Double Vision: My Life in Film by Andrzej Wajda provides an informal, accessible, and concise glance into the creative process of one of Poland’s most renowned filmmakers. Through a series of humorous, honest, and insightful anecdotes, Wajda presents an animated reflection of his pioneering, and largely self-taught, experience as a fledgling director during the nascent […]
Tag: Polish Cinema
Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film by Dina Iordanova
In Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film, Dina Iordanova proposes a reframing of Eastern European cinema (and by extension, film culture studies) away from conventional, western-centric paradigms that tend to evaluate post World War II cinema from the “other Europe” within the context of cold war politics […]
State of Weightlessness, 1994
Filmed after the dismantling of the Soviet Union at a time when the U.S. space station project (then called Freedom) that had been championed by Ronald Reagan was similarly facing its own crisis of survival after a series of deep budget cuts (partly in response to shifting political considerations and administrations), Maciej Drygas’s The State […]
Hear My Cry, 1991
Filmed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, Hear My Cry captures the essence of Maciej Drygas’s articulate and insightful film essays on the rupture between official record and human history, the impossibility of absolute truth, and the malleable nature of collective memory. The theme of revisionist history is prefigured in the film’s opening shot, […]
Debt, 1999
A pair of decapitated, naked male corpses are recovered from the bottom of a frigid, isolated lake as a team of police officers processes the crime scene in the hopes of recovering their heads in order to aid in the identification of the victims. Observing the idiosyncratically violent and methodical nature of the crime, the […]
Pornography, 2003
Unfolding with the deceptively lyrical and darkly comic surrealism of a diluted Emir Kusturica, Pornography, a film based on a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, is the powerful and haunting tale of an acutely sensitive and enigmatic, middle-aged artist named Frederic (Krzysztof Majchrzak) who, as the film begins, has returned to a luxury hotel in German-occupied […]