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Whereas the original design of merely producing a mirror image suggests the difficulty of entering into this particular historical narrative, the work as it was eventually shown — the enlarged photograph positioned next to where the house once, but no longer, stood — becomes a relic of, and monument to, that closed circuit of history. Today the grounds lie fallow, and a few mouldering structures, now covered in graffiti, are accessible on foot. As these projects evidence, it is difficult to tread lightly in such contexts, and the works produced in response to the site of Otwock deal in a currency of recurring signifiers of loss, decay and the passage of time: It is from this memorialising aesthetic that the third and most recent season at Otwock makes a departure.
They describe their project as having its origin in two apocryphal moments. The second was on their initial visit to Otwock decades later, walking at night with Balka, when a car drove towards them very quickly, sped up as it came closer and veered in their direction before turning a corner. As it drove away, de Gruyter and Thys saw two men inside, laughing and drinking, whom they instantly recognised as the same men from the train station years earlier. Anthropomorphic in shape and in scale, the sculptures are outfitted in cheap, dirty jeans, ripped and poorly mended polyester jackets, and off-brand, industrially produced athletic wear, with their bodies — faces, hands, and feet — fashioned out of stuffed hessian.
Elements of the sculptures are equally theatrical: The exaggerated, head-to-toe brand allegiance to Frankie Garage satirises the assumed neutrality of the performance of contemporary masculinities. In a text accompanying the work, the artists write: They seek each other out on the outskirts of large cities. They feel best in wastelands or dirty forests. The men from the underground are allergic to social positivism and utilitarianism. They abhor humans who aspire to physical health, labour and reasonable material wealth. They see themselves as the enemy of this. Although rendered as caricatures, the subjects of the work here are not being held out for ridicule.
In Otwock, the question of who is allowed to write cultural history is still active in light of the speed at which its past is becoming less and less material. See Kasia Redzisz ed. The Vanishing Points , Warsaw: Open Art Projects, , p. Bernadette Corporation used imagery from these kinds of brands to self-reflexively draw attention to their complicity with commercial fashion industries in the s, while more recent, post-digital iterations, as in the output of Dis magazine or Shanzhai Biennial, rely on the brand ubiquity of mega-corporations to articulate an aesthetics of living and working as an artist in a culture whose contradictions are both clear and inevitable.
Log in. Although he produced his most important films at the height of the famed Polish Film School , his films were stylistically different. Fellow director Aleksander Jackiewicz said of Has that if he had been a painter, "he would surely have been a Surrealist. He would have redrawn antique objects with all their real accoutrements and juxtaposed them in unexpected ways".
In his private life, he was a loner, rather grumpy and uncommunicative, but he spoke through his work. The Manuscript While the Polish Film School was busy analysing the fate of the Poles, Kawalerowicz chose more universal themes. His first films are neo-realistic. He used the style to poeticise boring everyday reality.
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He soon gained recognition as an excellent observer of reality, and a portraitist of authentic characters through sensitive visual imagery. Both films are exemplary of Kawalerowcz's directing style. Despite the diversity of the subjects he took up, there is an overarching trend in his artistic output — a deeply rooted and instinctive opposition to any unbridled individual and collective emotionality. This approach went hand in hand with the rejection of Romanticism. Film critic Maria Kornatowska famously said that he prefers the "wise man's looking-glass and eye" to "feeling and faith".
The 60s in Polish cinema were dominated by historical dramas and costume dramas. Jerzy Kawalerowicz received an Oscar nomination for his feature film from , Pharaoh , a big-budget film set in ancient Egypt. In the film, Wajda openly criticised the Polish tradition of romanticism. But the Godfather of Polish period dramas is Jerzy Hoffman. Sienkiewicz wrote historical novels that were meant to raise national spirits. The Deluge , another Sienkiewicz adaptation, is considered his greatest achievement. Made in , the five-hour-long film has both action and romance in its plot.
The film is set in the 17th century, during the Swedish invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of to , known as The Deluge , which was eventually thwarted by the Polish-Lithuanian forces. The protagonist is a brave soldier who risks his life to save his motherland, and falls in love with a Polish girl, Aleksandra Billewicz. Hoffman's Oscar-nominated film fused melodrama with adventure. The Academy Award nomination came in Over 27 million viewers saw the film in cinemas and millions more on TV. Big changes occurred in Polish cinematography in the 70s.
Historical topics were no longer at the forefront. Polish filmmakers began to pursue the psychological aspects of everyday reality in the People's Republic of Poland. They spoke of life in small cities and the countryside, corruption, nepotism and the clash between communist ideals and the problems of a communist state.
The filmmakers accused communist leaders of smothering artistic freedom and hindering the possibility of holding a public debate on vital social and political issues. Janusz Kijowski, who coined the term "cinema of moral anxiety", explained that moral anxiety is the foundation of cinema because "anxiety is conflict, conflict of interests […] In Poland at the end of the 70s, the term had another connotation. For the ruling party, it was iconoclastic because those in power feared all noble words.
Morality was one of those things that didn't function without a socialist adjective glued to it. They were threatened by references to the decalogue, to principles, un-systematic values that weren't endorsed by the communist party. It was also his feature debut. However, the current was at its peak after the release of Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble. Krzysztof Zanussi wasn't directly linked with the "cinema of moral anxiety", nor can his films be considered along any clearly-defined track or trend in Polish or international filmmaking.
He said,. The idea of visual cinema has always raised my doubts.
All these films had a protagonist built along the same lines - a man faced with a choice between values and the temptation to reject them. Zanussi's films are regarded as examples of "auteur cinema". He wrote the script to almost all his films. Looking at how they manifest themselves in the world today, Zanussi explored the perennial problems of love, death, happiness and conscience.
But he didn't always want to be a filmmaker. I'm So-So. But he was relentless, "I was really stubborn [ But it was worth it. At the school, he met people he could look up to — Kazimierz Karabasz, a lecturer and praised documentary filmmaker, and Jerzy Bosak. Back then he had no interest in features, so he made documentaries about life in the People's Republic of Poland.
The documentary genre taught him how to be a still observer of reality. Together they made several films: His films gained international praise. During the last months of his life, he worked with Piesiewicz on a screenplay for a triptych consisting of works titled Paradise , Purgator y and Hell.
Wojciech Smarzowski Wojciech Smarzowski on the set of the film "Angel", photo: The censors disagreed with his portrayal of members of the Union of Polish Youth a youth organisation closely affiliated with the Communist party. The storyline is set in pre-war Gypsy societies, travelling caravans and small pre-war Jewish cities. Negri's early life was marked by the departure of her father, who was arrested in by the Russians and sent to Siberia. However, the current was at its peak after the release of Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble. The Manuscript The film is an autobiographical story about a young artist struggling with the death of both parents.
His autobiographical films are therapeutic. Through his films, Koterski talks about his own limitations, weaknesses, misogyny, gullibility, arrogance and pettiness with self-awareness and humour. The traits start to seem characteristic to the viewer. Koterski makes himself mediocre so that everyone may discover himself in one of his protagonists" — Tadeusz Sobolewski wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza.
Critics have compared Koterski to American underground comic book writer, music critic and media personality Harvey Pekar. The Pole sees laughter, irony, the absurd as a lifebuoy which helps keep us afloat. Idealism is another such life preserver which forces him to continue directing his own theatre plays, turning plays into film scripts and filming them for the big screen.
His acting talent presaged a future in the film industry — but in front of the camera rather than behind it. See photographs of Polanski as an actor. It wasn't long after that the future director played in Andrzej Wajda 's big debut film — Generation. The film marked the beginning of Polanski's path because it gave him an incentive to study filmmaking.
He wasn't concerned with the same topics as the other upcoming directors. His films didn't tackle national traumas and history. He created his own cinematic world, grappling with loneliness and memory, sexuality as a tool of domination, and the relation between human urges and social roles. His films garnered awards at international festivals: He was arrested in the U. Since, then he has filmed mainly in France: She wrote several scripts with Wajda before directing her own films, which were soon winning awards at festivals.
In Poland, she gained notoriety as part of the Polish New Wave. Burning Bush , an HBO series about the factual story of Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in in an act of protest against the military aggression of the Warsaw Pact countries against Czechoslovakia, came out in Poland has many great cinematographers who are the unknown faces behind many box office hits. They worked together on Saving Private Ryan.
The Lost Year of Joaquin Phoenix , a mockumentary film. Unlike Romanian or Green cinema, which started concentrating on portraying specific topics and adapting unique senses of aesthetics after the year , a new strand of cinema emerged in Poland and went on to prove its diversity. Among the creators of new Polish cinema is Wojciech Smarzowski.
He drew a caricature of Polish society and all its national sins: His next films cemented his position as one of the most severe societal commentators after the fall of communism. In The Dark House , he showed the marginalised who drink and do evil, and criticised the overuse of the legend of the Solidarity trade union movement.
In the award-winning Rose , he looked into the topic of war and its consequences. His criticism of Polish reality also came through in Traffic Department , a conspiracy thriller about a policeman conned into a murder and Angel , in which he paints a ruthless portrait of human decay. As Wajda once did, he portrays Poles, but he shows entirely different and ugly faces. Maybe more faithful ones? What permeates the films of Andrzej Jakimowski is his vision of the world, one that is entirely different to that professed by Wojtek Smarzowski.
With every new film, he builds a cinematic world composed of memories, small human dramas, intuition and feelings. Every film is an intimate conversation to which he invites his viewer. His feature debut, Squint Your Eyes , was dedicated to his daughter. It showed her the concept of time. Imagine , is dedicated to his wife, to remind her that closeness lies in discovering and understanding the world together. In the meantime, he filmed Tricks , a film set in books of magical realism. New Polish cinema has another face: Jan Jakub Kolski. There, he first studied cinematography and later on directing, before graduating in He made numerous shorts, documentaries, and educational films.
As a director, he released his first feature in It was called The Burial of the Potato. Since then, Kolski has almost exclusively made full-length features and is considered one of Poland's most original filmmakers. He has adapted novels by Witold Gombrowicz Pornography , , told fairy-tale like stories Johnnie Aquarius ,; The History of the Cinema in Popielawy , and shot psychological war dramas Keep Away from the Window , Krzysztof Krauze is another big name in Polish cinema.
The co-writer of the script was the director's wife, Joanna Kos-Krauze.
My Nikifor was a big success. Her inconspicuous, soft films show lonely people searching for feelings and closeness. She draws moving psychological portraits of different characters, in particular children. She has continued to show an interest in children and the elderly as topics for films throughout her studies.
They helped her overcome her own shyness. Her subtle and emotional films don't fall under any single genre. In , she brought her maternal story about motherhood, pre-natal fear of birth, and roles prescribed by society to the screen in Stranger. But her breakthrough came in with 33 Scenes from Life.
The film is an autobiographical story about a young artist struggling with the death of both parents. In Elles and In the Name of The BBC called him "one of Britain's leading filmmakers", in his work, film critic Steve Blandford has found, "the purest essence of Englishness in contemporary cinema". He's not your run-of-the-mill Polish director. Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw in and left Poland at the age of He is a "hybrid-filmmaker" who seems caught between realities.
His imagination and way of illustrating are closer to Western European traditions than those espoused by the Polish Film School or the "cinema of moral anxiety". He studied literature and philosophy in London and Oxford. He went into the business of films at the age of thirty and made his first feature at forty. He made other documentaries for the BBC: Last Resort , his first full length feature, mirrored his own experiences as a refugee.
It earned him the critics' award at the London Film Festival. In , Pawlikowski became a internationally well-known figure thanks to the film Ida. Shot in Poland, the black and white psychological drama not only made headlines but received a nomination for an Oscar in The film is a black and white story about the Holocaust, Stalinism, and how history breaks moral backbones.
It's also the story of two women - a young nun and her aunt, a Stalin-era judge known as Bloody Wanda. The film won the Silver Lion prize at Poland's national film festival in Gdynia. Tomasz Wasilewski — Floating Skyscrapers — the first Polish film with a homosexual agenda. The tragicomedy reminds us that we are all freaks, that we all have our own little dramas, longings and fears.
The film marked Kox' transition from independent to mainstream films.
Kox eloquently combines a fairy tale film with images of grey Polish reality. Wojtek Smarzowski — Rose — Smarzowski pulls off a love story between a Home Army soldier and a woman whose husband died in the war, all the while illustrating the horrors of World War II and its aftermath. Despite the terrible things that have happened to her, Rose, the film's protagonist is still able to love. Maciej Pieprzyca — Life Feels Good — when Pieprzyca's film premiered at the Montreal Film Festival, it received two awards — one from the jury, the other from the public.
Pieprzyca's film is the first Polish feature to deal with disability. The story is loosely based on true events. The protagonist suffers from cerebral palsy and with all the odds stacked against him, he has to fight for his dignity. Andrzej Jakimowski — Imagine — The film tells two stories. One of love and the other of achieving the impossible. While teaching blind childen to walk in the street without the use of a cane, Ian falls in love. He is a teacher, she is a student and both of them are blind. With this touching story, Andrzej Jakimowski created a beautiful melodrama full of subtlety and tenderness.
The Krauzes picked up where Papusza left off and created a film that is a poem: The storyline is set in pre-war Gypsy societies, travelling caravans and small pre-war Jewish cities. Agnieszka Holland — In Darkness — twenty years after she became famous and received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Europa, Europa , Agnieszka Holland returned to the topic of the Holocaust.
In Darkness shows the deeds of a sewer worker, "the Polish Schindler", who risks his life to save a group of Jews from the ghetto of Lviv. The Oscar nominee which defies the black-and-white boundaries of good vs. He created a thriller about a Polish village with a dark secret.
The film is an important picture with wide public appeal that could influence the way audiences views Polish history. Jerzy Skolimowski — Essential Killing — the story of an Afghan prisoner who escapes a secret European CIA prison and needs to survive in the wilderness. The script to the film was written by year old Skolimowski in the span of a couple of days and inspired by media accounts of secret CIA prisons in Poland.
Shown at the festival in Venice, Skolimowski's work met with mixed reactions. Part of the public booed him, the other showed him support. Lech J. Majewski — The Mill and the Cross — perhaps the most unique Polish film of the last decade. Nothing like it has ever been made in Poland. The creative process took three years. Marek Lechki — Erratum — it took Marek Lechki eight years to find a producer for his first feature. He finally took matters into his own hands.
Or at least watch films about it? Try to surprise me. The Story of a Cigarette Girl, dir. Pola Negri on Film — Image Gallery display gallery as slider. Film critic Professor Tadeusz Lubelski wrote: Back to the top Andrzej Wajda — a director of national importance Andrzej Wajda, photo: Polish history from the films of Wajda Wajda didn't plan on becoming a director.
Back to the top The 60s Alongside the Polish Film School , a new current appeared in cinema in the mids. Jerzy Skolimowski Jerzy Skolimowski, photo: He said, "My films are derived primarily from literature, and are a kind of human speech. Film critic Andrzej Luter commented that Zanussi's films are existential: