Anna Prucnal plays secondary heroine Anna Planeta in - you guessed it - Dusan Makavejev's 1974 cinematic masterpiece, Sweet Movie.
Looking lovely as a young lass, pre-Sweet Movie. She was a fairly prominent Polish stage and cinema actress and had a decent career as a singer.
At some point in the late 1960s/early 1970's, she found herself playing a scandalous role in one of the most talked about-not-talked about films to ever be made - Sweet Movie, near and dear to the hearts and minds of BC/HF.
Curiously enough, her character in the film would somewhat foreshadow what she would experience upon its release.
Her role is that of Anna Planeta, free-thinking, Marx-loving captain of the ship Survival, welcome nowhere on land. She encounters the highly sexualized ex-sailor Potemkin, who she invites on board her candy-laiden vessel upon which they develop a very passionate, ultimately fatal relationship.
At some point in the late 1960s/early 1970's, she found herself playing a scandalous role in one of the most talked about-not-talked about films to ever be made - Sweet Movie, near and dear to the hearts and minds of BC/HF.
Curiously enough, her character in the film would somewhat foreshadow what she would experience upon its release.
Her role is that of Anna Planeta, free-thinking, Marx-loving captain of the ship Survival, welcome nowhere on land. She encounters the highly sexualized ex-sailor Potemkin, who she invites on board her candy-laiden vessel upon which they develop a very passionate, ultimately fatal relationship.
Oh yeah! That is totally sugar that they are covered in. Fascinating. Delicious.
The bed of sugar returns...this time more sinister. Too many sweets will rot your teeth, Potemkin.
This is possibly one of the most alarming stills from the film. Looks innocent enough, or does it? One of the main themes in Sweet Movie is sexuality, and often this sexuality is confusing or frightening to the recipient. Miss World Virginity, Carol Laure, has a very unpleasant honeymoon experience which leads to another odd sexual encounter with a certain Mr. Muscle.
This blog, however, is not about Carol Laure. It is about Anna Prucnal. In the questionable photo, she is seducing a small group of young (did I mention young!?) boys. On her ship of death, there is plenty of candy and sugary sweets to spare. Are the sweets there to interest the children or for Anna Planeta's pleasure?
Either way, little boys like candy. Little boys also like semi-nude women, and Anna's got that covered as well.
Before you leave in utter disgust, take a moment to think. Cohorts have expressed to me that they felt most sexual as a child. Freud certainly got into that shit. We are all sexual as youngsters, though not necessarily involving others. Then we grow older, and we are taught to be embarassed. We might not like the idea of childhood sexuality, but it exists. That's the beauty of Sweet Movie. It shows the ugly truth, from the Katyn Forest Massacre (which had not been formally acknowledged at the time of the films release) to absurd displays of American consumerism.
Well, the Polish government didn't see things that way...
The government thought the film was "pornographic" even though it is only implied that Anna has sex with with the children, as opposed to graphic images of child nudity or anything of the like. The children appeared fully clothed, looking curiously at Anna. The rest is in your filthy imagination after Anna pulls the curtain. She does have sex with a grown man, but come on! It's 1974, people! The government of Poland also saw the film as "anticommunist" because it is heavy with political allegory.
So, what's a country like Poland to do?
Ban Anna from using her Polish passport, of course! Can't go home. Poland gave her the finger. That's like getting kicked out of New Jersey. Humiliating, but worse than that was that due to this political bullshit, Anna could not be at her dying mother's side. Like her character, Anna Planeta, she was unwelcome and forced to wander a world filled with death. France didn't seem to mind Miss Prucnal, and she continued to have a career there and in several surrounding countries, but spastic fans like BC/HF will mourn the ignorance of her home country as Anna mourns the loss of her mother.
Dusan Makavejev’s “Sweet Movie”/SWM (1976) is about two irreconcilable social strata our specie is fatally polarized on (p
ReplyDeletearalyzed) – rich and poor (strong and weak, leaders and followers, deciders and the docile or the rebellious), about their psychology, so different and so unbreakably linked, and about their respective madness as a result of their permanent struggle and the impossibility of their unification. In other words, SWM is a film about the tragic impossibility of a real democracy in a too proud age of formal democracy. Makavejev analyzes two types of violence (that of the rich and that of the poor), coming as a consequence of the impossibility of a reconciliation between those on top and those on the bottom of the social hierarchy. According to the film, the violence of the wealthy (sovereigns) against the poor (the dependent ones) – triggers violence of the poor that sometimes surpasses that of the wealthy in its intensity and meaninglessness. By depicting the destiny of two protagonists, one with a conformist position towards the rich (Miss World, dreaming to exchange her virginity for marriage with a billionaire), and the other with a revolutionary position and sweet dream about a militant liberation of humankind (Anna Planeta moving about Europe on a ship with a giant smiling and crying figurehead of Karl Marx), Makavejev rejects the both attempts to solve the problem of inequality and injustice as sentimental and inadequate. While Miss World personifies the common superstitious idea that the poor can find life on the outskirts of wealth (in a condition that they will be persistent: hard working, in their efforts to get closer to its center), Anna Planeta personifies the two historical trends of rebellious resistance – the Soviet “socialist” (under the banner of Communism) and Western mass culture with its consumerism, freedom of sailing sales, pseudo-prosperity, sexual liberation and entertainment (as a “pragmatic” mini-Communism “equalizing” rich and poor in the utopia of general porous-prosperity). Makavejev’s directorial style in SWM is unique by a semantic distance between the intentional “juiciness” of his visual images and their meaning. Makavejev is a shock therapist of viewers’ blunted perception of the reality as a way to awaken their cognition. His aesthetic canon can be defined as anti-propaganda aesthetics, as a masterful undoing of what ideological propaganda, be it “socialist” or pseudo-democratic has done to human thinking. The film examines why attempts to create real democracy are failing again, in front of our very eyes. In 21st century when the wealthiest 1% (with their intellectual servants and conservative propagandists) advance under the banner of pauperization programs for the 99% through austerity measures, the cultural and aesthetic radicalness of Makavejev’s thinking and style in SWM can be appreciated much more today than it was in a more democratic years when the film was released. Makavejev masterfully combines fiction narratives and documentaries, mock documentaries and semantically stylized images to create a multi-narration about the human existential and political predicaments in today’s world.
by victor enyutin