Aleksander Ford

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Aleksander Ford by BJ Dorys (1952) .jpg
Ford's star on the Walk of Fame in Łódź

Aleksander Ford , Russian Александр Форд , native Moshe Liwczyc , (born November 11 . Jul / 24. November  1908 greg. In Kiev , Russian Empire ; † 4. April 1980 in Naples , Florida) was a Polish-Jewish film director .

Life

Ford was born into a Jewish family in Kiev. He studied art history in Warsaw and was one of the most successful film directors in Poland during the interwar period. He made his first film in 1929 and in 1930 he was one of the founders of the Society of Artistic Film Lovers (START) in Warsaw. During the time of the German occupation in World War II , he went to the Soviet Union , where he made training films for the Red Army between 1940 and 1943 and came back to Poland with the Red Army. As a documentary filmmaker (in 1945 he shot the documentary Majdanek - Friedhof Europa as one of the liberators of the Majdanek concentration camp ) and he was also the first director in 1945 in post-war Poland to deal with the German occupation. In the 1950s he taught directing legends Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polański at the Łódź Film School . His most famous film is the film adaptation of the novel The Crusaders by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1960). In 1968 he left communist Poland due to the anti-Zionist campaign , first living in Israel , then successively in the Federal Republic of Germany, in Denmark and finally in the United States .

Aleksander Ford committed suicide in a Florida motel on April 4, 1980 after his second wife filed for divorce.

Awards

Ford won international awards in Venice in 1948 for Die Grenzstraße , in 1952 in Karlovy Vary for Chopin's youth and in 1954 in Cannes (director's award) and Edinburgh for The Five from Barska Street . In 1951, 1955 and 1964 he received the State Prize, in 1962 the Prize of the Ministry of Culture and Art.

Filmography (selection)

literature

  • Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 3: F - H. Barry Fitzgerald - Ernst Hofbauer. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 44 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Aleksander Ford YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
  2. ^ Edyta Gawron: Contemporary history of Jews in Poland (1945-2005) - as Depicted in the Film. (PDF; 199 kB) Department of Jewish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków
  3. ^ A b Joachim Reichow: Film in Poland . With an essay by Stanislaw Janicki. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1979, Bio-Filmographien, p. 91–153 , here p. 105 .
personal data
SURNAME Ford, Aleksander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Liwczycals, Mosche (maiden name); Форд, Александр ( Russian )
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish film director
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiev
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 1980
Place of death Florida , USA