Posts Tagged ‘Jerzy Hoffman’
Sopot 1957
Poland, 1957, black and white, 16 minsBetween 1954 and 1956, Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski issued a series of hard-hitting cinematic challenges to a Polish documentary movement that was only just beginning to emerge from the crushing impact of World War II and the more consciously stifling period of Stalinism that followed. Films like Are [...]
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 [...]
The Children Accuse
Dzieci oskarżają Poland, 1956, black and white, 10 minsThe second 'black series' ('czarna seria') film by Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski seems to start in a more sedate fashion compared with the throat-grabbing immediacy of Look Out, Hooligans! (Uwaga chuligani!, 1955), in that it begins with a mother and daughter doing (Christmas?) [...]
Look Out, Hooligans!
Uwaga chuligani! Poland, 1955, black and white, 12 minsAlthough signs of a thaw could be discerned the previous year (Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski's sternly moralistic lecture Are You Among Them?/Czy jesteś wśród nich? did at least acknowledge the existence of petty crime and other forms of antisocial behaviour), their second film Look [...]
Polish poll
Despite being considered a hot favourite in some circles, Andrzej Wajda's Katyń failed to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar, being beaten at the final hurdle by the German film The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher). However, Polish Radio's English-language news service puts on a positive spin by pointing out that the largely Polish-made stop-motion [...]
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 [...]