A Love Letter to Cinema: Andrzej Wajda’s Film Reviews

thelma_i_louise_miedzy_slowami_forrest_gump_collage_culture.jpg, default, ‘Thelma and Louise’, photo: Pathe Entertainment / Getty Images; ‘Lost in Translation’, photo: SPInka; ‘Forrest Gump’, photo: Sunset Boulevard / Getty

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Unobvious, playful, and sometimes brutally honest, Andrzej Wajda’s notes on films invite us to a conversation about cinema and to an encounter with a hitherto unknown Wajda: the film buff.

Published in 2024 and composed of the director’s notes from the years 1942-2016, Andrzej Wajda’s Notesy (Notebooks) offer more than just a story of his life, grand history, politics, and film projects. They’re also a love letter to the kind of cinema that invigorates, seduces, annoys, disappoints, and exhilarates.

The short reviews peppered throughout the four volumes of the notebooks depict Wajda as a film lover through and through, but also as an uncompromising critic who does not shy away from bold statements and less-than-obvious judgments.

The world of ideas

It was as early as in the 1940s that Wajda began to jot down film reviews. He was then twenty years old and had just abandoned the study of painting in favour of the Łódź Film School. There, at private screenings for students, he would watch both widely accessible films and those ‘smuggled in’ by the lecturers, unavailable in wider circulation. On the pages of his notebooks, Wajda shares his first objects of fascination. In October 1948, he watches Ivan the Terrible by Sergei Eisenstein, one of the great masters of contemporary cinema, pointing out imperfections, but also claiming:

One thing is absolutely certain: Russian cinema doesn’t come into being in propaganda bureaus or statistical offices; rather, it’s created by those who were building the Soviet Union at the same time.

The ideological chains binding cinema on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain were something he aspired to understand and name. In the same year, having watched Za Wami Pójdą Inni (Others Will Follow) by his beloved professor Antoni Bohdziewicz, he noted with brutal honesty:

One could certainly squeeze a film out of these two-and-a-half hours of flogging a dead horse, but only if a social committee was in charge instead of the author. Too bad. As long as none of our filmmakers exhibit any artistic consciousness, let half of the work be done by a political bureau.

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CITIZEN KANE: 75th Anniversary Trailer

However, for young Wajda, cinema was not yet a space of polemic but one of exploration. This includes the exploration of politics, as Wajda attempted to define the social role of cinema for his own purposes. And so, having seen Citizen Kane in 1948, he wrote:

An unquestionably excellent film. The author’s social attitude remains consistent with the form. The film’s made so as to say: these, here, are the those to whom the people give away their income. The hyperrealist form perfectly reflects the content, these scraps and fragments of absurd reality conveyed through a catalogue of bizarre objects, matters, and symbols. (…) The consumption of such masterpieces is limited, and here we are faced with the fact that, while every masterpiece is justified by the fact that it’s a masterpiece, one nevertheless has to consider the social impact thereof.

For Wajda, cinema served as an impulse for reflection on politics, the rules that govern society, and the civilisational differences between the East and the West. After viewing Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film A Rebel without a Cause, he observed:

It’s the kind of film that speaks to me the most. It hasn’t aged one bit, with the exception of the colour, which is impossible to watch. It was made when I was 27-28 years old, but it’s not until my children are older that they’ll be able to rebel like this – so in around 30 years’ time, unless there’s a war. Over there, nobody asks about the boy’s car – they’ll simply buy a new one, and hence one can ponder on the psychological phenomenon itself. Meanwhile, over here one would have to ask: and where will dad get the money from to buy a car like this, brother? That’s why, for us, it’s a social problem and socially-oriented art; the psychology is secondary.

In the second half of the 1950s, he began to make his own cinematic masterpieces. He focused on work, and his notes on film criticism were less frequent. Admittedly, having watched Pharaoh by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, he wrote that ‘Kawalerowicz narrates Pharaoh as if he was using a foreign language which he only learnt with great effort’; Janusz Morgenstern’s Jowita he accused of being too full of ‘artistry and frustration’; and to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance he ascribed his restored ‘sense of freedom’. Still, it wasn’t until sometime later that Wajda the film critic truly emerged.

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‘Blind Chance’, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1981, photo: Sylwia Pakulska / WFDiF (Documentary and Feature Film Studios) / National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute

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In the 1990s, his cinephile tendencies escalate. Wajda becomes a voracious viewer – he’s up-to-date on new Polish releases, revisits the classics, closely observes the transformations of European arthouse cinema while also noting its state of crisis, and devours latest Hollywood productions. In the new Polish reality, Wajda made his own films somewhat less often, but he worked on them more meticulously. Film screenings were an integral part of his work, as if the director looked to the films he watched for the confirmation of his intuitions or new solutions that would help him perfect future productions.

The American Dream

There were several subject matters that fascinated Wajda, with one of the key ones being the changing sources of inspiration for Polish cinema, which, following years of mimicking European masters, began to began to draw heavily from American popular culture in the 1990s. When, in October 1994, he watches Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, he notes: ‘the American film industry now produces works of intellectual and poetic force more powerful than European cinema, fuelled by the scraps of its former greatness’.

Wajda grants himself the right to genuine awe and relinquishes all snobbish filters. Discussing Dances with Wolves, he admits straightforwardly: ‘I like such films. Naive and genuine, slightly childish, a fruit of true labour of love, both for the subject matter and for the art of film’.

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‘Forrest Gump’, directed by Robert Zemeckis, 1994, photo: Sunset Boulevard / Getty Images

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Not only does Wajda not criticise his younger colleagues that model their works after Hollywood – he admiringly observes their development. In 1991, he reflects upon a screening of Kroll:

Already during the opening credits I felt that I was truly in a movie theatre. I would have liked to make such a film myself. (…) a total work of cinema moves here. American, of course, but we, too, once held like this onto Italian Neorealism.

In 1997, having seen Night Graffiti by Maciej Dutkiewicz, he writes about the young director:

He watches every interesting American movie dozens of times, and hence he knows how it’s done. In contrast, we would watch these films between one and three times, paying attention to the content, not the method. But nowadays, making a film is a sport, in which visual technique and mimicry are essential for education.

All of this isn’t to say that Wajda wasn’t critical of the Americanisation of Polish popular cinema. In 1995, after viewing the film Daddy, he comments:

Yesterday I saw Maciek Ślesicki’s film. It’s excellent. Unfortunately, I’ve already seen a film like this one. Everything in it checks out, as it should in a film. (…) there’s no return, not so much to the subject matters of the past (these will certainly return) as to the ideals. The reality of Polish cinema is connected to what’s currently on, and a director needn’t consider anything else.

Fascination with American influences begin to irk him also in the works of Władysław Pasikowski, whom he deems ‘Polish cinema’s most talented director since Kawalerowicz’; elsewhere, however, he writes: ‘it’s unfortunate that from American cinema, he only picks out the motif of rape and violence, all the while too slavishly approaching dramaturgic and directorial solutions’.

Viewer, where are you?

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wajda was obsessively focused on the issue of the audience – the one that drifted away from arthouse cinema and the one that, in the new Polish reality, had become a real mystery for the director. On top his film reviews, we find bitter observations regarding the viewers of films a recurring theme in Wajda’s notebooks – their reactions (the famous laughs during the ‘blasphemous’ scene in Pigs) as well as their choices and needs, which new Polish cinema proves incapable of fulfilling.

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‘Down by Law’, directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986, photo: Black Snake

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In the 1990s, Wajda was already a great master of Polish cinema, almost a prophet in the world of film. While he was well-aware of his status, he also treated it as a challenge and a duty. Planning to establish his own film school, he attempted to understand what kind of role cinema could play in the new reality, how it could reach the viewer, what kind of conversations it could spark.

Having watched Rolland Joffé’s The Mission in 1987, he wrote:

Beautiful, noble, wonderfully made, with an extraordinary performance by Irons. But only one third of the seats occupied, many left during the screening, dissatisfied. I’m devastated. If such a masterful film is nothing to these viewers, what good can a Polish director do?

And on 25th December 1991, following a screening of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, he noted:

In yesterday’s Wyborcza [daily newspaper], an appalling mention of movie theatre attendance, especially for someone just about to begin a new film. For whom? If ‘Thelma and Louise’, a bold feminist picture that would’ve been on everyone’s lips as recently as a few years ago, only attracted 5,550 viewers. ‘The Wedding’ in the Stary Theatre in Kraków can attract that many in one week. A film is no longer an event outside of the screening room where it’s shown. It’s not being discussed, because it’s not being watched enough.

Two years later, after viewing Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue, he bitterly arrived at a conclusion:

It’s not true that there’s no more so-called better audience in the film world. They attend films by Kieślowski. It’s just that they want something entirely different now. 1. One should not demand anything from them or involve them in anything. They come to see life, not judge the characters’ conduct. 2. The film has to be beautiful, or at least pleasing.

Wajda, who himself searched for the ‘lost viewer’, could appreciate those able to reach a wider audience. In 1997, when he left a screening of Kiler by Juliusz Machulski – whose previous and later films he would tear to shreds – he admiringly acknowledged that the room was full to the brim, and the audience’s laughter confirmed that ‘the director never errs, and he knows his place’. Many years later, after seeing The Suicide Room, he also noted that over 650,000 viewers watched Jan Komasa’s film at the time.

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‘Thelma and Louise’, directed by Ridley Scott, 1991, photo: Pathe Entertainment / Getty Images

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But there are no traces of envy in Wajda’s entries. There’s an attempt to understand, to find the reasons why a contemporary viewer chooses certain productions rather than others. All the while, the director remains an attentive analyst, who learns by observing the viewers’ reception of subsequent titles. After watching Microcosmos by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou in the late 1990s, he was in such awe that he called it ‘truly a film for the end of the 20th century’, adding: ‘It’s what this audience likes, especially that no one harangues them from behind the screen, explaining everything they are seeing’.

A pen that rips to shreds

An educational tone is what irks him about Polish productions. Wajda, the ‘father’ of Polish cinema, also looked out for his successors on the big screen. As a reviewer of his fellow filmmakers’ works, he was sometimes cruel, but always astute.

In 1997, for instance, he wrote: ‘I finished watching films from the festival in Gdynia on VHSes, the rest I’ve seen in the theatre. Ten films made with the taste of contemporary viewers in mind and, with the exception of Stuhr, it’s disgraceful stuff’.

And in 1991, after watching W Środku Europy (The Middle of Europe), a film by Piotr Łazarkiewicz about the Kielce pogrom, he stated shortly, but with extraordinary brutality, that ‘Łazarkiewicz has once again tackled a subject that eludes him, both intellectually and technically’.

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‘Three Colours: Blue’, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, in the photo: Juliette Binoche, photo: MK2 / CED / FRANCE 3 / East News

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Equally harsh is his judgment of Barbara Sass-Zdort’s Like a Drug:

Her passionate hatred and contempt for the world, for everyone. The most important thing is to become a lecturer and give everyone an F, so that no one can give her an F.

After all, Wajda the critic spares no one, not even those close to him. About Jerzy Skolimowski’s Barrier, he wrote: ‘This film already aged 10 years on the day after its premiere’. And about Andrzej Żuławski, who took his first steps in the film world on the sets of Wajda’s films, ‘the Master’ said: ‘I have the impression that, when Żuław makes a film, he uses not his intelligence but rather his insecurities’ and, having watched She-Shaman, he adds maliciously: ‘One must be an extraordinarily intelligent man to spend so much time telling yourself that others are morons, and so they cannot feel or understand those films that he makes’.

In his notebooks, everyone could come under fire: both beginners and experienced filmmakers, including other legends of Polish cinema.

After seeing Jerzy Hoffman’s With Fire and Sword, he commented that ‘the director wasn’t there when the film was being made’, An Ancient Tale by the same director he callede ‘the last socialist realist film’, and having viewed Battle of Warsaw 1920, he only wrote: ‘An unbelievable piece of crap. Probably the worst post-1989 film’.

The young, too, get flayed at times. After a screening of Filip Bajon’s Poznań ‘56, Wajda noted with certain ruthlessness:

It’s a product of the communist regime, by a director who for a long time had neither an audience nor success, and no criticism either; but for the last twenty years he seemed promising. This made him full of contempt for the viewers and perfectly confident in his own genius.

And in 2008, after watching Kasia Adamik’s The Offsiders, he stated with resignation:

Alas, alas, a waving around of a camera that only captures the actors by accident. (…) The director’s self-satisfaction, visible everywhere at all times, bothers one. She’s clearly proud of herself, while in the audience there are eight people, myself included.

However, he can also be cruel towards foreign luminaries. Following a screening of Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, he commented with irony:

Unthinkably tacky: neither Allen nor Almodóvar, only scraps of TV soaps. It’s depressing, since it’s the fault of old age, and it also seems that the director blew his good sense out through that saxophone which he takes with him to Warsaw. We’re going home and I’m asking Krystyna to shoot me like Penélope Cruz did before I go about making anything similar.

Cinema as a mission

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‘Magnolia’, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999, photo: Goulardi Film

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Whereas the 1990s were a disappointment for Wajda as a follower of Polish and European cinema, the next decade saw him more and more often express admiration for new European socially engaged cinema. In 2003, he wrote:

Polish cinema has been caught in a real trap. Its force continues to come from socially and politically engaged films. These, however, require a wide audience – disadvantaged, deceived, dissatisfied with their reality. There’s no such audience in today’s cinema. There’s wealthy youth, oriented towards entertainment and sensationalism, even if it’s the artistic kind; but they don’t make a connection between their lives and what they see on the screen. Meanwhile, miners, steelworkers, and peasants don’t go to movie theatres. They watch TV, which only lulls them.

Awaiting new Polish socially engaged cinema, Wajda was particularly impressed with new French films. In 1996, he watched Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (Hatred), and noted, awe-struck:

Meanwhile, the colonies have arrived in Paris, in France, and the resulting experience is a tragic one – a dream of ‘glass houses’ [a utopian dream of social progress, welfare, and an end to wealth inequality, from Stefan Żeromski’s novel ‘The Coming Spring’ – trans.]. People live badly because they live in a pigsty; give them real houses, and they’ll live like human beings. The hope of Żeromski, of the Blok group [a Polish avant-garde collective – trans.], of Le Corbusier – all a lie. One cannot do anything for others if they don’t want to do anything for themselves.

A decade later, after seeing The Child by the Dardenne brothers, he commented in a straightforward manner:

This is the way for new Polish cinema to take. None other than that of socially engaged film. All the talk about the commercialisation of the country, some bollocks about the rat race. Here’s the truth laid bare: everything’s for sale. The child is reproduced. It’s the image of today’s world, not some idiotic pity party.

Similarly, following a screening of the award-winning The Class by Laurent Cantet, he wrote: ‘A wonderful film, it’s been a long time since I saw anything quite as captivating while also narrated in such an effective, meaningful way’.

He was also more eager to lavish praise on fellow Polish filmmakers. His commentary on Roman Polański’s The Pianist is among the most powerful reviews of the film:

A beautiful, magnificent, truthful film. One may consider it a triumphant end to the 40 years of the Polish film school. An ascetic production, documentary tendency pushed to the limit considering the type of picture it is. No attempt to make it easy for the viewer. (…) It’s the beauty of fate, of Greek tragedy. One must have buttons for eyes not to see the merit of this film. I have the impression that our reviewers were asking with astonishment: ‘And where’s Polański in all this? Has he left?’ Yes, he’s left and in this regard, he’s not coming back! Whose film is it, then? Polański’s as we never knew him, Polański who went beyond himself.

To live and breathe cinema

The dozens, even hundreds of film screenings also served as fuel for Wajda’s own explorations. Wajda the critic never simply worked for himself – rather, he was a tool in the hands of Wajda the director, who looked to cinema for insight, inspiration, stimulus. As a cinephile, he was fully self-interested, and because of that he was also extraordinarily attentive. He sought inspiration everywhere, which sometimes includes films that seem far removed from those that he himself makes.

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‘Rosemary’s Baby’, directed by Roman Polański, 1968, in the photo: Mia Farrow and Sidney Blackmer, photo: PARAMOUNT PICTURES / Forum

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In 1986, upon watching Down by Law by Jim Jarmusch, he expressed his enthusiasm with exuberance:

A happy night! My heart has fluttered once again, beating like crazy for cinema. I would like to make some beautiful film.

A few years later, he ‘borrowed’ Robbie Müller, director of photography, from Jarmusch who ends up behind the camera on the set of Wajda’s Korczak. Inspiration continued to flow from every which way for Wajda. In Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot, he found an element for The Explosion, on which he was working at the time:

A true film – cinema for everyone. It’s a shame that there were only a dozen or so people in the audience. But the world of our audience isn’t one where such a film attracts millions of viewers. An astonishing soundtrack: not so much music as sound design in the style of a TV documentary. A concoction tailored to the needs of each particular scene. This could be a clue for ‘The Explosion’!

Meanwhile, Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 film Hana-bi sparked an idea for a film about Andrzej Wróblewski, a genius painter whom the director met during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. The subsequent films he watched fed into the concept. He returned to it after a screening of Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse and Miloš Forman’s Man on the Moon. About the latter he wrote:

A portrait of an artist of our times; times are rough for art nowadays, since today, because of television, it’s the masses who make judgments about art, and not, as before, the elite – who were entitled to such judgments by virtue of their education and position in society.

Finally, viewing Krzysztof Krauze’s My Nikifor prompted the following reflection:

Perhaps the subject matter for the film about Wróblewski ought to be his friendship with an inferior friend at the Academy of Fine Arts, who becomes a filmmaker upon realising he’ll never paint anything unique himself.

Wajda’s notebooks contain remarkable traces of inspiration. About Bennet Miller’s Capote, he wrote:

I haven’t seen anything equally unique and exceptional, so against the rules of storytelling, developing the subject, character building. It’s not a film, it’s a novel, but at the same time it’s an inescapably filmic work, created in a way that’s difficult to retrace. Extraordinarily slow yet also interesting and engaging. An astonishing specimen of film.

Moreover, Miller’s work provided him with clues for the making of Sweet Rush.

Having seen Mike Leigh’s 2004 film Vera Drake, Wajda noted: ‘So dramatic, focused, and true – that’s what a film about Katyń should be like’. He also found inspiration for his future blockbuster in The Constant Gardener by Fernando Meirelles. Meanwhile, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rogue (2001) served as a warning against ruining his own The Revenge:

At first, I had a distinct impression that I was watching a TV set out of order, with various programmes all mixed up. This lasts for a good 15 minutes, after which (since the audience already feels at home) the time is ripe to begin a banal and thoroughly idiotic operetta, with a libretto not worthy even of Lehar.

Masterful reading of film

Out of the dozens of micro-reviews, the ones that prove to be the most interesting are the ‘disinterested’ ones, in which Wajda lets himself express pure, almost childlike delight with the art of film, directorial talents, and brilliant ideas that elevate average films to the status of masterpieces. Wajda the critic charms one with his insightful judgments and the ability to contain his reflections in one short entry.

In 1999, having watched Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson, he commented:

Here’s cinema with no literary, painterly, or musical pedigree. A coherent whole, a total work of filmic art – cinema indeed! What’s most important here is speed, like at a party at a club – the interpenetration of a TV programme and life. They perform to the rhythm of music, everything is a chase. It’s hard to believe that this scattered mosaic can form a whole. It’s beautiful!

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‘Adaptation’, directed by Spike Jonze, 2002, photo: Vision Film

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After seeing Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, he noted:

To begin with anything, anywhere, at random. LA recurs as an important setting. We hear TV voices from the air, a car’s coming, helicopters spray insecticide. What’s the most beautiful is that there’s something of Chekhov in it. (…) These scraps are brilliantly conceived, but the power of the film comes from the fact that it’s going nowhere. No central claim. It’s the image of human life in its duration, in this particular place.

For many who only saw Wajda as a dignified ‘Master’ and an elderly sage, many of these micro-reviews may come off as surprising – as when, for example, Wajda raved about The Matrix by the Wachowskis, writing:

‘The Matrix’ is ‘Battleship Potemkin’ of computer-age proletariat. The film is made beautifully and, except for the gaps, in a truly classic manner, narrated through images and with brilliant performances.

Wajda also surprises the readers of his Notesy when he joins the discussion about Pulp Fiction and Tarantino’s triumph in Cannes, where his film beat Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red for the Palme d’Or. In 1995, Wajda wrote this about Pulp Fiction:

A masterpiece, but why made of such stuff? A sculpture in shit, as we used to say. That’s probably how people reacted to Zola’s novels, but this isn’t the natural resistance of people raised with different categories of beauty, which Zola’s realism shattered. There’s no realism here that would offer any justification. There’s only nihilism and an audience ready to join the great fun. An audience composed of intelligentsia, I might add.

Wajda, who on the brink of the 21^st century was nearing the age of 80, was nevertheless open to cinematic experimentation, transgression, and the creation of a new language. In 2002, having watched Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, he wrote:

A wonderful film; I wish that someday, a director from my school would come close to reaching such a level. Though when I read that ‘Adaptation’ is the American ‘Day of the Wacko’, words fail me. ‘Day of the Wacko’ is a film made by an amateur, who perhaps does have a lot to say, but in words, not through cinematic means. Meanwhile, here we are presented with cinema of excess, which is absolutely exhilarating.

Some of his reviews are uniquely astute and insightful, as when, for instance, he analysed the role played by the character of the writer in Liv Ullmann’s excellent film Faithless, with a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman.

Words have a great power on screen provided that they’re written by a writer, not by a screenwriter. Bergman is such a writer, and that’s why we’re not forced to watch all these pathetic scenes that humiliate the viewer and make the characters in the film seem somewhat ridiculous at worst. A wonderful experience of cinema, which already seemed dead, impossible to save. Meanwhile, it’s not only perfectly alive, but it’s also – and right now I’m unable to explain this – nothing like a TV series. There are many more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. A film like this, for one. When everything has to be shown, it’s the telling something in words – that she took off her underpants – that makes a haunting impression. Not the taking off but the embarrassment when it has to be said.

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‘Lost in Translation’, directed by Sofia Coppola, 2003, photo: SPInka

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He also exhibited great insight and boldness while offering criticism – for instance when, after a screening of Europa, he stated that von Trier ‘has never read a history book on the subject’ or when he described Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as ‘an arid film’. Or, when having watched Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, he discusses the director and post-war German culture at large:

In America, Wenders is somebody, because he can see something bigger than his republic with teeth broken out and all the screws loose. That’s the real price that the Germans are paying for the camps and gas chambers – being completely absorbed by the victor, consumed by him, with the desire to guess his every innermost wish.

Wajda the observer, the seeker, the Master awaiting his public. Malicious, savage, intellectually independent Wajda. The one who’s unafraid to call a spade a spade and point out the weaknesses of his own films as well as those made by his fellow filmmakers. Ready to take down monuments and question the great. Andrzej Wajda’s film reviews written on the pages of his notebooks reveal an extraordinary man, deeply enamoured by the art of film but not blinded by this love. These micro-reviews, scattered across over two thousand pages, depict Wajda as a true cinephile as well as a marvellously astute observer of reality.

Translated from Polish by Anna Potoczny

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