Film Fatale: Why Possession Will Always Be Relevant
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An edit to a Mitski track appears before you: Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl (2014), Mia Goth screaming in Pearl (2022), Brittany Murphy shouting about the chicken carcass under her bed in Girl, Interrupted (1999). The comments are loving it, “literally me” says catholicwh0re99. “Me when he doesn’t text back” says writtenbyottessamoshfegh.
Soon after its entrance to the lexicon, female rage became a talking point that lost all meaning due to the oversaturation of aesthetic edits, YouTube video essays and Substack piece after Substack piece on the subject. The image of Mia Goth in Pearl manically smiling whilst tears stream down her face became the Can I Haz Cheezburger? meme for Gen Z women. Despite this, there are films that will never fall into this trap of complete memeification and oversaturation due to taking rage to an otherworldly realm. The horrors become tangible and wet in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981).
The career of Polish director Andrzej Żuławski is filled with blacklists and controversies within his depictions of political decline; his film The Devil (1972) being banned by the communist government in Poland and his unfinished sci-fi On The Silver Globe was defunded by Polish authorities during its production in 1977 - 1978. Due to the censorship in Poland at the time, Żuławski fled his native country to France. He then decided to set his next feature, Possession, in West Berlin during the country’s divide.
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Possession is a film on separation and division in its most brutal form. We follow Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and Mark (Sam Neill) through an animalistic relationship as Anna decides to leave Mark and their child for unknown reasons. It makes Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story seem like a comedy as Żuławski forces the viewer to feel the unrelenting pain the pair are experiencing, one that is much more than a typical divorce and crosses over to psychological torment. Mark is sweating out, rocking back and forth and slicing his arms with an electric meat cutter. Anna is also mutilating herself, and in the most iconic scene that is shared around the internet in meme formats and inspired a Massive Attack and Young Fathers music video, oozes out blood and pus in the Berlin U-Bahn.
“The themes of division, both political and domestic, make Possession a film that will never burn out. As Anna and Mark talk they go in circles, never reaching an agreement or point of rest in their arguments; they escalate to menacing degrees.”
This scene is climatic. Żulawski told Adjani to ‘fuck the air’ when they were filming, and fuck the air she did. Writhing about and flinging her groceries around her, eggs breaking as she puts every exorcist film to shame, demonstrating how disturbing the movement of the body can truly get. Throughout the film the performances are all hyperphysical like this one; over pronounced movements, erratic behaviour and wide, terrifying eyes. This acting style was inspired by the methods of Jerzy Grotowski - a Polish theatre director who “exploited the intimacy of live theatre to confront the audience directly”
Grotowski is most famous for his method of ‘Poor Theatre’, described as using “the smallest amount of fixed elements to obtain maximum results by means of the magical transformation of objects, through the props' multifunctional 'acting'. To create complete worlds using only the things to hand.” With Żuławski’s having his work defunded by governments and the bleak realities of Germany at this time, it seems only right that Żuławski gravitated towards this method of using what is already there around you. The film's lack of many extras and the cold palette of white, grey and blue ensure the audience are aware that this world is devoid of much pleasure.
Grotowski’s methods focus on physical movement, intense exploration between the actor and the audience, and rejecting the traditional layout of the theatre. Actors weaved within the audience, a performance style that could easily become invasive to the spectator. Of course, this goes hand in hand with trying to terrorise your audience. Żuławski clearly didn't create films to become commercial success with these types of performances, and the feelings of the audience meant little to him. He expressed as much after receiving criticisms of Possession: “I don’t make a concession to viewers. These victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”
Isabelle Adjani, who plays Anna, is an actress who was also on the controversy list and struggling to get work in her home country of France due to her being labelled as ‘difficult to work with and hysterical’. The film is a merging of Polish, German, French and English with its crew, cast and location, opening its arms to the outcasts of the industry. The film's cultural identity is merged and accents are displaced, all the while the camera is constantly looming around the Berlin wall. Most scenes take place right on the border, Żuławski zooming in to the guards lurking on the other side.
The themes of division, both political and domestic, make Possession a film that will never burn out. As Anna and Mark talk they go in circles, never reaching an agreement or point of rest in their arguments; they escalate to menacing degrees. As Anna screams: “I feel nothing for no one” during Mark’s attempt to once again get her back. Their family has crumbled parallel to the city they’re living in, and Anna and Mark lose the ability to function like the parents or rational adults they’re meant to be. Instead all they can do is harm themselves and each other as the only means to find intimacy.
Possession's big reveal in the third act makes it all the more difficult to piece together: Anna was having an affair with a tentacled monster the whole time. Knowing that Żuławski was going through his own divorce at the time, the monster is a motif that can mean so many different things when flicking through the film's themes of separation, politics, love and horror. Although it can be enjoyable to attempt to decode what it represents, to unlock the narrative and come to the ‘true’ meaning - the film’s ability to twist the narrative every time the audience thinks they have a grasp of what's going on is what makes Possession a piece of work which stands in its own league of filmmaking. It’s the absurdity that makes the horror punctuate.
At the end of the film Mark and Anna’s son jumps in the bath to drown himself once realising that his ‘parents’ are home, as he’d rather be dead than to be around their screaming and fighting. Bombs are dropping outside the house - a crescendo of war reminding the viewer both at the time of its release and today in 2023 - of the ultimate horrors of life, ones that are even worse than fucking a monstrous creature.
Words: Charlotte Amy Landrum