities. In a pivotal scene, when he visits the stadium, he is offered the choice to be impaled on the stake to the left or the one to the right. When he asks who the central stake is meant for, he receives no clear answer. The visual echo of the biblical crucifixion is unmistakable at this point; however, in this Dystopian world, the staging of martyrdom remains an empty gesture, utterly deprived of any spiritual or redemptive meaning. Still, Ga, ga – chwała bohaterom remains the only truly optimistic film in the tetralogy.
Among the crimes offered to Scope as grounds for his sentencing is the rape and murder of Once, a prostitute of girlish beauty and childlike innocence pressed upon him for that purpose. He refuses, and spends the rest of the film searching for her instead. Eventually, after he buys her freedom from her pimp with bags of stolen money, the two escape to his abandoned ship; there, Once forces the balky on-board Computer into action, and the pair flee the planet. The film closes on the fairy-tale revelation that they lived happily ever after and founded a new civilization. The biblical circle is thus completed: a civilization that had exhausted the redemptive promise of the New Testament, reducing even crucifixion to empty television spectacles, is granted no resurrection but only a return to Genesis – Scope and Once, as the new Adam and Eve, are left to begin the story of humanity again from its very first page.
These four films represent an interesting balance between locality and universality. On the one hand, they function as stark, thinly veiled metaphors for the lived experience in the waning years of communist Poland. The decaying infrastructure, the unreliability of authoritarian bureaucracy, and the omnipresent, cynical state propaganda accurately capture the societal exhaustion and economic stagnation of the time, while faith in great ideas is reduced to either blindness or empty, meaningless gestures. On the other hand, Szulkin's tetralogy outgrows the political confines of the Eastern Bloc era. His profound skepticism toward technological progress, his warnings about the manipulative power of the media, and his depiction of humanity's psychological degradation in the face of manufactured or exhausted myths, are deeply universal. Ultimately, while these films served as a cinematic mirror for a localized Dystopia, their Kafkaesque exploration of power, loss of faith, erased Identity, and the commodification of truth remains strikingly relevant to contemporary societies worldwide.
Though primarily a filmmaker, Szulkin was closely tied to the literary sf community of Fandom and published novelized versions of his scripts beginning with O bi, O ba i inne prawdziwe nowele filmowe ["O bi, O ba and Other Real Cinematic Novellas"] (coll 1984). His uncompromising independence, stylistic consistency, and focus on the psychological degradation of the individual under authoritarian systems place him among the most significant creators of philosophical sf, sharing thematic affinities with the literary works of Janusz A Zajdel and Arkady and Boris Strugatski.
In 1990 Szulkin directed Femina, a psychological drama based on the novel Pawilon małych drapieżców ["The Pavilion of Small Predators"] by Krystyna Kofta (1942- ), and in 2003 Król Ubu ("Ubu the King"), an adaptation of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu roi (performed 1896; 1896), which marked his return to the decadent aesthetics and yellow-and-green palette of his science-fiction pictures as well as the theme of human hunger for self-serving power
In 1984 Szulkin was given the European SF Society Award for Best Film Director at the combined Eastercon and Eurocon (Seacon '84) in Brighton, Sussex. [KW]
Piotr Szulkin
born Gdańsk, Poland: 26 April 1950
died Warsaw, Poland: 3 August 2018
works
collections
- O bi, O ba i inne prawdziwe nowele filmowe ["O bi, O ba and Other Real Cinematic Novellas"] (Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo ALFA, 1984) [coll: pb/Franciszek Starowieyski]
- Ga Ga "Szpital" ["Ga, Ga 'Hospital'"] (Bydgoszcz, Poland: Wydawnictwo Pomorze, 1988) [coll: pb/Andrzej Pągowski]
- Socjopatia ["Sociopathy"] (Kraków, Poland: Ha!art, 2006) [coll: pb/Anna Ostoya]
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