‘Short Films’ Archives
A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw
Spacerek staromiejski Poland, 1958, colour, 18 minsBy 1958, Andrzej Munk had already begun his second career as a maker of fiction features, and although A Walk in the Old Town of Warsaw was classified as a documentary short (and even won first prize in that category at the Venice International Documentary Festival), it works just as well as a [...]
One Sunday Morning
Niedzielny poranek Poland, 1955, colour, 19 minsAndrzej Munk's second film from 1955 is very different from the first, The Men of the Blue Cross (Błękitny krzyż), and marks another decisive break with the tenets of Socialist Realism that had dominated his early work - in particular, the sardonic humour is much more in line with reports of [...]
Are You Among Them?
Czy jesteś wśród nich? Poland, 1954, black and white, 8 minsTo a British viewer of a certain age, Are You Among Them? will look extremely familiar, as it's the exact Polish equivalent of one of those stern finger-wagging lectures masquerading as 'public information films' that the Central Office of Information churned out in vast quantities [...]
The Railwayman’s Word
Kolejarskie słowo Poland, 1953, black and white, 22 minsThe Railwayman's Word is one of those films that needs a certain amount of historical contextualisation, as its innovations are far less apparent today than they would have been back in 1953, the year of Stalin's death, and long before any cultural thaw. For all its mild unorthodoxies in [...]
The Hand
Ruka Czechoslovakia, 1965, colour, 18 mins Universally recognised as both the founder and the supreme master of the Czech puppet cinema tradition (an accolade far less trivial within Czech culture than it might seem in the West, where puppetry has long been regarded almost exclusively as a children's medium), Jiří Trnka (1912-1969) was [...]
Peasant Diaries
Peasant Diaries Pamiętniki chłopów Poland, 1952, black and white, 13 minsMade the year after the overtly Socialist Realist propaganda film Destination Nowa Huta! (Kierunek - Nowa Huta!), Andrzej Munk's Peasant Diaries derives from the same tradition, duly adopting many of the same archetypes and clichés (you half expect the ruddy-cheeked [...]
Destination Nowa Huta!
Kierunek - Nowa Huta! Poland, 1951, black and white, 12 minsWatching Destination Nowa Huta! for the first time, I felt a strong sense of déjà vu, as this is undoubtedly the film that inspired Andrzej Wajda's parody of an early 1950s Stalinist propaganda newsreel in his film Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977). That fake film's poster-boy [...]
Railway Junction
Węzeł Poland, 1961, black and white, 10 minsIn terms of conception and execution, Railway Junction is clearly part of the group that also includes the previous year's The Musicians and People on the Road. Once again, there's an abiding concern with presenting the lives of working people, though this time there's no distracting element of [...]
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 [...]