Special Season: May 7 - May 21

From Ashes to Iron: Andrzej Wajda

After losing his father in the 1939 Katyn massacre, Andrzej Wajda (1926-) survived WWII with his mother and brother in Nazi-occupied Poland. In 1946 he moved to Krakow where, after attending the Academy of Fine Arts to study painting, he turned his attentions to cinema. From 1950 to 1954 he studied directing at the elite Lodz Film School with peers Wojciech Has & Andrzej Munk. The school would later also intstruct Krzysztof Kieslowski & Roman Polanski, eventually coming to play a signifcant role in the major political & social transformations of Wajda's troubled homeland.

This season showcases a carefully selected cross-section of an incredible film-making trajectory, one which has earned the director life-time achievement awards from both the Berlin Film Festival (2006) & The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (2000) - recognition for an amazing ability to consistently adapt to the political, cultural & aesthetic shifts to his audience both in Poland & internationally. These films have been chosen to illustrate the genius of a director able to create crucially specific Polish cinema that speaks to any audience with hunger for the artful rendering of polical interrogation.

This season of specially imported 35mm prints provides an important introduction to the key aspects of Wajda's cinema, moving from his widely celebrated trilogy on Polish Resistance & the last years of WWII (Kanal,, Ashes & Diamonds), through his extraordinary revisions of Polish history & national identity (Landscape After Battle, The Wedding) to the stirrings of the Solidarity movement (Man of Marble).

Message from Andrez Wajda

Dear Friends of Polish Cinema,

It has been my life-long wish to visit Australia, a country with such close ties to Polish cinema through the person of Jerzy Toeplitz, Director of the Polish Film School in Łódź, who was also responsible for educating many Australian cinema professionals. [Toeplitz was foundation Director of the Australian Film, TV and Radio School].

Unfortunately, life is too short to be able to go wherever interesting and important events are happening. In connection with the film Katyń I have recently visited several countries which were interested in the film. However, due to my state of health my doctors have counselled me against journeying farther afield.

The selection of my films to be shown here, from Kanał [1956] to Landscape after the Battle [1970], seems to me to be particularly successful due to the films’ stylistic coherence as well as their subject matter. These films provide a survey of a cinematic output which reflects the enormously significant fact that the subject matter of Polish films was dependent entirely on the continually-changing Polish political situation. This situation allowed me in 1959 to make Ashes and Diamonds, however after the political Man of Marble [1977], only the psychological film, Les demoiselles de Wilko [1979], was possible. The transposition into film of the national classic of Polish Theatre, [Wyspiański’s] The Wedding [1973] was subjected to numerous instances of censorship.

For me these years were therefore a struggle for my very existence in Polish cinema. I searched around for various subjects knowing that political cinema requires the right timing. This enabled me to bring to the screen Aleksander Ścibor Rylski’s screenplay for Man of Marble a full 12 years after it had been written and, moreover, to get the film released, although it proved impossible to present it at any international film festival due to opposition from the government and the Communist Party.

It is clear that these facts have no meaning for today’s viewer, who watches the films many years after they were made.

In making these remarks I am not attempting to defend the artistic or political intentions of the films. They arose as a voice of Polish cinema which addresses not only its own audience but also the wider world in the hope that Poland has something important to say to other societies.

Andrzej Wajda, Warszawa, 18 April 2008

* information in square brackets added by Irena Zdanowicz

May 7 - 7:00pm

Kanal

Andrzej Wajda (1956) 95 mins

The 2nd of Wajdaís intense War trilogy is a stark & moving depiction of the Dantesque descent of partisans into the claustrophobic sewers of Warsaw to escape the Nazis during the September 1944 uprising. Deftly mixing poetry & realism, & providing an extraordinary portrait of a country scarred by the horrors of war, this is a key film of the New Polish cinema, & winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.