Hungarians in Hollywood

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 [...]

Back to Sarajevo

When I get a spare moment, I'm going to finish writing up my Sarajevo Film Festival reviews (I haven't even mentioned the documentaries yet, of which I saw a great many), but in the meantime here's Dominic Ambrose's blog - he also attended the festival and wrote capsule pieces on many of the films, including a few that I didn't see.

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. [...]

The Ghost of Munich

The Prague Post reports on a potentially intriguing film collaboration between two of the elder statesmen of Czech culture: playwright and former president Václav Havel and director Miloš Forman. Inspired by (as opposed to based on) the novel The Ghost of Munich by French journalist Georges-Marc Benamou, it's an account of the British and [...]

Snow Q&A

One of the better films I saw at this year's Sarajevo Film Festival was Aida Begić's feature debut Snow (Snijeg) - but though I attended the press Q&A the next day, it was all in untranslated Bosnian (or at least the first ten minutes was: I'd made my excuses and left by then).So I was delighted to find Michael Guillen's English-language [...]

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 – [...]