Posts Tagged ‘Wojciech Jerzy Has’
Wojciech J. Has on DVD
As the Barbican Centre in London gears up for a long overdue part retrospective of the career of the man I recently described in Sight & Sound as Polish cinema's only authentic surrealist, I thought I'd post another DVD overview for the benefit of those who can't get there - or indeed those who can, and who'd like to explore further. The good [...]
The Surrealist Visions of Wojciech Has
Now this is more like it! From October 1-25, London's Barbican Cinema is mounting an ambitious retrospective of the work of Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000) - or rather a partial retrospective, since it only features five films. But I shouldn't complain, since it's an excellent selection that comprises his feature debut Noose (Pętla, 1958), his [...]
What You Got?
23 January sees the launch of the Barbican's What You Got? season, a triple tribute to rebel icons James Dean, Gérard Philipe and Zbigniew Cybulski. As far as Cybulski is concerned, Andrzej Wajda's seminal Ashes and Diamonds (Popioł i diament, 1958) unsurprisingly gets the most prominent slot, being the opening gala on 23rd January at 19:30, [...]
The Saragossa Website
Wojciech Jerzy Has's mind-bending 1960s masterpiece The Saragossa Manuscript (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, 1965) now has its own dedicated website, courtesy of UK distributors Mr Bongo Films, and a quick glance suggests that there's a fair bit more content there than is the case with many similar promotional sites. I've only seen a [...]
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 [...]
Brzozowa Street
Ulica Brzozowa Poland, 1947, black and white, 9 minsOne of the key documentaries of Poland's post-World War II pre-Stalinism era, Brzozowa Street takes its name and setting from one of the front lines of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 - just three years before the film was made. Although Warsaw itself (at least according to Jerzy Piórkowski's [...]