‘Poland’ Archives
People on the Road
Ludzie w drodze Poland, 1960, black and white, 10 minsA companion-piece to Kazimierz Karabasz' The Musicians/Muzykanci (1960), and made at roughly the same time, People on the Road takes a similar approach to circus folk. Both films look at what happens between performances - in The Musicians' case, it's a band rehearsal, while People on the [...]
The Musicians
Muzykanci Poland, 1960, black and white, 9 minsWhen Sight & Sound magazine ran the fifth of its decennial critics' Top Ten polls of what was alleged to be the best films ever made, they extended the invitation to filmmakers for the first time. As one of the leading arthouse cinema lights at the time (1992) Krzystof Kieślowski's list came [...]
Day In Day Out
Jak co dzień... Poland, 1955, black and white, 12 minsMade as a Łódź Film School project, Day In Day Out, Kazimierz Karabasz' lyrical portrait of the daily morning journey of Warsaw's suburban commuters, has hardly dated at all: my fellow Londoners will find themselves nodding in recognition on numerous occasions, even if hanging onto the [...]
Symmetrical Corpses
I've just watched two Polish films from 2003 back to back. The first, The Body (Ciało), was the first film by the directing duo of Tomasz Konecki and Andrzej Saramonowicz, whose follow-up Testosterone (Testosteron, 2007) I watched last week. In general, the earlier film is superior: much tighter at 94 minutes, funnier and better structured, [...]
Polish précis
A huge workload means I can't do much more than brief jottings on a handful of Polish films that I've seen recently, but here goes: War of the Worlds: Next Century (Wojna światów - następne stulecie, d. Piotr Szulkin, 1981) The sly opening dedication to H.G.Wells and Orson Welles works on at least two levels: as an acknowledgement of the [...]
Krzysztof Kieślowski on DVD
The very welcome arrival of PWA's DVD survey of Krzysztof Kieślowski documentaries earlier today made me realise that of all Polish filmmakers, his output is probably the best represented on English-friendly DVD. So here's a survey of what's available with English subtitles, based on the filmography appended to Culture.pl's admirably thorough [...]
Wajda’s War Trilogy on Film4 this week
I've just discovered that Andrzej Wajda's great war trilogy - A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955), Kanal (Kanał, 1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958) - is being shown on Film4 in the small hours of the next few days (there are two complete screenings scheduled on consecutive nights, starting on the mornings of Tuesday 24th and [...]
Update
Apologies for the lack of updates - things have been insanely busy over the past fortnight, what with the Ken Russell retrospective at BFI Southbank (for which I contributed a 75-minute illustrated talk and met the man himself a few days later) and various other work-related things - including an interview about Jan Švankmajer for MovieMail's [...]
Polish animation DVD update
Further to my post of 8th June about a new two-DVD survey of key Polish animated short films, the Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne site has just uploaded official details - in Polish only at present, but an English translation will doubtless follow.More good news is that the list of titles I uploaded was incomplete - there are actually 28 films [...]
Polish Posters
Polish poster design is one of the frequently unsung glories of the visual arts over the past century. Many Polish filmmakers, including Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, started out as poster designers, and many other major Polish artists made memorable contributions to the form. Their influence has been far-reaching - when I interviewed the [...]