Andrzej Wajda: Ten films you might not know

By: kuxa kanema

Andrzej Wajda, a familiar name to all cinephiles, an oscar winner and along with Kieslowski the face of Polish cinema but how many people have actually seen anywhere near his complete filmography? His war trilogy of A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds has been widely seen and to a lesser extent Man of Marble and Man of Iron and his recent masterpiece Katyn, but what about his other some fifty feature films? Below are ten neglected Wajda films you should see before you can call yourself a true cinephile.

Andrzej Wajda is the son of a Polish cavalry officer murdered by the Soviets in 1940 in what came to be known as the Katyn massacre. After the war, he studied to be a painter at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts before entering the Łódź Film School.

After his apprenticeship to director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct his own film. With A Generation (1955), the first-time director poured out his disillusionment over jingoism, using as his alter ego a young, James Dean-style antihero played by Zbigniew Cybulski, 20-year-old Roman Polanski also featured. At the same time Andrzej Wajda began his work as a director in theatre, including some fantastic spectacles, like Michael V. Gazzo’s Hatful of Rain (1959), Hamlet (1960), Two On a Seesaw (1963) by William Gibson. Wajda made two more increasingly accomplished films, which developed further the anti-war theme of A Generation: Kanał (1956) [Silver Palm at Cannes Festival in 1957, ex equo with Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Ashes and Diamonds (1958), again with Cybulski.

While capable of turning out mainstream commercial fare (often dismissed as “trivial” by his critics), Wajda was more interested in works of allegory and symbolism, and certain symbols (such as setting fire to a glass of liquor, representing the flame of youthful idealism that was extinguished by the war) recur often in his films, the very characteristic of Wajda’s symbolism is film Lotna (1959), full of surrealistic and symbolic scenes and shots but he managed to explore some other field of existence making new wave style Innocent Sorcerers (1960) with music by Krzysztof Komeda, starring Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski (who was also a co-script writer) in the episodes. Then Wajda directed Samson (1961), a moving story about Jacob, a Jewish boy, who wants to survive during the Nazi occupation of Poland. In the mid-1960s Wajda showed the world an epic film The Ashes (1965) based on the novel by Polish writer Stefan Żeromski and directed some films abroad: Love at Twenty (1962), Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962) or Gates To Paradise (1968).

In 1967, Cybulski was killed in a train accident, whereupon the director articulated his grief with what is considered one of his most personal films, which turned out to be a touching story (using techique “film in film”) about film maker’s life and work on movie Everything For Sale (1968) whis is now established and regarded as one of the few films on that subject along with Federico Fellini’s “8½”. The following year he directed an ironic satire Hunting Flies with the script written by Janusz Głowacki and a TV film based upon Stanisław Lem’s short story “Roly Poly”.

The 1970s were the most lucrative artistic period for Wajda,who has made over ten films, some of them became one of his finest works like Landscape After the Battle (1970), Pilat And others (1971), The Wedding (1972) – the film version of polish most famous poetic drama by Stanisław Wyspiański, The Promised Land (1974), Man of Marble (1976) – the film takes place in two time periods, the first film showing the episodes of Stalinism in Poland, The Shadow Line (1976), Rough treatment (the other title: Without Anesthesia) (1978), The Orchestra conductor (1980), starring John Gielgud; or two, very touching, psychological and existential films based upon novels by polish famous writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz – The Birch Wood (1970) and The Maids of Wilko (1979).

Taken from wikipedia

1.The Pottery At Ilza, 1951
In Ceramika iłżecka (Pottery from Iłża, 1951) Wajda applied super-optical transformation of the filmed objects. Pottery shone with the rich shine of the spotlights and received symbolic meaning through the contrast of bright and dark shots or slow and fast camera movements. Wajda presented art as an activity bringing sense to life and work.

2.Lotna
Two years after winning the Special Jury Prize for Kanal at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival, renowned Polish director Andrzej Wajda directed this allegorical World War II drama. The film follows the winding paths of Lotna, a snow-white mare, as she wanders through Poland during it’s fight against the Nazis in 1939. As the poorly-equipped Poles wage an ill-fated struggle against the militarily superior German forces, Lotna is passed along to a series of soldiers as each is mortally wounded in battle.

3.Samson, 1961
Sampson is one of several Andrzej Wajda films harking back to his youth during the Nazi Occupation of Poland. Many of these concern not only the struggle between good and evil, but also between passive and impassive. The hero is a Jewish youth. He, like his family, has always been silent and undemonstrative in the face of prejudice. Now he stands up for his right to survive, and in so doing represents the fighting spirit that culminated in the 1943 Warsaw Uprising.

4.The Ashes, 1965
Originally running 234 minutes long and filmed in black-and-white CinemaScope, Popioly is Andrzej Wajda’s Western-style war epic. The screenplay is based on the novel Popioly by Stefan Zeromski and adapted by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski. Set in the early 19th century, the story concerns the Polish legion led by General Dombrowski (Daniel Olbrychski), who fought on the side of Napoleon Bonaparte (Janusz Zakrzenski).

5.Everything For Sale, 1969
Polish director Andrej Wajda’s portrait of life on a movie set, which is disrupted (although not that much) when the leading man is killed in a leap from a moving train. It seems that the temperamental, unreliable star was always late anyway, so the shooting goes on without him, his character’s absence being explained away in the script by the irked filmmakers. In the meantime, the performer’s wife and mistress join forces to find out what’s happened to him, as nobody has bothered to notify them of their lover’s demise. Wajda’s film was an homage to actor Zbigniew Cybulski, who worked with the director frequently in the 1950s and had been killed in an accident the previous year.

6.Landscape After Battle
Based on the writings of Tadeusz Borowski, a child survivor of Auschwitz who committed suicide at 29, this is the story of two concentration camp survivors. A sensitive young poet is approached by a pretty Jewish girl with a plan to move to the West. Fueled by hatred over his experience in prison, he is reluctant to go and seeks revenge on his former captors. His hatred of the Germans prevents him from realizing the girl has fallen in love with him. The woman is accidentally shot by an American soldier, causing the poet to cry for the first time in years. He must reckon with his past and is finally awakened to the feelings that allowed his initial creativity that was suppressed by his Nazi captors.

7.The Wedding, 1973
Adapted from Stanislaw Wyspianski’s turn-of-the-century play, The Wedding, or Wesele embodies a poetic exploration of Polish society in a crucial period during the mid-19th century when Poland had disappeared as a nation and was split three ways. Drenched in specifically Polish symbolism, it is not an easy film to understand. Much of the dialogue is in verse, the actors are made up in an exaggerated fashion indicating their mythical status, and the scenes are filmed in a hallucinatory style. The tale – based on real events – concerns the wedding of an intellectual poet and a peasant girl from Bronowice. At an ever-stranger celebratory gathering, the bridegroom’s friends dance, imbibe spirits, and mourn Poland’s subdivision into Prussia, Austria and Russia. The groom, his artist friend and a belletrist are visited by spirits from Poland’s past; later, a prophet charges the bridegroom with responsibility to “arm the peasants and prepare for a revolution,” though his words are then unveiled as a ruse. Variety wrote of the film, “Average audiences will be hard-pressed to piece together all the different threads and illusions… it is beyond non-Polish comprehension… though… [it is] beautifully filmed and acted.”

8.Promised Land, 1975
At the turn of the century, Lodz, Poland was a quick-paced manufacturing center for textiles, replete with cutthroat industrialists and unsafe working conditions. Three young friends, a Pole, a Jew and a German, pool their money together to build a factory. The movie follows their ruthless pursuit of fortune.

9.Young Girls of Wilko, 1979
Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda directs the psychological drama Panny z Wilka (released in the U.S. as The Young Girls of Wilko), based on the book by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz. Set in the 1920s, WWI veteran Wiktor Ruben (Daniel Olbrychski) returns to the town where he had spent his childhood summers before the war. He stays with his aunt (Zofia Jaroszewska) and uncle (Tadeusz Bialoszczynski). He also reunites with a family of women: Julcia (Anna Seniuk), Jola (Maja Komorowska), Zosia (Stanislawa Celinska), Kazia (Krystyna Zachwatowicz), and Tunia (Christine Pascal). Panny z Wilka was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in the 1980 Academy Awards.

10.Sweet Rush, 2009
Polish heavyweight director Andrzej Wajda helms this unusual, way-offbeat project, whose complicated backstory explains the complex structure on hand. Ostensibly the tale of a middle-aged woman who grows obsessed with a much younger man in the years following World War II, while facing her own impending death at the same time, the film reached mid-production when lead actress Krystyna Janda lost her beloved husband to a terminal illness and began to work through the grief. Hit by creative inspiration, Wajda decided to modify the film by superimposing Janda’s reading of a deeply intimate, confessional monologue onto the filmed material, thus commenting pointedly on the original work.

FULL FILMOGRAPHY
01 Zly chlopiec (1950) aka The Bad Boy
02 Ceramika ilzecka (1951) aka The Pottery at Ilza
03 Kiedy ty spisz (1952) aka While You’re Asleep
04 Ide do slonca (1955) aka I Walk in the Sun
05 Pokolenie (1955) aka A Generation
06 Kanal (1957) aka Canal
07 Popiól i diament (1958) aka Ashes and Diamonds
08 Lotna (1959)
09 Niewinni czarodzieje (1960) aka Innocent Sorcerers
10 Sibirska Ledi Magbet (1961)
11 Samson (1961)
12 Amour à vingt ans, L’ (1962) (segment “Warsaw”) aka Love at Twenty
13 Popioly (1965) aka The Ashes
14 Przekladaniec (1968) aka Roly Poly
15 Gates to Paradise (1968)
16 Wszystko na sprzedaz (1969) aka Everything for Sale
17 Polowanie na muchy (1969) aka Hunting Flies
18 Krajobraz po bitwie (1970) aka Landscape After Battle
19 Brzezina (1970) aka The Birch Wood
20 Pilatus und andere – Ein Film für Karfreitag (1972) aka Pilate and Others
21 Wesele (1973) aka The Wedding
22 Ziemia obiecana (1975) aka The Promised Land
23 Smuga cienia (1976) aka The Shadow Line
24 Umarla klasa (1977) aka Dead Class
25 Czlowiek z marmuru (1977) aka Man of Marble
26 Zaproszenie do wnetrza (1978)
27 Bez znieczulenia (1978) aka Rough Treatment
28 ‘Pogoda domu niechaj bedzie z Toba…’ (1979)
29 Panny z Wilka (1979) aka Young Girls of Wilko
30 Dyrygent (1980) aka Orchestra Conductor
31 “Z biegiem lat, z biegiem dni…” (1980)
32 Czlowiek z zelaza (1981) aka Man of Iron
33 Danton (1983)
34 Liebe in Deutschland, Eine (1983) aka A Love in Germany
35 Kronika wypadków milosnych (1986) aka Chronicle of Love Affairs
36 Français vus par, Les (1988) aka The Cowboy and the Frenchman
37 Possédés, Les (1988) aka The Possessed
38 Korczak (1990)
39 Schuld und Sühne (1992) (TV)
40 Pierscionek z orlem w koronie (1993) aka The Ring with a Crowned Eagle
41 Nastasja (1994)
42 Wielki tydzien (1995) aka Holy Week
43 Panna Nikt (1996) aka Miss Nobody
44 Pan Tadeusz (1999) aka Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania
45 Wyrok na Franciszka Klosa (2000) aka The Condemnation of Franciszek Klos
46 Lekcja polskiego kina (2002) aka The Lesson of Polish Cinema
47 Zemsta (2002) aka The Revenge
48 Solidarnosc, Solidarnosc … (2005) (segment “Man of Hope”)
49 Katyn (2007)
50 Tatarak (2009)

FILMS SEEN SO FAR
Pottery At Ilza, 1951, 7/10
*A Generation, 1955, 5/10
Kanal, 1957, 8/10
Ashes and Diamonds, 1958, 9/10
Lotna, 1959, 8/10
Innocent Sorcerers, 1960, 7/10
Samson, 1961, 8/10
the Ashes, 1965, 10/10
Roly Poly, 1968, 7/10
Everyone For Sale, 1969, 9/10
Silver Birch, 1970, 7/10
Landscape After Battle, 1970, 10/10
Wesele, 1973, 8/10
Promised Land, 1975, 9/10
Man of Marble, 1977, 6/10
Young Girls of Wilko, 1979, 9/10
the Conductor, 1980, 7/10
Danton, 1983, 6/10
Korczak, 1990, 8/10
Zemsta, 2002, 4/10
Katyn, 2007, 8/10
Tartarak, 2009, 7/10

FILMS TO SEE
Siberian Lady Macbeth, 1961
Gates To Paradise, 1968
Hunting Flies, 1969
Rough Treatment, 1978
Man of Iron, 1981
A Love In Germany, 1983
the Possessed, 1988
Holy Week, 1995
Miss Nobody, 1998