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Łódź Film School – the cradle of Polish filmmakers
The Polish film industry ceased to function during World War II. After the war, the Łódź Film School (Państwowa Szkola Filmowa) formed the bedrock of the reborn Polish cinema. The school opened on October 8th 1948 and among its students were names that would go into the history books: Andrzej Munk, Andrzej Wajda, Janusz Morgenstern, and Kazimierz Kutz, documentary filmmakers Kazimierz Karabasz and Andrzej Brzozowski and cinematographers Jerzy Wójcik, Witold Sobociński, Mieczysław Jahoda, and Wiesław Zdort.
Post-war cultural and artistic life in Poland unfolded slowly and had to put up with the beginning of censorship. Against that backdrop, Łódź Film School was progressive and innovative, a veritable bastion of artistic freedom. Lecturers and students followed the trends in European avant-garde, read the works of the Theatre of the Absurd, and revered the deep psychological analysis of Witold Gombrowicz and Franz Kafka. It was one of few places in the country which screened foreign films, European classics and the newest works of the Italian neorealist school. Its cinema rooms could barely hold the masses of students and visitors who wanted to see something unique.
Łódź-launched masters include Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Roman Polański, Andrzej Munk, Krzysztof Zanussi and Marek Koterski. Over the years, the school has continued to educate generation of filmmakers. Its more recent graduates include Wojciech Smarzowski, Małgośka Szumowska, Jan Jakub Kolski, Krzysztof Krauze and Andrzej Jakimowski. In 2014, the Leon Schiller National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź (its full name) was ranked among The Hollywood Reporter's Top International Films Schools.
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Post-war
Shortly after the war, the role of cinema within society and its relation to the government was decided. The communist regime saw film as a propaganda tool which would be fundamental in building a truly socialist country.
The works of documentary and feature filmmakers were marked by social realism. The first Polish film that was faithful to social realism and displayed a vision of socialism favourable to the ruling class was Jasne łany by Eugeniusz Cękalski. There were many others: Uczta Baltazara by Jerzy Zarzycki and Jerzy Passendorf from 1954, and Przygoda na Mariensztacie by Leonard Buczkowski from 1953 (the first Polish film technicolour film). The first films of the greats were also affected by the dogma of social realism: Celuloza by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Generation by Andrzej Wajda or Piątka z ulicy Barskiej by Aleksander Ford.
Aleksander Ford's Piątka z ulicy Barskiej was one of the best films of the 50s. The director's efforts were awarded at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival.
All over Europe, years of painful war had produced a need for films that would heal wounds. In Poland, Leonard Buczkowski's Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden Songs), which showed everyday life in occupied Warsaw, answered that call.
Other films, such as Wanda Jakubowska's Ostatni etap (The Last Stage), based on the true story of a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau, also appealed to the foreign public. The film was shown in 50 countries. In France it had 2.8 million viewers. In 1950, Wanda Jakubowska received the International Peace Prize of the World Peace Council. Among the same year's winners were Pablo Neruda and Pablo Picasso.
Also highly popular throughout Europe was Aleksander Ford's war drama from 1948, Ulica graniczna. The story dealt with Jewish and Polish children during World War II. It had almost one million viewers in France.
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Polish Film School
Out of the ashes of the war, a current in film arose in the 1950s - the Polish Film School. Its followers set out to create works that would help in coming to terms with the war. Most of its students were from the generation born in the 1920s . The war had interrupted and ruined their young adulthood and they became adamant about showing its consequences on camera. The current was represented by several directors: Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Wojciech Jerzy Has.
In 1956, changes in the political climate allowed the Polish Film School to surface. The artists rejected social realism and what it stood for, having another goal in mind - to free art from excessive romanticism and the use of national myths.
Film critic Zygmunt Kałużyński wrote in 1959, "It was a crackdown on the widespread ideal of being a hero at all costs, on the cult of blind patriotism [...]". ("Film" 48/1959)
Following Stalin's death, the Soviet Union’s influence over Poland was starting to slacken and the communist leadership in Poland permitted the setting up of production units. The period's greatest directors were part of the movement.
Film critic Professor Tadeusz Lubelski wrote:
- In a country where there was still no debate about the war that had just ended, the films produced by the Polish Film School set out to engage the public in a deep emotional dialogue that would prove to be therapeutic. Through stories which unfold in a near past, they touch upon different current topics: the Poles spirituality and their future perspectives.
Examples of the films of the Polish Film School include Canal by Andrzej Wajda (1956), awarded at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, his Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and Lotna (1959), as well as films by Andrzej Munk – Man on the Tracks (1956), Eroica (1957) and Bad Luck (1959).
Both directors analysed the same subjects in their creations. They talked about the history of Poland, national defeat, honour, patriotism, and responsibility towards the motherland. While expressing their belief in these values, they simultaneously questioned them.
The Polish Film School is also noted for creating psychological and existential films. These include Wojciech Jerzy Has' The Noose (1957), Farewells (1958) and Roomers (1959) as well as Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Real End of the Great War (1957), Night Train (1959) and Mother Joan of the Angels (1960). Along the same lines is Tadeusz Konwicki's The Last Day of Summer (1958) and All Souls' Day (1961).
The Polish Film School's impact on world cinema cannot be overstated. Martin Scorsese, who holds an honorary doctorate from Łódź Film School, commented:
I cannot explain how your cinema - from Wajda, Polański, to Skolimowski, the whole lot - influenced my cinematic output. But it still does. At some point, I realised that when I wanted to make actors or cinematographers understand something, I show them Polish films from the 1950s.
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Andrzej Wajda – a director of national importance
There's no discussion about Polish cinema without mentioning Andrzej Wajda. For years, he was the voice of a generation - his films mirrored changing social and political circumstances. Although they aren't documentary films, his cinematic works are like history books on film. At the start of his career, his films dealt with the war, later, with the films Man of Marble and Man of Iron, he showed the Solidarity trade union and the part it played in suffocating communism. He has received worldwide acclaim and has a faithful following in Japan. In 2000, he won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
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Wajda didn't plan on becoming a director. He studied painting in Kraków, and when he eventually dropped out from his course, he decided to try his hand at filmmaking. He enrolled at Łódź Film School. Painting continues to influence his cinematic approach - he pays attention to the visual layer of his films, often referring to classic Polish paintings in films like Ashes and Diamonds, Birch Wood or The Wedding.
Ashes and Diamonds is a significant work. It defined how Poles viewed their country after the war. In another film, Generation, Wajda was the first to shed light on the tragic fate of the "Generation of Columbuses" – the generation of Poles born soon after Poland regained independence in 1918 and whose adolescence was marked by World War II. Lotna, his first film in colour is a cruel portrayal of Polish romanticism, Man of Marble draws attention to the lies spread by the communist government, and its sequel Man of Iron ensures that Solidarity and the fight against communism will never be forgotten.
Wajda never ceased dismantling national myths in his films. In a society which revered national heroes, he told stories of heroism but finished them with his signature move – the question: and what's the point? In doing so he didn't gain any favour with the majority of the population. But in a weird way, that's what made him into who he is now: one of the biggest authorities on all things Polish.
Though historical films were his bread and butter, Wajda made other types of films from early on. In the New Wave Innocent Sorcerers (1960), he showed the mutinous and marginalised young people of the jazz generation. In Everything for Sale, shot after the tragic death of his friend, the well-known actor Zbigniew Cybulski in 1968, he created a sad self-portrait of the artistic milieu. In Birch Wood (1970), based on a story by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, he dealt with the topic of death and illustrated the poetic dance of Eros and Thanatos.
The Promised Land, a picture of the uncivilised reality of capitalism at the end of the 19th century, is one of the greatest films of Polish cinema. In 2007, Wajda created one of the most personal films of his career. The Oscar-nominated Katyń is the real-life story of the massacres which took place in April and May of 1940, when some 22,000 Polish citizens were murdered by the the Soviet secret police - the NKVD. The events are of personal significance to Wajda, whose family suffered directly from the tragedy.
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Andrzej Munk
Andrzej Munk was another important figure of the Polish Film School. Wajda used stories of heroism and romanticism to help Poles recover from the war. Munk, on the other hand, used rationalism to criticise Polish romanticism.
"Munk's style" - Jackiewicz wrote about Eroica (1957) and Bad Luck (1960) - "clearly broke away from the lyricism of the rest of the school. His films should rather be compared to 18th-century philosophical tales than with narrative poems like those of Wajda. Munk's essence was realism with some para documentary elements [...] his metaphors were more like the surrealism of Chaplin's comedies rather than Bunuel, as was the case with Wajda."
Before he would become famous for Eroica and Bad Luck, Munk was in fact a documentary filmmaker. Respecting the guidelines of the social realist doctrine and sometimes exaggerating them, he filmed the working conditions of railway workers and miners.
With just three feature films in his portfolio, he became one of the most important filmmakers of his generation. Man on the Tracks, often referred to as the Polish Citizen Kane, is the story of an unemployed railway worker. In other films, he tackled the war. In Eroica and Bad Luck, he used irony and objectivity to discuss Polish recent events, the war trauma and the reverence of heroism. Eroica was called an "anti-heroic" film.
"We wanted to show how spreading the ideal of being a hero at all costs influences individuals who aren't natural heroes and how it makes them into heroes", the director said in an interview.
Munk died in a car accident in 1961; leaving behind an unfinished work - Passenger.
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The 60s
Alongside the Polish Film School, a new current appeared in cinema in the mid-60s. It was dubbed "the third Polish cinema". After the first film efforts after the war, which maintained the pre-war style, and following the account-settling of the Polish Film School formed by people who had taken part in World War II, young artists entered the scene. They had been brought up after the war and so had only experienced the post-war reality. It was the end of the Stalinist era and instead of coming to terms with the nation's history and building a socialist motherland, these young filmmakers talked about their everyday lives, moral choices, opportunism and fear of adulthood.
Jerzy Skolimowski
Jerzy Skolimowski deserves to be called the leading representative of this generation of Polish filmmakers.
Film director, script writer, actor, poet and painter – Skolimowski is many things. In his youth, he was a boxer. He later made a short film titled Boxing, which won the Grand Prix at the International Sport Film Festival in Budapest in 1962. His script-writing debut happened in 1960 when he wrote Innocent Sorcerers, which was directed by Andrzej Wajda. He also authored the script to Roman Polański's Knife in the Water. The first film he directed was Identification Marks: None in 1964. He used an unusual method – he compiled several of his student films into one long feature.
In his third film, Barrier, while remaining faithful to principles espoused by "the third Polish cinema", Skolimowski broke with realism and used the language of symbols. Unlike his other films, Barrier is also less personal because of interference from the censors.
Skolimowski faced even greater problems with his next film, Hands Up! (1967). The censors disagreed with his portrayal of members of the Union of Polish Youth (a youth organisation closely affiliated with the Communist party). In one scene, the students are putting up a poster of Stalin and mistakenly give it two pairs of eyes. As a result, Hands Up! was banned for many years, only to be released in 1981.
Skolimowski decided to emigrate in 1967. The two films he made during his first years abroad, Le Départ and Deep End, seemed to define a new path for the director.
In 1991, he brought out 30 Door Key, based on Witold Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke, a work with which the artist was greatly unsatisfied and which led him to abandon the profession for 17 years. He made a successful comeback in 2008 with Four Nights with Anna.
He didn't stop at that. In 2012, he filmed Essential Killing - the story of an Afghan prisoner who escapes a secret European CIA prison and needs to survive in the wilderness. The script to the film was written by the 72-year old Skolimowski in the span of a couple of days and inspired by media accounts of secret CIA prisons in Poland.
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Wojciech Jerzy Has
There were many great filmmakers of Polish cinema. Wojciech Jerzy Has, the creator of unique and unforgettable visual universes, was one of them.
Has is often referred to as a visionary of Polish cinema. Critics note that he created a body of work that was surprisingly cohesive in its poetry, as if the director were recounting the same tale in various ways. He created his own world in practically every film. The adventures of his protagonists, their problems and the storylines in which they become embroiled were always of secondary importance to the visual environment in which the action takes place. These worlds are like journeys through the labyrinth of time with a particular narrative rhythm and the use of strange objects (critics often use the Polish term "rupieciarnia" - a random collection). Has explained, "In the dream that is a film, one often has a singular time loop. Things of the past, issues long gone, are overlaid onto current reality. The subconscious invades reality. Dreams thus allow us to reveal, to show the future".
Has avoided political or commercial overtones in his work, which often alienated him from the propaganda-driven industry. Although he produced his most important films at the height of the famed Polish Film School, his films were stylistically different. Fellow director Aleksander Jackiewicz said of Has that if he had been a painter, "he would surely have been a Surrealist. He would have redrawn antique objects with all their real accoutrements and juxtaposed them in unexpected ways".
In his private life, he was a loner, rather grumpy and uncommunicative, but he spoke through his work. His best known films, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1965) and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973), are cult classics of world cinema.
The Manuscript... has many fans: Luis Buñuel, Pedro Almodóvar, David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, to name but a few. In 1998, Scorsese helped restore the dilapidated works, and as part of the series Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola Present, the film came out on DVD in the United States in 2002.
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Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Not unlike Wojciech Has, Jerzy Kawalerowicz was another Polish Film School outsider.
While the Polish Film School was busy analysing the fate of the Poles, Kawalerowicz chose more universal themes.
His first films are neo-realistic. He used the style to poeticise boring everyday reality. He soon gained recognition as an excellent observer of reality, and a portraitist of authentic characters through sensitive visual imagery.
He is best known for his films Mother Joan of the Angels (winner of the Silver Palm Special Jury Award at the 1961 Cannes IFF) and Pharaoh (nominated for an Oscar in 1967). Both films are exemplary of Kawalerowcz's directing style.
"He was the best craftsmen among the artists of Polish cinema. Which, of course, is a compliment," Łukasz Maciejewski wrote in the review Film, "His cinema was worldly, European and timeless. [...] While his fellow Polish filmmakers were referring to past period of Young Poland and Romanticism, he adorned poetry with prose." (Film, 2008, no. 2)
Despite the diversity of the subjects he took up, there is an overarching trend in his artistic output – a deeply rooted and instinctive opposition to any unbridled individual and collective emotionality. This approach went hand in hand with the rejection of Romanticism. Film critic Maria Kornatowska famously said that he prefers the "wise man's looking-glass and eye" to "feeling and faith".
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Jerzy Hoffman
The 60s in Polish cinema were dominated by historical dramas and costume dramas. Jerzy Kawalerowicz received an Oscar nomination for his feature film from 1965, Pharaoh, a big-budget film set in ancient Egypt. Andrzej Wajda triggered a national debate with his adaptation of a novel by Stefan Żeromski - the period drama Ashes (1966). In the film, Wajda openly criticised the Polish tradition of romanticism. Meanwhile, Polish and international audiences were impressed with Wojciech Jerzy Has' oneiric The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1965).
But the Godfather of Polish period dramas is Jerzy Hoffman. Until he gained famed in 1969 with his cinematic debut Colonel Wołodyjowski, based on a novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, he made provocative documentary films.
Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) wrote historical novels that were meant to raise national spirits. With his black and white adaption of Colonel Wołodyjowski, Hoffman began to be viewed as a specialist in entertainment films, and so he made more of them. The Deluge, another Sienkiewicz adaptation, is considered his greatest achievement. Made in 1974, the five-hour-long film has both action and romance in its plot. The film is set in the 17th century, during the Swedish invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1655 to 1658, known as The Deluge, which was eventually thwarted by the Polish-Lithuanian forces. The protagonist is a brave soldier who risks his life to save his motherland, and falls in love with a Polish girl, Aleksandra Billewicz.
Hoffman's Oscar-nominated film fused melodrama with adventure. The Academy Award nomination came in 1975. Over 27 million viewers saw the film in cinemas and millions more on TV.
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Cinema of moral anxiety (1976-1981)
Big changes occurred in Polish cinematography in the 70s. Historical topics were no longer at the forefront. Polish filmmakers began to pursue the psychological aspects of everyday reality in the People's Republic of Poland. They spoke of life in small cities and the countryside, corruption, nepotism and the clash between communist ideals and the problems of a communist state.
A speech by Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi during the Filmmakers Forum in Gdańsk in 1975 marked the beginning of the new current. The filmmakers accused communist leaders of smothering artistic freedom and hindering the possibility of holding a public debate on vital social and political issues.
Janusz Kijowski, who coined the term "cinema of moral anxiety", explained that moral anxiety is the foundation of cinema because "anxiety is conflict, conflict of interests […] In Poland at the end of the 70s, the term had another connotation. For the ruling party, it was iconoclastic because those in power feared all noble words. Morality was one of those things that didn't function without a socialist adjective glued to it. They were threatened by references to the decalogue, to principles, un-systematic values that weren't endorsed by the communist party."
The first film "of moral anxiety" was Krzysztof Kieślowski's Personnel from 1976. It was also his feature debut. However, the current was at its peak after the release of Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble. The most important works of the "cinema of moral anxiety" are Agnieszka Holland's Provincial Actors and Lonely Woman, Krzysztof Zanussi's Camouflage, Illumination and The Constant Factor, Feliks Falk's Top Dog, Andrzej Wajda's Rough Treatment and finally Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance.
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Krzysztof Zanussi
Krzysztof Zanussi wasn't directly linked with the "cinema of moral anxiety", nor can his films be considered along any clearly-defined track or trend in Polish or international filmmaking. He said,
"My films are derived primarily from literature, and are a kind of human speech. The idea of visual cinema has always raised my doubts." (Film magazine, 1992 No. 17)
In the 70s, Zanussi made Family Life, Behind the Wall, Illumination, Camouflage and Spiral. All these films had a protagonist built along the same lines - a man faced with a choice between values and the temptation to reject them.
Zanussi's films are regarded as examples of "auteur cinema". He wrote the script to almost all his films. Looking at how they manifest themselves in the world today, Zanussi explored the perennial problems of love, death, happiness and conscience.
Film critic Andrzej Luter commented that Zanussi's films are existential:
"In his films, Zanussi provokes us - he asks us key questions: whether spiritual wealth, religion and faith can be a sufficient and convincing answer against evil and suffering, which in itself has no meaning and can they be a sufficient answer to the mystery of death?" (Kino 2009, No. 6)
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Krzysztof Kieślowski
Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of the best known Polish directors in the world. But he didn't always want to be a filmmaker. "To tell you the truth, I never really wanted to go to school" the filmmaker admits in Krzysztof Kieślowski: I'm So-So. "I wanted to be a stoker." When he finally decided to enrol at the Łódź Film School, it took him three trials to get accepted. But he was relentless, "I was really stubborn [...] If the motherfuckers don’t want me, I’ll show them by getting in".
But it was worth it. At the school, he met people he could look up to – Kazimierz Karabasz, a lecturer and praised documentary filmmaker, and Jerzy Bosak. After graduating he started working for the Wytwórnia Filmów Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (Documentary and Feature Film Production Company) on Chełmska Street in Warsaw. Back then he had no interest in features, so he made documentaries about life in the People's Republic of Poland.
Film critic Marek Hendrykowski writes,
Documentaries were Krzysztof Kieślowski's first great love. Today, when his worldwide successes as a director of feature films have obscured his documentaries, eclipsed them, we somehow forget how significantly the documentary film years preceding this success shaped Kieślowski's artistic identity and how much his features owe to his experience as a documentary filmmaker.
The documentary genre taught him how to be a still observer of reality. From that vantage point, he filmed his first features about the dark side of socialism – Personnel and Amateur.
1985 marked the beginning of Kieślowski's long-time collaboration on screenplays with renowned Warsaw attorney Krzysztof Piesiewicz. Together they made several films: No End, Short Film About Killing, Short Film About Love, The Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique and the Three Colours trilogy. At the beginning of the 90s, Kieślowski relinquished realistic poetry for the language of mystique. His films gained international praise.
After completing the Three Colours trilogy (1993-94), Kieślowski announced that he was abandoning the filmmaking profession. During the last months of his life, he worked with Piesiewicz on a screenplay for a triptych consisting of works titled Paradise, Purgatory and Hell. In 2002, German director Tom Tykwer's feature Heaven, produced in Germany and Italy, was based on Kieślowski's and Piesiewicz's screenplay for the first part of the unfinished trilogy.