Résumé

The documentary The Age of Czeslaw Milosz, directed by Juozas Javaitis, commemorates the 100th birthday of Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), the Nobel Prize-winning Polish-Lithuanian poet who lived for virtually the entire 20th century. The article intends, in dialogue with Martin Buber’s thought and Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of testimony, to address the prophetic and testimonial dimension of Milosz’s thought, recovered with poetic mastery by Javaitis’ documentary. Milosz survived two terrible totalitarian experiences of the 20th century, Nazism and Soviet domination. The same, as he said, freed him definitively “from the illusions and subterfuges” of life and showed him the “shameful nakedness of humanity”. As such, he was, at the same time, a witness who kept the memory of horror alive in his work, and also a prophet, insofar as he was prescient of the dramas and dilemmas that would come to the contemporary world, among them the madness and violence of the masses, the challenges of technology that made the world smaller, and the dominance of scientific vision in what he, echoing William Blake, called the “kingdom of Ulro”. For Milosz, however, the most significant feature of contemporary times would be the profound spiritual crisis of humanity. In a world marked by the advance of attempts at totalitarian domination, the documentary The Age of Czeslaw Milosz contributes to express not only the strength of this form of cinematographic language, but also the poet’s warnings as to the future of mankind.