Marie Maciak
The Education of a Filmmaker
Christian Scheider
Marie Maciak traveled to Ghana in 2007 with Ross School students and documented the experience on video. |
(4/2/2008) If there was a silver lining for Marie Maciak growing up in communist Poland in the 1970s, it was the rich history of Polish postwar cinema that she was exposed to. She grew up watching the films of auteurs such as Luis Bunuel, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Francois Truffaut, and the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, “not even knowing they were unusual films. There was quite a wealth of cinema on Poland’s two channels,” she said.
Ms. Maciak, a documentary filmmaker, editor, and the co-founder of the media studies program at the Ross School in East Hampton, said that in Poland, “as opposed to Russia, people were allowed to parody different elements of the ruling class or the government.”
“There were cases of writers whose work was banned, of filmmakers whose work was not shown, but a large body of work entered the market and was seen,” she said. “I think that was simply to keep the people who were educated satisfied. You had to somehow subdue the people’s anger and criticism.”
Despite the exposure to such work, seeing it was only an illusion of freedom, she said. “Yes, you’re seeing this, but at the same time, you’re not allowed to freely travel, you’re not allowed to get a visa to go to another country. Yes you’re seeing this film, but you’re not allowed to publish in the newspaper a critical analysis of what the government is doing or not doing.”
Ms. Maciak graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1989 and worked as a producer and editor of documentaries, editing projects for the Bravo channel, Polish television, and the BBC. She also curated a number of human rights screenings and festivals.
On the living room wall of her house on North Haven hangs a jarring movie poster of the Polish film “I Feel Like Screaming.” The documentary, made by Jacek Skalski, portrays the mundane life and horror that existed in communist Poland in the years when the country was under martial law, from December 1981 to July 1983.
The film, made in 1989, reflects the government’s brutal attempt to crush opposition to its rule and depicts a time of violence, repression, and massive arrests in Poland, which occurred directly after Ms. Maciak and her family fled the country.
It took a bribe for Ms. Maciak and her family to escape, before Solidarity, a trade union federation constituting a large anti-communist movement, was founded in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyards. They left in 1979, when Ms. Maciak was 13. “All I know is that our small Fiat and $5,000 had to be offered to receive visas to come visit my father,” who was in the United States working at an engineering company.
When the Polish government implemented martial law in response to increased strikes, Ms. Maciak’s family decided to stay in the United States. This was a major letdown to the 14-year-old girl who had so far been disappointed by America.
“In Poland, my perception of the U.S. was based on New York City skyscrapers and robots. I thought I was coming to New York, that I was going to live on the 60th floor, and would have a variety of different robots assisting me in my daily chores,” she said.
New York turned out to be Newark, where Ms. Maciak attended a Catholic private school unlike any in Poland. In her homeland, the role of the Catholic Church was revolution. Priests rallied revolutionary vigor. “The church here was something else. It didn’t have the spirit of youth and revolution that the church in Poland had.”
Asked to write a paper about her reactions to America, Ms. Maciak pointed out the hypocrisy of the school and the church. “The students aren’t really into religious studies, and there should be a more challenging curriculum,” she recalled writing. The nuns forced her to apologize to the heads of the school.
Not until her second year at East Side High School in Newark, where she transferred, did she start to feel at home in America. There she was exposed to a cultural diversity nonexistent in Poland. “There were gangs — people were grouping because of the music they were listening too, because of their race, and because of their ethnic group,” she said.
When she visited Poland for the first time three years after leaving, she felt that she did not belong anymore, “that I’ve had this weird experience, and it’s too Polish over there. I felt impacted by these cultures that I had experienced in Newark, and coming back to Poland, it was difficult to explain to my friends this richness, this new element, this new understanding.”
In 1997, she helped found the media studies program at the Ross School, where she teaches media production and criticism. She also runs a production company, Spiral Pictures, which has documented some of the school’s pioneering academic endeavors and experiments over the years.
“It’s kind of a reality check when you teach the students about filmmaking,” she said. “You’re asking them to step back and organize and plan their ideas instead of shooting 20 hours of footage and attempting to cut it in editing.”
“Filmmaking looks cool, but the tedious process of preproduction and organizing the material requires a tremendous discipline, and is difficult for many students at that age.”
Ms. Maciak, who has an 11-year-old daughter, Cosma, has been attempting to weave human rights into the media studies curriculum, and into her own work. She has been making a full-length documentary focusing on the growing problem of Iraqi refugees, primarily in Damascus, Syria, where there are more than 1.5 million of them.
The last of the neighboring Arab countries to accept refugees, Syria recently closed its borders due to overcrowded schools and lack of international help, Ms. Maciak said. She traveled to Damascus in September hoping to document their stories.
“As soon as people learned I was in the neighborhood, they wanted to tell their stories,” she said. “They didn’t even care if the camera was set up yet, they just wanted to speak about what happened.”
Ms. Maciak and one of her former students, Bronwyn Roe, a graduate of the Ross School, put together a 14-minute segment using footage from her last trip. It was screened at the New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival at the Tribeca Cinemas in New York City last month.
Her vision for the rest of the project includes further collaboration with the people in the documentary by including them in the creative process. Rather than have them recount their horrors, which she has already done, she’s interested in what they fantasize about, what their dreams and wishes are.
“When you meet characters whose experiences are so extremely different than yours, I as a filmmaker need a variety of tools to connect people. It cannot just be the account of having been kidnapped or tortured, because that’s so extreme, the audience feels so humbled yet so removed from that person. You feel this person is so great in their suffering that you have nothing to offer.”
Her experience of watching those early auteurs has influenced her approach to filmmaking, to allowing scenes to play out. “Today people have a tendency to cut very quickly, and the essence of a scene can be so diluted,” she said. “There’s a fear to let a shot develop. Meanwhile, those moments, that tension, is critical to understanding a situation.”