Four decades ago, Andrzej Wajda won the Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival. In so doing, he became the first Polish director to receive the prestigious award. More significantly, Man of Iron reflected the mood of a nation that had been galvanised by the formation of the Solidarity trade union and Wajda's courageous criticism of the Communist regime resulted in his picture being banned. To mark the anniversary of this landmark in political film-making, Cinema Paradiso celebrates Poland's screen achievements.
Film history might have looked very different had more people seen Polish photographer Kazimierz Prószynski's Skating-rink in the Royal Baths when it was first made with a Pleograph camera in 1894. As Poland was part of the Russian Empire, his achievement was downplayed and he became a footnote in the new medium's prehistory, despite inventing the Aeroscope camera that was used to shoot landmark combat documentaries like Geoffrey Malins's The Battle of the Somme (1916). Indeed, this handheld device was so prevalent on the Western Front that much of the footage digitally renovated by Peter Jackson for They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) would have been captured with this revolutionary compressed air camera.
Following independence, Polish film-making flourished in the 1920s, although stars like Pola Negri (born Barbara Apolonia Chalupiec) still had to move abroad to find fame in silent masterpieces like Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry (1919). More examples of Negri's iconic acting style can be found in Eureka's wonderful Lubitsch in Berlin collection, as she headlines Sumurun (1920) and Der Bergkatze (1921). Warsaw-born Szmuel Gelbfisz also had to relocate to make his name, although he was going by Samuel Goldwyn by the time he teamed with Cecil B. DeMille to make The Squaw Man (1914), which was the first feature filmed in Hollywood. Siblings Aaron, Hirsz and Szmuel Wonsal would also leave the old country and reinvent themselves Stateside as Albert, Harry and Sam, with the latter saving their studio, Warner Brothers, by taking a gamble on Alan Crosland's 'talking picture', The Jazz Singer (1927).
Yiddish cinema also thrived in Poland between the wars, with the influence of German Expressionism being evident on The Dybbuk (1937), which was directed by Michal Waszynski, who would go on to co-produce Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Graham Greene adaptation, The Quiet American (1958), and Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). All three titles can be rented from Cinema Paradiso, with the Mann epics also being available on high-quality Blu-ray.
The War in Film
Everyone will know from films as different as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) about the appalling things that happened in Poland during the Second World War. In the immediate aftermath, features including Leonard Buczkowski's Forbidden Songs (1946), Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and Aleksander Ford's Border Street (both 1948) examined events in the ghettos and camps with a realism and a restraint that would see so many 1950s Polish war features (see below) follow the example of Mikhail Kalatazov's The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and Grigori Chukrai's Ballad of a Solider (1959) in eschewing the Socialist Realist style imposed by the Kremlin.
Working from a novel by Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ford would go on to create one of the most popular Polish films of all time, with Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960) rivalling the widescreen epics that had been produced in 1950s Hollywod. Indeed, 15,000 extras were required for the Battle of Grunwald sequence, in which a Polish-Lithuanian force confronts Teutonic troops in July 1410. This sort of fare continues to find a domestic audience, with Jerzy Hoffman returning to Sienkiewicz for Fire and Sword (1999), which required the biggest budget in Polish screen history to recreate the Cossack-Polish War (1648-57). Hoffman would head back to the 9th century for Army of Valhalla (2003), in which a bloodthirsty prince recruits Viking warriors to uphold his tyrannical regime.
Hoffman came more up to date with Battle of Warsaw (2011), which was originally released in 3-D to chronicle the fabled rearguard fought by Marshal Józef Pilsudski (Daniel Olbrychski) against the Bolsheviks during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-20). The unit commanded by Henryk Sucharski (Michal Zebrowski) and Franciszek Dabrowski (Robert Zoledziewski) also sought to defy overwhelming odds in Pawel Chochlew's 1939: Battle of Westerplatte (2013), a divisive account of the September Campaign that also features in Wojciech Smarzowski's Hatred (2016), which follows the fortunes of the Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian residents of the rural Volhynia region over six years of Nazi and Soviet terror.
The often overlooked Porajmos persecution of the Romani peoples is recalled in Alexander Ramati's And the Violins Stopped Playing (1989), which stars Horst Buchholz as a musician desperate to smuggle his family to safety. A harrowing episode in the life of composer Wladyslaw Szpilman is recreated in Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), whose depiction of events in the Warsaw Ghetto earned Academy Awards for its director, writer (Ronald Harwood) and star (Adrien Brody).
Three friends struggle to keep the capital free in Robert Glinksi's The Battle for Warsaw (2014), which was adapted from Aleksander Kaminski's lauded novel, Stones For the Rampart. But the Red Army poses as much threat as the Wehrmacht and the SS in Jan Komasa's Warsaw 1944 (2014). The role played by Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain and beyond is commemorated in Denis Delic's 303 Squadron (2018), which centres on the exploits of flying ace Jan Zumbach (Maciej Zakoscielny).
In Wladyslaw Pasikowski's fact-based The Resistance Fighter (2019), the focus falls on Jan Nowak (Philippe Tlokinski), who carried messages from the government in London exile to the Home Army, as the tide of the conflict began to turn. Glinksi would return to the war theme in The Call of the Toad (2005), which is set in 1989 and stars Krystyna Janda and Matthias Habich as a picture restorer and a university professor who create the Polish-German Cemetery Society because their birthplaces had changed hands so frequently during their lifetimes.
Andrez Wajda, a Perspective
The war was a recurring theme in the career of Poland's greatest film-maker, Andrzej Wajda. Having lost his cavalry officer father during the notorious Katyn massacre, the teenage Wajda joined the Home Army and channelled his experiences into the trilogy he produced after graduating from the recently founded Lódz State Film School. Focusing on the radicalisation of woodworker Tadeusz Lomnicki after he joins the Resistance and is exposed to Communist ideology, A Generation (1954) is a paean to patriotism and Party unity that is tempered by Lomnicki's romance with youth leader Urszula Modrzynska and the blend of humanism and visual finesse that would become Wajda's trademark.
A young Roman Polanski features in Kanal (1956), which follows lieutenant Wienczyslaw Glinski in his bid to lead 43 partisans to safety through the city sewers during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising of September 1944. Starkly photographed in monochrome by Jerzy Lipman, this claustrophobic act of remembrance established Wajda's international reputation by winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes.
He surpassed it, however, with Ashes and Diamonds (1958), an adaptation of a Jerzy Andrzejewski novel that is set on the last day of the war and boasts a compelling performance by Zbigniew Cybulski, as a guerilla who questions the order to execute a Communist resistance leader. Distracted from his mission by his feelings for barmaid Ewa Krzyzanowska, Cybulski proved so charismatic is portraying corrupted idealism that he was nicknamed 'the Polish James Dean' and Wajda was so crushed by his accidental death on a film set that he made Everything for Sale (1968) as a heartfelt homage.
Cybulski cameos alongside Polanski and future director Jerzy Skolimowski in Innocent Sorcerers (1960), which charts the romantic entanglements of Tadeusz Lomnicki, a sports doctor who fancies himself as a jazz drummer. Sadly, this is the only Wajda title from the decade currently available on disc and we remeet him in 1974 for the sprawling Dickensian drama, The Promised Land. Adapted from a novel by Nobel Prize winner Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, this fin-de-siècle saga centres on the problems facing three friends (Daniel Olbrychski, Wojciech Pszoniak and Andrzej Seweryn) seeking to open a textile factory. Not only was it nominated for an Academy Award, but it was also voted the best film in the history of Polish cinema in a 2015 poll sponsored by the Polish Museum of Cinematography.
Wajda remained in historical mode for Danton (1983), which draws parallels between the struggle for hearts and minds in contemporary Poland and revolutionary France. In one of his most commanding performances, Gérard Depardieu excels as Georges Danton, who risks his life by returning to Paris in a bid to prevent the Committee for Public Safety run by Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak) from launching the Reign of Terror. For many, however, mention of Wajda will always conjure up memories of Man of Marble (1977) and its semi-sequel, Man of Iron (1981), which were totems of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety (see below) that chronicled the Solidarity era.
The former borrows the format of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) to reveal the problem facing Krakow documentarist Krystyna Janda, as she strives to unearth the truth about a 1950s bricklayer (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) whose heroic reputation has been tarnished. In the follow-up, Janda finds making a tribute to her Solidarity leader husband to be no easier than reporter Marian Opania's task of infiltrating the striking shipyard workers in Gdansk.
Wajda would revisit this tumultuous period in Walesa: Man of Hope (2013), which uses a 1981 interview between Lech Walesa (Robert Wieckiewicz) and Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (Maria Rosaria Omaggio) to show how an electrician struggling to provide for his wife (Agnieszka Grochowska) and children becomes a threat to the Soviet bloc. And Wajda further explored the tensions between Warsaw and Moscow in Katyn (2007). By far his most personal film, this Oscar-nominated drama shows how the Polish population belatedly discovered the fate of the 22,000 compatriots who had been slaughtered by Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, in the spring of 1940.
The Lódz, Polish Film-making Talent
The extension of the Soviet sphere of influence across Eastern Europe had mixed blessings for Polish cinema. On the one hand, Socialist Realism was imposed and censorship was enforced. But the Communist regime reorganised the film industry into creative units like X and Kadr (which are still going strong) and founded the Lódz Film School that would train some of the country's finest directors. In addition to Andrzej Wajda, the roll of honour also includes Andrzej Munk, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej Zulawski, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Zanussi, all of whom we shall encounter below. Another alumnus was Janusz Morgenstern, who tapped into the nouvelle vague for Goodbye, See You Tomorrow (1960), in which a naive Zbigniew Cybulski faces competition for the affections of visiting Frenchwoman Teresa Tuszynska from his suave pals, Jacek Fedorowicz and Roman Polanski.
Influenced by the Italian neo-realists and eager to circumvent the strictures inflicted by Moscow in the light of the political thaw of October 1956, Wajda and Munk formed the Polish Film School with the likes of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Wojciech Has, Kazimierz Kutz and Tadeusz Konwicki. Sadly, nothing by the latter pair is currently available on disc in the UK, but maybe the splendid people at Second Run, who have done so much to bring classic Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovakian films to British audiences, have them on their 'to do' list.
Let's hope Munk's Man on the Tracks (1957) is on there, too, as this intriguing political allegory about a railway fatality contrasts the flashbacking testimony of a station master, an engineer and a signalman in a manner that bears comparison with Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). The same air of biting satire informs Eroica (1958), a treatise on the nature of heroism that centres on drunken coward Edward Dziewonski's ill-starred stint with the Home Army and the truth about Tadeusz Lomnicki's bid to escape from a POW camp. But there's a cruel irony about the bleakly witty Bad Luck (1960), as the 39 year-old Munk was killed in a car crash before he could complete Passenger (1963), which was ingeniously finished by Witold Lesiewicz to chronicle the relationship between SS officer Aleksandra Slaska and Auschwitz prisoner, Anna Ciepielewska.
Having also made his mark with his own Rashomon-like saga about a body on a railway line, Jerzy Kawalerowicz followed Shadow (1956) with The Real End of the Great War (1957), in which a remarried woman is reunited with the husband she thought had perished in a concentration camp. Despite the presence of Zbigniew Cybulski as a jilted lover, Night Train (1959) is also essentially a two-hander, as Lucyna Winnicka and Leon Niemczyk find themselves sharing a sleeping compartment on an express that is being scoured for a murderer by the police.
While there's an element of Hitchcock in this tense thriller, the tone is closer to horror in Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), a retelling of the infamous instance of demonic possession in the 17th-century French town of Loudon, Lucyna Winnicka takes the title role opposite Anna Ciepielewska as the only sister spared the ordeal in a starkly stylised Cannes prize winner that inspired Ken Russell's nunsploitation classic, The Devils (1971). Going further back in history, Kawalerowicz worked in colour for the first time on Pharaoh (1966), an epic Oscar-nominated adaptation of a novel by Boleslaw Prus that reveals how Ramses XIII (Jerzy Zelnik) juggled domestic decay and court intrigue with the threat posed to Egypt by Assyrian and Phoenician forces.
The past also rears its head in Wojciech Has's The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), a freewheeling adaptation of an 1815 picaresque novel by Jan Potocki that follows the misadventures of Walloon captain Alphonso van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski) through Spain's Sierra Morena mountains. Has and Cybulski had previously collaborated on How to Be Loved (1963), a tale of wartime ingratitude that deserves to be better known. But a cult has grown up around The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), a surreal reworking of various stories by Bruno Schulz that sees Jan Nowicki arrive at an institution to visit ailing father Tadeusz Kondrat and find himself transported back to his own childhood, as the rules of time and logic are seemingly suspended. One rather suspects that Terry Gilliam might be a fan of this dizzying head-trip, just as its predecessor can count Luis Buñuel, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar and David Lynch amongst its admirers.
Roman Polanski and The Exiles
Despite being more liberal than many countries behind the Iron Curtain and despite being spared the interventions witnessed in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland had its share of clampdowns under Wladyslaw Gomulka and Edward Gierek. As a consequence, a number of prominent film-makers opted to move abroad to secure freedom of expression. By far the best known is Roman Polanski, who had been building his reputation with such subversive short subjects as Teethful Smile, A Murder, Let's Break the Ball (all 1957), Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), When the Angels Fall, The Lamp (both 1959), The Fat Man and the Thin Man (1961) and Mammals (1962). These fascinating insights into the evolution of a talent are available from Cinema Paradiso on Roman Polanski: Eight Shorts (2003).
Also on disc are a pair of documentaries, Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008) and Laurent Bouzereau's Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir (2011), which describe the manner of Polanski's exit from his homeland and the tragedies and scandals that have beset him since completing his sole Polish feature, Knife on the Water (1962), which ranks among the finest debuts in all screen history. Accompanying lovers Leon Niemczyk and Jolanta Umecka on a sailing trip with the hitchhiker they almost killed on the road (Zygmunt Malanowicz), this simmering monochrome thriller was nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Film. On reaching Hollywood, Polanski turned down the chance to direct a colour remake with Henry Fonda, but Philip Noyce did eventually team Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane in Dead Calm (1989).
The dark side of the psyche has preoccupied Polanski over the decades, with Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-Sac (1966), Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976) particularly fraying the nerves. With Chinatown (1974), Frantic (1988) and The Ghost (2010), he has also proved to be a dab hand at thrillers, while he has periodically reminded us that he is a thoughtful adapter of literary classics, with Macbeth (1971), Tess (1979) and Oliver Twist (2005). Like most film-makers who have lasted the distance, Polanski has the odd curio like The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), What? (1972) and Pirates (1986) on his resumé, along with surprises like Weekend of a Champion (1972), a documentary record of Jackie Stewart's bid to win the 1971 Monaco Grand Prix.
But, even when he has divided the critics with such diverse offerings as Bitter Moon (1992), Death and the Maiden (1994), The Ninth Gate (1999), Carnage (2011), Venus in Fur (2013), Based on a True Story (2017) and An Officer and a Spy (2019), Polanski has always demonstrated a mastery of his craft. Moreover, he and actress wife Emmanuelle Seigner have passed their skills on to daughter Morgane Polanski, who impresses in the debuting Rene van Pannevis's Hartlepool-set crime drama, Looted (2019).
For all his achievements, Polanski's work cannot be separated, however, from the grave crises within his personal life. Controversy also dogged Walerian Borowczyk, who was based in Paris from 1959 and was regarded in some quarters as a wayward genius who sold his soul to smut. As is clear from Arrow's Walerian Borowczyk: Short Films and Animation selection, there is much to amuse, amaze and marvel at in Astronauts (1959), Renaissance, Grandma's Encyclopaedia (both 1963), The Concert, Angels' Games (both 1964), Joachim's Dictionary, Rosalie (both 1966), Diptych (1967), Gavotte (1968), The Phonograph (1969), The Greatest Love of All Time (1977) and Scherzo Infernal (1984).
Equally innovative is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981), a variation on Robert Louis Stevenson's oft-filmed novella that sees Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro) discover the connection between fiancé Dr Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) and the murderously rapacious Mr Edward Hyde (Gérard Zalcberg). Although the setting shifts from an old dark house to an earthquake-riven island, the same sense of claustrophobia informs Goto, Isle of Love (1969), as flycatcher Grozo (Guy Saint-Jean) seeks to separate ruler Goto III (Pierre Brasseur) from wife Glossia (Ligia Branice) by exposing her affair with officer, Gono (Jean-Pierre Andréani). Jealousy is also the driving theme in Blanche (1971), which takes us back from the 1880s to the 13th century to show how an old baron (Michel Simon) becomes increasingly unhinged in trying to keep his wife (Ligia Branice) out of the clutches of his son Nicolas (Lawrence Trimble), the King (Georges Wilson) and the philandering royal page, Bartolomeo (Jacques Perrin).
Featuring Fabrice Luchini and Pablo Picasso's daughter, Paloma, among the cast, Immoral Tales (1974) tackled a range of sexual taboos, while a fifth story was expanded to feature length. Loosely based on Prosper Mérimée's novel, Lokis, The Beast (1975) charts the misfortunes of American heiress Lisbeth Hummel after she marries French aristocrat Pierre Benedetti and was regarded by some as arthouse pornography. But there's always more than meets the eye in a Borowczyk picture, as he went on to prove in following the hazardous progress to Rome of Grazyna Dlugolecka, as she seeks a reunion with the lodger lover she cannot live without in The Story of Sin (1975), a mischievous, sometimes sensually surreal treatise on the abuse of power and moral authority.
Ligia Branice (who was married to Borowczyk until his death at the age of 82 in 2006) returned for Behind Convent Walls (1977), a radical reinterpretation of a Stendahl novel that was more nunsploitation than art. Yet, even in such low-grade material as Emmanuelle 5 (1987) and Love Rites (1988), Borowczyk retained the striking visual sense that has prompted many to champion his cause as a misunderstood maverick.
Similar epithets could be applied to Jerzy Skolimowski and Andrzej Zulawski. The former left Poland after two features and followed a Palme d'or win for Le Départ (1967) with Deep End (1970), a rite of passage that charts teenager John Mulder Brown's sexual education at a London bath house at the hands of co-worker Jane Asher and mature client Diana Dors. A short story by Robert Graves inspired The Shout (1978), in which Alan Bates regales composer John Hurt and wife Susannah York with a yarn during a cricket match at an asylum. Britain and Poland collided in Moonlighting (1982), which sees Jeremy Irons on peak form as the workaway boss of a building gang trying to prevent his crew from learning about the unrest at home in the wake of the protests at the Gdansk shipyards.
For almost two decades, Skolimowski devoted himself to painting in Los Angeles and taking acting roles in such diverse features as Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! (1996), Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls (2000), David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble (2012). However, he has returned to directing and plans to follow the Vincent Gallo survival saga, Essential Killing (2010), with Balthasar, an updating of Robert Bresson's Au hasard, Balthasar! (1966) that will star Sophia Loren.
Too few of Skolimowski's films are available on disc in the UK and the same is true for Andrzej Zulawski. Having studied in France, he returned home to debut with The Third Part of the Night (1971), a potent and densely symbolic wartime story in which is Leszek Teleszynski is given a second chance of happiness after he helps pregnant Malgorzata Braunek because she resembles the wife who has been murdered by the Nazis. However, having guided Isabelle Adjani to the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her remarkable performance as an unhappily married woman with a grotesque lover in Possession (1981), Zulawski fell out with the Polish authorities while making On the Silver Globe (1988). He spent the rest of his life in France, occasionally provoking the critics with features like Cosmos (2015), a 'metaphysical noir thriller' adapted from a 1965 Witold Gombrowicz novel that becomes typically idiosyncratic from the moment that Jean-François Balmer and Jonathan Genet check into Sabine Azéma's guesthouse in search of some peace and quiet.
Cinema of Moral Anxiety
As is revealed in the documentary, Pope John Paul II: His Life and His Teachings (1999), the 'Year of the Three Popes' culminated in the election of Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla and the papal visit of 1979 sent shockwaves though Warsaw's corridors of power. The stirrings of socio-political discontent had been evident at the start of the decade in such acute satires as Marek Piwowski's The Cruise (1970), which used a mockumentary approach to poke fun at Communist caricatures and the flaws in the Party system. But the elevation of Pope John Paul emboldened the populace and impact upon the nation of the subsequent the rise of the Solidarity trade union and the imposition of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski was potently reflected in a what became known as the 'Cinema of Moral Anxiety'.
Along with Wajda's Man of Marble, Ryszard Bugajski's Interrogation (1982) became a totemic picture for embattled Poles, as pirated video copies allowed them to identify with the 1950s singer being tortured into signing a confession for an unspecified crime. As a mark of support from the wider film community, Krystyna Janda won the Best Actress prize at Cannes. But, while the authorities appeared to have regained control, the first bricks in the Berlin Wall had been loosened and it would topple in 1989.
Although Agnieszka Holland plays Janda's fellow inmate, she is better known as a director of such incisive critiques of Polish society as Provincial Actors (1978), Fever (1980) and A Lonely Woman (1981). While training at the FAMU film school, Holland had witnessed how pictures like Vera Chytilova's Daisies (1966) and Miloš Forman's The Fireman's Ball (1967) had shaped minds prior to the Prague Spring and she returned to Poland to learn her trade as Wajda's assistant. In holding up a mirror to a divided society, however, Holland made herself a target and she was prevented from returning to Poland after a spell in France.
She has remained peripatetically busy ever since, initially alternating between France and the United States for projects like Olivier, Olivier (1991) and The Secret Garden (1993), which was adapted from the much-loved children's story by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Holland would go on to make such diverse dramas as Shot in the Heart (2001) and Copying Beethoven (2006), which respectively focused on killer Gary Gilmore and composer Ludwig Van Beethoven. She also cast Danny Glover as a black Philip Marlowe in the 'Red Wind' episode of Perfect Crimes (1995) and worked on such TV series as The Wire (2002-08), Treme (2010-13), The Killing (2011-), House of Cards (2013-18) and The Affair (2014-19), all of which are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, whose selection of US TV titles is second to none.
Holland has not forgotten Poland, however. She has particularly excelled in films about the war, with Angry Harvest (1985) being nominated for an Academy Award. She also won a Golden Globe for Europa Europa (1990), which was based on the astonishing wartime exploits of German Jew Solomon Perel, and drew another Oscar nomination for In Darkness (2011), which harrowingly recreated life in the sewers beneath the Lvov Ghetto. In Mr Jones (2019), Holland recalled the heroics of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (James Norton) in exposing the Holodomor genocide that saw Joseph Stalin oversee the deaths of around 10 million people during the famine that ravaged the Ukraine between 1932-33. Moreover, teaming with daughter Kasia Adamik, Holland ventured further back to the troubled time of 1711-13 for Janosik (2009), a project that took six years to complete and draws on period documents to recount the daring deeds of Juraj Janosik (Václav Jirácek), the Robin Hood of the Carpathians.
Another of Holland's mentors was Krzysztof Zanussi, who has been poorly served by UK home entertainment labels, with The Structure of Crystals (1969) and The Constant Factor (1980) among the titles worthy of a release. Naysayers would insist that his distinctive brand of intellectual rumination is nigh on impenetrable. But it's as compelling as it is challenging, as demonstrated by the philosophical tract underpinning Illumination (1973), in which physicist Stanislaw Latallo comes to realise that life, unlike science, doesn't always follow the rules. Summer school academics Piotr Garlicki and Zbigniew Zapasiewicz are more entrenched in their views in Camouflage (1977), which uses a generational clash to expose the weaknesses in the Soviet-imposed tyranny. More accessible is Life For Life: Maximilian Kolbe (1991), which stars Christoph Waltz as the prisoner whose escape from Auschwitz leads to a remarkable act of sacrifice by a Franciscan priest (Edward Zentara).
Zanussi appeared as himself in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Camera Buff (1979), a stinging satire on camaraderie, surveillance and creative freedom that stars the estimable Jerzy Stuhr as a factory clerk whose obsession with an 8mm camera gets him into trouble at home and at work. A graduate of the Lódz Film School, Kieslowski had started out making documentaries like Concert of Requests (1967), which can be found on the splendid Cinema 16 (2006) compilation. Tellingly, there's a strong sense of actuality about such features as The Scar (1976), which accompanies Franciszek Pieczka to the deprived town of Olecko to supervise the construction of a chemical plant that is opposed by local population.
In Blind Chance (1981), Kieslowski brilliantly lays out the position facing Poles at a potential turning point in their history by contrasting the three scenarios that could befall medical student Boguslaw Linda as he runs for a train. The director reached a crossroads of his own with No End (1985) - a political ghost story that turns on the martial law relationship between lawyer Jerzy Radziwilowicz and his widow, Grazyna Szapolowska - as it marked Kieslowski's first collaboration with screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner. They would play a pivotal part in Dekalog: The Ten Commandments (1988), a collection of 10 teleplays exploring the moral ambiguities of modern living. Two features would be spun-off from the series, A Short Film About Killing, and A Short Film About Love, which was reissued in 2006 as Dekalog and Other Television Works (2006), which also contains such key early outings as Pedestrian Subway (1973), First Love (1974), Personnel (1975), The Calm (1976,) and Short Working Day (1981).
Returning to stand-alone features, Kieslowski drew an outstanding dual performance from Irène Jacob in The Double Life of Véronique (1991), which links the destinies of two young women in Kraków and Paris. Jacob would also headline Three Colours: Red (1994), the concluding part of a trilogy inspired by the bars on the French flag and the revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality. This had launched with Three Colours: Blue and Three Colours: White (both 1993), which had respectively starred Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy. In addition to Blue scooping the Golden Lion at Venice, Red also earned Oscar nominations for its direction, writing and Piotr Sobocinski's lustrous photography. Sadly, shortly after Kieslowski announced his retirement, he died at the age of 54 during open-heart surgery. A posthumous triptych was partially realised by Tom Tykwer's Heaven (2002) and Danis Tanovic's Hell (2005), but the Purgatory episode remains unfilmed.
Bookending this seismic decade are two films by Wojciech Marczewski. Set in 1955, Shivers (1981) follows 13 year-old Tomasz Hudziec to a summer camp, where he is indoctrinated by Communist ideology shortly after witnessing his father's arrest by the secret police. By contrast, Escape From the 'Liberty' Cinema (1990) is set in the aftermath of the Solidarity uprising and borrows from Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (1924) and Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) in chronicling the trouble that censor Janusz Gajos has in forcing the actors in a maudlin movie melodrama to stick to the script.
Warsaw Packed
Unlike Romania and the Czech Republic, Poland only experienced a minor movie wave following the collapse of Communism in 1989. The ending of state subsidies hit cinema particularly hard, hence the likes of Juliusz Machulski, Lech J. Majewski, Jan Jakub Kolski and Dorota Kedzierzawska are nowhere near as well known as they should be outside the festival circuit.
Krzysztof Krause captured the mood of the brave new free market world in The Debt (1999), in which a couple of entrepreneurs hoping to make a packet importing Italian scooters fall foul of the Russian gangster seethingly played by Andrzej Chyra. In partnership with wife Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krauze would also impress with Papusza (2013), a monochrome biopic of Roma poet Bronistawa Wajs, before his untimely death in 2014.
Fellow Varsovian Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14 and started out making arts documentaries after graduating from Oxford. He made a BAFTA-winning impression on his adopted country with Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2004) before finding his way to Paris for The Woman in the Fifth (2011). Having returned to Warsaw, however, he won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for Ida (2014), which was co-scripted by British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz and centres on the postwar journey of discovery made by novice nun Agata Trzebuchowska in the company of her aunt, Agata Kulesza, a hard-drinking party apparatchik.
Also in 2014, Pawlikowski collaborated with director Ben Hopkins on the script for Lost in Karastan, a witty dissection of post-Soviet revisionism that sees washed-up director Matthew Macfadyen and drunken Hollywood actor Noah Taylor being tutored by presidential aide My Anna Buring into how to make an historical epic that will please dictator Richard van Weyden. Four years later, Pawlikowski won the Best Director prize at Cannes for Cold War (2018), an affecting drama about the choices facing 1950s musicians Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig that also earned Oscar nominations for direction and Lukasz Zal's black-and-white photography, as well as for Best Foreign Film.
Cracovian Malgorzata Szumowska graduated from the Lódz Film School in 1998 and made ripples with visually innovative features like 33 Scenes From Life (2008), Her breakthrough, however, came with Elles (2011), which centres on an article on prostitution being written by Parisian journalist Juliette Binoche. Szumowska returned to Poland for In the Name Of (2013), which sees rural priest Andrzej Chyra face a crisis at the refuge he runs for troubled youths when he becomes obsessed with outsider Mateusz Kosciukiewicz.
Having won the Best Director prize at Berlin for Body (2015), Szumowska stayed with the subject of self-image in Mug (2018), in which Mateusz Kosciukiewicz (who is the director's husband) is so badly injured while working on the world's biggest statue of Jesus Christ that he requires Poland's first face transplant. She next ventured to Ireland to shoot The Other Lamb (2019), in which devoted cult member Raffey Cassidy begins to have doubts about the motives and methods of the only male in the group, who is known as Shepherd (Michiel Huisman).
The threat is posed by Katarzyna Herman in Tomasz Wasilewski's In a Bedroom (2012), as she drugs casual hotel pick-ups in order to rob them blind. However, she has hopes that things will improve after she meets handsome artist Tomasz Tyndyk. Wasilewski stayed with the subject of dangerous liaisons, as professional swimmer Mateusz Banasiuk falls for Bartosz Gelner after they meet at a gallery opening in Floating Skyscrapers (2013), which is one of the first Polish pictures to focus on a gay romance. However, the focus shifts on to the status of women at the dawn of the new era in United States of Love (2016), as an unhappily married mother, a teacher besotted with a female neighbour, a headmistress in love with a student's father and a lonely ex-beauty queen all face the realities of life in Poland in 1990.
At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, Polish cinema continues to throw up surprises. Nowhere offers you a wider choice of new titles on high-quality DVD and Blu-ray than Cinema Paradiso. So, why not take a chance with such eclectic offerings as Witold Swietnicki's The Naked: A Psychological Film (2001), Tomasz Wiszniewski's Where Eskimos Live (2002), Andrzej Jakimowski's Tricks (2007), Borys Lankosz's Rewers (2009), Jan Komasa's Suicide Room (2011), Maciej Pieprzyca's Life Feels Good (2013), Michal Gazda and Kasia Adamik's The Border, Wladyslaw Pasikowski's Jack Strong (both 2014), Agnieszka Smoczynska's The Lure (2015), Wojciech Kasperski's The Mountain Lodge, Jan P. Matuszynski's The Last Family (both 2016), Adrian Panek's Werewolf, Olga Chajdas's Nina (both 2018), Daniel Markowicz's Race Fast, Maciej Kawulski's How I Became a Gangster (both 2019) and Jan Hryniak's Zenek (2020).
