Polish season

When a country literally disappears off the map for more than a century, how can
its identity be sustained? By its language and its art. This has been the case for
Poland, whose lack of statehood led to a rich tradition of the artist as a figure of
spiritual leadership and moral authority.

Poland’s filmmakers are part of this noble context, their movies less concerned with
simply entertaining than with providing a unifying mirror. Polish films have demonstrated a dazzling blend of visual mastery and thematic questioning, whether the backdrop is World War II (Ashes and Diamonds and Photographer), post-war Stalinism (Wojciech Marczewski’s Shivers), stifling Communism (Escape from the Liberty Cinema), or the impoverished – spiritually as well as materially – post Communist world (Retrieval).

Poland’s most revered and inspirational cinematic poet is Krzysztof Kieslowski, thanks to such probing works as The Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique, and Three Colours.

The best of the Polish motion pictures explore heroism with a combination of tragedy
and (increasingly) irony. George Bernard Shaw once said there were three tragic nations – the Jews, the Irish and the Poles. Indeed, Polish cinema reflects the tragedy of a yearning (“tesknota” is the evocative Polish word) especially for romantic heroism.

Its greatest directors – including Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Zanussi,
and Kieslowski – have explored the lack of an appropriate context for traditional heroism, as well as the inability of any one character to be called the sole hero. Ashes and Diamonds, Knife in the Water, and Camouflage are brilliant examinations of symbiosis: their antagonists have more in common than what separates them. Moreover, cynicism and idealism are shown to exist in a dynamic relationship within individuals, and within society.

Ashes and Diamonds (which has been cited as an inspirational film by directors including Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola) is arguably the greatest film ever made about the transition from war to peace. Through the character of Maciek (played by Zbigniew Cybulski, known as the “Polish James Dean”), Wajda explored the tension between individual and state, obedience and self-renewal, collective responsibility and personal voice.

“ Polish films have demonstrated a dazzling blend of visual
mastery and thematic questioning.”

Wajda put Polish film on the map in the late 1950s, evolving a cinematic style of tension and audacity. By the time his Man of Iron won the Golden Palm at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival, Wajda was recognized as one of the most visually, politically and morally vigorous filmmakers in the world.

Some of the credit must go to the Lodz Film School, from which Wajda, Polanski,
Zanussi, Kieslowski and others graduated. But each of these major directors created a
different style as well as area of cinematic inquiry. Even if many were lumped together by the term “The Cinema of Moral Anxiety,” Polanski’s mordant satire is as far from Zanussi’s philosophical rumination as Julius Machulski’s sci-fi comedy is from Kieslowski’s questioning of fate, chance and free will.

There is a haunting quality to Kieslowski’s Veronique, as two women (beautifully played by Irene Jacob) seem connected by invisible strings. Equally haunting is the duality explored throughout Photographer, namely between the past of the Lodz Ghetto – captured in 400 colour slides taken by the Ghetto's accountant – and the present-day emptiness of the same city.

It’s no surprise that this brilliant documentary was made by Dariusz Jablonski, who had
been Kieslowski’s assistant on The Decalogue. In Escape from the Liberty Cinema, Marczewski pays homage to Purple Rose of Cairo, playing – like Woody Allen – with the notion of a screen becoming a window: the film is no longer determined and self-contained, but open to the participation of viewers AND actors, who are free. Escape from the Liberty Cinema suggests that artists must lead the way to freedom, both internal and external.

Annette Insdorf, Director of Undergraduate Film Studies, Columbia University;
Author of “Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski”