Polish week ends with celebration of Joseph Conrad’s most seminal work
The Polish Arts and Culture Week started last Sunday at Chualalongkorn University’s Central and Eastern European Studies Section. While previous activities over the past four days have attracted much interest, the centrepiece is tomorrow’s event at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre: the celebration of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad.
Conrad, whose real name is Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, spent years as a sailor in the late 19th century travelling to far-flung territories — including the Gulf of Siam. He didn’t speak English fluently until his early 20s, but once he did, the world was given one of its finest English-language prose stylists, who also captured the sense of adventure and melancholia as the European colonial endeavour spanned its dark wings across the globe.
The event at Chulalongkorn tomorrow will begin at 1pm, with a screening of Apocalypse Now. The 1979 film, a Vietnam War masterpiece by Francis Ford Coppola, was inspired by Conrad’s best-known book, Heart Of Darkness. The novel’s story about a trip into the darkest part of the Congo under Belgian rule was transformed into a psychedelic war movie that probes the American and French imperial ambitions in Indochina. Martin Sheen plays a zonked-out soldier who cruises down the river to meet the apocalyptic Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in one of his most memorable roles.
A discussion by English-language professors and experts will follow the screening.
At 5pm onwards, the focus is on Conrad’s connection to Siam, beginning with the screening of the 2014 film Secret
Sharer. The film is based on Conrad’s short story of the same name, telling the story of a mutiny on a cargo ship as it’s sailing down from Bangkok to the Gulf of Siam and the young captain’s encounter with a mysterious man who swims naked towards his ship one night.
In the film, however, that man’s part was changed into a Chinese woman. Directed by Peter Fudakowski, Secret Sharer was shot in Thailand, largely on an old cargo ship. After the screening there will be a discussion by experts from Chulalongkorn and the Polish Embassy.
At around 7pm, there is a presentation, “Joseph Conrad — A Global Polish Citizen In A Global Asian City”, by Luc Citrinot. The event concludes with an award ceremony for the contest “What Would Conrad Say?” — which called on participants to send in photographs with captions that imagine what the writer would say about Bangkok were he alive today. (When his ship anchored here, Conrad said he was impressed with Bangkok’s surroundings although he also called the city “unhealthy”.)
The Polish Arts and Culture Week is organised by the Polish embassy, in collaboration with the Centre for European Studies and the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. The event ends on Saturday with the screening of the Polish film Foreign Body by Krzysztof Zanussi.
The screening takes place in the fifth-floor auditorium of BACC, and is free of charge.