Posts Tagged ‘Jerzy Bossak’
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 [...]
Warsaw ‘56
Warszawa 1956 Poland, 1956, black and white, 10 minsEssentially a cross between Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton's classic British documentary Housing Problems (1935) and a particularly sadistic child-in-peril suspense thriller, Warsaw '56 is the most sheerly terrifying film in the 'black series' of documentaries that shook up Polish cinema in the [...]
Return to the Old Town
Powrót na Stare Miasto Poland, 1954, black and white/colour, 20 minsIn essence a documentary about the recreation of Warsaw's Old Town, all but destroyed during World War II, Jerzy Bossak's film has enough genuinely powerful images of the large-scale restoration and reconstruction process to compensate for the commentary's attempts at rewriting [...]
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 [...]