Serocki’s film music
Kazimierz Serocki composed music to fourteen feature-length films and about thirty short documentaries and animated films. His soundtracks come from 1949–1974, though most were composed in the late 1940s, early 1950s and first half of the 1960s. Although it was a marginal strand in Serocki’s oeuvre, today the composer’s name is associated most strongly with film music.
Serocki was one of those composers who supported the revival of Polish cinematography after the Second World War. It could even be said that until 1950 he was primarily a “film composer”, who was just fighting to become a fully-fledged professional composer. In that period he wrote, for example, a very vivid musical illustration to Natalia Brzozowska’s The Coal Mine, a documentary that stood out among Polish productions at the time by virtue of its outstanding artistic values. Serocki’s first feature-length film was Others Will Follow You (1949), a drama directed by Antoni Bohdziewicz about the left-wing resistance in German-occupied Warsaw.
The composer collaborated with many Polish directors, but the most productive creative partnership he formed was the one with Aleksander Ford, the “tsar of Polish cinema”, with whom he worked on five films. The first and one of the most important in his career was Chopin’s Youth (1952). As its music director Serocki had a lot to do, working on the production. Not only did he select Chopin’s work, hire performers and oversee recordings of the music, but he also worked creatively. For example, he conducted ethnographic research to recreate the musical folklore of Cuiavia and Mazovia from the period in which the action of the film took place, and reconstructed Chopin’s creative process for some scenes. Serocki’s music undoubtedly contributed to the success of Ford’s next film, The Five from Barska Street (1953), which won the International Prize at the Cannes Festival. On the other hand, Eighth Day of the Week (1958), a film banned by Polish censors and initially distributed only in the West, revealed Serocki’s talent for composing popular music. He wrote not only the film’s striking jazzy motif but also the first rock-and-roll motif in Polish cinema (Bubble gum rock).
Serocki’s collaboration with Ford culminated in The Teutonic Knights (1960), to this day the biggest box-office hit in the history of Polish cinema. Fourteen year later the composer wrote music to another grand historical epic after a novel by the Polish Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz – Oscar-nominated The Deluge directed by Jerzy Hoffman. Given their genre and time of action, the dominant feature of both films is stylized music (period songs and dances, fanfares), although there are also fragments that sound very modern, like Serocki’s concert music. Of note are also battle scenes, in which music – through characteristic motifs – serves as a navigator through the chaos of the battlefield.
An important, although relatively lesser known, strand of Serocki’s oeuvre was animated film. In the 1960s and 1970s his music accompanied a number of works by the luminaries of the so-called Polish school of animation. For example, he created music to Piotr Szpakowicz’s Countryside Pictures (1959) and Witold Giersz’s A Horse (1967). The animation technique used in both involved applying thick layers of paint that seemed to be changing during painting. For the latter film – a story of a horse that could not be tamed by man – the composer provided six minutes of vivid music, using the colour potential of orchestral sounds to imitate hoofbeat or neighing, and to provide emotional support to the events on screen.
In all his films, regardless of the genre or theme, Serocki remained a master – with an excellent sense of drama – of integration between music and picture. A master faithful to his conviction that
music in film should emphasize evocatively, enhance emotionally the images we see.
[Kazimierz Serocki: Rola muzyki w filmie [Role of music in film], unpublished manuscript ca. 1949, Warsaw University Library]