What enchanted the Polish cinematographer in Japanese and Scandinavian films was the way they showed the relations between man and nature. Like those artists, Wójcik was able to use such natural phenomena as wind, rain, fog and everything that surrounds people as an evocative commentary to human fate, giving it a tragic aspect. Janusz Skwara wrote in the above-mentioned article:
‘Nikt nie woła / Nobody’s Calling’ and ‘Mother Joan of the Angels’ repeat a cruel evocative obsession with raw walls, overpowering the people living within them. In ‘Nobody’s Calling’ the rugged scenery of what seems to be a ghost town is a reminder of the horrors of war, and an excellent complement to the twists and turns in the characters’ lives, their experiences still linked to the war. In ‘Mother Joan of the Angels’ the scenery of convent walls symbolizes limitations to human freedom and is also connected with the main plot – the protagonist’s attempts to free herself from the bonds restricting her human emotions.
The critics, to mention Aleksander Ledóchowski (‘Kino’ 1/1961), emphasized many times that matter, landscapes, nature filmed with Jerzy Wójcik’s camera are turned from objects under observation into the partners of people. The most often quoted example of this is the famous scene from Westerplatte, when the defeated soldiers march among the stumps of burnt trees, themselves looking eerily similar to those burnt stumps. A similar commenting, interpreting function was fulfilled by fire in Paweł Komorowski’s Elegia / Elegy, and by rain in the scene of the fight between Wołodyjowski and Kmicic in Potop / The Deluge. The role of nature in Jerzy Wójcik’s film works is also highlighted by the symbolic role of the river in The Gateway of Europe, a film with cinematography by Witold Sobociński but directed by Wójcik.
Many filmmakers shoot the elements, fire, rain, many use this as a way of making a picture more attractive. With Wójcik, just increasing the attractiveness is never the point. In an interview with Seweryn Kuśmierczyk, Jerzy Wójcik said: