‘Poland’ Archives
The Banner of Youth
Sztandar Młodych. Poland, 1957, tinted monochrome, 3 mins. A three-minute advertisement for the Polish Communist daily youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych ('Banner of Youth'), this is a more or less exact equivalent of the films that Len Lye made for the GPO Film Unit in Britain twenty years earlier. Lye's A Colour Box (1935) was an [...]
In the Time of King Krakus
Za króla Krakusa. Poland, 1947, black and white, 14 mins. One of the peculiarities of Polish film hisory is the almost perfect separation between the pre-1939 and post-1945 eras, for reasons that the dates themselves spell out all too clearly. Many Polish filmmakers didn't survive World War II, while others chose not to [...]
Pawel Łoziński DVD
The latest entry in NInA (formerly PWA)'s superlative Polish School of the Documentary (Polska Szkoła Dokumentu) has just been announced, and it's a survey of films by Pawel Łoziński, son of Marcel.The press release is currently in Polish only, but Culture.pl has an English-language career overview, and the two discs contain the following [...]
Polart: new Polish DVDs
Polart Video in the US have announced three new releases, one of which, Andrzej Wajda's Katyń, is widely available elsewhere (it's even out on Blu-ray in Poland), but I think the other two are exclusive to them.Much the most important is Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), one of the first major films about the Holocaust, [...]
Lost Polish film discovered
A substantial chunk of a long-believed-lost Polish silent film from 1913 about the 1794 uprising against Prussia and Russia (a short-lived victory for the Poles before their country vanished as an independent nation between 1795 and 1918) has turned up in a flat in Kraków. Thenews.pl has the full story - and it looks like being the most [...]
Off Cinema: the winners
The 13th Off Cinema documentary festival was held in Poznań, Poland, between last Wednesday and Sunday, during which a jury comprising documentary-makers Maciej Drygas and Edyta Wróblewska, critics/historians Andrzej Kołodyński and Michael Brooke and festival programmer Piotr Kotowski watched forty films and picked five winners, namely:• [...]
Wojciech J. Has on DVD
As the Barbican Centre in London gears up for a long overdue part retrospective of the career of the man I recently described in Sight & Sound as Polish cinema's only authentic surrealist, I thought I'd post another DVD overview for the benefit of those who can't get there - or indeed those who can, and who'd like to explore further. The good [...]
The Surrealist Visions of Wojciech Has
Now this is more like it! From October 1-25, London's Barbican Cinema is mounting an ambitious retrospective of the work of Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000) - or rather a partial retrospective, since it only features five films. But I shouldn't complain, since it's an excellent selection that comprises his feature debut Noose (Pętla, 1958), his [...]
Sweet Rush
Tatarak Poland, 2009, colour, 85 mins Director: Andrzej Wajda Screenplay: Andrzej Wajda (and, uncredited, Krystyna Janda), based on the story by Jarosław Iwaskiewicz Photography: Paweł Edelman Production Design: Magdalena Dipont Costume Design: Magdalena Biedrzycka Music: Paweł Mykietyn Sound: Jacek Hamela Editing: Milenia Fiedler Producer: [...]
Sweet Rush
Tatarak Poland, 2009, colour, 85 mins Unlike the long-gestating, big-budget Katyń (2007), Andrzej Wajda's new film was shot relatively quickly with a small cast and on a comparatively low budget, and premiered less than eighteen months after its predecessor at this year's Berlin Film Festival, where it shared the Alfred Bauer prize. But [...]