Wajda to Make a Film About Strzemiński

strzeminski wladyslaw portret_6984146.jpg, small, Władysław Strzemiński, 1932, photo: Koncern Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny / Archiwum Ilustracji/ Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC), Wajda to Make a Film About Strzemiński

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Bogusław Linda is to play the main role in Andrzej Wajda’s new film. Shooting will commence in autumn 2015.

Andrzej Wajda has been talking about his idea of making a film about Władysław Strzemiński for a number of months. In February 2014 at a meeting with the authorities of Łódź he said:

I have no longer plenty of time, so I think I ought to make some films. I'm think about a film about Strzemiński as one of my projects. He is the one of the artists who were most painfully wronged in the times of social realism. I'm struggling with the script, but in my opinion it should be transferred to the screen, for it is not just Strzemiński – a great individual, unique, known nowhere else. At first he taught at the Film School. I never met him, but I could see how they’d got rid of him.

Wajda’s future film will show us the story of the unusual artist and outstanding theoretician of art who was fired after opposing communism and who died in 1952. He was a leading representative of the avant-garde in the 1920s and 30s. It was he who proposed establishing the Art Museum in Łódź – one of the first permanent modern art galleries in the world. In the 20th century he co-created avant-garde groups Blok and Praesens, and at the turn of the 20s and 30s, together with his wife – prominent sculptor Katarzyna Kobro – and Henryk Stażewski, a painter he started the group "r. a" (revolutionary artists).

He created the theory of 'unism'. In 1927 he formulated it with regards to painting, and from 1931 to 1933 he expanded it to sculpture, architecture and typographic techniques in turn. The general rule of unism, relating to every form of artistic expression, was a requirement for a "unity of art and the place of creating it." In painting, it was necessary to try to emphasize the force of the full autonomy of the image as a flat quadrilateral framework evolved from its environment and completely enclosed in itself.

Wajda's film about Strzemiński will not be just the story of an outstanding artist destroyed by communism; it will be also a story of the marital drama of Strzemiński and his wife, one of a powerful love which turned into an equally great hatred. As Jędrzej Słodkowski wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza.

During World War II Strzemiński was painting postcards, while Kobro was sewing toys. They survived the war in extreme poverty – at the end of it Kobro had to burn her own sculptures in the oven. The spouses were constantly arguing. Their daughter Nika mentioned that "not a day went by without fights and all kinds of schism". Strzemiński used to beat his wife with a crutch. After World War II, he tried to take their daughter away from her, he also deprived Kobro of an opportunity to work in the newly-created School of Fine Arts in Łódź (today ASP, with Strzemiński as its patron) where he taught.

Władysław Strzemiński, "Pejzaż łódzki", 1932, tempera, tektura, fragment obrazu, fot. dzięki uprzejmości Muzeum Regionalnego w Stalowej Woli — Władysław Strzemiński, "Pejzaż łódzki", 1932, distemper, cardboard, a fragment of a painting , photo: courtest of the Muzeum Regionalne in Stalowa Wola

"I will have the honour of acting in Andrzej Wajda's latest film, about Władysław Strzemiński. Shooting the film will start in September”, Bogusław Linda informed on his Facebook profile on May 5, 2015. That will be the next professional meeting between Linda and Wajda. Bogusław Linda previously starred in Wajda’s Man of Iron, Danton and Pan Tadeusz. By taking part in the film about Strzemiński, Linda will return to cinema after a four-year break. Actor and director, who in recent years has devoted himself to teaching, appeared last on the big screen in 2011, in Jerzy Hoffman’s film Battle of Warsaw 1920.

Source: Gazeta Wyborcza, inf. własne, opr. BS., translated by MK.

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