Working on a Guide to Polish Cinema

I'm by no means an expert, but I think this little document will help me become one.
Here's the document converted to an image. To access the links, you'll have to use the link to the actual document that I've provided at the bottom of the page.



LINK TO DOCUMENT

The next step is finishing the little director guide, and then trying to find some more web resources and relevant papers in cinema journals.

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Letterboxd | ReverseShot | SlantMagazine

You made this? Awesome job, really cool idea. Have to say that Polish cinema is an area I have long neglected. I've seen Roman Polanski films but that is about it.

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I highly recommend Knife In The Water

I'm only around 30 films into the process myself with around a dozen of those being Polanski's work. I will say having seen a lot of Polanski took me in this direction long before I realized the filmic legacy of the region. They had a much more practical video recorder than Edison did at that time. They produced some of the earliest animation with the first documented use of stop motion. The state run Lodz Film School was pretty much the best equipped film institution on the planet when it arrived. To this day, there are countless graduates of the Lodz School who make their living as cinematographers from Hollywood to the Czech Republic which just speaks to the education they receive there. Billy Wilder and Samuel Goldwyn were both born in Poland and immigrated to the United States as children where they would both have sizable impacts on Hollywood.

Sorry for rambling, but I've went down the rabbit hole reading about this stuff for a while now.

That's not a ramble, that's informing.. Please continue...

I'll make sure to make a more significant post once I finish some more of my reading. I've got a book in the mail at the moment and a couple at the local library that I can borrow.

Great thing you did mofo!

No Mocny człowiek (1929)? Blasphemy!
Epilog norymberski and Mistrz are both Antczak films superior to Nights and Days (1975). Probably not available in English, though.
Only two films from the 30s? Where are the movies with Eugeniusz Bodo and Adolf Dymsza?

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

I was waiting to read Charles Ford's book which apparently is the authority on silent era and Yiddish cinema regarding Poland. It was $90, but Google has the page scans for like $16. Will definitely look into your recommendations!

I've got a feeling, it will be my fav thread

Prussian Culture (1908) (Dir. Mojzesz Towbin)


The first Polish narrative picture on record is Kazimierz Proszynski's The Return of a Merry Fellow (1902). It was a single-shot piece of fiction that Proszynski shot on the pleograph, a camera which he himself invented. The film starred Kazmierz Junosza-Stepowski who portrayed a drunk wandering home. Junosza-Stepowski would go on to be a prominent figure in the silent era of Polish film. Proszynski wouldn't fair as well, his pleograph being looked down upon by his fellow countrymen in comparison to imported equipment which showcased exotic foreign lands as opposed to Prozynski's local films. Disgraced, he would flee to other parts of Europe and experiment with sound film using the gramophone in 1908, concurrent with Edison's experiments that resulted in the photophone. It is speculated that his aversion to "lofty national slogans" also played a role in his failure as patriotism would play a major role in early Polish film.

That film and 29 others which proceeded Prussian Culture (1908) are lost forever. As such, Mojzesz Towbin's film stands as the earliest example of Polish film making. It is a truer representation of the era as it is about Poland's history of suffering and oppression under the rule of their neighbors, in this particular instance Germany. The history of their struggle to resist assimilation had already informed their nation's highly regarded literature which filmmakers would go on to adapt for the screen repeatedly.

The art of the film is rather standard for the period. Theater actors, play directors, costuming, and staged settings would lend credibility to film as an art form as it did in France. I must admit the copy that I watched was in a rather poor state, oddly cropped with the final scene overexposed to an alarming degree.

Sources:
The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 by Sheila Skaff
Polish National Cinema by Marek Hatlof

The Polish Dancer (1917) (Dir. Aleksander Hertz)


This film introduces us to two highly important figures in Polish film history: Aleksander Hertz and Pola Negri. Hertz was the head of Studio Sphinx which reigned supreme during the years of WWI thanks to Hertz' ties to companies outside of Poland. With a virtual monopoly on Polish film, Hertz built a star system akin to classic Hollywood, of which Negri would shine the brightest. After this film and six others, the "Polish Ashta Neilsen", would break contract with the studio and relocate in Germany where her career bloomed as an iconic femme fetale, eventually moving once again to Hollywood alongside famed director Ernst Lubitsch.

The Polish Dancer is a melodrama of the type that Negri starred in repeatedly involving jealous lovers and tragedy. Studio Sphinx thrived on the success of such sensationalized films which frequently exploited patriotism as well. In the film, Negri rejects the men in her life one after the another. She flees her father for the abuse he doles out. She flees her boyfriend in search of a career. She flees her suitor because of the marriage he withheld from her. Her cabaret performance echos these events with her being literally tethered to her dance partner and frequently escaping his sensual clutches. Despite the intertitles being redundant much of the time, it's a brisk 40 minute story with a pair of fun dance numbers.

Sources:
The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939 by Sheila Skaff
Polish National Cinema by Marek Hatlof

Wow, thanks. Amazing pieces of history. 100 years ago (last movie).. Poland gained their independence in 1918, and how that affected things.. Maybe that was the reason for all the nationalistic slogans?

A question for anyone.... How was the transition of Polish movies after WWII being a satellite state for the USSR?

Poland was split up between its neighbors a few different times in the 18th century, the final "partition" effectively ending its existence as a state. I haven't read closely about the roots of their patriotism yet, but I imagine it was an effort to preserve pride and culture. Poland would draw upon the memory of their revolt against Russia in the 19th century, the January Uprising, in later instances of revolt so their resilient history stretches back further than cinema. That's why they had a wealth of literature which was still relevant to their present state to draw upon when cinema took off. Tadeusz Lubeski is referenced in Haltof's book as saying that early "melodramatic kitsch" laid the foundation for future national art, likely having something to do with the moving image not requiring literacy to comprehend (speculation on my part). Apparently the lack of patriotic message in their earliest cinema drew criticism from the public against film producers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_Uprising

As one should expect, no movies were made in Poland in WWII. Immediately after the war we see works of "socialist realism". "Socialist realism is a style of realistic art that was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in that country as well as in other socialist countries. Socialist realism is characterized by the glorified depiction of communist values, such as the emancipation of the proletariat, by means of realistic imagery." With the establishment of the National Film School in Lodz, located in Lodz because the war had leveled places like Krakow and Warsaw, you see socialist realism abandoned pretty quickly with censorship limiting their expression otherwise.

"Polish Film School (Polish: Polska Szkoła Filmowa) refers to an informal group of Polish film directors and screenplay writers active between 1955 and approximately 1963.
The group was under heavy influence of Italian neorealists. It took advantage of the liberal changes in Poland after 1956 to portray the complexity of Polish history during World War II and German occupation. Among the most important topics were the generation of former Home Army soldiers and their role in post-war Poland and the national tragedies like the German concentration camps and the Warsaw Uprising. The political changes allowed the group to speak more openly of the recent history of Poland. However, the rule of censorship was still strong when it comes to history after 1945 and there were very few films on the contemporary events. This marked the major difference between the members of the Polish Film School and Italian neorealists.
The Polish Film School was the first to underline the national character of Poles and one of the first artistic movements in Central Europe to openly oppose the official guidelines of Socialist realism. The members of the movement tend to underline the role of individual as opposed to collectivity. There were two trends within the movement: young directors such as Andrzej Wajda generally studied the idea of heroism, while another group (the most notable being Andrzej Munk) analysed the Polish character via irony, humor and a dissection of national myths."

I will say that final little wedge they drive between Wajda and Munk seems pretty dumb. They say Wajda focused on heroism, which he did, but Munk literally has the movie Eroica aka Heroism. Wajda definitely used irony in his work, but he was rarely as humorous as Munk was willing to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Film_School

Keep in my that my reading hasn't caught up with my watching, and my grasp on these areas are bound to become more accurate as I approach that area.

I like your write-ups on individual movies much more than the first post in this thread!

Even though I'm from Poland I can't say I've seen that many movies made in Poland. 394 titles including shorts and multinational collaborations compared to 5336 movies in general does not seem that impressive. I have movie buff friends from Poland who've seen more than 1000 Polish films. Well, for some reason I very rarely feel like watching them.

Yeah, the guide is really just a reference sheet. The good stuff is watching those films and digging through those books, papers, and web pages. As I said, I've only watched 33 Polish films so far. Polanski led me to Zulawski led me to Kedzierzawska, and this is my journey down the rabbit hole. A funny part of watching these early Polish films is that often the American counterpart to a style or film star is named as a reference point, and I've become more familiar with the Polish equivalent than my homeland's own product. For every movie I watch there are like a dozen I need to see. I'm beginning to under what I've gotten myself into.

Also, I'd highly recommend reading those books that I cited. Without them, these movies wouldn't have meant nearly as much to me.

I have Tadeusz Lubelski's Historia Kina Polskiego 1895-2014 and recommend it if it's available in English.

That's still impressive

I don't think he is, but his work is definitely cited in the two texts I'm currently working off of.