01 June 08

Features

Welcome To Holly - Woodge

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And yet the winds of change are beginning to gust optimistically through Lodz’s crumbling cotton mills. Following one of the largest urban regeneration projects in Europe, the city’s famous old Poznanski Factory has now been renovated and reopened as Manufaktura, a massively popular leisure and cultural complex, while other factories are being gutted, scrubbed up and converted into loft apartments, museums and cultural centres. David Lynch himself recently took over an abandoned power station, which he plans to convert into film studios and a cinema.

The new face of Lodz can be seen most clearly along the magnificent Piotrkowska Street, touted as the longest shopping street in Europe, which cuts arrow-straight through the heart of the city for almost 5km, lined by an eye-catching array of mansions.

It’s along Piotrkowska that you get the sense of what Lodz is swiftly becoming, and which puts the stereotypical image of the city as a place of grime and crime firmly in its place. The beautiful old mansions are slowly being restored and turned into bookshops, galleries and cafés, catering to the city’s enormous student population, who give the whole place a youthful air and provide steady custom for the hundredodd bars that line the street.

For the time being, Lodz provides a fascinating study in contrasts. Old men in grey suits and flat caps play chess in parks, as trams clatter past towering Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks. Around the corner, crowds of students sit in modern cafés sipping ice coffee and practising their English to a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Blur. At one end of the street it’s 2008, and at the other it’s still 1975. Confused? Well, yes, so was I, and yet this is all part of the wonder of Woodge – that for a lot of the time you don’t quite know where you are. Or when you are, either.

Meanwhile, back at the Textile Museum, the next shoot is already in progress. The lights are casting eerie purple shadows onto the dusky walls of the looming factory buildings, while five bowler-hatted actors are performing a bizarrely choreographed sequence that looks like an attempt to recreate Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch at the end of a long night on the tiles. We watch this final slice of quintessentially Woodge-like weirdness for half an hour then head off, feeling slightly surreal ourselves, for a final night in the bars of Piotrkowska Street.

And make mine a pint of Lodzkie Mocne, please. Woooo!

THE PROMISED LAND (1975)
Definitive cinematic portrait of Lodz during its industrial heyday, directed by seminal Polish director and Lodz film school graduate Andrzej Wajda, who was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2000.

INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
Characteristically enigmatic David Lynch movie partly filmed in Lodz and starring Laura Dern and Justin Theroux. The surreal action centres on a schizophrenic actress (Dern) and features the usual array of Lynch grotesques, including a one-legged woman and a trio of characters with the heads of rabbits.

THE PIANIST (2002)
Lodz film school graduate, Roman Polanski, returns to his Polish roots in this masterful World War II epic following the travails of Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. Although set and partly shot in Warsaw, the film gives a harrowing sense of what life in the enormous Lodz ghetto would have been like.