| |
view contents
chapter samples
Preface
Foreword
by Andrzej Wajda
reviews
'A rewardingly wide-ranging book, with excellent translations seamlessly
weaving the Polish contributions together with the English ones.
This book examines, amongst other things, what Wajda has fought
for in his films, and the means by which he has done so. It reveals
enough about Polish history, politics and culture to be read by
non-specialists, as well as about Wajda’s films in particular,
to be of interest to experts.
There are key themes which recur throughout this book, Polish history,
literary adaptations and Freudian interpretations. An important
strand running through the volume looks at Wajda’s treatment
of Polish-Jewish issues. It has a great deal to offer anyone with
even a passing interest in Wajda.'
Milena Michalski, The Slavonic East European
Review
'The most comprehensive and multifaceted compilation
on Wajda’s
filmmaking published in English … A desideratum for anyone
drawn to Wajda's films or Polish cinema in general.'
Renata Murawska, Macquarie University
‘Collected
articles that address the progress of the Lifetime Achievement
Oscar-winning filmmaker's aesthetical development under and away
from the strictures of the Communist Party. Wajda, a major auteur
of Polish cinema since his graduation from the famous Film School
in Lodz in the 1950s, managed to continue producing world-class
films despite government censorship, martial law, and the shift
to a capitalist commercialism in the 1990s. While Wajda's career
spans the ebb and flow of political censorship and the nation's
economic hardships, there are several constants that characterize
the filmmaker's aesthetic. A majority of his films are based
on the Polish literary canon, they appeal to the eye due to Wajda's ‘cinepainting’ camera,
and they are grounded in the post-war Polish School's inclinations
to confront local history while addressing social and moral problems.
Like the major defining cultural trait of the Polish soul, Wajda's
films can be called romantic-expressive, regardless of the adaptive
stylistic variations they encompass within the movements of Poland's
national and cultural history.
The enlightening Foreword of the book was written by the director
in 2001 and offers insights into his ideas about the positioning
of his films in a Polish national cinema, the influence of American
films, as well as what his films might offer future generations
of Polish filmmakers. Polish artists who reaped the benefits
of state-supported financing for their projects, while avoiding
the blades of communist party censors, must now face the commercial
marketplace of advancing philistinism that accompanies the democratized
box office. As Wajda states: 'The intelligentsia is in retreat.
The ethos of the intelligentsia is disappearing', while expressing
some nostalgia for the Polish cinema that 'was born only to speak
about the disasters of this nation'. He bequeaths his cinematic
accomplishments to the future ‘barbarians’ who will
make the European world 'young and healthy', thus making his
films worthwhile because the youth 'will learn our language,
fall in love with our past and our culture … [to] create
beautiful Polish art'. Clearly, Wajda's ‘beauty’ reflects
a romantic vision.
As the editors point out in the Preface, Wajda has been able
to 'harness different traditions of realism, romanticism, and
modernist reflexivity in forging a coherent filmic vision of
his native country and its modern predicament'. Nationalism provided
the cornerstone for much of the country's art due to its centuries-old
struggle against repeated imperialistic interlopers on either
side of the shifting Polish borders. This sort of public and
political responsibility would seem to stifle artistic imagination.
Instead, Poland has succeeded in producing at least two major
filmmakers of genius, adding Polanski to the pantheon Wajda occupies,
in addition to its canon of Nobel laureates in literature. There
exists, also, the dramatic theory of Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theater
to impress non-Polenphiles. Some would add Kieslowski to Wajda's
pantheon along with Polanski, raising the number of Polish cinematic
geniuses on global screens to three. It would seem that the Polish
mind thrives on adversity and the near insurmountable pressures
wrought by adapting to shifting political winds. Polish nationalism
is as inescapable as the nation's history for Wajda and the rest;
nevertheless, national cinema in Poland, as in the rest of Europe,
faces globalization, with Hollywood's influence gaining even
more dominance.
John Orr's essay, 'At the Crossroads: Irony and Defiance in the
films of Andrzej Wajda', introduces the novice and intermediate
reader to Polish cinema's ties with Poland's history as artfully
revisited in Wajda's films. Perhaps the primary irony comes from
the benefits that artists reaped from the Polish communist state,
which provided free higher education and supported the artistic
intelligentsia. For example, grand opera and the classics as
well as Polish folk traditions were the birthrights of, and made
available to, peasants as well as Party dignitaries. The stature
of the Film School of Lodz that graduated Wajda was an outcropping
from the State's belief in film as a higher art form than, say,
Hollywood's capitalist commercialism views it. There is further
irony in that Polish filmmakers must now compete, even locally,
with commercialism and Hollywood.
Wajda's most recent epic film, Pan Tadeusz (1999), addresses
this sort of competition from the notion of the legacy to the
younger generation of 'barbarians', as he calls them. Are they
barbarians, I wonder, because commercialism negates the necessary
idealism of their antecedents? What better legacy is there for
Polish cinema and its audience than Wajda's return to the nineteenth-century
Romanticism closest to the filmmaker's and Polish hearts! As
Orr points out, Wajda's 1999 film version of the Mickiewicz epic
poem confirms the filmmaker's continuing supremacy among his
peers, even after having 'cast aside the heavy cloak of defiance'.
Wajda's re-issuing of the more refined, higher resonances of
Polish culture found in Mickiewicz provides only one new model
for Polish National Cinema as it adapts to globalism. The idea
of being responsible for leaving a grand and elevated nationalistic
legacy becomes, then, so very characteristic of Wajda, making
obvious the auteur's sense of community responsibility by making
beautiful, but thoughtful, films. Michael Goddard's essay compares
how Grotowski's theatre and Wajda films re-inscribe the 'legacy
of Polish Romanticism and Symbolism in a contemporary context'.
Goddard conflates both directors' application of the Mickiewicz
legacy into a reduction constituting 'individual metamorphosis',
using Mickiewicz as their 'model for heroic subjectivity'.
Most of the essays in the book refer to Pan Tadeusz,
Wajda's romantic 'aesthetic renewal' and reflection of the 'deep
harmony
in the order of things' while discussing his oeuvre of films.
Orr points out that Wajda managed to create a masterpiece (a
touchstone for the book's discussions of his other films) nearing
the end of his career. In doing so, Wajda succeeded in resolving
the weaknesses found in Ryszard Ordynski's 1928 version that
coincided with the tenth anniversary of Polish independence.
Though popular with audiences, the Ordynski adaptation was criticized
for trivializing the Mickiewicz poem and for its lack of originality.
Wajda distances himself from the postcolonial deconstruction
of the Polish gentry's world even as his Pan Tadeusz coincides
with the tenth year of Poland's post-communist political transformation.
Lisa Di Bartolomeo's essay discusses Wajda's successful adaptation
process for the film, while Izabela Kalinowska's essay looks
at exile, homeland, and Wajda's romantic vision as the potential
for a retrograde move toward colonial ideals. She rightly points
out the contradictions built into the modern adaptation of nineteenth-century
history – adaptations that are filled with reversals of
Poland's imperialistic past.
Tadeusz Lubelski's essay discusses the auteur's reflexivity in
Everything For Sale (1968), a film about making a film
on the heels of the European New Wave. Lubelski properly identifies
the role of the author-characters in the film as 'therapeutic',
serving as 'guardians of the Romantic myth of origins' who invite
the audience to 'participate in a communal ritual … to
recognize the community's identity'. Lubelski's essay provides
a contrasting comparison to the Parisian salon scene in Pan
Tadeusz where Mickiewicz, the exiled author, reads the 'vivid
and radiant myth of Poland' to an audience of emigres severed
from
the Polish-Lithuania world in which the Mickiewicz plot is set.
Kalinowska describes an event in Connecticut where Polish-Americans
wept for and cheered Wajda's film and the traditions of the Polish
gentry so characteristic of Polish culture. Lithuanians, as well
as Ukranians, nevertheless experienced the Poles on their soil
as colonizers. Lithuanians viewing the film could be neither
as distant nor unattached as the audience in the Parisian salon,
nor would they cry with nostalgia for the lost ‘Polish’ homeland
Mickiewicz idealizes. Such are the paradoxes built into a worldview
that Wajda's Polish nationalism sublimates.
Elzbieta Ostrowska's essay discusses the The Wedding (1972) – Wajda's
adaptation of the Stanislaw Wyspanski play – and other
more obscure Wajda films for the benefit, perhaps, of a non-Pole
audience with less access to Wajda's entire film catalogue. She
evokes a sensuality within the 'spiritual metaphor of Polishness'
and the moral duty to motherland. It is also satisfying to read
about A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents (1986), a beautiful
film with its haunting 'idyllic' images of a wedding-suicide
pact involving a schoolboy enamoured of a school girl whose military
father opposes the relationship. As Ostrowska points out, 'the
destructive influence of History is often to blame' for the absence
of contented love in Wajda's films. This mirrors a ubiquitous
theme in Polish culture and art: the abrupt graduation from youthful
innocence to adult communal responsibility caused by war or social
conflict. While the purpose of Wajda's defiance has been exhausted,
any artistic reflection upon the historic past cannot escape
its irony.
The coverage of Wajda's films in the book is not far from being
comprehensive, thanks to the editors and the expertise of the
other contributors – all being academics or critics from
Europe and the United States. The articles reference many of
his films, while offering varied and more extensive discussions
of those films which received wider distribution. The bibliography
provides useful titles for research into the work of a filmmaker
about whom discussion could never be exhausted … There
is little lacking in The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda. Some
of the most fascinating, but minor threads of discussion include
the strategies Wajda used to avoid communist party censorship,
as well as on the relationships and influences of the producers
and cinematographers with whom Wajda collaborated to make his
films.’
Hedwig Gorski, www.film-philosophy.com
books of related interest
Cinema
of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European
Film
Hungarian Cinema: From
Coffee House to Multiplex
The Red and the White: The Cinema of People's Poland
The Czechoslovak New Wave
Crossing
New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie
The Cinema
of Central Europe
The Cinema of the Balkans
The Cinema of Emir
Kusturica: Notes from the Underground
The Cinema of Ken Loach:
Art in the Service of the People
The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid
Highway
The Cinema of Kathryn
Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor
The Cinema of Robert
Lepage: The Poetics of Memory
The Cinema of George
A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead
The Cinema of Terrence
Malick: Poetic Visions of America
The Cinema of David Lynch:
American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
The Cinema of Krzysztof
Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance
The Cinema of Nanni
Moretti: Dreams and Diaries
The Cinema of Mike Leigh:
A Sense of the Real
The Cinema of John
Carpenter: The Technique of Terror
The Cinema of Roman
Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World
The Cinema of Todd Haynes:
All That Heaven Allows
The Cinema of Steven
Spielberg: Empire of Light
|
