Polish film school

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The Polish Film School is a group of Polish filmmakers who, from the mid-1950s to the beginning of the 1960s (1955–1963; 1956–1965), created films that show Polish identity in terms of Polish history especially during the Second World War .

history

The State University of Film, Television and Theater Łódź was the starting point of the Polish Film School in the mid-1950s.

The Polish Film School emerged in the more liberal cultural climate in Poland after the deaths of Josef Stalin in 1953 and of the Stalinist Polish Prime Minister Bolesław Bierut in 1956. At the State University of Film, Television and Theater in Łódź , a group of students met to study American and Western European students in the directorate building To watch films that no longer fell victim to censorship. The influences of these films can be traced in the Polish productions of those years, which were able to escape the Polish censorship with their stories of heroes from the war or the post-war period. This development marked the ambivalence of Polish cultural policy: While the film school founded in 1948 was supposed to function as a cadre forge for socialist film, a generation of internationally recognized filmmakers emerged who distanced themselves from socialist realism. The term Polish Film School was coined in 1954 by the film critic Aleksander Jackiewicz , who expressed the hope that it could build on the great tradition of Polish art. While the term school is now generally recognized, the existence of the Polish Film School was still controversial among contemporaries and did not play a role , for example, in contemporary representations by Bolesław Michałek and Jerzy Płażewski in Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinema .

Daniel Olbrychski (left) and Andrzej Wajda at the “Lubuskie Lato Filmowe” film festival in Łagów in the late 1960s. Wajda was one of the central figures of the Polish Film School.

It is one of the most important periods of Polish film, in which directors such as Jerzy Kawalerowicz , Andrzej Wajda , Wojciech Has , Kazimierz Kutz , Janusz Morgenstern , Tadeusz Konwicki and Roman Polanski , who at that time were even more actors in front of the camera stood as a director, worked. They mostly belonged to the war generation and processed their experiences in their films. These were there quite varied and ranged from epic historical films about romantic Themem to Comedies . Wajda's film The Canal , which won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, was of particular importance . In the film, Wajda deals with the Warsaw Uprising and the following year with ashes and diamonds the resistance against the communists after the war. In such films, a much more critical perspective on Polish history was possible than historians could take in their writings. The films were ambiguous and subversive; contrary to the official narratives, the resistance fighters, for example, now offered themselves as sex symbols. But not all films deal with such political issues. Polanski's debut The Knife in the Water from 1962 was a relationship drama with elements of a psychological thriller.

Both resistance veterans and dogmatists from the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza criticized the films. With the more restrictive cultural policy in the early 1960s, the group increasingly began to break up. In addition, the artistic thrust of the Polish Film School had worn out. Until then, their international festival successes gave the directors the freedom they needed.

literature

  • Paul Coates: The Red and the White. The Cinema of People's Poland , Wallflower Press, London / New York 2005, ISBN 1-904764-26-6 .
  • Marek Haltof: Polish National Cinema . Berghahn Books, New York / Oxford 2002, ISBN 1-57181-275-X .
  • Marek Haltof: Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema , Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham u. a. 2015, ISBN 978-1-4422-4471-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Info page on the Polish Film School on empireonline.com, August 9, 2016, accessed on March 26, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c Roberto Galea: The Polish Film School , published on: culture.pl, August 2012, accessed on March 26, 2018.
  3. ↑ Markus Krzoska: A country on the move. Cultural history of Poland since 1945 , Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-657-78085-3 , p. 191.
  4. ↑ Florian Peters: Revolution of the memory. The Second World War in the historical culture of late socialist Poland , Ch. Links, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-891-2 , 69f.
  5. ↑ Florian Peters: Revolution of the memory. The Second World War in the historical culture of late socialist Poland , Ch. Links, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-891-2 , 70.