When I first saw „Slowly” (2010) the doc­u­mantary made by Tomasz Wol­ski it reminded me of a nearly twenty five years’ older doc­u­ment­ary „The Fam­ily of Man” that Władysław Śle­sicki shot in 1966, awar­ded the Golden Hobby Horse in Krakow and Golden Lion in Venice. Both films, apart from the sub­ject – a pic­ture of life in the coun­tryside – are brought together by the sim­ilar poetics.

All the inform­a­tion on protagonists’s names, set­ting where the action takes place and the exact time have been omit­ted. Wol­ski and Śle­sicki rather than in facts are inter­ested more in a human being and his every­day life. At the same time both films express the same mes­sage, that first appeared as a mani­festo announced by the authors of the „Fam­ily of Man” – pho­to­graphy exib­i­tion that clearly inspired Śle­sicki – there is one man and one world, and in res­ult we are all a big fam­ily that shares com­mon fate, life exper­i­ence and feel­ings.


Tomasz Wolski’s doc­u­ment­ary is not build upon com­monly estab­lished dramtur­gic out­line. „Slowly” shows the real­ity, that is well known by the prot­ag­on­ists. We are whit­ness­ing their every­day life, tra­cing their small rituals like light­ing a stole, mak­ing the beds, feed­ing anim­als or cut­ting trees in the woods. What we get is a com­pos­i­tion of dis­creet epis­odes which joined together make the pic­ture of every­day fam­ily life.


The power of those quite loosely linked plots lies in their poetry that was grasped only thanks to director’s patience and dis­tance towards the epis­odes he films. There is no judging nor the attempt of influ­en­cing the nat­ural pro­gress of events. This approach is noticed espe­cially in the scenes of cut­ting the trees, mak­ing tea or the birth of the calf. What dom­in­ates in those pic­tures are long, static takes and soundtrack grasp­ing only the sounds pro­duced at the moment of shoot­ing. Here dia­logues are a rare nar­rat­ive prac­tice. This doc­u­ment­ary, made without any styl­istic orna­ment­a­tion, aims to cre­ate the most object­ive por­trait of prot­ag­on­ists’ every­day life. It stems from the strong belief that patient obser­va­tion of com­mon­ness is key to reach­ing the poetry of true life.


In Tomasz Wolski’s doc­u­ment­ary, just like in the „Fam­ily of Man” the cam­era never leaves the farm, whit­ness­ing the events tak­ing place in the house, farm­yard and at the field. Only two short takes of the road lead­ing home are testi­fy­ing the existance of the outer, urban real­ity. We can­not dis­tin­guish brands or even shapes of the cars that are passing by nor notice faces of the pas­sen­gers. Yet what is vis­ible are the con­stant oppos­i­tions: slowly-​fast, contryside-​city, life-​death (the film starts with the birth of the calf while in one of the last scenes there is a funeral pro­ces­sion mov­ing down the road). Wol­ski, apart from dir­ect­ing our atten­tion to he per­ceptron of this micro­cosm, shows that the outer world is exist­ing as well.


That isol­a­tion from the real­ity that exists out­side the farm pic­tures life of the prot­ag­on­ists in utter har­mony and tran­quil­lity, that is being so well emphas­ized by the beau­ti­ful takes of nature. One of the prot­ag­on­ists is wait­ing for the right moment for the cer­eal to be picked. Here only mother nature is the one that decides when the work will start. The labour is not easy. Only a child is allowed to rest longer than the other fam­ily mem­bers. But soon it will grow up, like a cer­eal, and then decide whether to live fast of slowly.


Daniel Stopa

(04.04.2011)