‘Poland’ Archives
Andrzej Wajda showreel
Courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, here's a two-and-a-half minute showreel of Andrzej Wajda's films, originally made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to accompany the presentation of his lifetime achievement Oscar in 2000.
Sopot 1957
Poland, 1957, black and white, 16 minsBetween 1954 and 1956, Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski issued a series of hard-hitting cinematic challenges to a Polish documentary movement that was only just beginning to emerge from the crushing impact of World War II and the more consciously stifling period of Stalinism that followed. Films like Are [...]
Night Train
Pociąg Poland, 1959, black and white, 93 minsBy the time Jerzy Kawalerowicz made his sixth feature in 1959, overnight trains had long been established as an ideal setting for scenarios of intrigue and suspense: Alfred Hitchcock in particular had very much made the genre his own. But although a fair amount of Night Train (also known as Baltic [...]
From Powiśle…
Z Powiśla... Poland, 1958, black and white, 10 minsAfter making short films at the Łódź Film School (among them Day In Day Out/Jak co dzień..., 1955) and collaborating with Władysław Ślesicki on Where the Devil Says Goodnight (Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, 1956) and People from an Empty Zone (Ludzie z pustego obszaru, 1957), Kazimierz [...]
Retro-futurism
On his magnificently-titled blog Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, Owen Hatherley has published an incisive analysis of Dom (1958), the collaboration by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica that's now regarded not just as their own breakthrough but the film that kick-started serious Polish animated cinema in general - though, as Hatherley [...]
Place of Residence
Miejsce zamieszkania Poland, 1957, black and white, 16 mins Of all the "black series" documentaries presented on PWA's collection, Place of Residence is most explicitly indebted to the Socialist Realist tradition that dominated Polish cinema from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s. Taking its cue from wide-eyed celebrations such as Andrzej Munk's [...]
City on Islands
Miasto na wyspach Poland, 1958, black and white, 9 minsThe rebuilding of the Polish capital is one of the most frequent themes encountered in Polish documentaries of the late 1940s and 1950s, as demonstrated by such films as Brzozowa Street/Ulica Brzozowa (1947), Return to the Old Town/Powrót na Stare Miasto (1954), Warsaw '56/Warszawa 1956 [...]
Article Zero
Paragraf zero Poland, 1957, black and white, 16 minsIt says something for the social stigma associated with prostitution that this is apparently the only documentary of the 'black series' to tackle it. Very different in tone from Włodzimierz Borowik's rural Rocky Soil (Skalna ziemia, 1956), this is set in a far more enclosed series of urban [...]
Green Hair, German Sausage and Headless Chickens
Today's Mail on Sunday has an extract from Maureen Lipman's forthcoming book Past-It Notes in which she describes working with Roman Polanski on The Pianist (2003) and encountering his somewhat unorthodox methods - which, amongst other things, involved her hair turning green and her distinguished co-star Frank Finlay being smeared with sausage. [...]
Gdynia garlands
One of these days I'll make it to the Gdynia Film Festival, the largest annual round-up of the Polish film industry's output - but in the meantime, these were the competition winners. Grand Prize (Golden Lion): Little Moscow (Mała Moskwa, d. Waldemar Krzystek - IMDB) Silver Lion: Before Twilight (Jeszcze nie wieczór, d. Jacek Bławut – [...]