"I, Gombro" - Description
Witold Gombrowicz born in 1904, as a writer, was highly praised by some and severely criticised by others. His first works, a novel "Ferdydurke" and a drama "Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy" gained him instant recognition. He made careful observations about the reality, exposing the weaknesses of human nature and creating his own philosophy of art.
In August 1939 when Gombrowicz boarded MS "Chrobry" and went on a trip to Argentina, he had already had significant artistic output and regular readers. He never returned to Poland though. In Paris, he published "The Wedding", "Operetta" and novels "Trans-atlantyk", "Pornographia", "Cosmos". From 1953 he started writing "The Diary" that was successively published in "the Culture" in Paris, it was the writer's honest confession of his views on culture and art as well as the wider issues related to the ontological nature. From 1963 Gombrowicz had changed his place of living several times, finally he moved to Vence in the south of France, where he died in 1969.
Gombrowicz hated literary critics, he, himself, wrote reviews of his novels, he even wrote interviews with himself, he wanted to have direct contact with readers, he wanted them to "consummate", "crunch" and "savour" him or to make them "vomit" him, he wanted them to admire or disgust him but always "dance" with him- accepting his invitations to a great confession of the subconscious.
30 years after Gombrowicz's death, one of his voracious readers accepted his challenge. The author of the film, Marian Marzyński was born in Warsaw in the year when Gombrowicz published "Ferdydurke". In the year when the writer was dying he emigrated to the United States where for 30 years he "was sinking" into the new world ("open, big sky" as Gombrowicz called it) observing Poland and Polish tradition, just like him, from a refugee perspective. Gombrowicz's writing accompanied him when he was leaving Poland in 1969 as a political refugee rebelling against the hypocrisy of communist ideology, one of the most vivid manifestations of FORMA and it still accompanies him in America, where he has been surrounded by new, political, social and cultural FORMA.
The director, as a regular reader of Gombrowicz's works has presented his profile not only as a distinguished writer but also as an extraordinary person. The documentary's makers followed Gombrowicz, they visited the places he visited and talked to the writer's Argentinian and Polish friends. The pictures from Argentina, France and Poland alternate with shoots from the plays and interviews with actors who played the characters of Gombrowicz’s works. They wanted to present various, individual views on Gombrowicz's works, to show that there are numerous ways of understanding his novels and dramas. It is a proof of a strong interest in the works of the author of "Ferdydurke" and the universality of the contents that they include.