15. March 2017

Retrospective: Andrzej Wajda

In the autumn of 2016, Andrzej Wajda, perhaps one of Poland’s most famous directors, who had been awarded the Golden Palm, the Golden Bear, the Golden Lion, the César, the European Film Prize and an Oscar, died at the age of 90. The splendid ‘journalist and poet, romanticist and analyst’ (DER SPIEGEL) worked almost until the end of his life. His last production, Afterimage,celebrated its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival only a few weeks before his death. Born in Suwałki in North-East Poland, Wajda first studied painting at the Kraków Academy of Arts and later turned to the National Film School in Łódź. His films not only tell stories, but also try to capture them, and some of his stories have even written history. Wajda was not only influential in Polish cinema and theatre; without him and his images, the freedom movement Solidarity, where he was senator from 1989 to 1991, would not have existed in the form it did. The Polish Film Institute declared his death a huge loss for the Polish culture. Grief over his death will linger for years to come. Stefan Laudyn, the long-time director of the international A-list Warsaw Film Festival and a profound expert on the life and work of Andrzej Wajda, chose five films which he considers to be the best movies of the unyielding national artist for LET’S CEE. The famous anti-war film Canal and the bitter-ironical drama Ashes and Diamonds take place before and directly after the end of the Second World War. In these films, Wajda, who himself had joined the resistance against the German occupation, raised the issue of the tragic fights of the partisans of the national Home Army. His great classics Man of Marble and Man of Iron were released more than two decades later and, with the help of numerous flashbacks, tell the drastic story of his country during the Stalinist and totalitarian era until the formation of the movement Solidarity. Only Innocent Sorcerers, taking place in the late 1950s during the post-war period, forgoes clear historic features by tracing a sensitively pictured and extraordinarily enacted love story. Nevertheless, this piece of art was highly praised by international critics and became a central piece of art of the Polish New Wave.

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