Camouflage
(Barwy ochronne)
With Piotr Garlicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Mariusz Dmochowski.
Poland, 1977, 35mm, color, 106 min.
Polish with English subtitles.
Zanussi's sixth film is the story of machinations surrounding the awarding of a prize in linguistics, Camouflage revealed much about the corruption of scholarly life in Poland—despite the assertion of the Communist Party that there was no such school and no such professors. But the film's setting, a summer institute, also functioned as a microcosm of Polish society as a whole—surely the reason why Camouflage, although neither advertised nor reviewed when it opened in Poland in 1977, attracted more than a million viewers and became Zanussi’s first commercial success. Polish filmmakers today consider it the beginning of the "cinema of moral restlessness," which in the late 1970s included the best films of Kieslowski, Kijowski, Falk and others.
