Poland’s Oscar entry brings “peasant-mania” to the 21st century

By Aleksandra Janiszewska-Cardone

Poland’s entry for the Oscars brings together the work of a Nobel Prize-winning author and the team behind the previously Oscar-nominated hand-painted animation Loving Vincent to provide a modern telling of a classic Polish story.

A quarter of a million hours of work, 80,000 handmade frames produced from 3,000 paintings made by a hundred animators from Poland, Serbia, Lithuania and Ukraine. That was the effort that went into producing The Peasants (Chłopi), Poland’s entry for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

The technique, which involves first shooting a traditional feature film with actors before the results are painted over by hand to resemble canvases, will be familiar to those who have seen Loving Vincent, the previous film by Polish-British couple DK Welchman (formerly known as Dorota Kobiela) and Hugh Welchman.

Yet while that last work – itself nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2017 Oscars – focused on the familiar figure of Vincent van Gogh, The Peasants tells a story that will be unfamiliar to most audiences outside Poland.

“A hundred years ago, [Władysław] Reymont, an author little known outside of Poland, won the Nobel Prize for Literature and his book travelled to over 100 countries worldwide,” the film’s directors told the Deadline news site.

“We hope our adaptation of his book, brought to life in oil-painting animation, will similarly reach out and touch audiences around the globe and, like he did, find award success too.”

The Peasants is indeed proving a hit with both critics and audiences, who greeted its premiere at Toronto International Film Festival with a standing ovation.

The film is “a ravishingly beautiful visual triumph”, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “The result is near hallucinatory in its effect, as if walking through an art museum filled with masterpieces that have lives of their own.”

Moreover, despite being based on a book published over a century ago, the film’s story feels relevant today.

“As well as all the film’s artistic merits, it also deals with contemporary subjects that are important socially: oppression against women, their dependence or even ‘belonging’ to men, sexual violence and mobbing,” explained Ewa Puszczyńska, head of Poland’s Oscar selection committee.

“It’s a story that will be understood around the world, across borders and political divides.”

The film’s plot is based on the novel of the same name by Reymont – published in four parts between 1904 and 1909 – which depicts the life of Polish village around the turn of the 20th century and helped the author win the 1924 Nobel prize.

The Peasants was part of an extremely interesting trend in Polish cultural history, often known as “peasant-mania” (chłopomania). Artists and writers associated with the influential Young Poland movement at the turn of the 20th century regularly created works based on the lives of peasants.

They saw folk culture as a treasury of the “eternal” Polish customs preserved in everyday peasant life and in harmony with the rhythm of nature.

What led the filmmakers to decide to bring a novel from the early 20th century to the silver screen?

“Peasants was a natural choice for me – I just love that book,” DK Welchman explained at the Polish premiere, which took place at the Gdynia Film Festival in September.

“I went back to it during the painting of frames for Loving Vincent. I was listening to the audiobook. I think that’s when the first spark appeared. After years of working on a film about Vincent van Gogh, I felt a strong urge to talk about women: their struggles, passion and strength.”

Reymont chose as the protagonists of his novel the Boryna family, residents of the real-life village of Lipce, concentrating particularly on the fate of a young woman, Jagna, who marries the head of the family.

The changing seasons, which dictate the rhythm of community life, act as a background for a story of tragic love, efforts to find happiness, and the brutality of eternal rules allotting everyone their place. Anybody attempting to transgress these rules risks humiliation and rejection.

Upon publication, The Peasants achieved near-immediate recognition among critics in Poland. Winning over foreign readers proved a more complicated task.

The attempt to conquer France ended prematurely when Marie-Anne de Bovet, who had expressed an interest in translating The Peasants, ultimately published her own novel based on Reymont’s work. French readers were unimpressed.

But soon genuine translations began to appear – in Ukrainian, Russian and German. The last of these paved the way for European renown.

The German press’s response to The Peasants was remarkably enthusiastic, and during the First World War the general staff of the German army set it as compulsory reading for the members of the command administering the Polish lands as a compendium of knowledge on the contemporary Polish countryside.

The translation also made its way to prisoner-of-war camps. It fell into the hands of the French writer Franck Louis Schoell, who decided to translated Reymont’s novel into his native language.

Meanwhile, Ellen Wester’s Swedish translation satisfied the formal criteria of the Swedish Academy, which on 3 November 1924 awarded Władysław Reymont the Nobel Prize.

Poor health prevented the laureate from accepting the award in person, and the diploma, gold medal and a cheque for 116,716 Swedish kronor were collected on his behalf by Alfred Wysocki, the Polish ambassador to Sweden.

One of the main characters in Reymont’s novel is nature itself. The protagonists’ lives are dependent on the changing seasons, the alternate cycles of death and rebirth of nature. The author devotes one volume to each of the seasons, opening and closing with descriptions of the changes.

These descriptions are translated into visual language by the filmmakers, who used turn-of-the-century Polish paintings to recreate them, including the works of Józef Chełmoński, a painter of the Polish countryside and nature.

They were also inspired by European artists Johannes Vermeer, Jean-François Millet, and Edvard Munch).

“Painting from the Young Poland period was very inspiring to us, but let’s remember that these artists belonged to the European art world,” Hugh Welchman pointed out in Gdynia.

“Chełmoński lived in Paris and was a very well-known painter. He created his best works, to which we refer in the film, after returning from France. So we alluded to the European painting tradition, as well as what was unique to Poland.”

“We looked for colours corresponding to the different seasons,” added DK Welchman. “It was very important for me for them all to have their own colours. On that basis we chose the paintings and costumes. That all combined to form a remarkable collection that transports the viewer into that world.”

“Hugh and I worked together on the style,” she says. “He had a slightly different perspective. He suggested that we do it in a broader, Slavic context, more emotionally – like we experience painting”.

Their films’ success has recently been tarnished, however, by reports in Polish media that painters who worked on both The Peasants and Loving Vincent faced difficult working conditions. Production company BreakThru denies any wrongdoing and says its staff were properly paid and cared for.

When creating the music for The Peasants, the filmmakers again combined Polish and Slavic traditions though a soundtrack composed by the Wrocław-based rapper and producer L.U.C. (Łukasz Rostkowski).

The composer invited artists associated with Polish traditional and folk music to collaborate on the project, including the legendary Kurpian singer Apolonia Nowak.

The song “Jesień – tańcuj” (Autumn – dance) features the voice of Kayah, a Polish vocalist known for her duets with Bosnian musician Goran Bregović, as well as folk group Laboratorium Pieśni and the singers from the Polish-Ukrainian band Dagadana, working with the traditional folk outfit Tęgie Chłopy.

In the last scenes of the film, we hear the song “Koniec Lata”, which also has a version in English, “End of Summer”, performed by the Georgian-British singer Katie Melua. The soundtrack has also been put forward for an Oscar nomination in the best film music category. And it has a good chance of success.

The music from The Peasants was showcased at the Deadline Sound and Screen Concert in Los Angeles on 9 November, performed by a symphony orchestra. Łukasz “L.U.C”’ Rostkowski’s compositions were played alongside pieces from Napoleon and Barbie.

Milan Records, an LA-based specialist film music label that has published the works of such stars as Hans Zimmer of Danny Elfman, has also published the soundtrack to The Peasants globally.

We do not have long to wait to find out whether those at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are similarly enthused. Preliminary voting ended on 18 December, with the shortlists being published three days later. The official nominations for the 2024 Oscars will be announced on 23 January.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Translated by Ben Koschalka

Aleksandra Janiszewska-Cardone is a curator in the National Museum in Warsaw, specialising in early modern art from the Netherlands. She tells stories from the field of art on her blog Otulina.