‘Documentary’ Archives
Brzozowa Street
Ulica Brzozowa Poland, 1947, black and white, 9 minsOne of the key documentaries of Poland's post-World War II pre-Stalinism era, Brzozowa Street takes its name and setting from one of the front lines of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 - just three years before the film was made. Although Warsaw itself (at least according to Jerzy Piórkowski's [...]
The Coal Mine
Kopalnia Poland, 1947, black and white, 10 minsMade the same year as Jerzy Bossak and Wacław Kaźmierczak's The Flood (Powódź), The Coal Mine is a similarly wordless study, this time of miners in action. Using high-contrast lighting, boldly-defined compositions and intensely, almost aggressively rhythmic editing, writer-director Natalia [...]
The Flood
Powódź Poland, 1947, black and white, 13 minsAlthough barely known outside Poland, Jerzy Bossak (1910-89) was one of the key figures in the development of Polish cinema, especially in the immediate postwar period when the industry was getting back on its feet after a near-total shutdown during World War II. In the 1930s, he had been a member [...]
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 [...]
Men of the Blue Cross
Błękitny krzyż Poland, 1955, black and white, 56 minsEven more than The Stars Must Burn (Gwiazdy muszą płonąć, 1954), The Men of the Blue Cross blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. So much so, in fact, that at 56 minutes this is effectively Andrzej Munk's first solo feature, essentially an adventure story about a real-life [...]
The Stars Must Burn
Gwiazdy muszą płonąć Poland, 1954, black and white, 64 minsMost filmographies claim that Man on the Tracks (Człowiek na torze, 1956) is Andrzej Munk's first feature, yet two earlier entries in his filmography could also qualify, and not just because of their length. The 64-minute The Stars Must Burn, which Munk co-directed with Witold [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]