If all goes according to plan, by the time this post appears I’ll have just landed in Warsaw, where I’m spending what promises to be four fascinating days as a guest of the Filmoteka Narodowa, the main Polish film archive.
To mark this year’s centenary of Polish cinema, they wrote to their counterparts abroad to ask if they had any pre-1945 Polish films lurking in their vaults – the aim being to make at least a token attempt at filling some gaping holes in Polish film history caused by Nazi and Soviet destruction during World War II. Anyone familiar with the BFI’s Missing Believed Lost and Missing Believed Wiped initiatives in the 1990s will recognise what they’re trying to do – and, sensibly, the Filmoteka’s definition of ‘Polish films’ is pretty wide, encompassing films shot in Poland, films shot abroad by Poles, or even non-Polish films about Polish subjects or which happen to feature famous Poles.
I was charged with researching the BFI National Archive’s holdings, and after sending them a list of everything we had, they requested five specific titles, which I’ll be presenting in Warsaw on Friday as part of the Common Heritage – Polish traces in international film archives (Wspólne dziedzictwo – polonica w archiwach światowych) conference. Only one of the films is actually Polish – The Roof of America (Polska wyprawa na Andy, 1934), the official record of the famous 1934 Polish mountaineering expedition to the Argentinian Andes. The others consist of a fragment of a 1920 newsreel shot during the 1919-21 Polish-Bolshevik War, and three World War II propaganda films made by the British company Concanen Films (founded by the actors Derrick and Terence De Marney, much of its wartime output consisted of propaganda films about Poland, supervised by exiled filmmakers Eugeniusz Cękalski and Stefan Osiecki – the latter also shot the 1934 expedition). Picturesque Poland (1940) is essentially a travelogue made up of footage shot in Poland in the 1930s, the aim being to show British audiences what they were fighting to defend, The Poles Weigh Anchor (1942) is a study of life on a Polish destroyer as it fights alongside its British counterparts, while The Call of the Sea (1942) is a three-part study of famous naval Poles, starting with Joseph Conrad.
At the moment, those are the only films that I’ve actually seen, but that’s a very small part of the overall programme. The Filmoteka’s own website offers an overview in Polish, plus an English-language programme of events (PDF format) – which lists similar sessions hosted by the Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen (Germany), the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Germany), Gosfilmofond (Russia), the Archives Françaises du Film du Centre National de la Cinematographie (France), the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive (Israel) and the Imperial War Museum (UK), all of which seem to have their own distinctive flavour. But all I have to go on at the moment is the titles – I should be much better informed by the weekend.
Nice blog!