Polish film

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The Polish film history begins the already in the early days of the film end of the 19th century . It is as changeable as the Polish history of the 20th century and has always been influenced by political change in Poland .

history

Silent films and talkies up to the Second World War (up to and including 1945)

The beginnings of Polish film

Pola Negri, 1927.

At the end of the 19th century, Kazimierz Prószyński invented the pleograph , with which he filmed small scenes from everyday life in Warsaw . At the same time, Bolesław Matuszewski was making small documentaries as a cameraman for the Lumière brothers' company . In 1910, Władysław Starewicz created the first puppet film in the history of cinema. The film premiered in Moscow in 1912.

In 1908 the first Polish feature film had its world premiere in Warsaw. The screenplay was written by the leading actor in the film, Antoni Fertner . The most popular films of this time were mainly comedies and melodramas. In 1914 Pola Negri made her debut in Polish film. In the following years she became a world star , mainly through German and American silent film productions .

Films were mainly shown in theaters and the projectionists worked like traveling stages.

Second Republic - interwar period

After the First World War , the Republic of Poland came into being after over 100 years of oppression by the German Empire, the Russian Tsar and the Austro-Hungarian Danube Monarchy. When independence was regained, the first Polish film production companies were founded. In addition to the light comedies and other melodramas, the first patriotic films and literary adaptations were also made. In 1928 Ryszard Ordyński directed the first film adaptation of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz .

The first sound film in the history of Polish film was made in 1930 and was also a literary adaptation: The Morals of Frau Dulska by Gabriela Zapolska . The 1930s were also marked by commercial success. Some actors and singers like Adolf Dymsza or Eugeniusz Bodo became national idols, others like the later world-famous Jan Kiepura started their careers. There were also attempts to make avant-garde film more popular, including a. from the artist group "START" ( Stowarzyszenie Propagandy Filmu Artystycznego ), who u. a. Wanda Jakubowska , who later became known as a director, also belonged and was founded by filmmakers such as Aleksander Ford and Jerzy Toeplitz . Between 1918 and 1939 a total of almost 300 Polish films were made. Shortly before the start of the Second World War , there were 68 cinemas in Warsaw alone , and over 800 throughout the country.

Polish film during the Second World War

When the German Wehrmacht attacked Poland in 1939, the Polish film industry officially ceased to exist and, like all Polish culture, went underground. In particular, the historical recordings made by documentary filmmakers and cameramen of the defense of Warsaw and, later, of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, are important documents in the history of the Second World War to this day. The Polish cinemas, on the other hand, came into the possession of the German National Socialists and degenerated into an instrument of anti-Polish propaganda. Polish cinema-goers therefore automatically came under suspicion of collaboration .

The Polish filmmakers tried to emigrate abroad. Most of them ended up with the Polish armed forces abroad. A film group was formed in London as well as in the Soviet Union . The filmmakers who worked in the Soviet Union were the first to find their way back home with the Soviet troops after the liberation of Poland. They formed the basis for building up the cinema after the war. One of the leading filmmakers in this group was Aleksander Ford , who was a documentary filmmaker in Warsaw before the war and who in 1945 made a documentary film about the Majdanek extermination camp in Lublin . The title of the film Majdanek - Cemetery of Europe .

Polish film in the People's Republic (1945–1989)

Polish cinema after World War II

Before the war, film production was mainly limited to Warsaw; after the war, Łódź became the center of filmmaking. There was one main reason for this - Łódź was far less destroyed than Warsaw. The first feature film after the Second World War was made here. It was the film Forbidden Songs ( Zakazane piosenki ) by Leonard Buczkowski . The film tells the time of the German occupation in Warsaw from 1939 to 1945. Danuta Szaflarska played one of the leading roles. The film had its world premiere on January 8, 1947 in Warsaw.

In 1948 the Łódź Film School was founded. The second post-war film was the 1948 film Die Grenzstraße ( Ulica Graniczna ) by Aleksander Ford about the coexistence of the Polish and Jewish populations in pre-war Poland and during the war. In the same year, Wanda Jakubowska's Auschwitz drama The Last Stage ( Ostatni etap ) was released as the third feature film.

The early Polish post-war film was based on the Italian neorealism of directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica . First and foremost, a cinema should be created that was more political than the Polish pre-war cinema. The first three feature films from the film studio in Łódź had already shown this programmatic direction. Directors such as Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Wanda Jakubowska became the first star directors in post-war cinema. In the 1950s, the graduates of the newly created film school quickly got their chance and quickly established themselves. An outstanding example of the young directors was Andrzej Wajda , who dealt with the themes of the time. His outstanding work in the 1950s was the film The Canal ( Kanał ), which for the first time thematized the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which was still taboo in Poland, which was still under Stalinism . The film was the first Polish film to receive an international award at the Cannes Film Festival and opened the door to the world for Polish films. The international star of Polish cinema then became the Łódź graduate Roman Polański in the 1960s . His film The Knife in the Water ( Nóż w wodzie ) achieved recognition at the Venice Film Festival and gave him the opportunity to create cinema classics in France and later in the USA . Contemporaries, especially in retrospect, saw this phase of Polish cinema as the Polish Film School .

In addition to feature films, documentary film has been one of the most important means of expression for Polish film artists since the 1950s. The Warsaw Documentary Film Studio was founded in Warsaw in 1950 . There was a tradition until the 1980s that documentaries were shown in Polish cinemas before the main films. Kazimierz Karabasz and Jerzy Bossak were prominent figures in post-war documentary films . In the 1970s, Krzysztof Kieślowski , who achieved fame through his documentaries, joined them, before becoming one of the most important feature film directors in Poland in the 1980s.

The Polish cartoon was also made in the 1950s. Outstanding artists of this art form were Walerian Borowczyk , Jan Lenica and Witold Giersz . In addition to art films and challenging short films, most of the animation production consisted of children's films. The children's films became a popular export hit, not only to socialist countries. The cartoon heroes Lolek and Bolek became popular children's film characters even beyond the Iron Curtain .

The Polish Film Festival in Gdynia has been providing an overview of Polish filmmaking every year since 1974 .

Polish Cinema and Political Change in Europe after 1980

Polish feature film production
year number
1975 36
1985 39
1995 23
2005 26th

The political change in Poland was also taken up very early on by the Polish filmmakers. The films Wajdas ( The Man in Marble and The Man in Iron ) were almost documentary films of the politically exciting period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, some films only saw the light of day after the political change in 1989: Ryszard Bugajski's film The Interrogation or Krzysztof Kieślowski's A Short Working Day , both from 1982.

Third Republic - independent Poland (since 1989)

Polish cinema today is characterized by light comedies, highly budgeted monumental works or even low-budget films that are successful at festivals. The series of light comedies includes films like Big Boys Don't Cry ( Chłopacy nie płaczą ) (a mafia comedy with Cezary Pazura ) or the crime comedy series Killer, also with Cezary Pazura. Expensive cinematic successes from literary adaptations resulted. Wajda directed Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz and Jerzy Hoffman completed the trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz with his film With Fire and Sword ( Ogniem i Mieczem ). Both films were big box office hits. Another film in this series of monumental films was the remake of Henryk Sienkiewicz's Nobel Prize work Quo Vadis by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. However, there were also films that deal critically with the new political reality in Poland after 1989. Dogs ( Psy ) and the second part, Dogs 2 ( Psy 2 - Ostatnia Krew ) by Władysław Pasikowski , an action crime thriller with a political background, which describes the corruption and double standards of the new Poland.

The low-budget films offered impressive examples of Polish film art at international festivals. Director Krzysztof Krauze won in 2005 with his film about a naive painter Nikifor at the Film Festival in Karlovy Vary . Younger directors convinced with their debuts: Piotr Trzaskalski with the touching film Edi about a scrap collector or the short film A Man's Thing by Sławomir Fabicki , which garnered 25 prizes at various festivals and was nominated for an Oscar . In the year 2000 the career of old director Andrzej Wajda also reached its climax. He received an honorary Oscar from the American Film Academy for his life's work. In 2006 Wajda also received the Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlinale .

The Polish Film Academy has awarded the Polish Film Prize every year since 1999 .

Important Polish films

Eminent Polish filmmakers

Directors

Andrzej Wajda , 2008

actor

Other filmmakers

literature

  • Konrad Klejsa, Schamma Schhadat, Margarete Wach (eds.): The Polish Film. From its beginnings to the present . Marburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-89472-748-2 .
  • Marek Haltof: Polish National Cinema. Oxford / New York 2002, ISBN 1-57181-276-8 .
  • House of Documentary Films (Ed.): Between Realism and Poetry. Documentary in Poland. Stuttgart 1998.
  • Nikolas Hülbusch: The "black series" of the Polish documentary film 1955–1959 in the diachronic context of the theoretical discourses on documentary film. Alfeld / Leine 1997, ISBN 3-930258-47-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ World Film Production Report (excerpt) ( Memento from August 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF) Screen Digest, June 2006, pp. 205–207, accessed on October 3, 2015.