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| Poster for A Generation (Andrzej Wajda, 1954) |
The postwar decades in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, can be divided into three distinct periods*.
1949-56 The imposition of a totalitarian Stalinism involving the suppression of the avant-garde periods in art history and film and the aggressive endorsement of the ‘official art’: a template of social realism imposed through total state control of production and exhibition.
1956-68 The Stalinist “Thaw” marked by some regional liberalisation (Poland 1956-60, the Prague Spring 1963-8, Yugoslavia 1956-61, Hungary after 1963) in respect of theme and style in films, alternating with Russian military suppression ( Hungary 1956 and of the Prague Spring in 1968). A borderline phenomena between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ art : the aesthetic rehabilitation of the historical avant garde; some penetration of Western influences. The emergence of a new generation of filmmakers born in the 1930s: the Czech and Hungarian New Waves with more films achieving international acclaim and distribution ; the ‘silencing’ of the ‘Polish School’ 1963-71. The sixties was a ‘golden age’ for Yugoslavia’s multinational film industry. Bulgarian cinema experienced its first period of growth to maturity, 1956-65, of a national ‘cinema of poetics’, “finding its audience via the image rather than than the word”.
1968-80. “Convergence and divergence” involving the co-existence and various ideological and aesthetic strategies in the art scene with intense artistic developments in major cities after 1968. Perspectives for new positions in international art and awareness of the avant garde with occasional situations of subversive dissident filmmaking. Continuous interest in historical topics, often as allegories. Mass production of mediocre and socially correct socialist dramas and comedies marking the split between art for international circulation and entertainment for domestic consumption. The beginning of the seventies heralded a breakthrough for “native thematic material” in the Bulgarian cinema, the state providing greater independence through the setting up of separate production units.
*Adapted from a summary by Dina Iordanova
Jerzy Kawalerowicz b.22 Wojciech Has (1975) b.25 Andrzej Munk b.25 Tadeusz Konwicki b.26 Andrzej Wajda (1964) b.29 Roman Polanski (1967) b.33 Jerzy Skolimowski (1970) b.38
Figure in brackets indicates year selected as one of International Film Guide’s 5 Directors of the Year
The Polish School under stress
The second half of the sixties was marked by a widespread groundswell for social and political change in the western world. This came early in Poland in 1956 with the October uprising marking the retreat of Stalinism followed by four years of creative freedom that had not existed anywhere in Eastern Europe since 1945. “In the arts the principles of socialist realism were rejected, replaced by the aspiration for a “critical realism,” a renewal of questioning that had infused Polish ideological life through the 19th century” (Michalek & Turaj 28). Reforms introduced in July 1955 created self governing film-makers' production units with a degree of autonomy in decision-making. A modern Polish cinema was born with its own style, its own themes, its own spiritual and aesthetic identity known as “the Polish School' 1956-60. “Once put to retreat, socialist realism, “schematism,” disappeared quickly.” It had been in full operation in 1949 but did not have the staying power in Poland that it continued to have in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. “The mood in Poland supported a new liveliness in the arts,” 1955 being the milestone year (ibid 15).
Challenging films, including those with avant garde tendencies, were no longer proscribed. “A subjective approach diametrically opposed to socialist realism reigned supreme to an increasing degree. […] Polish directors approached reality more and more through the main character or characters, sometimes identifying directly with them.” (Liehm 181). Jan Rybkowski was inspired to advance a changed point of view in Godziny nadziei / The Hours of Hope (1955) in a story set in Germany when war is about to become peace creating “a climate of hope as well as one of disillusionment” (Michael & Turaj 15).
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| Andrzej Wajda |
The “true auteurs” were Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016) and Andrzej Munk (1925-61). Wajda's work from A Generation(1954), his first feature, to Danton (1982) which he made in France, can be summed up as nearly three decades of fused irony and defiance installing him as a national figure in Poland who defied labelling as a realist, modernist or romantic in his on-going concern with the pitfalls and agonies of national identity (Orr 2-3). Pokolenie/ A Generation (1955), as Nowell-Smith points out, is politically orthodox basically adhering to the proscriptions of socialist realism in ascribing the leading role in the resistance to the communists with the hero developing political consciousness as the story develops (New Wave 65). Both The Hours of Hope and A Generation were nevertheless accused of imitating Italian neo-realism drawn into an on-going conflict in which neo-realism was accused of deep pessimism residing in naturalism’s tendency to dwell on the grimness of life while not foretelling victory of the proletariat in the class struggle (M&T 16)..
The second film in the trilogy is formally more adventurous in its romanticism most of the action taking place in the sewers under Warsaw with Wajda shedding some new light on the tragic national legend of the 1944 Warsaw uprising in Kanal / Canal (1957) showing how the participants were destroyed by conflicting forces. The writer Jerzy Stawinski's rationalism - he saw the absurdity of the military uprising played out before the waiting Soviet army - “dissolved into Wajda's romanticism and fateful tragedy” to take a more sympathetic view of the nationalist underground army than had previously been politically possible (Liehm 178; McArthur ).
While a complex neo-romanticism can be seen to arise from the Polish romantic tradition in Wajda's cinema, the aesthetics that departs from that legacy can arguably be found in the work of Munk, Has, Borowczyk and Skolimowski (M.Goddard 144, Orr ed.). Munk the ironist, in Zezowate Szeście/ Cock-eyed Luck (1960) is “often farcical and sometimes bitterly realistic in the mixture of various conventions from silent movies to socialist realism” (Michael & Turaj 124). On release it was popular with the public but critically controversial in the satire of political and social conformity, important for contributing to the national debate about history and patriotism with a view parallel to that of prominent writer Witold Gombriewicz attracting strong official criticism (ibid).
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| Ashes and Diamonds |
In the third film of Wadja’s trilogy, Popoli I diament/ Ashes and Diamonds (1958), based on Jerzy Andrzejewski's controversial novel written in 1948, it is evident that the Polish resistance was split into Communist and non-Communist (the Home Army) factions, capturing the hopelessness of so-called “moments of truth” through the prism of the war's official end. Ashes and Diamonds is symptomatic of the films of this period in portraying the tragedy of postwar Poland still torn with internal dissension brought to light in all its ambiguity. Set on the first day of peace with Zbigniew Cybulski as Maciek the young resistance fighter in the anti-communist Home Army which had fought against both the Soviets and the Germans without official recognition. Against Social Realist convention, Wajda and Cybulski extend to Maciek the ambiguous status of tragic anti-hero with a persona resembling Marlon Brando. He has to decide whether to carry out what is a pointless directive to murder an ageing Communist functionary, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War whose son, like his assassin, is a member of the nationalist army. The personal story of Pole facing Pole is set against the reality of postwar Poland, an expressionist vision blending with complex symbolism in Wajda's on-going sense, both romantic and ironic, after centuries of denial of Poland’s full nationhood.
The cast of characters in the trilogy relate to each other in the ways in which a cross section of Polish society is presented. In Ashes and Diamonds, “communist and non-communist, aristocrat and worker, old bourgeois and new party bureaucrat” are shown dancing a sad polonaise at the end [of the film] while outside the old Communist is being murdered.”(McArthur)
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| Andrzej Munk |
Munk was even more controversial with Eroica (1957), an ironic summing up of the national mythology. in the two separate stories comprising the film. “Reality is seen in Munk’s films through the eyes of his characters, imprisoned in certain unmistakable environments that symbolise their lack of freedom - the railway station in Man on the Track (1956), Warsaw of the uprising and the prison camp in Eroica , the mountain in The Blue Cross (1955), and the concentration camp in The Passenger” (Liehm 176).
Munk died in a car accident after finishing the Auschwitz sequences of the The Passenger in September 1961. Colleagues decided to let the public see the assembled footage as it was made with an added narrative commentary leaving the meaning of the strange relationship between the two women - captor and victim in extreme circumstances - unresolved, subject only to Munk’s sternness in the creation of the background, the death camp, “a calculated coldness that by its very nature horrifies more than a portrayal in which the director’s sympathies are apparent.” Munk creates “an ambivalent rather than a clear picture from the moral point of view [… ] the effect is not to excuse anything but to go deeper into what happened in this case between two people […] a search for motivations governing human behaviour” (M&T 127).
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| Eroica |
In 1958 Polish films gathered 15 awards at various international festivals. The next step was a change of theme to contemporary life.The end of the 50s in Poland, as well as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, saw a deterioration in relations between artists and government which by 1960 had gradually silenced dissent. Wajda managed to complete, without making concessions, Niewinni czarnodzieje/ The Innocent Sorcerers (1960) a film about young people co-scripted with Lodz film school graduate, Jerzy Skolimowski. The finished work was severely criticised by the authorities. The period of freedom from the strictures of socialist realism had been short lived. In what was referred to as a ‘small stabilisation’ the Politburo closed down the ‘Polish School’ in 1960 after it was attacked by Party authorities. This introduced a decade of harsh administration along ideological lines resulting in the relative stagnation of Polish film production through the 60s.
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| Polish poster for Everything for Sale |
Following the success of the war trilogy plus Lotna (1959) both in Poland and in establishing his international reputation, Wajda averaged almost one feature a year through the sixties despite their varying success with the public and critics while being subject to more or less ongoing political flak from the bureaucracy. His one fully engaged work at this time was the reflexive Wsystko na sprzedaz/ Everything for Sale (1967) described as “adhering to the New Wave model of authorship” from his own screenplay following the void left by the untimely accidental death of Zbigniew Cybulski - he was to have played the main role. Wadja redirected the film to be about the fact of the young actor's death. “There was nothing about the Polish cause […] it is quite different from anything he'd done before […] It does link with the theme of generations which he and Cybulski had explored together before.” Originally it was intended that Skolimowski would play the role of the director in which Andrezj Łapicki was finally cast. The filmmaker in the film has no doubts concerning one issue: cinema has to be reinvented” (Lubelski ed.Orr 33). Stylistically it was a new departure. Scenes that dramatise the production of the film overlap with actual scenes of the film being produced, interspersed with documentary footage (Cybulski's funeral) and real comments and observations made by Cybulski's friends and some fans. In comparison with Wajda’s previous work, Everything for Sale could be seen as “a kind of ragged conversation about death and other things seen retrospectively, a rumination about past and present and what fact and fiction have in common, and also a record, an inclusive filmmaking experiment “that is also a remarkable achievement” (Michatek & Turaj 144).
The end put to the Polish School by the Gomulka government meant the 60s was a bleak decade of “silence” especially for Polish art cinema. As noted, Wajda continued to make films it would seem, too often without conviction, as 'experiments'. In mid-decade he involved himself again with the encounter between humanity and history. In Popioly/ Ashes (1965) his inspiration was a neo-romantic novel by Stefan Zeromski, centred historically on the Poles allying themselves with Napoleon in the hope of regaining their statehood from Russia, Prussia and Austria. This allowed Wajda to embrace “as the stable character of his films: the freedom fighter who is left disillusioned and sceptical by his struggle, but seems to retain his nobility” (Liehm 369). A tragic role is played by Polish patriots “fighting for their own freedom only to end up suppressing the freedom of others.” The size and scope of the production was huge and attracted much attention including some of the finest sequences Wajda ever filmed , such as the capture of Saragossa. But the philosophy attracted “profound disapproval,” Wajda finding himself again under attack (ibid).
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| Landscape After Battle |
Wajda's “finest film of the decade,” Krajobraz po bitwie/ Landscape after Battle (1970), marked his return to high seriousness, the great Polish problems and the atmosphere of despair. Based on the novel of “an extraordinary writer,” Tadeusz Borowski, who survived a boyhood in Auschwitz, 'The Battle of Grumwald’, is set in an American displaced person’s camp in Germany in 1945. The main theme is still “the Polish character” but in line with the novel the film is “complex and ambiguous in its presentation of the hero and the other inmates of the camp” (Micatek & Turaj 146).
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| Wojciech Has |
Wojciech Has (1925-2000) was most prolific in the 60s. He was an individualist not associated with any group or movement (Michael & Turaj 39). His fifth feature Juk być kochanq/ How to be Loved (1963), a psychological drama divided into two sections is about an actress on a flight from Paris after the war recalling life under Nazi Occupation - the suffering, love, disappointment, and disaster. Carefully directed by Has is “a consummate performance by Barbara Kraft.” What emerges through personal pieces of biography is “an historical picture comparable to that of the Polish School.” (ibid). In his second feature Pozegnania/ Farewells (1958), “had concentrated on the atmosphere of uncertainty and despair in Poland in 1939 when people, traditions, objects, memories, and relationships were doomed. An obtrusive tone of nostalgia for something that perhaps never existed imbues Farewells with an unusual sensuous fascination” (Liehm 183). Has made his break from more intimate drama into grand historical mode with an extraordinary original period piece, a surrealist drama, the Buñuelian Recopis znaieziony w Saragossie/ The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), “was a super production in every way […] the story takes place nowhere except in the tale” (M&T 39), a collection of fantastical tales dating back to 1815, inspired by the Decameron and Arabian Nights based on what is apparently an equally extraordinary 19th century Polish novel written in French by a Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki who viewed literature as an intellectual game. “Clearly Has was not going to be involved with the main themes of Polish cinema...He chose a separate and private route for his expression” (ibid 33).
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| Jerzy Kawalerowicz directing Pharoah |
The last significant films of the Polish School were made by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (1922-2007) who rarely touched the great problems of Poland’s national existence; “he dealt with universal and diversified themes, while going through a number of stylistic metamorphoses” (ibid 94). In his fifth feature Pociag/ Night Train (1959) Kawalerowicz shows how formal mastery in staging a one night train journey through mise-en-scène, can atmospherically transform the spatial restrictions of a seemingly conventional melodrama into a different reality, suspicion transforming peaceful passengers into a hateful mob who then return to the smothering normality on a journey whose goals are unclear. “No other film has been so adept at creating the impression of nihilism. This film journey brings no resolution...except the diffusion of self and the coming of emptiness” (Frank Guido, 'Cinema nuouo' 1960). Kovács describes Night Train “as a spectacular break with the dilemma between romantic heroism and everyday realism” the former continuing to dominate the wartime genre films as in Wajda’s Lotna released in the same year. When it opened, Night Train was dismissed as banal, empty, and pretentious by most Polish critics, “still under the spell of what they saw as great national themes”. Elsewhere in Europe it was more widely recognised as “something quite new in its subtle themes and form, something masterful” (Michatek & Turaj 102). Kovács concludes: that Polish cinema took its part in the general European emergence of modernism in 1959, was due to one director and his film Night Train (286).
The other film in which his thematic eclecticism and formal mastery is most evident, one of Kawalerowicz's last and best films on the theme of intolerance and dogmatism and the conflict between faith and love, Marka Joanna od Aniolów/ Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), is adapted from a novel by contemporary writer Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz sourced in the witchcraft trials at the Loudon Convent in France in the 17th Century. The witchcraft trials are also subject of a book by Aldous Huxley and numerous other works including Ken Russell's film The Devils (1971). The central relationship is between Mother Joan the possessed nun, and the exorcist Father Suryn. The initial coldness between them grows into something more sinful leading to the murder of two servants by the priest. This raises various questions including a possible exchange of souls to which there is no clear answer. The accompanying psychological tension and pain is palpably visualised by Kawalerowicz, his cameraman and art director, through the use of geometrical lines, black and white contrast, and horizontally tracking camera. Deepening allegory that destroys both inquisitors and victims, is further reinforced by the sound of the strangely echoing voices of singing nuns. Kawalerowicz felt that the subject imposed the visual form.
In his next film Faraon/ Pharaoh (1966), set in ancient Egypt (shot in Kazakhstan, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and the Lodz studio), based on a classic Polish novel written by Boleslaw Prus adapted by Konwicki (q.v.), was part of the trend towards super productions in a time of political restriction on contemporary subjects - it was made in the same year as Wajda's Ashes. In place of the spectacle of large events and set pieces (there is only one obligatory battle) with slow and majestic ballet-like narration “the characters using hieratic and ritual gestures conventionalized like the celebration of a mass” (M &T 106). The central concerns are with psychological, moral and philosophical problems wholly fictionalised in the novel. The young ruler, Rameses XIII, in the 9th century BC is fictional. His nobility of purpose is in strategic conflict with the experienced political cunning of the priests. The subject of the novel and the film is “the mechanism of power and the morality of politics” (ibid). Kawalerowicz’s films seemed to evolve one from another as M&T note (110) as in the theme of political power and morality from Pharaoh to a “remarkable historical docudrama,” Death of a President (1976), the director’s only immersion in Polish history, “without diminishing the elements of tension, suspense and story.”
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| Tadeusz Konwicki |
Tadeusz Konwicki (1926-2015) one of Poland's outstanding writers to have emerged since the war, turned to screenwriting in his original style - intelligent, witty and sceptical – attracting public attention. He co-directed Ostatni dzeri lata/ Last Day of Summer (1958) with Jan Laskowski on a miniscule budget with no crew, a cameraman and two actors in the period of freedom from socialist realism. Beneath the surface subject is a secondary theme which became central to Konwicki's later work: the emotional destruction wrought by the war on people described as being “contaminated by death.”
This underlying theme was further developed in Konwicki’s first full-scale feature Zaduszki/ All Soul's Day (1961) closer to the subjective approach, assuming tragic irony in Salto (1965) bringing to mind much of the tradition of Polish literature in the story of a man wearing dark glasses (Zbigniew Cybulski) who arrives in a small town where he surrounds himself in ambiguity with a different story for everyone, pretending he used to live there during the German occupation. The town is full of characters each claiming connection with him in some way, initially accepting him as a prophet. He succeeds in involving all in mystifying problems, comic and tragic, climaxing in teaching them a traditional dance called the salto - “full of symbols and relics of the Polish school” - in “a long metaphoric sequence” before he is rejected. “Polish critics welcomed Salto with enthusiasm as the first systematic demystification of the Polish character and the Polish wartime legend, even though the tragic undertone that resounds in Salto seems to indicate rather the opposite (Liehm 372).
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| Roman Polanski |
Roman Polanski's only Polish feature was Nóź w wodzie/ Knife in the Water (1962). Within the bounds of a realistic style, a power struggle with abstract connotations develops involving three people on a small yacht. The power struggle that develops assumes a more general social theme in the psychological duel between the self confident, dominant older man and the much younger hitchhiking stranger, the woman resilient in the face of male domination. The image of the younger generation projected in the film initially concerned the censors. The film attracted extraordinary attention in both Western Europe and the US, providing the impetus for Polanski to seek a film career outside Poland.
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| Jerzy Skolimowski |
Polanski's collaborator on the script of Knife in the Water was Jerzy Skolimowski who wrote and directed a stylistically radical semi-autobiographical trilogy, 1964-66, ‘the Leszcyc cycle’ in which he also plays the central character Andrezj Leszcyc in the first two: the last day as a student before army service in Rysopis:Identification Marks None, a boxer who has lost the will to win in Walkover, and a stand-in for himself as a radically non-conformist student in Bariera/ Barrier*. The poetically layered narrative unfolds with a “freewheeling improvisatory individualism” which Skolimowski described as “the mental landscape” expressive of Andrzej's distance from the cynical conformity of his generation's ambition. In this, Skolimowski was close to Konwicki (see above). Leszcyc returns in the similarly surreal-inflected Rece do góry!/ Hands Up!(1967), gathering with friends to celebrate their material success at the tenth anniversary of their graduation from tertiary college. The present gathering engages in an imagined reenactment in a cattle car of a kind of schematic nightmarish stage play representing a traumatic experience where real time is suspended (Iordanova 76). Flashbacks constitute Skolimowski's sharpest satire of Stalinist intolerance overlain by ironies in the present of “a society enclosed in a vicious circle” symbolised by the gesture of ‘hands up’, resulting in the film’s banning from public exhibition in Poland. Skolimowski in the words of the Liehms, “profoundly marked by the experience of Stalinism and by his own hatred of dogma,” chose to go into semi-permanent exile in 1968, one of the worst years for the Polish film industry outperformed by most European countries, locked in a ‘silence’ of politically imposed conformity.
Skolimowski’s quartet, Nowell-Smith describes as “a one-man bridge between the Polish School that seemingly fell apart in the early 1960s and the emergence of the ‘cinema of moral concern’ inaugurated by Krzysztof Zanussi, another Lodz graduate, whose first film, The Structure of Crystals, was released in 1969” ( ‘Making Waves’ 168).
* Surrealistically signified by the face of the actor playing Leszcyc wrapped in a poster of Skolimowski’s face when riding a chute on a case.
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Marek Hendrykowski, “East Central Europe” Oxford History of World Cinema 1996 Nowell-Smith ed.
Dina Iordanova Cinema of the Other Europe 2003
John Orr & Elzbieta Ostrowska eds. The Cinema of Andrej Wajda 2003
Boleslaw Michalek & Frank Turaj The Modern Cinema of Poland 1988
Ewa Mazierska Jerzy Skoklmowski The Cinema of a Nonconformist 2010
Bruce Hodsdon “Great Directors: Jerzy Skolimowski Senses of Cinema July 2003
Colin McArthur “Andrzej Wajda: Films from the Ashes” Movies of the Fifties ed. Ann Lloyd 1982
David Sterritt “Early Jerzy Skolimowski” Cineaste Fall 2024
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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links
Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more
Part Two - Defining Art Cinema
Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism
Part Four - Authorship and Narrative
Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles
Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror
Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke
Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms
Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE
Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry
6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group
6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent
6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard
6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel
6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice
6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson
6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati
6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer
6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti
6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One
6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism
6(20) - Rossellini in Australia
6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni
6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi
6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi
6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren
6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One
6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two
6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta
6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder
6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet
6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg
