Outsiders and Exiles: Inside the BFI's Jerzy Skolimowski Retrospective
Jerzy Skolimowski
Boxer, poet, actor, painter and one of the most restless directors of the last sixty years, Jerzy Skolimowski has never been easy to pin down. Now a month-long retrospective at the BFI, Outsiders and Exiles, organized jointly with the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, offers a rare chance to see most of his work on the big screen, from his 1964 debut through to EO, which premiered at Cannes in 2022.
We spoke with the season's curator about what the programme includes, why it carries that title and which films newcomers shouldn't miss.
Key Themes
The Alienated Outsider: Nearly every Skolimowski film centres on a man who doesn't belong. Some are thrown into an unfamiliar world, as in Deep End, Moonlighting, Essential Killing and EO. Others grow apart from the place that raised them, as in Identification Marks: None, Walkover, Barrier and Four Nights with Anna.
Trying to Fit In, Knowing You Can't: His heroes keep attempting to find a place in society while sensing that forces beyond their control make it impossible. The mood shifts from talkative satire in the early films to near-silence later on.
Restless Invention: Each film tries something new, from the long takes of Walkover, which has only 29 shots, to the bold colours of Deep End and the splintered timeline of 11 Minutes.
Economy and Precision: Despite their richness, his films rarely run past 90 minutes, and several last under 80. The curator sees this as the mark of a director who knows exactly what he wants.
Exile, On Screen and Off: Skolimowski lived outside Poland from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Unlike Polanski, Borowczyk or Żuławski, he eventually returned and made his last four films primarily as Polish productions.
Influential Figures
A handful of key people shaped Skolimowski's path, from his first break to the producer who helped him thrive abroad.
Andrzej Wajda
In 1959 the two happened to be staying at the same Polish Writers' Union retreat. Wajda, then in his mid-thirties, was struggling with Innocent Sorcerers (1960), a film about people in their early twenties. He asked the young poet for his opinion. Skolimowski found the script unconvincing, not least because its characters showed no interest in jazz, and ended up largely rewriting it, earning a co-writing credit and a small role as a boxer. Wajda then urged him to apply to the Łódź Film School, and he got in.
Roman Polanski
The two met on Innocent Sorcerers, where Polanski had a supporting part. Polanski later asked Skolimowski to look over his first feature script, Knife in the Water. One of Skolimowski's key suggestions was to compress the story into a single 24-hour period.
Jean-Luc Godard
French critics quickly embraced Skolimowski, and Godard famously wrote to him naming the pair of them the greatest directors in the world. Skolimowski claimed he had not yet seen Godard's films when the comparison was first made.
Jeremy Thomas
The producer hired Skolimowski for The Shout (1978), only his second feature as a producer, hoping to win a major festival prize. It did, taking the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and turning a profit too. The two stayed close, and Thomas executive-produced Skolimowski's last three films.
The Early Polish Films (1964–67)
These four films made Skolimowski's name, and the retrospective shows them all. As writer, director and often star, he was something rare in Polish cinema, and rare even among the new waves elsewhere: an auteur who was also the face on screen.
"Identification Marks: None" (1964)
At Łódź, Skolimowski hit on a then-unheard-of idea: planning his student exercises so they could be cut together into a feature. He played the lead, Andrzej Leszczyc, because he wanted an actor he could fully depend on, while his then-partner Elżbieta Czyżewska took several female roles. Leszczyc, adrift and uncertain, has more in common with James Dean's Jim Stark or Holden Caulfield than with earlier Polish heroes.
"Walkover" (1965)
A loose sequel that brings Leszczyc back, it is built from long, virtuoso takes, just 29 shots in total. It confirms that army life gave him none of the direction he had hoped for.
"Barrier" (1966)
With Jan Nowicki in the lead, Skolimowski pushed further into experiment, with dialogue so layered that some say only Polish speakers can catch every nuance. It was sparked by one striking image: a man riding a suitcase down a ski jump. Barred from starring, Skolimowski sneaked in a cheeky cameo, with Nowicki wrapping a poster of the director's face around his head.
"Hands Up!" (1967)
Here politics moved to the foreground. The image of a giant Stalin poster with doubled eyes is unforgettable, but what truly angered officials was the film's suggestion that a whole generation felt cut off from Polish society. Its Venice competition slot was cancelled days beforehand. When appeals to the leadership failed, Skolimowski vowed never to make another film in Poland if it stayed banned, and so began his exile.
Skolimowski and the Polish New Wave
Was there a Polish New Wave, and was Skolimowski part of it? The curator's answer is more complicated than a simple yes.
A Cultural Thaw
Poland's creative boom began in the mid-1950s. When the Gomułka government ended Stalinist cultural policy in October 1956, an explosion followed across cinema, theatre, jazz, music, painting and animation. Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Polanski, Krzysztof Komeda, Jerzy Grotowski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica all emerged in this period. Skolimowski's first published work came then too, but as poetry rather than film.
The Polish Film School
The major features of 1957–62, known collectively as the Polish Film School, came from directors shaped by firsthand experience of the war. Skolimowski was only seven when it ended. Masterpieces like Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, Eroica and Night Train were great films but not formally radical; the real experiments came in shorts and animation, such as Polanski's Two Men and a Wardrobe and Borowczyk and Lenica's Dom.
A Movement of One
By the mid-1960s, almost no one else in Poland was making films like Skolimowski's. His closest kin were abroad: Godard's Breathless and Bande à part share the same blend of precise control and free improvisation, fuelled by poetry and jazz. Both men also turned sharply political around 1967. The differences are just as telling: Skolimowski hates analysing his own work, and it is hard to imagine Godard playing Hollywood villains in White Nights, Mars Attacks! or Avengers Assemble, as Skolimowski has.
Highlights from the Years in Exile
The season includes Le Départ (1967), Skolimowski's Belgian-made French New Wave film, and five features from his years abroad. Skolimowski himself rates three of them among his best.
"Dialogue 20-40-60" (1968)
A rare screening, possibly a British premiere, of an experimental anthology made in Czechoslovakia with Zbyněk Brynych and Peter Solan. Each director films the same conversation with a couple of a different generation. Skolimowski takes the twentysomethings, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as a Slovak rock star. It screens alongside four of his Łódź student shorts.
"Deep End" (1970)
His first colour film made with full creative control, splashed with vivid primary colours. A shy teenager (John Moulder-Brown) starts work at a public baths and draws unwanted attention from older customers and his colleague, played by Jane Asher.
"The Shout" (1978)
Based on a story by Robert Graves, it stars Alan Bates as a man who learned in the Australian outback a shout that can kill. John Hurt plays a composer hunting for new sounds, at one point by trapping a wasp in a jar. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and Skolimowski chose it to screen after his career Q&A in London on March 28.
"Moonlighting" (1982)
Jeremy Irons plays Nowak, foreman of four Polish builders working illegally in London. When martial law is declared back home in December 1981, he hides the news from his crew and, as money runs out, turns to shoplifting, an idea inspired by Bresson's Pickpocket.
"The Lightship" (1985)
His only fully American film and the nearest he came to pure genre, lifted by Robert Duvall and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
The Ones That Got Away
Skolimowski dislikes most of his literary adaptations, from The Adventures of Gerard (1969), where Claudia Cardinale saved him from being fired, to Ferdydurke (1991), after which he stepped away from directing for seventeen years. They're missing here because of rights and print problems, not at his request. The curator's biggest regret is Success Is the Best Revenge (1984), an English-language film about an exiled Polish theatre director and his troubled son, played by Skolimowski's own son Michał. A French-subtitled print was found, but the current UK rights holder could not be traced.
Return, Recognition and Legacy
After seventeen years spent painting, Skolimowski came home to Poland in 2008 and began one of the most remarkable late chapters in modern cinema.
The Late Polish Films
The retrospective covers all four: Four Nights with Anna (2008), Essential Killing (2010), 11 Minutes (2015) and EO(2022). In Essential Killing, Vincent Gallo's fugitive says barely a word, arguably less than EO the donkey. Yet both are stranded far from home by forces they cannot control, just like Nowak in Moonlighting.
Uncompromising, Not Unpopular
Skolimowski's films have often divided critics and rarely been blockbusters. Apart from a few projects he took on reluctantly, his work is a series of uncompromising personal visions. The curator points out that films like Deep End, The Shout, Moonlighting, Essential Killing and EO still did well enough to please their producers.
Perfect Timing
EO, nominated for an Oscar, has arrived at just the right moment. When Essential Killing came out in 2010, his earlier work was hard to find; even Deep End went unseen for decades until the BFI revived it in 2011. Now English-friendly Blu-rays are available or on the way for most of his key films, thanks largely to the BFI and Second Run, and Le Départ is even on Netflix. Anyone inspired by the season can easily keep exploring.
Conclusion
Jerzy Skolimowski's career covers six decades, several countries and a dazzling range of styles, yet his films keep returning to the same figure: someone who longs to belong but never quite can. Outsiders and Exiles brings that body of work together, from the jazz-fuelled rebellion of 1960s Poland to the quiet wanderings of a donkey named EO.
Whether you start with the bold experiments of Barrier, the dark wit of Moonlighting or the lyrical journey of EO, this season is the ideal way to discover, or rediscover, one of European cinema's most original voices.
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