Lessons in Humanity: How Britain Watched Andrzej Wajda

andrzej-wajda-john-gielgud-na-planie-filmu-dyrygent-1979-fot-jerzy-kosnik-forum-0428536048-miniatura.jpg, default, Andrzej Wajda & John Gielgud on the set of 'The Orchestra Conductor', 1979, photo: Jerzy Kośnik / Forum

#film

Andrzej Wajda arrived in Britain as a revelation. From Lindsay Anderson’s early championing of his ‘human’ war films to later visions of him as a moral voice of Solidarity-era Poland, British critics repeatedly cast Wajda as a filmmaker who had something to teach them – even as their view remained partial, selective and shaped by ideas of what a ‘Polish’ director should be.

The introduction of the work of Andrzej Wajda to British film audiences began in a notable way. Reviewing Wajda’s debut feature A Generation (1955) and its follow-up Kanal (1957) in the summer 1957 issue of the journal Living Cinema (Vol 1, No.3), Lindsay Anderson – not yet a leading light of the British New Wave but already renowned as a critic and co-founder of the Free Cinema documentary movement – expressed great enthusiasm for both of Wajda’s first films.

‘A young Polish director [...] has shown himself to be a genius at making films about war,’ proclaimed the introduction to Anderson’s review. For the critic, A Generation and Kanal not only ‘signal[ed] the emergence of a new, authoritative young talent among European film-makers’, but also confirmed ‘the maturity – technical as well as artistic – of the Polish cinema’.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Lindsay Anderson, 1975, photo: Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty Images

Picture image

Lindsay-Anderson-1975-photo-Hulton-Deutsch-Collection-Corbis-GettyImages-613505088-s.jpg

Always eager to point out the deficiencies of 1950s British cinema as he saw them, Anderson favourably compared the two Wajda films with a Cannes-premiered British offering of the same year. Michael Anderson’s Yang-Tse Incident (1957) was, the critic claimed, ‘rather embarrassing’: a work of ‘political naivete’, of ‘stiff upper-crust lips’ and ‘untranslatable English lower-deck humours’. In contrast, Wajda’s Kanal added up to:

Text

...a remarkable experience in a number of ways. First of all for its tragic power, its obsessive picture of a nightmare world, its insistence on the human dramas continuing within the chaos.

This would be the first, but certainly not the last, time that a critic would suggest that Wajda’s work offered something ‘teachable’ to British cinema – a lesson in how to do things better.

Lindsay Anderson’s lesson from Poland

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Still from 'A Generation', 1954, directed by Andrzej Wajda, pictured: Tadeusz Janczar, Roman Polański, Tadeusz Łomnicki, Ryszard Kotys, Juliusz Roland, photo: Ryszard Golc / Kadr Film Studio / Filmoteka Narodowa, fototeka.fn.org.pl

Picture image

pokolenie_andrzej_wajda_fototeka_fn_org_pl-2.jpg

Turning to A Generation, Anderson perceptively noted that Wajda’s debut ‘shows clear signs of the pressures which operated at the time of its making’. Yet the critic believed that these compromises were ultimately transcended: ‘In the most extraordinary way, the film avoids the tendentious and the propagandistic.’ Noting Wajda’s background in painting, Anderson highlighted the eloquence of the visuals in relation to the themes, as ‘the film’s ideal of human dignity and independence [becomes] implicit in its images’. Mostly, the critic praised the human scale of both works, their focus on war in terms of the waste of human potential, a perspective born of deep belief in the value of life itself:

Text

The violence, the terror, the occasional heroisms of war are all in these films; but their most most powerful pervasive sense is the sense of waste, of human waste. It is their passionate faith in the possibilities of life that makes their picture of destruction so overwhelming.

Anderson’s emphasis on the ‘humanity’ of Wajda’s vision set a certain precedent for British responses to the Polish director’s work that would endure. Highlighting the final sequence of A Generation, the critic summed up the achievement of both films as a delicate balancing act of qualities:

Text

Maturity without scepticism; idealism without sentimentality; a deep, persistant [sic] feeling for the poetry of living. These are Wajda’s gifts to us in these two films.

‘I owe my first international success to Lindsay Anderson’s review [which] meant that the newly established Polish Film School was closely monitored in the West,’ Wajda reflected many years later, quoted in Sight and Sound in June 2008. That a British director/critic was the first to promote Wajda’s work abroad is significant, and established a connection between the two filmmakers that lasted as their careers progressed. It also led to a more complicated relationship between wider British film culture and Wajda’s cinema, the perceived ‘Polishness’ of which would be viewed variously as a virtue and a drawback.

BAFTA nominations & the fashion for Polish cinema

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Andrzej Wajda showing a promotional still from 'Kanal' during its premiere in Germany, 1958, photo: Tadeusz Kubiak / PAP

Picture image

andrzej_wajda_pap_19580801_002.jpg

The British interest in Wajda’s work first stoked by Anderson’s review was cemented by the recognition that the third part of the unofficial ‘War Trilogy’, 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds, received following its UK premiere: nominations in a pair of categories at the 1960 British Academy Film Awards – Best Film, and Best Actor for Zbigniew Cybulski.

These two early-career nominations indicate that Wajda had been quite swiftly established as a significant figure in world cinema, well known and celebrated by cinephiles. Although sometimes expressing reservations about aspects of the films that clashed with their view of Wajda as a dedicated realist (‘gratuitously arty and theatrical touches’, ‘an overindulgence in the conventionally cinematic’, ‘obvious symbolism’), and disagreeing about which of the trilogy was the most artistically successful, British reviewers by and large echoed Anderson’s praise.

Video embed

Ashes and Diamond (Trailer) - AIFF 2018

Coupled with these critical accolades, UK exhibition of Wajda’s 1950s films, while not precisely extensive, was nonetheless impactful for the time. Alongside that of other Polish and Central and Eastern European directors, Wajda’s work was generally distributed by the pioneering Contemporary Films. The movies would screen at London’s Academy Cinema and across the country via film societies, ensuring fairly wide engagement. (Of the British filmmakers who’ve recalled formative encounters with Wajda’s cinema, Mike Leigh’s memory of first watching Kanal in the summer of 1960 projected onto the wall of a kibbutz in Israel, with English and Hebrew subtitles, must rank as the most striking.)

Wajda’s next offering, the ‘failure’ Lotna (1959), created less of a stir. But Innocent Sorcerers (1960), in its freshness and novelty, made an impact, becoming no less than the subject of the lead review in the winter 1961-1962 issue of Sight and Sound, where it was appraised alongside Jacques Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient (1961). The pairing constituted a clear recognition of New Wave influence, and a placing of Wajda in the vanguard of European film, reflecting how fashionable Polish cinema was at the time.

Embedded Work

Innocent Sorcerers – Andrzej Wajda

Critic Robert Vas’s joint review called Wajda’s film ‘a piece of cinematic chamber music set to jazz’, contrasting its ‘single movement’ with the filmmaker’s previous ‘sweeping four movement symphony’ (a rare inclusion of Lotna among the early war films). Notably ignoring Jerzy Andrzejewski and Jerzy Skolimowski’s contributions as writers of the screenplay (better for emphasising Wajda’s status as presiding auteur), Innocent Sorcerers represented for Vas both an act of self-reclamation on the filmmaker’s part and an evocation of cusp-of-1960s attitudes:

Text

[It] is fascinating to see this director whom we last saw losing himself in the romantic cavalry charge of ‘Lotna’, recapturing his own real self within a forty-minute scene in a bare room... Through script and playing, Wajda floods the room with a charged pathos which is entirely of today. He shows his anti-heroes as amiable, innocent, rebellious victims of a world-wide atmosphere impregnated with the fall-out of fear and nihilism.

‘Innocent Sorcerers is a relatively modest film,’ Vas concluded, ‘but one that hits a bull’s-eye.’

Universal humanist or ‘too Polish’?

Auspicious beginnings, for sure. But the British reception of Wajda’s films would cool in the ensuing years. Although he was definitely present in the 1970s – giving a lecture at the National Film Theatre, bringing theatre productions to London and Edinburgh to great acclaim, and as the subject of two critical studies – Wajda’s new films would fall into neglect. The ‘bull’s-eye’ of Innocent Sorcerers was the last of his films to hit the ‘target’ of significant attention in the UK for almost two decades.

Initially established on the British scene as ‘a genius at making films about war’, and permitted the contemporary foray of Innocent Sorcerers, Wajda’s diverse, bold and experimental work in the following years perhaps proved too difficult to market or to categorise – or too ‘national’. This meant that key films – The Ashes (1965), Everything for Sale (1968), Landscape After Battle (1970), The Birch Wood (1970), The Wedding (1972), even The Promised Land (1974) – did not readily become viewed in Britain as part of the Wajda ‘canon’.

In this way, a double vision began to become apparent in British perceptions: Wajda as a universal ‘humanist’ filmmaker, on the one hand, versus Wajda as too specifically ‘Polish’ to consistently connect beyond his homeland on the other. As Darragh O’Donoghue suggests in his essay on the changing British reception of Wajda’s work between Man of Marble (1976) and Katyń (2007):

Text

In a sense, British critics projected their vision of what a Polish filmmaker should be onto Wajda, and it is worth taking that into account when considering his sudden emergence in the late 1970s, when he seemed to answer specifically Western curiosities about Poland.

Back in focus: Wajda, Solidarity & British curiosity

Video embed

LET'S CEE presents MAN OF MARBLE (Poland 1976)

Indeed, it was again in something of an (unwittingly) ‘instructive’ role that Wajda returned to the consciousness of British audiences and critics in the late 1970s. The delayed release of Man of Marble undoubtedly spoke to the broad global interest in the Polish crises of the period, the emergence of the Solidarity movement, and the imposition of martial law.

Thus began what O’Donoghue calls the era of ‘Wajda’s greatest visibility as a filmmaker in the United Kingdom’. This so-called ‘resurrection’ (never mind that the director had been more prolific than ever in the intervening years) occurred at the same time as Wajda’s emergence as a Solidarity-associated figure, with attendant coverage in the press. It also coincided, in part, with his engagement with the British industry itself, through Thames Television’s co-production of his English-language Joseph Conrad adaptation The Shadow Line (1976) and in the casting of John Gielgud in the Ingmar Bergman-beloved The Conductor (1979).

As O’Donoghue summarises:

Text

From April 1981 to January 1982 [Wajda] was rarely off London screens with his two most outspoken works, ‘Rough Treatment’ [1978] and ‘Man of Iron’ [1981], together with revivals of the War Trilogy [...], and ‘Man of Marble’, the film whose frankness startled British critics familiar with the ‘coded’ approach to contemporary politics practised by most European filmmakers.

Not every British critic was convinced initially. ‘A key film for students of Poland but too specialised for general entertainment,’ griped Leslie Halliwell, reviewing Man of Marble. But, for most, Wajda was back to his best and most ‘relatable’ again, delivering work that offered a hotline to the complexities of Poland’s condition while also reminding viewers of ‘universal’ verities. Such responses also carried over into the positive British reception of Danton (1982) – read, despite the director’s denials, as an allegory of the current Polish situation – and latterly described by the British playwright Nick Dear (on whom the film was a major influence) as offering a ‘lesson in humanity’ for viewers. Indeed, O’Donoghue highlights the strong sense of Wajda’s ‘moral authority’ for British (and other) commentators during this era, and the romantic appeal of his status as an ‘artist against the system’.

After 1989: fading exoticism, fading attention

Video embed

Korczak (1990) Official Trailer [FHD]

Nonetheless, this peak period of Wajda’s British prominence would be followed by a further one of neglect, with another near two-decade gap separating the UK distribution of Korczak (1990) and Katyń (2007) – the latter delayed due to concerns, again, over its ‘inaccessibility’ to British viewers. The sense that Wajda had ‘lost his way’ as a filmmaker in the intervening years, supplanted by the increasingly Euro-friendly figure of Krzysztof Kieślowski as Poland’s leading male auteur, was part of the reason. But so too was a wider shift in East/West dynamics after 1989. As Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard have pointed out about the post-communism era’s beginnings:

Text

Eastern European cinemas, and Polish cinema in particular, no longer appeared to be exotic enough to deserve the special treatment they enjoyed during the communist period when they were regarded as speaking for the oppressed peoples and cultures, or central enough to illustrate specific pan-European or global tendencies.

British responses to both of the released Wajda films were mixed. ‘After Shoah, earnest humanist tracts are not enough,’ complained Time Out about Korczak. Other reviewers were kinder though, with Peter Bradshaw, reviewing Katyń in The Guardian, finding the film ‘powerful and even remarkable’.

Most telling, perhaps, is the wartime subject matter of both films, which indicates that Wajda was still primarily perceived in Britain through the prism of the War Trilogy. Pictures focused on WWII experiences continued to be viewed as the director’s most characteristic or ‘distributable’ works.

A book cover with the top half a close-up photo of an ageing white man's face looking surprised — Cover of 'The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance', 2003, photo: Wallflower Press

Still, Katyń’s initial UK premiere (as part of the 2008 Kinoteka Film Festival in London) was at least accompanied by a retrospective dedicated to the director. A lengthy 2008 interview with Wajda conducted by Michael Brooke and Kamila Kuc in Sight and Sound also allowed the magazine’s readership to ‘catch up’ with a filmmaker that the publication had once been so instrumental in supporting. Meanwhile, scholarly offerings such as John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska’s edited volume The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance (Wallflower Press, 2003) kept Wajda present in academic study, and articles like BFI online’s ‘Where to Begin with Andrzej Wajda’ offered a gateway to novices.

This ‘revival’ of British interest led to the inclusion of Sweet Rush (2009) in the 2009 London Film Festival programme. Described as ‘subtle and beautifully realised’, this was precisely the kind of particular, idiosyncratic Wajda work that was likely to have been overlooked in previous years. Again highly praised by Bradshaw, Wałęsa: Man of Hope (2013) even achieved UK cinema distribution, another testament to renewed awareness of Wajda as Poland’s foremost cinematic chronicler.

Retrospectives, remembrance & a partial canon

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Andrzej Wajda in Paris, 1978, photo: Daniel Simon / Getty Images

Picture image

Andrzej-Wajda-in-Paris-1978-photo-Daniel-Simon-GettyImages-124131920-s.jpg

Along with the specialist DVD/Blu-ray distributor Second Run, Kinoteka continued to make Wajda’s work accessible to UK audiences – which by now included a large cohort of new migrants following Poland’s entry into the EU in 2004. The director’s Afterimage (2016) would be the opening night gala film of the 2017 edition of Kinoteka, which also included several of Wajda’s earlier works under the Martin Scorsese-selected ‘Masterpieces of Polish Cinema’ banner, as a tribute following Wajda’s death the previous year.

Inevitably, Wajda’s passing in October 2016 led to the publication of many obituaries and tributes across British media. While some – like Michael Brooke’s for Sight and Sound – were nuanced and comprehensive, others tended to regurgitate familiar tropes: in The Guardian, for instance, Wajda was again best summed up as ‘a voice for humanity’. Such a categorisation was reflected once more in the title of 2026’s BFI/Kinoteka retrospective commemorating both the centenary of Wajda’s birth and the 10 years since his death: ‘Andrzej Wajda: Portraits of History and Humanity.’

Reflecting on the retrospective in the Financial Times, Daniel Marc Janes admitted that ‘Wajda’s films have been under-appreciated, many of them never released in the UK’, putting this ‘neglect’ down to the filmmaker’s ‘essential Polishness’. The retrospective undoubtedly tried to challenge that by making space for some lesser-seen works like The Ashes and Hunting Flies (1969), and by taking the season across the country through Kinoteka On Tour. Articles such as Agnes Dudek’s interviews with Annette Insdorf and Richard Peña for Culture.pl, or my own interview with Agnieszka Holland for BFI online, have also attempted to offer fresh perspectives by giving voice to Wajda’s commentators and collaborators of many years standing.

Among the scholars and critics presenting the films in the retrospective was Michał Oleszczyk, who reported British audience members at the recent BFI Southbank screenings of Rough Treatment and The Conductor fondly reminiscing about their first encounters with these works in the early 1980s. Such anecdotes suggest that Wajda’s films have remained firmly in the consciousness of certain British viewers (the comedian Alexei Sayle has also recalled seeing Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds as formative), even though only a partial, selective iteration of the director’s output has been available to UK viewers.

In total, indeed, only 14 of Wajda’s features ever received wider UK distribution, a slim number in relation to his extensive filmography of over 40 feature films, though it is still more than most other high-profile Polish filmmakers could boast. And if the UK’s vision of Wajda has often been reductive, this centenary year provides a perfect moment to expand it – whether through English-subtitled DVD or Blu-ray releases, or via streaming services (Culture.pl provided a guide to the latter earlier this year). Undoubtedly, for British viewers today, there remain many surprises and riches to be discovered in resuming the engagement with Wajda’s work that began with the publication of Anderson’s heartfelt review almost 70 years ago.

_{Written by Alex Ramon, May 2026}

_{Selected sources:}_ft.com_;_{theguardian.com}

Tytuł (nagłówek do zdjęcia)

Andrzej Wajda Centenary

Link URL

Discover the Life & Films of Andrzej Wajda!

Language English

andrzej wajda

andrzej wajda centenary

polish culture in britain