In what's already been a great year for underappreciated Polish auteurs comes the latest box set from Radiance, The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin. The three films collected here, all taken from Szulkin's loosely connected 1980s Apocalypse tetralogy, are science fiction at their most grimy and grounded, a distant cry from the fantastical whimsy of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom occurring in contemporaneous America. And while the omission of the first entry in that tetralogy, Szulkin's feature debut Golem (1980), seems odd, this set still marks the best way to see Szulkin's unsettling visions of life under oppressive police state rule.

Szulkin's work carries many of the same preoccupations as his Polish filmmaking peers, particularly Andrzej Żuławski: the daily oppression of the communist government in Poland, the aggressive censorship of art and media, and pervasive anxieties around the apocalypse. But unlike Żuławski and his penchant for flowery, obtuse dialogue, Szulkin is more curt in his criticism, instead leaving any obfuscations to the tyrannical states that form the major antagonists in each film. The dystopias that Szulkin constructs may be futuristic, but his depiction of malicious systems of governance speak directly to their present moment—perhaps unsurprisingly, the first film in this set was immediately banned upon its release.

The three films assembled here each hue so closely to a shared formula that it's hard to avoid discussing them in unison. Each film starts with the sort of climactic event dystopian narratives most typically build from, whether it's the invasion of martians (read: Soviets) in War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981), or a nuclear holocaust in O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985). These are worlds where the worst case scenario has already occurred and yet somehow humanity still clings on, a morbid status quo where only the bitter husks of civilisation have been left behind. If the protagonists have any sort of heroic qualities, it's only in contrast to the barbaric societies they inhabit, forced to wade through a series of propagandic contradictions and confounding anti-climaxes in service of governments who operate solely with self-preservation in mind. By grounding the audience perspective with these every man, the sharpened blade of Szulkin's criticism cuts ever harsher.

Such a grounding is useful given the strange vagaries of the desolate landscapes Szulkin builds in each of these three, whether it's the dusky blue retrofuturism of O-Bi, O-Ba and its collapsing final refuge for humanity, or the ice-capped hellscape of distant planetoid colony Australia 458 in Ga, Ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986). In many ways these can be read as mood pieces, especially since each plot consists mostly of ineffectual rubes being sent on wild goose chases by their handlers, encountering various denizens of nebulous moral character in their circular quests for answers. Szulkin favours woozy low lighting that accentuates the unclear dimensions of the dank concrete offices and rooms these quest givers occupy, occasionally switching to harsh spot lighting to add to the dreamlike delirium in the films' more noirish sequences. Matched with the complex, crowded mise-en-scene and the flattened depth of each frame, the feeling of claustrophobia carries with it an undercurrent of end time paranoia.

While Szulkin is far from shy about his feelings toward the Polish government at the time, it'd be a mistake to limit his films as locally-focused polemics; their ideas about the contorting power of propaganda and speech are far more universal than that. Indeed, Szulkin's vision in Ga, Ga of a universe where space exploration is so treacherous that it's limited to prisoners aboard penitentiary cruisers, each warned that they'll be made to pay for any breakages to the ship's equipment, feels like a precursor to the recent influx of anti-capitalist satire in games like Hardspace: Shipbreaker or Citizen Sleeper. What separates Szulkin's work from the lighter jabs of his antecedents is its persistent nihilism, and while there are flecks of hopefulness to be found, in addition to an absurdist sense of black comedy, it's the disorienting bleakness that sticks in the memory.

Ultimately, the main appeal of this collection is also what holds it back. Fans of grimy low budget science fiction will find plenty to please them, as will purveyors of hard-nosed anti-establishment miserabilism. But Szulkin's consistency in tone, aesthetic, and ideology can't help but end up feeling repetitious, a commentary on the cyclical nature of corruption and sadism that lacks in impact on the third run through. Why Golem isn't also included here is also unclear, especially given its relative scarcity—a short run DVD release here, a badly subtitled appearance on YouTube there—but the other extras are excellent, especially the short films Radiance has selected from filmmakers cut from a similar cloth. And that's the headline: as either an introduction to the world of international science fiction or an opportunity to dig deeper into some hard-to-find Eastern Bloc gems in the rough, this set contains some of the best looking restorations of ‘80s Polish cinema you're likely to see this year.

Special Features

• 2K restorations of each film supervised by Piotr Szulkin, DoP Witold Sobocinski, and sound engineer Nikodem Wolk-Laniewsk
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio
• New and improved English subtitles for each film by Dobrotka Więckiewicz
• Programme of complementary grotesque and absurdist short films
• Newly designed artwork based on artworks by celebrated artist Andrzej Pagowski
• Limited edition 80-page booklet featuring new writing by Michal Oleszczyk, Olga Drenda, Ela Bittencourt, Piotr Kletowski and Daniel Bird
• Limited Edition of 3000 copies, presented in a rigid box with full-height Scanavo cases for each film and removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin releases in the UK on December 4th. 

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