O-BI, O-BA: THE END OF CIVILIZATION – A Great Polish Sci-Fi

Who won this war? The Boers did not come. No one came. High in the mountains stood a building, whose dome isolated it from the influence of the atmosphere. All it took was convincing this dazed crowd to seek refuge in that asylum. And then the Ark program was created… O-bi, o-ba: The End of Civilization.

…which was meant to sustain faith in survival. Among the endless maze of concrete corridors, through the eyes of the guard Soft (Jerzy Stuhr), we observe helpless, apathetic people dressed in rags and aimlessly moving about. Of the two thousand survivors of the atomic devastation, only 850 human beings remained. Nearly all forms of social activity had disappeared. There is no government, no laws, no economy, no rebellion, or hope. Above the gray mass stands only a group of guards, who have created a semblance of normalcy around them, filled with work duties, a bar, and prostitutes.

The official ideology denies belief in the mythical Ark, which, according to its biblical model, will come and take the suffering survivors to a better world. As one of the few, Soft, against his own nature, wants to believe in the Ark, to awaken people from their stupor and force them into some activity in the name of saving what little humanity remains in them. But the crumbling dome that protects the bunker from the nuclear winter suddenly cracks, blinding the gray crowd, which runs blindly toward the mythical salvation…

O-bi, o-ba: The End of Civilization from 1984 is Piotr Szulkin’s third film. Staying within the realm of very relevant sociological science fiction, started with Golem and continued with The War of the Worlds: The Next Century, the director consistently built a world of post-apocalyptic paranoia on screen. Its source was, of course, the harsh Polish reality of martial law, during which the script was written. And much like in The War of the Worlds, Szulkin presented the issues of the time in an almost grotesque exaggeration. The gray crowd, fighting for rotten bread (made from ground books), resembles the struggle for every item from store shelves in the 1980s in Poland. Apathy and lack of perspective are offset in the film by degenerate forms of activity. With unofficial currency, one can buy luxury goods like onions, dry bread, or canned meat. The world turned upside down in Szulkin’s film successfully borrowed from the everyday reality of martial law in Poland. In O-bi, o-ba, there is no permanent threat from “enemies” or forcing “friendship” (as depicted in The War of the Worlds), but Piotr Szulkin this time focused on the sociotechnics of belief.

The Ark does not exist and will never come. Do not believe the rumors, superstitions, and nonsense. Your today and tomorrow depend only on yourselves.

Don’t you believe in the Ark?

If you keep shouting that the Ark doesn’t exist, it means it definitely does.

The Ark doesn’t exist…

Then why don’t you build it, fool?

The announced megaphone denials of belief in the Ark are a deliberate move. Knowledge of totalitarian propaganda clearly indicated that when a piece of information is persistently denied by the official authorities, it surely contains at least part of the uncomfortable truth. Paradoxically, the belief in the Ark, maintained through denial, leads to a whole series of distortions, which observation becomes the main driving force of the film’s plot. Following Soft, we see a mad millionaire who built himself an asylum from wood and filled it with animals, firmly believing in his mission as the biblical Noah. One of the guards (a phenomenal cameo by Krzysztof Majchrzak) builds a sanctuary in a cold storage for the Ark, where he keeps frozen girls for better times. Another guard secretly presses a currency called arks from sheets of metal for the only airplane. Prostitutes practice walking on tightropes, believing that this way they will reach the Ark faster when it finally arrives. A politically deranged librarian throws the Bible into the shredder because it does not mention the Boers, a nation with which the war caused the atomic catastrophe.

This paranoia is contrasted with the tragic and desperate love story of Soft for the prostitute Gea (Krystyna Janda, who played the wife of Iron Idem in The War of the Worlds, also named Gea). The carrier of human values is also an engineer (Jan Nowicki in a very typical role), who refuses to cooperate in saving the crumbling dome in the name of preserving what’s left of dignity. Only he can consciously look into the face of hopelessness and with almost conformist nonchalance not care about this entire world. All the others are pathetic human puppets, feeding off each other, submitting to enslavement, or escaping into madness, caused by the belief in an unreal salvation.

Szulkin visually illustrated this hopelessness very effectively. Of all his works from the 1980s, O-bi, o-ba: The End of Civilization is certainly the best in terms of craftsmanship. The main credit for this goes to the magnificent, masterfully lit, blue-hazed cinematography by Witold Sobociński. For those who remember the famous camera moves in Kubrick’s The Shining, equally impressive should be the long, steadicam shots by Piotr Sobociński, the son of Witold, who was the camera operator in O-bi, o-ba.

The set design by Andrzej Kowalczyk is also remarkable, although from an aesthetic point of view, there’s nothing to get excited about when looking at the gray walls that resemble the underground of a gigantic boiler room from 50 years ago. The worlds of Piotr Szulkin’s films are dark, the characters repellent, the situations reeking of degeneration and nihilism, and the philosophical message leaves no illusions about the human condition in the face of final events. This most bitter vision of downfall still leaves an indelible mark, even years after its premiere, and remains one of the best Polish science fiction films.