‘Poland’ Archives
Murder
Morderstwo Poland, 1957, black and white, 1 minSome artists find their characteristic themes and approaches some distance into their career, while others emerge seemingly fully formed. Roman Polański so unambiguously falls into the latter group that the authorship of his first batch of Łódź Film School shorts (literally the first films he [...]
The Eye and the Ear
UK, 1945, black and white, 11 mins. Of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson's three surviving films, The Eye and the Ear is much the most successful, and one can only regret that their extensive interests in other fields precluded them making any more in a similar vein. As the title implies, and the explanatory intertitles explain in [...]
Calling Mr Smith
UK, 1944, black and white, 8 minsThe first of two films made by the husband-and-wife team of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in Britain towards the end of World War II, Calling Mr Smith is a visually virtuosic, despairingly bleak piece of anti-Nazi propaganda that tries to open British audiences' eyes not merely to the physical destruction of [...]
The Adventure of a Good Citizen
Przygoda człowieka poczciwego Poland, 1937, black and white, 10 minsThe last of five films made by the husband-and-wife team of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in their native Poland, The Adventure of a Good Citizen is the only one to have survived World War II - indeed, it's one of the few remaining examples of what by all accounts was a [...]
Agnieszka Holland DVD Box
I meant to review the four titles in Telewizja Kinopolska's DVD box set of Agnieszka Holland's first four films (one's a collaborative exercise) in more detail, but it's so long since I watched them that I'm in danger of forgetting salient bits. So here's a quick précis: Screen Tests (Zdjęcia próbne, 1977): a three-part portmanteau film [...]
Kinoteka 2009
The Kinoteka Film Festiwal (or, more prosaically, London's seventh annual Polish film festival) has just announced its full programme - and very impressive it is too, offering a mixture of recent Polish films and important retrospectives, including the extraordinary Polish New Wave season at Tate Modern. I say "extraordinary" partly because it's [...]
What You Got?
23 January sees the launch of the Barbican's What You Got? season, a triple tribute to rebel icons James Dean, Gérard Philipe and Zbigniew Cybulski. As far as Cybulski is concerned, Andrzej Wajda's seminal Ashes and Diamonds (Popioł i diament, 1958) unsurprisingly gets the most prominent slot, being the opening gala on 23rd January at 19:30, [...]
Polish Traces
If all goes according to plan, by the time this post appears I'll have just landed in Warsaw, where I'm spending what promises to be four fascinating days as a guest of the Filmoteka Narodowa, the main Polish film archive. To mark this year's centenary of Polish cinema, they wrote to their counterparts abroad to ask if they had any pre-1945 [...]
Agnieszka Holland: Europe/America
From 10 December 2008 to 5 January 2009, MoMA in New York is mounting what I think is the most extensive Agnieszka Holland retrospective ever attempted - though the title 'Agnieszka Holland: Europe/America' arguably doesn't go far enough, given that her career included stints in communist and capitalist Europe prior to crossing the Atlantic. The [...]
Short Animated World
I've just discovered the Short Animated World blog, dedicated to chronicling all 100 entries on the recent Annecy Film Festival/Studio Magazine/Variety poll of thirty animation historians to establish the best animated films of all time. There's no original critical material, but each entry offers links and - in most cases - a streaming copy of [...]