The Box: Going Out Into Poland, Honorata Martin

My husband is a keen cyclist and we started watching documentaries some time ago on GCN (Global Cycling Network).  We often watch documentaries of people doing long distance rides, adventurous rides or extremely challenging ones.  We have also branched out to watching similar documentaries for other sports.  I admire the people who do this very much.  It's obviously difficult but these people train hard and have a certain personality type.  It's obvious to me that the people who are successful at this and making documentaries like this are at the top of their game physically and mentally.  They are adapted to these challenges.  I am not saying they don't find them difficult, that they don't have extreme lows.  I do think though, that they work through it better than the average person.

Some of these adventures are supported, so people are not alone and have support and their needs met.  Jenny Graham is the most well known long distance female cyclist that does extreme distances self-supported.  It's clear she is incredibly resilient.  And brave.  She sleeps in ditches, all alone in all sorts of different countries.  Bus stops.  anywhere.  As a woman I know I could not do that.  It would put me into survival mode.  Jenny however is relentlessly upbeat (mostly).  She is an outlier

So what happens if you get someone who is not a trained athlete, someone without that drive to compete and succeed which carries people through an incredibly difficult journey?  Someone who is self supported and completely isolated.  Honorata filmed herself making just such a trip from Gdansk to Wroclaw in Poland with her dog, a sleeping bag and a change of clothes.  She covered around 30km most days and had a hand cart she pulled along.

To me, she spent much of the time in that survival mode.  It's clear she was scared and depressed for much of the journey and incredibly lonely.  If I attempted a journey alone like that, I would be too, the lack of planning and certainty would be crushing for me.  I don't have that competitive spirit that carries people through things like this is in a healthy manner.  Even her dog was depressed.

She talks about how she was in all these incredibly beautiful places but unable to engage because of how she felt.  I can believe that.  The snippets we were shown of Poland were beautiful but there was a little social commentary as well.  I found some of the subtleties of this tricky to engage with.  I know from reading things about the film that it provides a depiction of second class, rural Poland.  But...  when you have a 17 minute film and spend a lot of time talking about your feelings, there is less time for explicitly shedding a light on the communities you are passing through.

It was clear that people did not understand why she was doing this journey, it was something outside their experience that they had not seen before, not even on TV.  It was unexpected, so people did not know how to react with her.  Their were snippets of interactions written down, but I guess its hard to go back and get permission to include recordings of people for a film.  I think it is this ambiguity that takes the film itself into art and away from documentary.  It also makes it tricky for me, because I am trying to interpret it in to fact while struggling to read into the film.

So was it that men made her feel unsafe?  A snippet of conversation, people wondering if their was a sexual aspect to her journey.  A man who was a good man, but making jokes that made her feel unsafe because she did not know him well enough to know they were jokes.  A room with some explicit pictures of women on the walls.  I grew up with page 3 in British newspapers, so perhaps this is not so shocking to me as it would be to someone younger.  

I have been to Poland but the Poland she was showing, was not the Poland I have seen.  This is not surprising, there are worlds within worlds.  Maybe the world she is showing her Polish audience is shocking to them?

I think we can only interpret art from the perspective of our own experience, unless we are given the other perspectives to learn from.  So my perspectives are less about Poland and more the context of other documentaries on extreme journeys.  

I imagine other exhibitions have included more material, more context.  Seventeen minutes was not long enough for me to understand issues that were not being explicitly dealt with.  I will be sitting down with Polish friends soon and I will absolutely be talking to them about what I saw in this film and other parts of the exhibition.