Table of contents: Andrzej Munk | Jerzy Kawalerowicz | Andrzej Wajda | Andrzej Żuławski | Ryszard Bugajski | Roman Polański | Wojciech Jerzy Has | Polish Cinema Classics
Andrzej Munk
Eroica, 1957
The most celebrated work of the director concerning the topic of anti-heroic protagonists who cannot escape the spirit of heroism during the Second World War. Born in 1921, Andrzej Munk's youth was during the German occupation, and he took part in the armed resistance. Munk’s documentaries shot early in the post-war communist era had been propaganda productions. His later feature films, including Eroica, broke with schematic formulas and subtly pointed out drawbacks in the politicised approach to labour. Eroica tells two tales. One is of a seemingly irresponsible, selfish man who joins the Warsaw Uprising despite his reluctance and rationalism. The second story is set in a German POW camp where Polish officers invent a legend of heroic escape to lift their fellow inmates' morale. The film is considered a landmark of Polish cinema and has been called "A darkly comic, intelligent, and unorthodox chronicle... a clever, engaging, and insightful satire on duty, courage, and heroism" (Strictly Film School).
A remastered HD version in Polish with English subtitles is available on DVD.
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Passenger, 1961-1963
An unfinished work, Andrzej Munk died in a car crash at 39 while still filming the production. The material was assembled by the director's colleagues, and Passenger has entered the canon of Polish cimena classics, and called "one of the most audacious fictions ever made about the Holocaust". The story tells of an encounter between an ex-Auschwitz inmate and her oppressor. Marta, the prisoner, creates her beautiful humanity within the confines of imprisonment, and defends freedom as her private, intimate cause. "I can think of no other movie to compare with Munk's", a New York Times critic writes, "in the precise and harrowing balance of romantic beauty and profound terror".
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Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Mother Joan of the Angels, 1960
The director (born 1922) remained outside the mainstream "Polish school” of filmmaking. While the main Polish-school theme was the fate of the Poles, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's style poeticised the uninteresting everyday reality he showed in his films. He gained recognition as an excellent observer, and a portraitist of authentic characters depicted through sensitive visual imagery. Mother Joan of the Angels is a love story between a priest and a nun at a monastery that is possessed by demonsin east Poland in the 18th century. In an interview with Ray Privette of Kinoeye, Kawalerowicz says, "They often talk about and teach about love—how to love God, how to love each other—and yet they cannot have the love of a man and a woman because of their religion. This dogma is itself inhuman. The devils that possess these characters are the external manifestations of their repressed love. […] It is like the devils give the man and woman an excuse for their human love." The film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1961.
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A Forgotten World DVD Box Set
Claustrophobia, paranoia and fear, a film metaphorically portraying the collapse of society and individuals, 1959 film The Night Train, the is one of four Kawalerowicz masterpieces on the DVD Box Set. A world of the lurking uncertainty and danger in The Inn, the demon-possessed nuns of the monastery in Mother Joan of the Angels, and the powerful solar eclipse in Pharaoh, all four films show Jerzy Kawalerowicz's drive to poeticise, his sense of detail and astute feel for observing reality. As the artistic manager of the Kadr film studio and co-founder and first president of the Association of Polish Filmmakers, Kawalerowicz was the godfather of the Polish Film School, yet with his own creativity, he remained outside prevailing trends. The DVD Box set also contans the biographical documentary Whisky with Milk dedicated to his memory, and is part of the Masterpieces of Polish Cinema series.
Andrzej Wajda
Innocent Sorcerers, 1960
Andrzej Wajda (born 1926), winner of the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000, made Innocent Sorcerers at age 33, after his renowned War Trilogy (A Generation, Canal and Ashes and Diamonds). Portraying contemporary youth through a day in the life of a young doctor who drums in a jazz band, the film is a commentary on the lives of young Polish people who, though born during the Second World War, didn't experience it first-hand and came of age in communist Poland. The film’s script was co-written by director Jerzy Skolimowski who was then a 23-year-old aspiring poet. "The vitality (as well as beauty) of Innocent Sorcerers", Michał Oleszczyk writes in an essay included in the DVD, "stems from the perfectly rendered panorama of semi-bohemian Warsaw life circa 1959: the moldy jazz dens, the endless pursuit of yet another love affair, the fashionable spleen veiled in omnipresent cigarette smoke, as well as the underlying dream of turning oneself into one of the characters seen in Western movies".
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Korczak
Wajda's film in based on Janusz Korczak's The Ghetto Diary. Korczak, a writer, author of books for children, about medicine, hygiene, politics and interpersonal relationships, the social activist and doctor is remembered for his struggle to 200 children living in his orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. Wajda's 1990 film is a biographical picture hailed by Spielberg as "one of the most important European pictures about the Holocaust." Korczak is a study of the great Polish-Jewish pedagogue’s life and work from service in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war to death in Treblinka. A black and white production, the film contains scenes with archival footage of the Warsaw ghetto shot by German photographers. The screenplay was written by Agnieszka Holland, the musical score composed by Wojciech Kilar, and the lead role played by eminent Polish actor Wojtek Pszoniak.
Andrzej Żuławski
The Third Part of the Night, 1971
Called a non-conformist visionary of world cinema, the French educated, highly cultured Andrzej Żuławski (born 1940) created film characters known for cathartic explosions of violence, sexuality and despair, playing out high-pitched emotions as intense as any in cinema history. (According to The Ferroni Brigade, the French coined the term "Zulawskienne" meaning "over the top”.) The Third Part of the Night is a story about the cruelty of war. Based on the experiences of his father who ran experiments on typhoid-fever infections, the film follows a fugitive who witnesses the murder of his family and enters a crazed world of traps, doubles, disease and death.
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Ryszard Bugajski
Interrogation, 1982
Ryszard Bugajski (born 1943) started his career working as an assistant to the director Krzysztof Zanussi and under Andrzej Wajda at the Polish studio Film Unit X. The message of his film Interrogation, incompatible with communist authorities after the imposition of martial law, caused X Unit to be dissolved. Based on a true story about Stalinist terror of the early 1950s, the film’s protagonist is a not-too-clever girl with doubtful moral principles who is forced to be heroic. Smuggled out of Poland by the director, copied on videotapes and issued by an underground publisher in book form in 1982, Interrogation reached a large audience and gained popularity. The Polish premiere took place in December 1989, after the nation's political transformation to democracy.
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Roman Polański
Tess, 1979
Restored for release in High Definition for the first time worldwide in a Dual Format Edition, the film is "a tear-jerking story of frustrated love, pain, wrongdoing, revenge and well-deserved punishment." Based on Thomas Hardy's 19th century novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, starring Nastassja Kinsky, the 1980 best cinematography BAFTA and Oscar winner Tess is perceived as a melodrama or a romance coming close to an ancient drama. In the film Tess, a young country girl becomes the affection of two men and murders one of them. Awards: The Los Angeles Association of Film Critics' Award in the Best Director category, 1980; the Oscar Awards for the best cinematography, best set decoration and best costumes, 1980; BAFTA award for the best cinematography.
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Wojciech Jerzy Has
DVD Box Set
Restored and digitally remastered, the DVD box set contains the cinematic marvels The Hour-Glass Sanatorium and The Saragossa Manuscript, along with two documentaries about director Wojciech Jerzy Has. Revered as a visionary of Polish cinema and active during one of its most productive eras, Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925 - 2000) made films in which the poetic visual environment transcends the complex story lines. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973), is an adaptation of one of the great Polish-Jewish artists of the 20th century Bruno Schulz’s story collection. It was made in the aftermath of Poland's 1968 anti-Semitic campaigns that forced most remaining Polish Jews into exile. Smuggled out of Poland, the film was brought to the Cannes Film Festival and awarded the jury prize. After The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, Has was banned from making another film in Poland for almost a decade. It was remastered and returned to Polish and international screens in 2009 due to efforts by the directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. The Saragossa Manuscript is an adaption of Count Jan Potocki’s astonishing frame-tale novel. Set during Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, the film weaves together fantastic tales of Moorish princesses, picaresque adventurers and the Spanish Inquisition. The Hour-Glass Sanatorium and The Saragossa Manuscript are Has's best-known films, and he has influenced several generations of Polish filmmakers. The DVD box, released by Telewizja Kino Polska, includes two documentaries about the director: Adam Kuczyński's Ze snu w sen / A Dream From a Dream and Robert Glinski's Ślady / Traces [editor's translation]. In the documentaries, from the testimonies of his co-workers and students, Has appears like a perfectionist who drew every camera angle on graph paper before shooting.
Polish Cinema Classics DVD Box Set
A 4-disc DVD set of Polish cinema classics containing Andrzej Munk’s Eroica from 1957, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Night Train from 1959, and Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers and Janusz Morgentstern’s Goodbye, See You Tomorrow, both from 1960. Eroica is Andrzej Munk’s most celebrated work, its two tales featuring anti-heroic protagonists who cannot escape the spirit of heroism during the Second World War. Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s iconic Night Train contrasted with other contemporary images from the Polish Film School. With no explicit references to the historical and political context of the 1950s, the film nevertheless captures the end of the Polish Spring, with its accompanying disappointment and anxious atmosphere. Academy Award winner Andrzej Wajda made Innocent Sorcerers when he was 33. The film occurs over a single day and night, as a commentary on the lives of young Polish people born during the Second World War who didn't experience it first-hand and came of age in new, communist Poland. Goodbye, See You Tomorrow is Janusz Morgenstern’s debut feature. "Superficially resembling a French new wave tribute", Michael Brooke writes in the booklet accompanying the DVD set, "the film is about the hesitant romance between Jacek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and a capricious Frenchwoman". The film shows an unusual facet of Cybulski, who also co-wrote the script. In a review for the Digital Fix Film, Jones Clydefro wrote:
Viewing these four films in close succession reveals some remarkable consistencies. One is the presence of actor Zbigniew Cybulski, a rare breakout star of Polish cinema who appears in three of the pictures. […] Another recurring impression was just how well these films were shot. They tend to display highly interesting compositions, lighting choices and the like, and it made for a really unexpected strength across the pictures. […] Noted composer Krzysztof Komeda, who'd go on to work with Roman Polanski on Rosemary's Baby before dying far too young in 1969, scored two of the films, and Andrzej Trzaskowski did Night Train.
The four celebrated films have been fully restored from new high-definition masters.
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Polish Cinema Classics DVD Box Set Vol.II
Volume II of Second Run's Polish cinema classics series contains three films, two from the 1970s and one from 1990. Fully restored in new director-approved HD masters Andrzej Wajda's The Promised Land from 1974, Krzysztof Zanussi's Illumination from 1972 and Wojciech Marczewski's Escape from 'Liberty' Cinema from 1990 are landmark films. The Promised Land is one of Wajda's top cinematic achievements. Set in Łódź at the end of the 19th century as the Polish textile industry flourishes, through the story of three businessmen he exposes the inner emptiness accompanying their drive to make big money. One of Zanussi's best films, Illumination is a film about a young student who tries to reach "illumination" through study, reflection and contact with others. Escape from 'Liberty' Cinema, an anti-totalitarian satire is a darkly comic examination of the nature and effects of censorship.
The films have been fully restored from new high-definition masters.
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