‘Documentary’ Archives
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 [...]
43.3km Transylvanian Timber
My second review for the London International Documentary Festival website is of Georg Tiller and Claudio Pfeifer's almost wordless Austrian meditation about two very diverse professions - logging and border patrolling - operating in the same remote valley in Romania, inaccessible except by narrow-gauge railway. Much of it played out to me like [...]
Karosta
I've just been commissioned to review various films for the London International Documentary Festival website, many of which fall within this blog's remit - an excellent example being Peter King's British-Latvian co-production Karosta. This is one of the most vivid portraits I've seen to date of the legacy of the collapse of communism - Karosta [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Pawlikowski Online and in London
BFI Screenonline has just had its regular monthly update, and while this online encyclopaedia of British film and television history rarely has much of especial relevance to this blog's remit, it does now feature two pieces on Pawel Pawlikowski's early work, written by my friend and Andrzej Wajda co-interviewer Kamila Kuc. They cover From Moscow [...]
The Polish Documentary Movement 1947-60
(This is the text of a presentation I gave at the BFI this afternoon, on the early history of the Polish documentary movement 1947-60 - I've deleted some scene-setting preamble that was only relevant to that particular audience, but otherwise this is pretty much verbatim.)One thing that becomes very clear very quickly when one starts to delve into [...]