Apologies for the apparent lack of activity over the past few days: I’ve spent them preparing the various multimedia elements of my talk Andrzej Wajda: An Introduction, which I’ll be presenting at the BFI Southbank tonight at 6.15 – and, as ever, these things take much longer than expected!
Polish Radio recently interviewed me about the Wajda season, though they only ended up using a short snippet on Katyn. The recording is here – I’m the one without a Polish accent.
Once the immediate Wajda pressure is off, I’ll post more pieces on individual films, and I’ll also be looking at Jiří Menzel’s collaborations with the novelist Bohumil Hrabal as the latest, I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), finally gets a (minuscule) British cinema release.
And I can also thoroughly recommend the Imperial War Museum’s ongoing season of Polish films, which I mentioned a few days ago – I paid a visit myself on Friday and saw Krzysztof Zanussi’s In Full Gallop (Cwał, 1995) on the big screen for absolutely nothing. Sadly, the number of people in the auditorium didn’t even stretch to double figures, which just goes to show how little value people place on things when you give them away.
Interesting reactions to the Katyń film, and looking forward to your thoughts on I Served The King of English. Also just a quick note to say that there’s a superfluous line break in the link to the Polish Radio snippet you might want to fix.
Thanks for that – now fixed.
The Wajda talk is now behind me: it went pretty well, I thought, aside from losing my laptop-generated backgrounds at an early stage so the poor audience had to look at me instead of them (fortunately, this was their main function), but at least the clips played OK. Tellingly, the technical rehearsal was absolutely flawless, which is always a bad sign.
Not a bad turnout either, especially given the good weather – I didn’t do a head count, but there were at least fifty people in the auditorium, and I don’t think I disgraced myself too much in the Q&A afterwards.
Oh, and my capsule thoughts on I Served the King of England are that it was immensely enjoyable, hugely nostalgic (it’s the first new Menzel film I’ve seen in ages, but aside from a few CGI effects he could have made it at any point in the last forty years), slightly overlong and rather more than slightly sexist. But a firm thumbs up generally, and I’ll try to get a full review up before it opens in British cinemas.
I wasn’t able to attend the talk as I was at a screening of XXY.
I missed Everything For Sale, which really annoyed me as I really wanted to see this. I might only be able to see Man of Marble, Man of Iron and Rough Treatment out of the entire run; at least they’re the films I definitely want to see.
Everything For Sale is out on an excellent Polish DVD, with optional English subtitles (though sadly only on the main feature). I’m compiling a Wajda DVD survey which I hope to have finished before the end of the retrospective.
On the other hand, Rough Treatment doesn’t appear to be out on a subtitled DVD, so I’m greatly looking forward to the BFI screening.