Andrzej Wajda

[knives]

He takes out the references to Jews [/bad joke]

[MichaelB]

I'd forgotten that the other Wajda "director's cut" was a fair bit shorter!

But what baffles me is why this is happening just months after the world premiere - surely Wajda had final cut on the first version? It's hard to imagine anyone overruling him given that he's been the Grand Old Man of Polish cinema for decades now.

Annoyingly, it seems that neither the Polish DVD nor the BD have English subtitles (if anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to be wrong), and the British release has been delayed until June - I have seen the film, but several months ago, so I'm not sure I'd be able to spot any differences unless they're really glaring.

[Stephen]

Another titan falls. What a year.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37603756

[Mr Sausage]

Another titan falls. What a year.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37603756

Already being discussed here.

[L.A.]

Satyajit Ray interviews Andrzej Wajda at the 1965 Delhi Film Festival

[FrauBlucher]

TCM at 2AM est has the doc Wajda by Wajda scheduled followed by Ashes and Diamonds

[Calvin]

I've been making my way through the Polish Blu-Ray releases of Wajda's films and have just watched Chronicle of Amorous Accidents (Kronika wypadków milosnych), on which there is little English-language discussion to be found. The title is rather weighty for what is essentially a period romance between two high schoolers, set on the cusp of the breakout of war, that takes some Shakespearean turns but doesn't fully follow through with them. The film opens with a quote from Pan Tadeusz, which Wajda would later adapt in the 90s: "there is but one region in which there is a crumb of happiness for a Pole: the land of his childhood!" Writer Tadeusz Konwicki plays the protagonist's ghost of future past, searching for that crumb of happiness before war, before the iron curtain. His presence, though his screentime is minimal, makes the film far more interesting than it would otherwise be - it reminded me of two more recent films, Miyazaki's The Wind Rises and Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hanagatami. Both of which are very different beasts both in content and form, but have the same sense of retrospection and introspection around that late pre-war period.

The female lead, Paulina Mlynarska, was 14-years-old at the time and it seems that the shoot was particularly unethical - she's reported in recent years that she was plied with alcohol and sedative medication prior to shooting nude scenes (of which there is little detail on-screen) with co-star Piotr Wawrzynczak.

[kekid]

How does the Picture Quality of the Polish Blu Rays compare with the DVD's in the big Wajda box?

[Calvin]

The BFI Southbank will have a two-month Wajda retrospective starting in February to mark his centenery. Full details of the programme are still TBC but I've confirmed with Ben Stoddart that there won't be any home video releases from the BFI to tie-in. I will have to see what's showing when but I'm not sure I'll be able to pass up the opportunity to see The Ashes or The Birch Wood on the big screen. Fingers crossed for an English-language print of Gates to Paradise as I've only ever managed to see that in its German dub (and cut, I believe).

[MichaelB]

How does the Picture Quality of the Polish Blu Rays compare with the DVD's in the big Wajda box?

Same sources (i.e. the Wajda-approved restorations), but in 1080p.

The BFI Southbank will have a two-month Wajda retrospective starting in February to mark his centenary. Full details of the programme are still TBC but I've confirmed with Ben Stoddart that there won't be any home video releases from the BFI to tie-in. I will have to see what's showing when but I'm not sure I'll be able to pass up the opportunity to see The Ashes or The Birch Wood on the big screen. Fingers crossed for an English-language print of Gates to Paradise as I've only ever managed to see that in its German dub (and cut, I believe).

They've booked me to introduce The Ashes on Saturday February 7th at around 2pm.

And for various logistical reasons I'd be surprised if the season included anything that isn't already out on Blu-ray (in Poland, obviously; if that stricture applied to UK releases it would be a very short season indeed!).

[MichaelB]

And the full programme has been confirmed—as I suspected, already knowing who was behind the Wajda season, it's a Polish-only affair, although it still includes plenty of big-screen rarities. Screenings with intros/Q&As are marked with an asterisk.

• An Introduction to Andrzej Wajda, involving me and other guests (almost certainly including Ewa Mazierska, as she's doing something else the same day) - 11/2
• A Generation + While You Are Sleeping - 1/2, 15/2
• Kanal, with pre-recorded Annette Insdorf intro - 2/2, 15/2*
• Ashes and Diamonds, with extended intro (details tbc) - 4/2*, 15/2, 24/2
• Innocent Sorcerers + The Bad Boy - 5/2, 20/2
• The Ashes, with intro by me - 7/2, 28/2*
• Everything For Sale + Warsaw (Wajda's episode from Love at Twenty) - 6/2, 19/2
• Hunting Flies + Roly Poly - 7/2, 21/2
• The Wedding, with Ewa Mazierska intro - 8/2, 11/2*, 21/2
• The Promised Land with Daniel Olbrychski Q&A - 22/2, 11/3*
• Man of Marble - 16/2, 1/3
• Rough Treatment with Michał Oleszczyk intro - 17/2, 9/3*
• The Maids of Wilko, with intro TBC - 5/2*, 15/2
• The Conductor with Michał Oleszczyk intro - 26/2, 9/3*
• Man of Iron - 22/2, 1/3, 15/3
• Korczak plus Q&A TBC - 2/3*, 13/3
• Katyń with Carmen Gray intro - 5/3, 10/3*
• Wałesa: Man of Hope - 1/3, 16/3
• Afterimage + Towards the Sun - 12/3, 18/3

I'll update this post with more details as I get them. I've contacted the BFI to clarify the date of my intro to The Ashes, as they actually booked me for February 7th, although I'm also free on the 28th, so it's no big deal either way.

Aside from the events that I'm personally involved with, I'm going to try to get to the two Michał Oleszczyk ones on March 9th (I'm not a big fan of The Conductor, but I am a big fan of Michał!) and of course the Promised Land/Daniel Olbrychski combo, which looks pretty unmissable.

In parallel with this, starting yesterday and running until March 6th (Wajda's actual centenary), I'm publishing two pieces every weekday on my Substack—something context-setting at 3pm GMT and detailed coverage of an individual Wajda film at 9pm. This will ultimately cover his entire theatrical feature output plus a fair number of his television productions. I'll update this index as I upload each new piece.

• Andrzej Wajda: Poland's Man of Memory
• Early short films (1951-55)
• Socialist Realism in Polish cinema
• A Generation (1955)
• Polish Film Units
• Kanal (1957)
• The Polish Film School
• Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
• Talking about Wajda... (planning and recording commentaries for the 1950s War Trilogy)
• Lotna (1959)
• Jazz and Polish Cinema
• Innocent Sorcerers (1960)
• Wajda and War
• Samson (1961)
• Andrzej Wajda Abroad
• Siberian Lady Macbeth (1962)

[MichaelB]

I should have seen this coming, since I myself was the curator of the Jerzy Skolimowski (2023) and Wojciech Has (2025) joint BFI/ICA Kinoteka retrospectives, but there's another tranche of this year's Wajda retrospective playing at the ICA in London.

I'll update this post when I get sight of the final line-up, but it includes at least three titles not being screened at BFI Southbank.

[MichaelB]

Well, this is a flattering—if slightly alarming—surprise!

(Scroll down to the bottom.)

[ryannichols7]

I haven't gotten to catch up with your substack (I did subscribe, and plan to read this weekend), but I just want to say, it'd be great if this is the year Criterion asks you to contribute something besides an essay for them. I'm rooting for that!

[therewillbeblus]

I recently watched Innocent Sorcerers and struggled to engage with Łomnicki before he met Krystyna Stypułkowska - but once he did, I thought their moments together were stupendous. Stypułkowska gives such a lived-in performance, and her dialogue is fantastically eccentric and authentic, in contrast to Łomnicki's purposefully blander rhetoric. I wish more of the film involved the two of them talking - like Before Sunrise, meeting and engaging in rich conversation right off the bat - but I was grateful to get what I did

[Swift]

Just wanted to chime in and say that I have been making my way through your substack posts Michael, and it's made for some excellent reading especially for this relative neophyte to Eastern European cinema who has been starting to dip his toes in. Thank you!

[MichaelB]

With embarrassingly poor timing, I'm having to delay tonight's post because the subtitles in my copy of 'Samson' turned out to be wildly out of sync, but not in a way that can be explained (and therefore swiftly corrected) by a simple framerate tweak.

But having the option to get things back on schedule was one of many reasons why I opted not to post things at weekends, so it'll be up tomorrow or on Sunday.

[Lowry_Sam]

Looks like a nice overview of his career, Michael. I searched online and it looks like the last Wajda retrospective here (BAMPFA) was in 1992 (which I remember only getting to catch one double bill). Too bad there's no Polish or Eastern European equivalent of the Japan Society making touring director retrospectives a possibility here for former East Bloc directors.

You mentioned that there's no (BFI) release tie-in, but has there been any inquiries for better coverage of his catalog? I would think Radiance or Deaf Crocodile might be good labels to help fill in what Criterion, BFI & Second Run haven't had interest in.

And for various logistical reasons I'd be surprised if the season included anything that isn't already out on Blu-ray (in Poland, obviously; if that stricture applied to UK releases it would be a very short season indeed!).

So are films being screened digitally or in 35mm? Are the shorts & Love At Twenty available on blu? I haven't seen them. It's too bad there's not more of his television work or titles that havn't been issued on disc. Hopefully the retrospective sparks more interest so that these get recovered/restored, properly subtitled & released.

They've booked me to introduce The Ashes on Saturday February 7th at around 2pm.

One of my favorites. I got to see a screening at the PFA 15+ years ago, shortly after also seeing Marketa Lazarova there. Both had me wanting to see more Eastern European wide-screen b&w historical epics. Will you be recording your presentation? I remember having a bit of an intro (for both), but nowhere near enough to really cover enough to have a full grasp on all that takes place. I'm also curious if you get to screen it uncensored or if the horse/battle scene is flagged by the British censors for cruelty?

Since you are commenting on Jazz in Polish film you may also know if the song Jeunes Fillettes from the film ever made it on to a physical release? I have been hunting it (or a comparable recording with younger singers) down for close to 2 decades with no luck. There is a Youtube clip but it's a tv broadcast of the film which still has movie sound/dialog and isn't the best quality. The few recordings of the song that I have seen are all by older singers.

I guess I'm out of tune with his post-2000 work. Katyn seems to get consistently favorable reviews but did not impress me. On the other hand my favorite of his late-career work is Zemsta, which seems to be one of his most disliked films judging by online ratings.

Is there a comprehensive list of his films that have been released on blu-ray so far? I'm noticing there are a few I must have missed (The Conductor & The Wedding] and they're no longer available on Amazon.de.

I just signed up for Substack so that I can read your comments on the individual films & look forward to doing so when I have more time.

[MichaelB]

Second Run has already released six Wajdas (the war trilogy, Innocent Sorcerers, The Promised Land, Man of Marble—although those are (unsurprisingly) the ones with the strongest reputations and therefore the most commercial potential. And he's not really a "Deaf Crocodile" director—with the possible exception of the 35-minute TV film Roly-Poly, his only foray into sci-fi—so I'm not surprised that they haven't announced anything by him.

But the vast majority of his 1957-90 output (i.e. Kanal to Korczak) is available on English-friendly Blu-ray in Poland—it's easier to list the exceptions, which are unsurprisingly mostly international productions: Samson, Siberian Lady Macbeth, Gates of Heaven, The Birch Wood and A Love in Germany, although The Possessed is available in France (I forget whether it has English subtitles; possibly not). Most of his ill-fated 1990s period is MIA—that was by far the hardest for me to track down viewable copies of—but there are Polish Blu-rays of Katyń (although Artificial Eye is better), Wałęsa: Man of Hope (albeit unsubtitled) and his last film Afterimage. The three film-school shorts are included in Second Run's War Trilogy box, but my best copy of Warsaw, the Love at Twenty short, came from the huge 36-DVD Wajda box that came out in Poland a few years ago—I first saw that courtesy of a misframed YouTube rip in dubbed Italian!

(One of the endless challenges of researching this stuff is that you often do have to fall back on less than wholly licit sources, because otherwise they're simply not available. I always, always replace those copies with proper ones once released—quite aside from anything else, the quality is usually unrecognisably better—but I make no apology for straying off the copyright-legal beaten track from time to time. As I told a fellow poster here when he tried to claim that this was no better than pirating a current mainstream release, my yardstick was "Would I be prepared to tell the film's rightsholder or director to their faces what I'd done, in the reasonable expectation that they'd be pleased rather than appalled?", and I know for a fact that that was the case with Wojciech Marczewski, who was not only astonished by how much of his back catalogue I'd managed to dig up, but he even asked me for a copy of one of his early TV films that he didn't himself have!)

Anyway, back to Wajda—the big problem with him, not an artistic problem but very much a commercial one, is that he always firmly aimed his films at audiences that he completely understood: his fellow Poles. When I interviewed him back in 2007, I asked him about this directly, he confirmed my hunch, and said that while it's great that non-Polish audiences like his work too, that's very much a bonus rather than the primary reason for its existence.

And one of the side-effects of this is that a fair number of Wajda films assume an audience already versed in what may well be quite obscure and convoluted history to someone non-Polish. This is why films like the four-hour Napoleon-era epic The Ashes (1965) and the adaptation of the Adam Mickewicz epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1999) made a huge, blockbuster-level splash in Poland—Pan Tadeusz even beat Titanic in the overall 1990s chart, admittedly with the considerable help of school party block bookings—but were barely released internationally. In fact, in Britain, no Wajda films opened theatrically between Korczak (1990) and Katyń (2007), but he made seven in between. And only one of the three subsequent ones got a very brief UK run—inevitably, Wałęsa: Man of Hope (2013).

As for screening format, the BFI's Ashes and Diamonds is being explicitly billed upfront as 35mm. I'm all but certain that the rest will be the digital restorations—as was the case with last year's Wojciech Has retrospective and much of the Jerzy Skolimowski ones (certainly all the Polish titles). It's simply not practical to do these things on 35mm; the number of extant subtitled prints will be tiny, the number of showable prints smaller still (quite aside from the logistical challenges of geting hold of them), and quite a few of these films were never screened in English-friendly form during their celluloid lifetimes. This is why the BFI took ages to mount a Walerian Borowczyk retrospective—they'd been wanting to do one for many, many years, but the prints were in lamentable condition (UK release prints invariably being censored and often dubbed), and so it wasn't until Arrow restored much of his back catalogue that it became viable—albeit unsurprisingly in digital form.

Oh, and my regular Polish sources are Empik and DVDMax; in my experience there's no real difference between quality of service, impressively robust packaging, etc.—and both The Conductor and The Wedding are still available for around 50 złotys apiece (currently just over ten pounds, just under twelve euros, or just under fourteen US dollars).

[MichaelB]

In fact, I might as well be explicit about how I'm watching Samson: I have a legitimately released Facets DVD, but it's honestly borderline unwatchable, an assessment that will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Facets' output. So instead I took this unsubtitled TV rip, cropped off the Polish TV station idents (happily, they only just nudged the top of the picture), found a set of subtitles via OpenSubtitles... and belatedly discovered that they don't sync up at all, and that there are loads of other formatting quirks (including putting dialogue in quotation marks if the speaker is offscreen even temporarily, which was really off-putting).

Fortunately, a pretty big part of my day job involves beating subtitles into usable shape, so I do at least have the tools and the speedy technique, but I'm still having to go through it line by line. Fortunately, I understand Polish well enough to be able to match up the subtitle to the dialogue and even judge the correct break points, and a major bonus is that I'll be very familiar with the film by the time I'm done!

I also have two big subtitling jobs ahead of me—for his 1969 TV adaptation of Macbeth, I have a legitimate Polish DVD, but it's entirely unsubtitled, so I'm creating my own subs with the aid of the original Shakespeare text and a Polish translation of the play (so I can be precise about where the cuts are; as ever with moving-image adaptations, it's by no means the full text). And his 1978 TV version of Stanisław Wyspiański's November Nights comes from another TV rip (I seriously doubt that this has ever been made available outside Poland). I couldn't track down an English translation of the play for love nor money, so instead I'm working from the Polish text, machine-translating it line by line, with occasional manual tweaks when I can tell that it's gone off in the wrong direction. Obviously, the end result is going to be a complete hodge-podge... but it's better than nothing.

Oh, and with his epic 1980 TV series As the Years Pass, As the Days Pass, the Polish DVD release happily has Polish SDH subtitles—so with that I'm ripping them off the discs, running the lot through machine translation, manually stripping out transcribed sound effects, and relying on the end result. Which I'm sure will be hilariously wide of the mark at times, but I should at least be able to get the gist. (Given the sheer length, tackling this one line by line simply isn't viable.)

[Black Hat]

Anyway, back to Wajda—the big problem with him, not an artistic problem but very much a commercial one, is that he always firmly aimed his films at audiences that he completely understood: his fellow Poles. When I interviewed him back in 2007, I asked him about this directly, he confirmed my hunch, and said that while it's great that non-Polish audiences like his work too, that's very much a bonus rather than the primary reason for its existence.

And one of the side-effects of this is that a fair number of Wajda films assume an audience already versed in what may well be quite obscure and convoluted history to someone non-Polish. This is why films like the four-hour Napoleon-era epic The Ashes (1965) and the adaptation of the Adam Mickewicz epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1999) made a huge, blockbuster-level splash in Poland—Pan Tadeusz even beat Titanic in the overall 1990s chart, admittedly with the considerable help of school party block bookings—but were barely released internationally. In fact, in Britain, no Wajda films opened theatrically between Korczak (1990) and Katyń (2007), but he made seven in between. And only one of the three subsequent ones got a very brief UK run—inevitably, Wałęsa: Man of Hope (2013).

This is really nice to hear. I've always been bothered by directors, catering their films, especially when they're political, to Western European/American audiences. Years ago Lincoln Center did a great Polish film retro which got me to seek out Wajda and other Polish filmmakers. Thank you, Second Run! Would be cool to compile a list of other directors who made films for their home country. Kobayashi is a name that immediately comes to mind. Perhaps Frantisek Vlacil and the Hungarian directors, too?

[MichaelB]

Miklós Jancsó is another one who definitely didn't cater for international audiences, at least not with his Hungarian films. (The early 1970s Italian films are—reasonably—a slightly different matter.)

In fact, it's pretty incredible that so many got released abroad, because they're absolutely uncompromising in their expectation of a sometimes quite detailed knowledge of Hungarian history—I suspect they're so stylistically overwhelming that that aspect was quietly overlooked, until he fell out of distribution favour in the mid-70s. After which, pretty much no Jancsó films were released in the English-speaking world outside festivals, although he carried on making them at an impressively prolific rate right up to 2010, when he was already nearly ninety. I'm actually very impressed that the Hungarian DVDs of his six turn-of-the-2000s Pepe and Kapa comedies had English subtitles, because those films honestly require footnotes, and extensive ones at that.

[MichaelB]

And this is why I've never been quite as wowed by the Three Colours trilogy as many others have been, because I came to it after having already seen a pretty hefty chunk of Krzysztof Kieślowski's previous work (certainly all the features from Camera Buff onwards), and so I was disappointed by the way that he'd largely abandoned his ultra-incisive anatomising of his own country (it's no coincidence that White, the dark horse of the trilogy, is my personal favourite!) in favour of more metaphysical concerns that, while brilliantly realised, are more generically "Euro-arthouse". Although I don't have that issue with The Double Life of Veronique, a film that I pretty much unreservedly adore, so it's not a hard and fast rule.

And to be fair to Kieślowski, he actively didn't want to work outside Poland, but felt that he had no choice, because in the 1990s the Polish film industry virtually collapsed, there was very little money available, and Kieślowski very strongly felt that as one of the few Polish filmmakers who could viably attract international funding, he was morally obliged to do this in order not to take away money from other Polish filmmakers.

Although Andrzej Wajda didn't share this attitude, which made him extremely unpopular in the industry for a time, especially since the 1990s was—by pretty much universal agreement, with Wajda's own views very much included—his worst decade creatively, so it's not as if the money was particularly well spent. (He made four features between Korczak in 1990 and Pan Tadeusz in 1999, but they're very rarely screened and incredibly hard to track down. Tellingly, they were also omitted from that big Wajda-approved 36-disc Polish box set, along with his other self-perceived failures like Lotna, Samson, and Gates of Heaven. (To be fair, there may have been legitimate licensing challenges with some of them, but that shouldn't apply to the Kadr-produced Lotna or Samson; he just wasn't very happy with how they turned out.)

[MichaelB]

OK, it looks as though the Wajda retrospective is a four-venue affair. I've listed the BFI Southbank titles above, and these are the others:

Birkbeck University

Frames of Freedom—Andrzej Wajda, Polish Cinema and the Culture of Dissent, incorporating a screening of the documentary We Film the People followed by a discussion with Michał Oleszczyk.
6 March, 18:00

Ciné Lumière

Six screenings, three by Wajda, three by his former assistant Andrzej Żuławski, on 28th February (The Wedding/The Devil), 7th March (Man of Iron/Possession), 14 March (The Possessed/La Femme Publique).

ICA

8 March - Danton (with intro by me)
15 March - A Generation/While You're Sleeping
18 March - Kanal
19 March - Ashes and Diamonds
24 March - Pilate and the Others
26 March - A Love in Germany

So it's not quite a complete retrospective—discounting the TV work (which I wasn't seriously expecting), it's missing Samson, Siberian Lady Macbeth, Gates of Heaven, The Birch Wood, the six films made between Korczak and Katyń, and Sweet Rush. But otherwise it seems to be comfortably the biggest retrospective he's had in the UK, and I'd say the only two regrettable omissions are The Birch Wood and Sweet Rush (interestingly, both based on the work of the same source author, although The Maids of Wilko is being shown).

More info via the Kinoteka website.

[amberry]

I do hope you manage to make it back to your rundowns Michael when your schedule allows, they've been a godsend thus far following the season along (also your Iosseliani writings when I was watching the box!). Your/his comment on making films pretty exclusively for his fellow countrymen makes me feel a little better about being completely miffed by some like The Wedding. I had in my (rather unknowledgeable on Wajda) mind that Pan Tadeusz is a major work of his, but sounds like it isn't particularly worth seeking out?