Filmography
Andrzej Wajda was a highly prolific artist, interested in more than just cinema. However, it is through this medium that he became a distinguished personality among Polish artists.
He made nearly 60 films: features, documentaries, anthology films, and numerous television plays. In the introduction to the book that accompanied an edition of his collected works—a gift to the master on his 90th birthday—Andrzej Wajda wrote:
‘My films were made over several decades, in different eras of cinema. I tried not only to participate in the political events of our country, but also to take part in the evolution of European cinema. Thanks to Cybulski, in Ashes and Diamonds, I embraced new American methods of acting. I wasn’t alone, and Polish films made their mark on the world, moving foreign audiences despite the language barrier and our difficult past. (…) I would like to express my gratitude to those who fought for the conditions that allowed our films to thrive. Right after the war, our film industry gradually became part of the struggle for political and artistic freedom. It was consistent in expanding this freedom—from Aleksander Ford and Wanda Jakubowska, through Jerzy Kawalerowicz and Jerzy Bossak, to the fight for cinema’s survival during martial law in the 1980s. I am fortunate to have been part of this process—with my films and the artistic authority of a director.’
In the notes below, which provide a summary of Wajda’s films and their reception, the fight for artistic freedom emerges as a central theme. We hope that by reading them, those who are only just beginning to discover our patron’s work will gain a better understanding of his passion for expressing both the European psyche and our own Polish identity—complicated, marked by many shocks and paradoxes.
‘The generation described by Czeszko in his novel was not mine. And yet, I associated the title of the film with the first generation of Polish filmmakers who graduated from the Łódź Film School. We were all debutants on this film,’ said Andrzej Wajda about his first feature, based on Bohdan Czeszko’s novel. The film, made in 1954, gained praise and is considered one of the first examples of the Polish Film School.
In many contemporary critical reflections, the film is criticized for being based on social realist literature. Initially, the novel, which was awarded the National Prize, was to be adapted by the ‘grey eminence’ of the Polish film industry, Aleksander Ford. In the end, he entrusted the project to his former student Wajda. There are speculations that the reason was the mediocre grade the text received from the verification commission. Nonetheless, it was a great honor for the young director, and it allowed him to assemble a remarkable crew, mostly made up of debutants. Together, they transformed a ‘program’ book into a film that surpasses the original in artistic, narrative, and psychological depth.
What’s more, the recent war experiences of the crew and the location in Warsaw—still rising from the ruins—added an authenticity that foreign critics compared to newsreels. Even though it’s easy to detect propaganda content and tone in A Generation, when compared to other first-time features of the time, it becomes evident that this story about left-wing youth engaged in conspiratorial fights with the occupier, searching for their own way in a time when people believed they could shape the future ‘here and now,’ cannot be called a socialist film.
A great asset of the film was the introduction of many young actors who would soon become the leading figures in Polish theater and cinema. The acting styles of Tadeusz Łomnicki, Tadeusz Janczar, Zbigniew Cybulski, and Roman Polański—who, despite his directing career, continued acting throughout his life—were something new, completely different from the pre-war method. They made the protagonists feel moving and real. These were the same boys the audience could encounter at work, on the street, or in a yard, speaking in a familiar, sometimes clumsy, informal slang, devoid of the unnatural mannerisms typical of actors. The problems they spoke about were the worries and dilemmas shared by all Poles.
‘In A Generation, we showed the workshops I worked in during the occupation, tenements, and poor suburban streets where I lived during the war. It was important for me to place a heavy burden on my protagonists’ shoulders—these boys from the suburbs and their parents, workers from the Wola and Koło districts. The occupation was a failure for our nation, but their lives were never carefree or beautiful. That’s why our boys are normal—not cut out to be heroes,’ Andrzej Wajda recalled.
Other filmmakers who later became great personalities of Polish cinema also contributed to making A Generation. Kazimierz Kutz, who later became a eulogist of his native region of Silesia and a respected theatre and film director in his own right, worked as assistant director, while cinematographer Jerzy Lipman later worked with Andrzej Munk, Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Hoffman and Roman Polański. He was very much inspired by the the philosophy of neorealism: with Wajda they created a scenery of roaring workshops, cheap bars and dirty streets shot in an expressive way.
A Generation came to be the first part of Wajda’s trilogy about the dramatic experience of war; it was also a testament to the director’s fondness for distinct characters troubled by doubt and tragic choices, living an initiation that gave them a bitter awareness of the fact that clear victory, reason, or truth do not exist.
‘In this canal my teenage illusions died’ – said Jerzy Stefan Stawiński, alias Łącki, a soldier in the Warsaw Uprising, lieutenant of the Polish Army. On September 26, 1944, as the leader of the signal company of the ‘Baszta’ regiment, he led seventy people into a canal with the hatch on 6 Szustra Street in the Mokotów district. The next day six survivors exited the canal on the crossroads between Aleje Ujazdowskie and Wilcza street…
Writing the story of the soldiers’ ordeal, coincided in time with historical events that allowed for its publication and helped pave its way on to the screen. In 1956 during the XX Congress of the CPSU in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev disclosed some of Stalin’s crimes, while Bolesław Bierut had died a few months before. Stawiński published the short story describing the insurgents’ tragedy in March 1956 in Twórczość monthly. A month later, under the amnesty, numerous former Polish Army soldiers were released, and a large part of society demanded their vindication and recognition of their merit and bravery in the unequal fight with the occupant. It was also important for the families of the victims and the survivors to see the lives of their loved ones as an element of the story of this traumatic time, even if it were to be just the story of their martyrdom, and not their moral victory. For political reasons Aleksander Ford opposed the idea of adapting Stawiński’s text for the screen, yet Konwicki, Toeplitz and other young intellectuals backed it.
At first Andrzej Munk prepared for making the film, yet after he went in the sewers, he decided what was supposed to be the essence of the film, is actually impossible to express: ‘What’s the most important thing about the canal? The darkness, of course. If we go down there with the lights, it is not going to be dark anymore. (…) The other thing is the awful smell. How do we show it in a film?’ – he asked Janusz Morgenstern, whom he asked to assist him. Finally, he withdrew from the film.
Andrzej Wajda recalled: ‘Tadeusz Konwicki was the godfather of my first and most important success, which was Kanał. He gave me Stawiński’s short story and as the literary director of the Kadr film studio he did everything in his power to make this film possible. He also lobbied for the screenplay when working in the committee that evaluated films and screenplays (…) From the first time I read the short story, I knew I would be making a film that was important to me. I just wasn’t sure if I would be able to present an image that would be potent and convincing enough. It’s hard to imagine what Kanał’s fate would be, if not for the surprising decision made by the cinematography chair Leonard Borkowicz, to show the film at the Cannes film festival. It was even more surprising due to the fact he was the one who had the most reservations and was very skeptical about making the film at first’.
At the Cannes Film Festival, many American writers and producers asked Jerzy Stefan Stawiński how he came up with such a brilliant dramaturgical idea to bring his protagonists into the sewers. The Silver Palm award the film received (shared ex-aequo with Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal) brought him international recognition, while for Polish moviegoers – some of whom, just over a decade earlier, had taken part in the Warsaw Uprising and lost loved ones – Kanał was the first film to honor the truth and memory of the defeated heroes.
The film was shot in a sewer constructed in a studio on Łąkowa Street in Łódź. In the group scenes set in Warsaw, soldiers from the Kościuszko Infantry Division appeared. The tanks the army rented for the crew were used to portray the Wehrmacht’s munitions – their shots even broke the windows of buildings surrounding the set. Kazimierz Kutz, who worked as Wajda’s assistant, recalled: ‘Nobody protested, since people knew we were making a film about the uprising. All the glaziers from Warsaw came to the rescue.’ Kutz also recalled Wajda’s hesitation, knowing how important the subject matter was. Wajda spoke about the making of the film: ‘We knew we were the voice of the dead; we knew our duty was to give testimony to these awful years, the terrible destruction, the awful fate of the Poles – the best of us. We wanted to make films that would help change our country. It was the strength of Polish films, as well as the incredible social energy of the moving image, that spoke to the world about us and the tragic experiences of people living in a certain Eastern European country behind the Iron Curtain.’
Expectations for the film among various audience groups were so different that it was impossible to satisfy everyone. Some people found it too symbolic, while others thought it was too real and didn’t convey every meaning. Some criticized the psychology of the characters. Yet, there were also positive reviews. Stanisław Grzelecki wrote in Życie Warszawy after the premiere: ‘There are two ways of looking at Kanał: either as an artistic report from an event or as an attempt to generalize people’s tragedy. In both cases, a part of the audience will not be able to free itself from the burden of personal memories. I am one of them. I walked the same underground path from Mokotów to Śródmieście as Jerzy Stawiński, and just as he did, I spent seventeen hours in the sewers. I saw and experienced enough to say that Wajda’s film tells the truth. The general tone and atmosphere are realistic, as are individual episodes. I could give examples from real people’s lives – just as many who shared the same path – which would confirm almost every minute of this part of the film… The tragic fate of those who believed in the righteousness of the fight is movingly reflected in Wajda’s film. The drama becomes an even more suggestive metaphor, since its protagonists were for years pushed into darkness, into silence, into a mire of unjust accusations and defamation.’
The film’s international success, which began with the prize at Cannes, gradually changed the Polish audience’s opinion about it. In the first year of screening, 4.2 million people went to see it, and Kanał remains one of the most recognized Polish films in the world to this day.
The true dimension of Ashes and Diamonds is eschatological because the film’s true passion is not that of a meticulous historian, but of a moralizer who speaks about the most essential things: life and death, beauty, love, and the nightmare of taking someone’s life. Even if Wajda’s intentions were different, his talent controlled them, and critics should always remain faithful to the talent. There is a scene in Ashes and Diamonds where two people—the victim and the murderer—walk toward each other and fall into each other’s arms, as if seeking salvation from something else, from destiny. This is the true summary of the film—a summary that evokes not Wyspiański or Styka, but Aeschylus and Shakespeare,’ wrote Stanisław Grochowiak in Ekran magazine after the premiere. His words seem to explain the phenomenon of Wajda’s film, which many consider his greatest accomplishment, shot when he was only just beginning his career, at the age of 32.
Ashes and Diamonds, Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel, published three years after the war, was a set book in Polish schools during the communist era, supported by the government. Prominent figures such as Erwin Axer and Antoni Bohdziewicz had considered adapting it for the screen. Andrzej Wajda first heard about the novel from Tadeusz Janczar and Janusz Morgenstern. In November 1957, the director and the novelist met and began working on the script, modifying the literary work to preserve the unity of time. A few months later, the screenplay was accepted for production. Initially, Wajda wanted to cast Tadeusz Janczar, with whom he had already worked on A Generation and Kanał, but Janusz Morgenstern suggested Zbigniew Cybulski for the role of Maciek Chełmicki. This choice turned Cybulski into an icon of the new generation and became one of the pillars of the film’s success. Cybulski brought with him an intuitive style of acting based on improvisation. Thanks to his decision to wear his own clothes—which didn’t fit the intended costume design, as they were ten years more modern than what people wore immediately after the war—and his refusal to take off his dark glasses, which he felt comfortable in, the role of Maciek Chełmicki has remained timeless. At the time, it was one of the first examples of a truly modern acting style, to the point where Cybulski became so closely associated with this role that he struggled to break out of his rebellious persona until he matured as an actor.
After three months of shooting and post-production, the film received permission for distribution, thanks to the mediation of Andrzejewski himself. However, decision-makers found it difficult to accept Chełmicki as the film’s main protagonist. Wajda’s former mentor, Aleksander Ford, also lobbied for a ban on distribution. The party also blocked the film’s participation in festivals. Yet despite all that, it was enthusiastically received by critics, both in Poland and abroad. According to many, it became the most famous Polish film in the world and the flagship work of the Polish Film School—a group of filmmakers influenced by romanticism and symbolism, focused on the wartime experiences of the young generation of Poles. In the year of its premiere, over 1.5 million people saw the movie in Poland.
Ashes and Diamonds had a profound influence on the history of Polish cinema, sparking controversy among other directors from the Polish Film School. In 1960, Kazimierz Kutz directed the ‘antithesis’ of Wajda’s film, Nikt nie woła (Nobody’s Calling), where the protagonist, also an underground Polish Army soldier, decides not to execute the order but instead to start a new life. In his great work How to Be Loved, Wojciech Jerzy Has made a pastiche of the legendary ‘lamp scene.’ After the war, the main protagonist enters a bar, where the song Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino plays, but it is sung by an elderly woman who looks like a cocotte, while Cybulski’s character is a drunk who recalls his invented heroic deeds.
Many years later, Andrzej Wajda described the tragic paradox that led him to adapt Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel in his own way, according to his own conscience and motivations: ‘The fate of the boys from Kanał, Tadeusz from Landscape After the Battle, Marcin from The Crowned-Eagle Ring, and Maciek Chełmicki from Ashes and Diamonds could easily have been mine. I just had more luck. It was by chance that I avoided their situation, and so I felt it was my duty to tell their stories to the best of my abilities. The never-ending discussion about what Ashes and Diamonds is as a novel and what it is as a film adaptation doesn’t clearly point to an important motive. In the novel, Jerzy Andrzejewski aimed for a national consensus; he tried to convince his readers that even though Poland was politically divided, and the division ran deep, one had to seek agreement. This aim is clearly seen in the last scene of the novel, where Maciek Chełmicki falls, and the soldiers come to him and ask: ‘Boy, why did you run?’ For Andrzejewski, this was a real question: ‘Why did you run?’ If you hadn’t run, you might have had a chance to live. When we shot the film in 1957, we already knew what it meant. Both Zbyszek Cybulski and I knew well why Maciek escapes—we understood that he had to escape. We realized that nobody really wanted a consensus, and that it was impossible to reconcile.’
Lotna premiered in September 1959. Despite the title, it is not a film about a very special horse, but the third film—after Stanisław Różewicz’s Wolne Miasto (Free City) and Leonard Buczkowski’s Orzeł (Eagle)—to tell the story of the September 1939 tragedy, which was not discussed in film for over a decade after the war. Yet, in contrast to both previous films—especially Różewicz’s feature, which was almost a paradocument—Wajda’s movie refers to a legend, a myth, and a stereotype. After A Generation, Kanał, and Ashes and Diamonds, it was his fourth feature. ‘I needed a film about the cavalry to end the subject of war,’ the director recalled many years later. In a sense, the cavalry was the essence, the substance, and the pride of the Polish army during the time of the Second Polish Republic. It’s hardly surprising that Wajda said his aim was to make a ‘sad, almost watercolor film about uhlans in Kutno. About a beautiful, pointless tradition,’ wrote historian Jerzy Eisler about Lotna.
The film, an adaptation of Wojciech Żukrowski’s novella, is actually a story about the ethos, symbolism, and values of a world passing into oblivion. The author himself appears in the film as a soldier resting in a stable. Lotna was shot on ORWO color film, but due to shortages, the final sequence was shot in black and white. After the film’s premiere, a discussion arose about the vision and judgment of September’s failure, which divided Polish society. However, the director’s aim was not to document the subsequent stages of this failure but to create a symbolic impression, set in September, that showed something completely different: a portrait of a hermetic world standing against time, immersed in the pre-war romantic myth symbolized by the horse in the film’s title and the Polish cavalry.
The director recalled the film’s premiere: ‘Early in the morning, after the film hit the screens, I was full of trepidation when I sat on a bench in Ogród Saski with journals on my lap. All the reviews were crushing. Surprised by this turn of events, I thought: Lotna failed, and I didn’t need the press to tell me about it. I struggled with the script, with the cast, and the production for months, and was completely aware of that. And yet… it is my film, and no one else could have directed it. So maybe my flaws are more original than my assets. Or at least they are mine, and I should defend them even from myself.’
The film was accused of being ‘all poetic form and no substance,’ of forging historical truth, and of making the audience indifferent by not focusing on the protagonists—although many critics appreciated the director’s struggle with the artistic matter. In foreign reviews, there was praise for the work’s baroque style, its artistic mastery (Lotna was compared to von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress, Welles’s The Process, and Fellini’s 8½), and the director’s invention. Various paintings were noted as inspirations, as well as their masterful use in the film—a technique that would become a signature element of Wajda’s directing style. Zygmunt Kałużyński wrote that Lotna is a cross between surrealism and Polish Uhlan tradition, as well as ‘all the props of our 19th-century battle painting.’ However, surrealism was viewed with suspicion in socially realist Poland as a trend that distorts and profanes reality. The analogy with how Wajda treated the historical truth about September 1939 was more than obvious.
‘With Lotna, Wajda flew high as an artist, but he didn’t cope with himself as a director,’ Dariusz Chyb wrote in an essay about artistic inspiration in Wajda’s films. ‘His fourth film is a failed masterpiece; crippled, unfinished, like many works in the history of art. It’s like a genial sketch for a painting that never came to be. But there is something very charming about what’s sketchy—just as in all the unfinished romantic poems.’
Innocent Sorcerers is now seen as one of the most politically neutral films I have ever made. Yet, that wasn’t the case in the times of Gomułka. This innocent theme of a young doctor who likes elastic socks and good cigarettes, owns a tape recorder, and records his conversations with girls, who’s only passionate about playing the drums in Krzysztof Komeda’s jazz band—it was more controversial for the ideologists than the Polish Army and the Warsaw Uprising,’ said Andrzej Wajda about his fifth feature, shot in 1960, co-written with Jerzy Andrzejewski and Jerzy Skolimowski.
That’s what Janusz Wilhelmi—politician and Wajda’s fiercest critic—wrote about Innocent Sorcerers in Trybuna Ludu: ‘For most of the audience, especially the young ones, the social critique will be almost invisible. But the free lifestyle, which is presented so alluringly, will be much more seductive. And this can be seen as socially harmful.’
The aim of one of the film’s screenwriters, Jerzy Andrzejewski, was apparently to capture a new way of being and the new phenomenon of ‘social egoism’ among young people, which consisted in hiding their feelings, nihilism, and a cynical, anti-metaphysical view of reality. The title was borrowed from Mickiewicz’s Dziady, Part I:
‘Such seclusion’s been sought out by the fervent sage
Intent on finding wealth, medicinal balm,
Or poison… We, young innocent sorcerers – let us test the scope.’
It may come as a paradox that some advocates of the film, who appreciated Wajda’s versatility when it came to style and subjects, believed the film to be an accusation of the protagonists’ behavior. Critic Stefan Morawski wrote in a review published in Ekran magazine: ‘The film is socially useful. And I believe—although the intentions of its creators might have been objective—it is an accusation. The accusation has been weakened by the unnecessary ending (Pelagia’s return), yet the moral bankruptcy of the way of life we see is evident enough. The film is alarming, since Bazyli and his peers scare us with their emptiness and passivity. It’s alarming, if not for the young themselves (who are not innocent sorcerers at all), then at least for the adults.’
International reviews were favorable—the film was associated with the style of the European New Wave, and critics noted how it distanced itself from the wartime experience, focusing instead on the love life of the young generation and their values. Yet the film received much criticism in Poland: Polish Catholic Church deemed it completely unfit for young audiences due to its helplessness in the face of the problems it presented and its lack of educational advice. This opinion was included in a letter Wajda received in early 1960 from the Department of Pastoral Assistance of the Archdiocese of Warsaw. The film was also attacked by the Polish Communist Party, which deemed it to be promoting a way of life devoid of any healthy ambitions and goals.
Innocent Sorcerers is one of Wajda’s most surprising films, not easily associated with his usual style or the subjects he typically explores. This intimate story, faithful to the classical unities of time, place, and action, its formally minimalistic style reminiscent of cinéma vérité, contemporary themes, modern music by Krzysztof Komeda, and Tadeusz Łomnicki’s acting style, make it a film that achieved cult status in certain circles. The director thought the story might have been even more modern if he had cast one of the writers, Jerzy Skolimowski, in the leading role, and his wife, Elżbieta Czyżewska, as Pelagia—they were one of the ‘power couples’ of Polish cinema in the 1960s. Yet, the audience and some modern critics believe the film captured a sense of being stuck in ‘little stability’—a lack of perspectives, goals, and ideas—that resonated with the young generation. Paradoxically, the more time has passed, the more praise the film has received: today, its title serves as the name of festivals, music clubs, and restaurants. It remains a constant reference point in Polish popular culture, and 60 years after its premiere, it continues to find new audiences. Abroad, its fame doesn’t fade either: Martin Scorsese, a great admirer of Wajda’s talent, considers Innocent Sorcerers to be one of Poland’s greatest masterpieces. In 2014, he included the film in his review shown in the USA and Canada, entitled Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema.
The novel Samson was written soon after World War II as part of the Między wojnami (Between the Wars) tetralogy, which also included Antygona, Troja. Miasto otwarte, and Człowiek nie umiera. Kazimierz Brandys strongly identified with the protagonist of Samson, even giving him his own date of birth. When the rules of social realism for artists were loosened in 1956, he went on to write a film adaptation of his novel, which received positive reviews from cinematography authorities. The screenplay was written independently, without consulting Wajda, yet the director of Ashes and Diamonds quickly contacted the writer and told him he wanted to adapt his work for the screen. Brandys envisioned a fully realistic movie; Wajda, in contrast, chose to approach Samson with a monumental picture in mind.
‘When I was reading Kazimierz Brandys’s novel for the first time, I had hopes for a contemporary biblical parable. But the novel demanded simplicity and modesty from the director, and most importantly—attention to detail. From the first day of shooting to the last day of editing, I was torn between these two extremes. After making Ashes and Diamonds, both Jerzy Wójcik (the cinematographer) and I knew the power of cinematic abbreviation and the use of symbols on screen. We wanted to pursue this path, yet the novel resisted our ideas and defended itself as much as it could,’ said Andrzej Wajda years later about his approach to adapting the work of the author of How to Be Loved and Mother of the Kings.
Wajda searched for a young, Semitic-looking actor for the lead role at film schools and universities, but he didn’t find anyone he wanted to work with. Many years later, he pointed out that the Holocaust in Poland was such a total force that it caused a certain type of beauty to vanish. ‘It’s proof that it was the destruction of a whole nation,’ Wajda said. ‘I just couldn’t find anyone who looked right among students at the time, so I decided to cast a French actor who was the opposite of Samson.’ The role was played by Serge Merlin, and the supporting cast included Roman Polański, Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, Edmund Fetting, and Bogumił Antczak.
The tragedy of a young fugitive from the ghetto, struggling with fear and a sense of alienation against the backdrop of occupied Warsaw, who decides to end his life in a suicidal gesture that also kills the occupiers, was filmed by Wajda with visual finesse and mastery, which led to a nomination for the main prize at the Venice Film Festival. However, the way he told the story was brutally criticized. ‘In Wajda’s world, everything is upside-down, like the Christ from Ashes and Diamonds. Everything is just decoration. Wajda is only interested in photogenic faces, objects, stories, and problems. He always wants to make his own deal: to show everyone how talented he is. Yes, he is. But he lacks taste and thought. If he’s really a master of a school, this school should burn, because it teaches coquetry, narcissism, irresponsibility,’ wrote Andrzej Kijowski in Przegląd Kulturalny.
Years later, Wajda himself decided not to include Samson in an anniversary edition of his works. After the film’s premiere, Konrad Eberhardt wrote in Film magazine about the reception and contrasting opinions of the movie, trying to separate its artistic meaning from the psychological and historical layers: ‘People didn’t really strain their brains when criticizing Samson. The same objections were mentioned in most reviews: that the film is false in showing this or that, that the protagonist is not representative enough, and that the film does not carry its burden well enough, that the subject of the ghetto is still waiting, and so on. Nobody really tried to interpret this new proposal from Wajda—so different from what he’s done before—on an artistic level (and not a journalistic one), thinking about the artist’s goals and his values.’
Perhaps because of this confusion and dissonance between different interpretative layers, as well as a sense that it didn’t resonate with the audience as strongly as Wajda’s previous works about the tragedy of war, Samson is now one of the least-known films by Andrzej Wajda.
‘When working on Siberian Lady Macbeth, I lacked a distinctive idea and a cinematic grasp. I realized I needed a dramatic move that would present the story of the unfaithful killer in retrospect, making the procession of convicts to Siberia the central plot. The life of the laborers, their unusual customs, and surprising scenes from literature – such as the bell that was convicted and sent to Siberia for not playing the right sound – would make for great material. I also considered incorporating the topic of Poles exiled to Siberia, as well as protagonists and situations from Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead. There was so much to show on screen!’ – Andrzej Wajda recalled his idea for the film, which was an adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s short story published in 1864.
Great Shakespearean dramas, as well as Dostoevsky’s novels, posed a challenge for Wajda, who returned to them many times throughout his career. This was the case with Hamlet, which he worked on four times, as well as with Dostoevsky’s novels, which captivated him with the extreme experiences of their protagonists, their insightful and moving depiction of the anatomy of evil, and their portrayal of systems and ideologies that sanction it. He was also drawn to the protagonists’ journey toward self-awareness, a path filled with suffering and struggle. Shakespeare was another of his fascinations, guiding his readers through the deepest and darkest recesses of human nature.
Wajda successfully staged Macbeth twice in the theater (in 1969, with Magda Zawadzka and Tadeusz Łomnicki, and in 2004, with Iwona Bielska and Krzysztof Globisz). However, it was in Siberian Lady Macbeth that he first touched upon the subject on film, setting the story in 19th-century Russia.
Shot in 1962, Siberian Lady Macbeth was one of the few films Wajda directed abroad. Made in collaboration with a Yugoslavian crew and cast, Wajda hoped that working in a foreign country would inspire new artistic possibilities. Yet, as he recalled many years later, his hard work resulted in ‘beautiful cinematography by Aca Sekulović, Syergiej portrayed with heart and talent by Ljuba Tadić, and set design.’ Nevertheless, the film made the director realize how difficult it was for him to find his place in a foreign country. The creative freedom he felt abroad did not make him feel as comfortable on set as he did in his homeland.
The film was well-received internationally, though the director himself was not satisfied. A review published in Sight and Sound praised the change in cinematic style – moving from a baroque form to a simpler, more modest way of telling the story of a woman who killed for love. Critics also lauded how the film captured the spirit of the time and place, as well as the timeless atmosphere that accompanies every universal tragedy. Variety complemented the Slavic character of the film, reinforced by sophisticated imagery, precision in working with actors, and the use of excerpts from Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, based on the same literary material.
Cinematographer Aleksander Sekulović, whom Wajda praised, and lead actress Olivera Marković were awarded at the Yugoslavian Film Festival in 1962. It seems that international cinephiles revisit this film – which the Americans called ‘a Russian-Shakespearean noir’ – more often than Polish fans of Andrzej Wajda’s talent.
‘Beginner Parisian producer Pierre Roustang, after a film with Basia Kwiatkowska (then Lass), decided to produce a series of moving images about ‘love in different countries.’ It was meant to be a portrait of contemporary youth. France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Poland participated in the project,’ Andrzej Wajda recalled about the anthology project L’amour à vingt ans. François Truffaut (who had the task of inviting other directors), Renzo Rossellini, Marcel Ophuls, and Shintaro Ishihara also contributed to the project. Jerzy Stefan Stawiński wrote the Polish episode, while the leading roles were played by Barbara Kwiatkowska-Lass, Władysław Kowalski, and Zbigniew Cybulski. The score was composed by Jerzy Matuszkiewicz, Andrzej Żuławski served as the second director, and Jerzy Lipman was responsible for the cinematography.
Wajda came up with the idea for the script after hearing about an event in passing: ‘By chance, I heard about an incident reported in a local paper in Wrocław. At the zoo, an anonymous man rescued a child who had fallen into the cage where polar bears lived. The child was fine, and the rescuer disappeared into the crowd that gathered after the accident. That’s all I knew. To my mind, this protagonist had to be Cybulski. He had changed since Ashes and Diamonds – he had put on weight and lost his boyish figure, but he was supposed to play himself, only later: someone who survived the war and is now forgotten and alone. After a lost war, as I had shown in Lotna and Kanał, the subject of a lost life came to mind.’
Only four years had passed since Ashes and Diamonds, yet the actor, who was 35 at the time, convincingly portrayed a man permanently scarred by the war, clearly different from his younger peers. Cybulski would go on to play other great roles, but this was the last time he worked with Wajda on set, a collaboration the director would deeply regret after Cybulski’s death.
Through the combined artistic forces of five directors, a diverse film was born, offering a sketch of a generation entering adulthood, becoming cynical and resigned while gaining life experience. Even though Wajda’s episode was short, it was highly praised as a standout piece, masterfully using mental shortcuts, symbolism, and sharp vision. The French review Positif wrote: ‘In what could have been yet another cliché about the timeless generational conflict, or worse, a malicious pamphlet against the egoism of youth, Wajda was able to achieve a brilliant balance. Instead of glorifying the heroism of the former soldier confronted with contemporary shallowness or condemning the young into the fatality of the times, he was courageous enough to confront them: the braveness and complacency of a man who’s been written off, with the instinctive cruelty of the young, and with the awkward, sincere sensitivity of the girl. Mastery after babble, sharpness after vague obsessions – it’s one proof against four, but enough for a hundred, of the pretentious void of our nouvelle vague.’
For Wajda, the film became a valuable lesson about the passage of time. He understood that his sympathy and identity lay with Cybulski’s character, the man whom he described as ‘a mediocre man who doesn’t expect much from life,’ and, most importantly, someone for whom the war was a formative experience. He noted: ‘That’s when a new generation grew up, one that didn’t remember the war. … With these young people around us, a new element of play entered our lives. And so, fun became the subject of the movie as well. We had to keep cruel visions of executions – as seen in Andrzej Wróblewski’s paintings – and wartime fears for ourselves, leaving the joy to the young. … Our combatant past didn’t interest anyone anymore. What was even worse, new filmmakers entered the stage, and I was surprised to learn that I was no longer the youngest director in Poland.’
‘The first feeling I got was fear at the thought that I am part of the same nation whose deeds I see on screen. Would anyone else have such cruel courage to show his nation this way? I don’t know anyone in the whole world capable of such an awful exhibition, of such a presentation: look at us, how cruel we are, how stupid, yet how faithful. How courageous! Our deaths are so beautiful, and yet somehow we are immortal, as we hear in the opening song: Poland has not yet perished / So long as we still live… A nation without a brain, without politicians, mindlessly walking towards their undoing, towards their death – a nation of only hearts and heavy hands, ready to fight’ – wrote critic Andrzej Jarecki in Sztandar Młodych daily after the premiere of The Ashes – a film Zygmunt Kałużyński called the last work of the so-called Polish Film School and its recapitulation, which gave it ‘a monumental truth and historical perspective it lacked before.’
Adapting Żeromski’s epic, Andrzej Wajda underlined that the most important scenes are ‘absurd and heroic at the same time, as many moments in our history.’ He has shown this paradoxical, contrapuntal approach to national ‘sanctities’ many times, in films such as Ashes and Diamonds, Lotna, and Kanał – all of which featured protagonists who paid the highest price for fighting for a just, yet lost cause. ‘I don’t pick Sienkiewicz to adapt, but Żeromski, because I am not interested in the literature of national agreement, a literature seeking to reconcile everyone with everyone,’ said the director about his choice. The film, which stirred up a hornet’s nest and challenged the essence of patriotism, was debated long after its premiere by historians, critics, and journalists. ‘Sienkiewicz’s healthy patriotism was then recognized as the model. Explaining that the criticized scenes, situations, and dialogues were not taken from Sienkiewicz, but from Żeromski, was futile. Nobody wanted to check this. Moczar and his people wanted to divide our society as quickly as possible, or at worst – to divide its elite into revisionists and true patriots. That’s how I became a revisionist, and that wasn’t helpful when trying to make more movies,’ Wajda recalled many years later.
The Ashes was the director’s ninth feature film, and at the time of its premiere, it was one of the most expensive movies in the history of Polish cinema, alongside Pharaoh and The Saragossa Manuscript.
The film was problematic from the start. Noble Poland, with all its attributes and iconography, ceased to exist after the 1944 land reform and the destruction of tens of thousands of manors. The first task before shooting was research and the reconstruction of everything, from historical costumes to hunting dogs, from weapons to locations. Private collectors helped the director, as well as horsemen who brought their horses from all over Poland and – lacking professional ones – served as stuntmen in the battle scenes, treating their charge as honorary service. For example, before shooting the scene of the Battle of Samosierra, a lot of controversy surrounded the scene in which a live horse was thrown from a cliff to film its brutal death.
Years after the premiere of the film – which entered the canon despite all the critiques – Wajda spoke about his mistakes during the shoot and what he would change. While Daniel Olbrychski’s role turned out to be a bull’s-eye and launched the young actor’s career, the director regretted listening to emotional fans and advisers who urged him to cast Bogusław Kierc in the role of Krzysztof Cedro instead of Zbigniew Cybulski. ‘Zbyszek would have been a wonderful Cedro, yet I chased young actors, hoping for a successful film,’ he recalled. He also concluded that making the film in black and white had been a mistake. ‘We feared color at the time; we were anxious that the costumes, the grass, the sky, and the architecture would not form one cohesive picture, that we would be able to artistically control it. Yet now I believe struggling with color film might have been a spur for our imagination. It was in fashion at the time to make widescreen films with anamorphic lenses. This format was never natural; it fought with the editing process because instead of making many takes, we shot the whole scenes in one long take, which made it impossible to accelerate the film’s rhythm…’
Despite these opinions, The Ashes is perceived as a courageous and outstanding film, polemical with the official, ‘polite’ versions of Polish history. Tadeusz Miczka wrote: ‘The quarrel over the appropriation of The Ashes lasted for three years. During this debate, which was the most turbulent discussion about any Polish film since after the war, emotions ranged from hysterical requests from appalled viewers and critics to burn Wajda at the stake, to thanks given to the director by the film’s enthusiasts, for creating a genuine version of the nation’s birth. For some, the film was the greatest historical and artistic lie in history, while for most, it was a great, sincere interpretation of past events.’
‘It was me who came to Jerzy Andrzejewski with the idea for a movie about the Children’s Crusade as the topic for our next film. As usual, he was enthusiastic,’ said Andrzej Wajda about the beginnings of Gates to Paradise. Indeed, it was the director who introduced Andrzejewski to the subject that had fascinated him for years: the medieval Children’s Crusades (German and French), based on the idea that only pure, innocent children could free the Holy Land from the Muslims. The fate of the crusaders was tragic: before reaching their destination, the children died from exhaustion and illness or were captured and violated.
The initial foundation of Andrzejewski’s script involved setting the film in early medieval Silesia. ‘This poetic, dramatic story with characters on the edge of the abyss, thrown there by magnified, wild passion, is very close to my heart and is a natural consequence of my interests,’ the director explained. ‘I am also attracted by the visual side. A never-ending procession of children through vast woods and fields, few props, and modest costumes make this film very different from a serial production of historical images, bringing it closer to modern problems of contemporary cinema. This story, which seems so distant, as if it was taken from old chronicles or even fairy tales, is a beautiful subject and, for that reason, I think worthy of being made into a film.’
Wajda said that Gates to Paradise gave him so much hope that it could have been the film he dreamt of the most. Yet, he couldn’t realize the idea he had prepared for so long. The commission that evaluated the script of Gates to Paradise in 1963 did not approve the application to send the project to production, justifying the decision with the fact that the subject was too distant from current affairs (a topic which was part of the program of Kamera Film Studio, the producer applying for the evaluation), and that it was impossible to translate the script into cinematic language (many retrospections and internal monologues could potentially limit the audience to intellectuals). The text was also accused of pessimism and, indirectly, of the presence of controversial homosexual motivations. The commission deemed the project equally great and risky, while Minister Zaorski, who chaired the meeting, deemed it impossible to reach a conclusion. Thus, making the film in Poland was put on hold, but Wajda was far from giving up.
His determination led to a British-Yugoslavian co-production, but he was not satisfied with the result.
‘The rejection of this project by the Polish cinema caused the delicate, poetic matter of Gates to Paradise to become an object of the brutal reality of an international co-production,’ he recalled. ‘Dialogues were translated into English, and I would never learn whether they transmitted anything but their pure content. Young actors were called, among whom only Mathieu Carrière had Schlöndorff’s beautiful film Young Torless behind him. The two male leads were played by actors I had known from Polański’s films, who wanted to help me in this difficult situation. In the end, Yugoslavia became the location. Rocky mountains dominated the whole film, giving the impression that the crusade, which marched for weeks, just stays in one place. (…) Now, when I look at the photographs of the boys’ faces, so beautiful and pure, when I go through ideas I sketched on pieces of paper, like Blanka’s hair which devours Aleksy’s head or two boys dressed as angels who carry a third one whose wings are broken; finally, when I go back in time to awe-inspiring Yugoslavian landscapes that are now ruined, it’s so hard to understand why I wasn’t able to show all of it on screen. I just have one answer. I trusted a group of random people – producers, actors, technicians – with my intimate dreams, and they reduced it to a minimum, to their own tastes and their own level, and I was completely helpless.’
His words are confirmed by the reviews, especially this excerpt by Claude Michel Cluny:
‘Andrzejewski’s novel has been noticed for two reasons. One: it consists of two sentences, one of which is a hundred-plus pages long, and the second – a few words long. Two: the book is marvelous. The filmmaker’s experiment is the answer to the writer’s experiment. Yet unfortunately, the book’s power and its tough greatness have not been equaled by the cinematic translation of its carefully chosen words, which expressed powerful passions, mixing exaltation with disappointment and fiery love which grew with every step towards the East with death. Each mind’s vision is turned into its visual equivalent. Illustration and interpretation narrow the imagination, imposing just one point of view. The creative element is reduced. Wajda betrays the original by remaining faithful – that’s the eternal reason for failure in the process of translating one art into another.’
For many, Everything for Sale remains Andrzej Wajda’s most personal film and one of the greatest works of autobiographical fiction in the history of Polish cinema. It is a film-essay attempting to capture ‘death in progress’ and understand the phenomenon of a man by confronting his sudden absence. The spark for the film was Zbigniew Cybulski’s tragic death; in the film, which premiered two years after his passing, shock dominates, along with a surreal feeling caused by the ontological absurdity of death – intensified by the presence of someone who suddenly becomes forever absent.
‘I always wanted to work with Cybulski; he only played in four of my films, yet I was also lucky enough to work with him in the theatre. Zbyszek was not just an actor, but also a personality worth showing on screen. One evening, on January 9th, 1967, in London, I spoke about such a film with David Mercier. He knew Zbyszek well, so we had a lot of fun, remembering anecdotes around which we could build the script. Late at night, when I went back to my hotel, Roman Polański called and told me Zbyszek was dead. That night, his death seemed unreal to me; I needed time to understand it wouldn’t change, that he would never play in any of my films again,’ Wajda recalled.
He began shooting with the conviction that he was making a film about Cybulski – attempting to capture the essence, the traces, the remains of a man who was no longer here. He knew that it wouldn’t make sense to talk about Cybulski using archival materials and photos of him. The film he decided to make turned out to be a story about Wajda himself and others who were suddenly orphaned and unable to comprehend the absence – the irreversible disappearance of someone so important to them. They try to express their pain and feelings, disclosing their emotions in the process. The boundary between privacy, truth, and artistic fiction becomes fluid and blurred.
‘It’s intentional that they appear under their own names,’ said Wajda about the actors in Everything for Sale. ‘Why would I give them different names if I make them say their own words? They say what they want to say. From the very beginning, I knew exactly who should star in this ‘sale’. The only problem was the part of the director. To be honest, there was a time when I thought I should play him, but I decided against it. I am not an actor, and I would never do it as well as Andrzej Łapicki (…)’
The film not only unveils the emotions of the people who, by playing themselves, lived their own private mourning, but also Wajda’s own indecision about the role art should play when confronted with reality and the limits of performance. This can be seen in the (auto)ironic portrayal of the film community. Wajda scrutinizes the parties, snobbish trends, and the general mendacity of his contemporaries. The protagonists of Everything for Sale are mannered and false; they’ve lost everything that was truthful about them.
What’s symptomatic is that the director, Andrzej, finds shelter from an overwhelming void in an art gallery. It’s telling that the works exhibited there are paintings by Wajda’s prematurely deceased friend Andrzej Wróblewski, who created a shocking series on the nightmare of war. ‘Remembering the past, a sense of mission, and a need to find the truth are all features of an old model of art that was never forgotten by the director of Everything for Sale,’ wrote Robert Birkholc on Culture.pl.
Confronted with loss, trying to redefine the sense and limits of creation for himself, Wajda made a deep, multilayered, and surprisingly accurate film about the relationship between art and reality. ‘In Everything for Sale, action is often paused,’ wrote British critic Philip Strick. ‘The grinding sound of train wheels in the first scene echoes throughout the whole film, as cars, parties, projects, and human interactions are stopped. Two contrasting images return as a chorus: a merry-go-round where Ela sits among a crowd of sophisticated film people she hates, and the pulsating gallop of horses (running in a circle) that measures the rhythm of the film, and finally ends it. Wajda’s commentary is a paradox: although everything stops when a person dies, life goes on, whether we like it or not. And so, the second layer of Everything for Sale is a synthesis of a director in general, and Wajda in particular. Everything the protagonists possessed (or imagined possessing) was for sale and was sold; now Wajda even sells Cybulski’s death and his own resignation from finishing the film for cinema’s greater glory.’
Przekładaniec (Roly Poly) is an unusual film in Andrzej Wajda’s filmography. However, when viewed in the context of its time, its genesis becomes more understandable. By the time Wajda began making the film, he was already an established director both in Poland and in Europe. He was looking for new experiences in genres, means of expression, and subjects that went beyond the interests of the Polish Film School, particularly the experiences of war. In the 1960s, Wajda was constantly on set – making films like Samson and The Ashes, which were deeply connected to Polish national identity, but also more contemporary films, such as Innocent Sorcerers and Love at Twenty. He also engaged in international co-productions based on literature (Siberian Lady Macbeth, Gates to Paradise). Right before Przekładaniec, Wajda made one of his most intimate and painful films, inspired by a personal loss – Everything for Sale – and followed it by adapting Lem’s work, Hunting Flies. Many critics have described the 1960s as the time when Wajda was searching for a new cinematic language to address a changing world – one that was shaking off the trauma of war and focusing more on human relationships, a growing consumerism (both at the societal and interpersonal levels), and a crisis of values.
The 36-minute film, based on a script by Stanisław Lem entitled Do You Exist, Mr. Johns?, is Wajda’s first comedy, his first television film, and his one and only sci-fi film. It is surprisingly ironic and brilliantly executed. When Wajda asked Lem for permission to adapt his text, Lem prepared the script on his own. It was published as Przekładaniec in the Ekran monthly in 1968. The texts are only slightly different, mainly because the original story focuses on cybernetics, while the film script shifts focus to transplantology, a new science at the time that was both controversial and fascinating.
Stanisław Lem, who was openly critical of adaptations of his work (Kurt Maetzig’s The Silent Star, Edward Żebrowski’s Hospital of the Transfiguration, Marek Piestrak’s Inquest of Pilot Pirx, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris), not only accepted Wajda’s version but even praised it: ‘Wajda’s film with Kobiela in the leading role is probably the only adaptation of my prose that fully satisfies me. The first source of this satisfaction comes from the film’s internal construction. Wajda admitted that he tried to rebuild my script by rearranging the blocks, but it turned out to be impossible; it was satisfying for me as a constructor.’
Not long after the premiere, Lem wrote to Wajda: ‘Your work, the actors, as well as the set design, all seemed very good to me. I particularly liked the lawyer; the surgeon seemed very nice, and not to mention Kobiela. (…) The future, which is close yet undefined, was created very ingeniously, especially given how modest the means you used.’
Despite being just a low-budget TV film, Przekładaniec received many awards, including recognition from the typically insular sci-fi world. It also showcased Wajda’s versatility, creativity, and instincts. He was able to craft a true visionary cinematic gem with the help of his crew. The film’s futuristic style was inspired by comic books and pop art – the drawings and fonts were created by lettering and magazine designers Elżbieta and Bogdan Żochowscy. Andrzej Markowski, who had worked on over thirty movie soundtracks, was responsible for the sound design, which featured many effects and jazz motifs. Wajda had already collaborated with him on A Generation. The costumes were designed by Barbara Hoff, who was famous for designing popular clothes for Domy Handlowe Centrum department stores.
Bogumił Kobiela, playing the role of rally driver Richard Fox (who has accidents in every race and forces doctors to transplant more and more organs from deceased donors, raising questions about his identity), delivers a true tour-de-force performance. Legal and ethical dilemmas are explored through Fox’s lawyer, played by Ryszard Filipski. Wajda was so impressed with Kobiela’s performance that he stated the film could easily be adapted into a full-length feature. Tragically, the role in Przekładaniec turned out to be one of Kobiela’s last triumphs, as he died in a car crash less than a year later – an ironic postscript to the film.
Film critic Małgorzata Bugaj summed up the project in her 2018 text Wajda autoironicznie: Lem i Przekładaniec (Wajda and Self-Irony: Lem and Roly Poly): ‘Considering the experiments of the 1960s, we can speculate that the gradual loss of ‘self’ of the main protagonist is a reflection of a certain deadlock in Wajda’s artistic and personal life. This deadlock added layers to his identity, which was established earlier. The cover granted by the genre and a sense of humor allowed for a self-ironic distance and a summary of achievements at a moment of crisis, which preceded the opening of a new chapter in the director’s career.’
Hunting Flies is considered an oddity in Andrzej Wajda’s body of work and is his only true comedy, even though comedic elements appear in Roly Poly, as well as in Pan Tadeusz and The Revenge. The story told by Wajda is an adaptation of a short story and the first script by writer and playwright Janusz Głowacki, who reverses the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. In this version, it’s the young woman who shapes the older man to meet her requirements, expectations, and fulfill her dreams.
Wajda connected the genesis of Hunting Flies to his own personal, sentimental struggles. He explained: ‘Without thinking much (…) embittered by my temporary failures, I decided to tackle the subject of women trying to shape our male lives. As is typical in such hopeless situations, the beginning was promising. First of all, Małgorzata Braunek turned out to be a great choice. Her wide grin and eyes enlarged by unnaturally large glasses seemed to leap off the screen and perfectly illustrated the cruel fly drawn by the screenwriter. If I were to further explore the psyche of my man-eater, I could have achieved a lot. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a male partner. Initially, I thought of Kobiela, even inviting him for a test. But my temporary disdain for women clouded my judgment, and I convinced myself that only a complete nobody could be controlled by a woman the way Janusz Głowacki presented it in his script. I decided Kobiela was too interesting for that, too expressive. In retrospect, I’m certain that only his humor would have saved the film from me and my self-righteousness. I lacked distance and had to pay for it…’
Wajda took to heart the criticism of the film, with many accusing him of not finding his place in the genre of satire. The film was called ‘quite pale’ by some. After the premiere, critic Jerzy Płażewski wrote: ‘A funny satire doesn’t require one-sided scrutinizing of its protagonists, nor treating them like idiots (…) Wajda looked for satire in the wrong place. He searched for it in caricature and simplification, which didn’t make the film funnier, but instead limited the extent of issues it could address in Hunting Flies.’
The director later admitted that casting Zygmunt Malanowicz, who had no prior acting experience, as Włodek – mostly due to his looks – transformed the film. What was originally meant to expose the cruel and manipulative nature of women turned into an exploration of the crisis of masculinity. The Warsaw bohéme, which Włodek aspires to join under the influence of his young lover, also saw itself reflected in the film, like a mirror revealing its own smallness, deficits, and pretentiousness. The portraits, observations, and tidbits from the life of Warsaw’s ‘glitterati’ are especially interesting to modern viewers, who can now see them as a testament to the social condition of the time.
What did impress audiences, in contrast to the passive, unhappy male protagonist, was the character of Irena – the nightmare of every man: an independent, cynical man-eater. She is possessive, vain, exalted, and manipulative – both fascinating and repulsive. As a result, Małgorzata Braunek undoubtedly took advantage of the opportunity presented by this ‘failed’ film and created one of her most significant roles, demonstrating her full potential.
When watched with the benefit of time, Hunting Flies paradoxically does fulfill Wajda’s initial intention: men and women live in illusions about themselves. They see projections of the partners they wish to have, not the people they truly are.
‘Among many Polish literary masterpieces about the war, Zofia Nałkowska’s Medallions and Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen hold a special place. When I read them, even today, I am overtaken by fear. A man knows so little about himself until he finds himself in such situations. None of these stories were adapted to the screen – perhaps because their depiction of war left no illusions about human nature. The Battle of Grunwald is penetrated by this bitterness – although it is set in post-war Germany, in a camp for the so-called DPs. Pre-war Poland fell apart in 1939 in front of our very eyes. The disillusionment with old Poland that we experienced at the time shaped the mood of the post-war intelligentsia, leading to its initial affinity for the new authorities. I think that is why Borowski’s bitter irony was so close to me. I could have easily imagined his short story as part of my own life. That’s why, as soon as I could, I did everything in my power to bring The Battle of Grunwald to the screen’ – Andrzej Wajda recalled the inspirations that led to making Landscape After the Battle.
The script was based on Tadeusz Borowski’s short story Battle of Grunwald, but the co-writer, documentary filmmaker Andrzej Brzozowski, and Wajda decided to incorporate motifs from several other stories by this author. The subject, based on drastic wartime prose, did not attempt to express the inexpressible – the Holocaust itself – but rather focused on life after the Holocaust and the process of reconstructing one’s identity, fighting trauma, and the possibility of adapting to an ‘afterlife’, when confronted with total disillusionment with human nature. Wajda’s film is filled with a sense of emptiness, bitterness, resignation, and the loss of humanity. Even though the protagonists were freed from the German camp, they are still kept there – as in a transit camp – waiting for the difficult, yet desired moment of confronting freedom.
The director noted that this moment immediately after the war was depicted not only by him and Borowski but also by painter Andrzej Wróblewski, whose work is quoted in the frames of Landscape After the Battle. Wajda, who always considered it his duty to speak in the name of the dead who could no longer raise their voices, decided this time to focus on the state of mind of those who survived but whose psyche had been broken by the war – a war that put an end to everything they believed in – and who were now confronted with the need to learn how to feel again. Both Wajda and Borowski seem to suggest that love could be an antidote to trauma and hopelessness, yet paradoxically, this love will once again be accompanied by death.
The leading roles in Landscape After the Battle were played by Daniel Olbrychski, who was a close collaborator of Wajda after The Ashes, Everything for Sale, and Hunting Flies, as well as debutante Stanisława Celińska. The film demanded great dedication from her, especially with regard to demanding sex scenes, which she prepared for by coming on set with a sex manual, shocking the nervous Olbrychski and Wajda. After the premiere, in addition to an award at the Łagów Film Festival, the young actress received letters from men interested in an intimate relationship. At the same time, she raised the bar very high for herself – at the Cannes festival, she was compared to Monica Vitti.
Melchior Wańkowicz wrote in a review for Kultura: ‘There is passion in the film, which at first glance seems distant from social issues. It’s a loving embrace between a boy and a girl, who are freeing themselves but are not yet free. (…) I read it as a symbol. I read it as Mickiewicz’s lava, which sticks to the bitter girl, to the sceptic boy. A surreal image of two bare bodies transforming in a multiplied twist on the ground, lined with (under some dried leaves) sharp twigs and pebbles that scratch, cause pain – a pain that accompanies liberation. Maybe that’s a symbol Wajda didn’t even intend to put there? (…) This beautiful image of love can symbolize human mulch from the barracks. The shell of humiliation will fall, but will creative fire burn? (…) I think Wajda caresses. He is not alone. He is standing on the shoulders of our greats. Żeromski scratching wounds, Matejko criticized for the bitter message of Rejtan, Chopin with his sadness. The revisionism of the Kraków history school. That’s a powerful background.’
Landscape After the Battle won, among other accolades, the Złota Kaczka prize from the readers of Film weekly for Best Film of 1970 and the Syrenka Warszawka prize from critics. Andrzej Wajda also received top prizes at film festivals in Milan and Colombo, as well as at the summer film festival in Łagów.
‘I am not a stranger to emotions awakened by the beauty of nature. In particular, I remember the first feelings from my childhood. But then, busy with making films and sitting in dark theatre rooms during rehearsals, I had no possibility to notice the changes in nature’s repetitive cycle. Either I ripped the leaves off the trees – as in Ashes and Diamonds – because it was already summer, and I needed an early spring, or I glued them on, because I didn’t make it in time for summer, and autumn had begun – as was the case with Landscape After the Battle. To be fair, I could only closely observe something through the lens of a camera, and that’s why I only saw real spring once in my life. I had known Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s short story for a long time, yet I needed to grow up to the selflessness of its subject. Polish Television helped me by ordering The Birch Wood’ – wrote Andrzej Wajda about the beginnings of adapting Iwaszkiewicz’s story.
‘After the first few days, the crew, used to the stuffiness of film studios, could barely stand the crystal-clear morning air – it was a shock for many of us. It wasn’t a surprise that one day the key grip asked me for a cigarette, saying: ‘This fresh air is killing me…’. We joked that it was oxygen poisoning. Under the influence of this incredible drug, we made a film that felt different: fresh and surprising, even to me. The air entered my lungs, I felt lighter, and I looked at the screen in awe, as if it wasn’t mine. Some of its freshness remained, both in the actors’ and cinematographer’s work’.
Andrzej Wajda employed Zygmunt Samosiuk to shoot the film, having noticed his talent while watching film chronicles and a reportage where the cinematographer filled each frame with falling snow. To Wajda, this meant he was a master in cinematography and worked quickly. Edward Kłosiński, Samosiuk’s younger colleague and assistant, also worked on the film, later becoming Wajda’s collaborator and friend for many years. Partly due to Samosiuk’s work, The Birch Wood is considered one of the most artistic and visually stunning films by the director. Wajda, who studied to be a painter, filled The Birch Wood with a network of associations and references to paintings – in this case, mostly by Jacek Malczewski, Stanisław Wyspiański, and Aleksander Gierymski. Many frames are direct transpositions of paintings such as Self Portrait with Thanatos, Death, The Poisoned Well, and Narcissus.
Despite some slight changes to the literary original, Wajda succeeded in preserving the soul and depth of the story. The actors also contributed: Daniel Olbrychski and Olgierd Łukaszewicz, who created a moving portrait of a man saying goodbye to life in his prime. ‘It’s sad to die on a bright day in the spring,’ wrote Wajda. ‘To pass, when so many incredible things are happening in the natural world. To me, Jacek Malczewski was the one to show this phenomenon with his paintings of death waiting behind the window in the garden. I am always moved when I think about this film – maybe because I made it for pleasure, not thinking about its potential success. I knew there were a few things I should do in my life and making a film in a birch wood is one of them.’
The consensus among Polish and international critics was favorable toward The Birch Wood. They wrote that it was a film ‘woven with both violence and fragility, force and passion, with acceptance of fate and tears, a passion for life even in a world that’s so poorly organized, against the certainty of death’. It was called ‘a film pulsating with agony, the last gesture of life, life itself’, and praised as ‘Wajda’s look at the essence of human fate’. Iwaszkiewicz himself wrote to Wajda about the Paris premiere: ‘It was a great joy for me, because I really like this short story, written 45 years ago, and I believe that you did it magnificently. As they wrote in the New York Herald, ‘you were faithful to Iwaszkiewicz’s spirit.’ And all that’s yours (Malczewski, the whole of Easter) is so beautifully combined with what’s mine. I am very grateful for all of that and remain an admirer of your intuition, your work, and everything that made my story into your movie.’
When Andrzej Wajda began thinking of a story about Pilate, he tried to interest poet Zbigniew Herbert, who was living in Berlin at the time, in a collaboration. This creative team might have come together had it not been for Herbert’s commitments in the United States. ‘I wasn’t satisfied with the first two versions of the script I ordered in Warsaw. Fortunately, at that time, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was published in Polish for the first time. I read it in awe. It became obvious that I wouldn’t find a better text for my movie than a novel about Pilate. I had everything: Jesus, Pilate’s dark intrigue, Judas’s treason, and the overwhelming loneliness of the only student and Evangelist,’ wrote Andrzej Wajda about the preparations for Pilatus und Andere, a film for the German ZDF television channel, which granted him complete artistic control over the project.
Four out of the thirty-two chapters of The Master and Margarita, based on the Gospel of Matthew, were a precise, concise, and moving chronicle of the protagonists’ last hours, which Wajda wanted to explore. However, he decided to move the plot away from its original setting. While in Nuremberg, Wajda saw the ruins of a Third Reich congress hall, and his instincts told him that this contemporary setting would serve as the perfect commentary on the story of a murderous empire, like ancient Rome two thousand years before. ‘Shooting on the tribune where Hitler spoke during the NSDAP party conventions was particularly moving. We were part of the Slavic nations that were supposed to be destroyed to make Drang nach Osten possible. Yet here we were, healthy and alive, in the ruins of the Third Reich – and we were making a movie! When we were working on Pilate, I felt so free. I have never forgotten that personal and artistic freedom,’ the director wrote in his diary after the shoot.
The Way of the Cross was filmed on the streets of Frankfurt am Main, and a garbage dump near Wiesbaden served as Golgotha. The camera didn’t shy away from filming the observers who gathered to watch the movie set. Wajda designed the costumes himself. They were an eclectic mix of styles and historical elements with modern clothes and everyday objects. For the soundtrack, in addition to natural sounds from contemporary locations, The Gospel of Matthew by J.S. Bach played. ‘I show tourists who jump to a bus’s windows to catch a glimpse of the execution,’ recalled Wajda. ‘Yet a modern highway has its own rules, the signs which forbid cars from stopping, solving a moral issue. If we crucified a man to the cross with real nails, their reaction would be the same. What can you do for a suffering man, how can you help him, if the car cannot stop anyway? I think the film was successful in showing this sadness of indifference and the loneliness of death.’
Wojciech Pszoniak as Yeshua Ha-Nozri and Jan Kreczmar in his final role as Pontius Pilate gave memorable performances. Daniel Olbrychski, Marek Perepeczko, Andrzej Łapicki, and Wajda himself – as a reporter – also appeared in the film.
The film was first screened on Good Friday, March 29th, 1972, on the second channel of German television. Wajda, who received the prestigious Western-German Bambi award for the production, considered this the end of its road. However, the director was determined to screen the film in Poland, especially given how popular Bulgakov was. He succeeded in his plan three years later. The film was shown only in arthouse cinemas, on just two copies, but the interest was immense. Yet, recommendations were soon issued by the Main Office for the Control of the Press, Publications, and Performances, forbidding the dissemination of information about the film, including reviews, articles, and overviews; only information about screening times was allowed.
In Germany, the film received mixed reviews. Some critics found it too eclectic and extravagant, while others believed it was filled with suggestive symbols of modernity that helped a 20th-century audience understand the tragedy of Good Friday, which is the foundation of European civilization.
‘Many years after the premiere, in Paris, I met Elia Kazan, a master of American cinema. When I told him my name, he asked, ‘Are you the director who made the movie that takes place in one night?’ I instantly thought he meant Ashes and Diamonds. But he was referring to The Wedding. He asked me who wrote such a wonderful script for me. I was happy and proud that I could give cinematic shape to a theatre play and that Elia Kazan looked beyond the brilliance of Stanisław Wyspiański’s play,’ recalled Andrzej Wajda.
The Wedding is considered one of the most original plays ever written in Polish, and it would be hard to find an important artist who hasn’t drawn inspiration from Wyspiański, borrowed motives, or directly referenced his play in their own work. It is also one of the most analyzed Polish literary texts, often studied in the context of its adaptations. Universally regarded as essential to Polish culture, it addresses issues of national identity, freedom, and historiosophy. At the same time, it delves into the nation’s complexes, weaknesses, and character traits, which have led to its ruin time and time again.
Adapting it to film seemed almost impossible. However, Wajda had mentioned the idea of a film version to Stanisław Janicki as early as the 1960s. He even adapted the play for the stage at Teatr Stary in Kraków in 1963. The first attempt to film The Wedding, based on Andrzej Kijowski’s script, which moved the action out of the house in Bronowice and placed it around Kraków, was abandoned after four weeks of shooting. Wajda realized that only the unity of action, time, and place could ensure the proper dramaturgy and condensation of the plot. From those early days, only the introductory sequence, the procession scene from the church in Bronowice, and the scene of the failed insurrection remained in the final cut.
The finished film was shot entirely inside a hut with movable walls, constructed in a studio. Set designer Tadeusz Wybult was asked by Wajda to further move the walls so that the rooms seemed even smaller. This, combined with Witold Sobociński’s dynamic cinematography and the colors he envisioned, created an effect of constant movement, like a dream-like, vertigo-inducing trance. The camera flowed to the rhythm of folk music, as well as a score composed by Stanisław Radwan. Additionally, the hypnotic, sharp voice of Czesław Niemen, whom Wajda cast in the role of Chochoł, added to the film’s atmosphere.
Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz wrote about the film in Miesięcznik Literacki: ‘As every director adapting a play to the screen, Wajda needed to ask himself one question: not wanting to destroy The Wedding, how could he break through its staginess, its theatrical unities, its divisions into scenes and acts, and the conventionality that cinema hates? The task is even more difficult in The Wedding, since the protagonists speak in verse. If they didn’t, it would be an offence to everything the modern audience remembers. Wajda’s response to staginess is reality. The film doesn’t try to make the play more colorful or dream-like, but instead makes the reality of the drama more concrete, material, and touchable. The reception room is small, stuffy, crowded; the hall is narrow; the courtyard is muddy and ugly; and the Host’s canvases are lying around in a shed next to barn equipment. Theatre doesn’t happen in such an environment; life does, and that’s what the film does. […] That’s what The Wedding is: some peasants, some writers, a councilwoman – and suddenly, one of the most important things ever written in Polish appears.’
While the film received mixed reviews, it was clear from the start that it was an unprecedented achievement in Polish cinema – revolutionary in its form and in how it adapted a theatrical play. Its most important feature, however, was its condensation of symbols, myths, and historical figures into a chaotic dance that tells the tragic story of Polish national identity and collective ignorance in just over a hundred minutes.
Raymond Lefévre, reviewing the film for the French press, summarized his impressions: ‘This masterpiece by Wajda takes us right to the heart of Polish reality. At first glance, it brings us a joyful atmosphere that the camera joins without restraint. As if it were an invited guest, it clings to pirouettes, gets drunk on folk music, joins conversations, underlines responses, analyses faces, and then joins the dance again. Tireless, interested, mad, but hopelessly sharp. That is Poland caught in its contrasts. […] Poland, drunk on alcohol and words, made ill by its master’s cravings and ridiculed heroism, stuck in resignation and Catholicism, as the messenger gallops through a country that does not exist. This wonderful allegory somehow reconciles baroque and acuteness. It is far more convincing than any consciously didactic discourse.’
Today, The Wedding is considered one of the masterpieces of Polish cinema, both in Poland and internationally.
There’s a funny anecdote connected to the beginnings of The Promised Land that Andrzej Wajda recalls: “Tired and dissatisfied, in the spring of 1973, I turned to housework. Krystyna (Zachwatowicz – Wajda’s wife) had just sown the lawn and, as the experts advised, I started cutting it with scissors. On my knees, I had worked through a patch barely larger than a table when I decided: I prefer making movies. Suddenly, I felt lighter and brighter. I submitted the script of The Promised Land. It was well received, and in the summer, we started shooting. A great adventure began with a city that uncovered new fragments of its incredible past every day.”
It was Andrzej Żuławski who gave Reymont’s novel to Wajda and also showed him a documentary by Leszek Skrzydło about the palaces of factory owners in Łódź. These buildings, untouched by the war, were still incredibly impressive and became natural sets for the film. Wajda was so enthralled by the possibilities Łódź offered that he quickly began preparing for the shoot—especially since he already had a script. He had written the first draft in 1968, but it wasn’t until 1971, when the X Film Studio opened and he became its chair, that he received official permission to start production on The Promised Land.
Wajda altered the literary original (written by Reymont under the political influence of the National-Democratic Party) quite significantly. He transformed Borowiecki’s business partners—a German and a Jew—from traitors, as depicted in the novel, into friends and allies. The book reflected a stereotypical, antisemitic view held by Polish nationalists of the Lodzermensch, which Wajda consciously challenged.Casting also played a crucial role in adding complexity to the three main characters. Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Seweryn, and Wojciech Pszoniak—who would go on to collaborate with Wajda many times—formed what became known as his “great trio.” Seweryn was chosen immediately, Pszoniak was cast after a process he himself found unsatisfactory, and Olbrychski—who initially disliked Reymont’s novel and his character—needed the role explained through comparison to Kmicic, whom he had played not long before.
The project benefited from the realism of its visual language, almost photographic in nature, and from meticulous documentation of interiors, costumes, and props. Wajda worked closely with set designer Tadeusz Kosarewicz and historical reconstruction expert Maciej Putowski. The film was shot in authentic interiors of palaces and factories in Łódź, and nearly 600 costumes were designed by Barbara Ptak (donated to the Silesian Film Library in Katowice in 2016). Filming lasted five months, beginning in early 1974, and was carried out by two crews led by Wajda and second director Andrzej Kotkowski. Three cinematographers worked on the film: Witold Sobociński, Edward Kłosiński, and Wacław Dybowski. The film was completed in November 1974, although Wajda struggled with the ending, creating several versions. Ultimately, he chose one that diverged from the novel, emphasizing factory workers being shot—a powerful reference to a pivotal moment in Polish history. In cinemas, The Promised Land was preceded by a music video featuring Olbrychski, Seweryn, and Pszoniak walking through modern Łódź, singing “It was once given to us, the promised land.” The first screenings were held for factory workers in Warsaw (at the FSO factory) and in Łódź (at cotton industry plants). The official premiere took place in Warsaw in 1975. Three versions of the film exist today: the theatrical release, a television version, and a shortened cut prepared by Wajda for the film’s digital restoration. It was a commercial success—around 7.5 million people saw it in cinemas by 2000. However, it also sparked controversy. Some fans of the novel and critics accused the film of antisemitism, leading to its premiere being blocked in New York and Los Angeles by American Jewish groups. In Poland, some critics claimed Wajda endowed the Polish protagonist with the most repulsive traits, suggesting political subtext. Nonetheless, the film was widely regarded as a masterpiece for its artistic quality. Even the censorship office supported it as Poland’s submission for international film festivals, including the Academy Awards. Despite this, it did not succeed in the U.S. due to the antisemitism accusations—though German critics praised it as “a merciless view of Polish history, rejecting the convenient notion that Jews or Germans were always the villains.”
Today, The Promised Land—which won the Golden Lions at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia—is considered one of Poland’s greatest films and a global classic. Its universal significance was captured in Film magazine by Aleksander Ledóchowski:
“In Wajda’s vision, Łódź is an exaggerated, intense city with a single goal. The sound of looms and the bustle of the stock exchange are its only music—overwhelming, numbing feelings, silencing minds, and driving people into a frenzy. Wajda’s city, a monstrous black kingdom of capital and speculation, is Łódź, but also the jungle of Manchester or Chicago. Łódź has its own score—the staccato of the looms. Behind it, the rising din of machines, conveyor belts, and linear slides. The factory rhapsody drowns out the scream of a man crushed by gears. Red flowers appear on white dresses. Andrzej Wajda’s film—cohesive yet torn, uniform yet multi-styled, beautiful, and expressive. Brilliantly envisioned and inconsistent. Spontaneity bursts from the ‘sins’ of its style. It merges beauty with vulgarity, intellect with emotion, intuition with experience, poetry with prose.”
At first, instead of The Shadow Line, a film was supposed to be made based on Bolesław Sulik’s idea for a script about Joseph Conrad, which the author brought to the ‘X’ Film Studio. Wajda thought it would be a beautiful subject for a film, but at the time, he decided it would be easier to adapt Conrad’s The Shadow Line than to make a movie about the author himself. The idea for the adaptation came from England, along with a budget – prompted by Conrad’s growing international popularity. When interviewed during the shoot, Andrzej Wajda spoke about his directorial intent: “I liked the idea of filming the short story as if it were transferred directly to the screen. The Shadow Line is well suited to this concept because it is much shorter than the other books I have adapted for film. And it has great strength thanks to its compact structure. While staying faithful to Conrad, we allowed ourselves two major interventions: the narrator of the story becomes Conrad himself (…) The other intervention is the addition of a prologue and an epilogue.”
After the film was completed, and even years later, Wajda affirmed: “Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line has a distinct plot that is easy to follow, but otherwise it’s not easily translated to the screen.”
The film was shot in Bulgaria (on the Black Sea), in England, and in Bangkok. The main protagonist was renamed Joseph Conrad – Korzeniowski, instead of John Nieven as in the original story. His Polish identity is emphasized by scenes showing him looking at family photographs and reading a letter from his uncle. Despite this, Wajda later admitted he had failed in his struggle with the literary text: “When you want to be faithful to a novel you’re adapting for the screen, you have to destroy it completely and then rebuild it, giving it a chance to be reborn as a film. When I think about adaptation, I recall what Hamlet tells his mother: ‘I must be cruel to be kind.’ I wasn’t cruel enough to The Shadow Line. I chased atmosphere, fleeting words, and subtleties – and so I made a film that was itself subtle, fleeting, and not communicative enough.”
Casting the lead role also posed a challenge. For the first time in years, Wajda did not invite Daniel Olbrychski to participate – not because he lacked the ability, but because Wajda believed the actor had already passed his own “shadow line.” Seeking youth, he sacrificed Olbrychski’s energy and expressiveness, choosing Marek Kondrat instead. “I understood and accepted his ambitious, deeply considered vision for the role, which involved concealing all emotion,” Wajda recalled. “Unfortunately, seeing how well this young artist executed his plan, I realized I should have given him bolder material – scenes and situations that required no verbal explanation. With his impassive expression, he could have remained intriguing and comprehensible to the audience without needing to ‘comment’ on his performance. Sadly, the single – threaded plot of The Shadow Line left no room for artificial dramatic devices.” Wajda also experienced creative doubts during production: “While working on The Shadow Line, I thought: I’ve made this film before. Why am I making it again? At first, I couldn’t recall what film I had in mind. But then it became obvious – it was Kanał: the same theme, the responsibility of a commander toward his men.”
The film received a lukewarm reception. Reviewer Michał Komar tried to explain why The Shadow Line failed to become the compelling work of art one might expect from a director of Wajda’s stature: “Perhaps the source of the film’s failure lies in its pursuit of psychology where there was no room for it. The ‘shadow line’ is treated as a description of a young man’s inner journey as he faces adversity. The director had to search for strength and meaning in the relationship between the protagonist’s psyche and his environment – the ship, the crew’s illness, the oppressive heat. But since neither heat nor stillness can be shown for long (as the audience might fall asleep), everything has to be beautifully shot, and actors must be given visually engaging tasks, like balancing on a mast. When deeper questions are left unasked and moral dilemmas are ignored, the whole task is reduced to technical efficiency – a visual compensation for the demands of realism.”
Years later, Wajda reflected on the film’s place in his body of work: “I’ve returned to this film many times, trying to answer my own question: what could I have done better? Today, I’d say it’s easier to make a film about Conrad – keeping in mind the style of his writing – than to film any of his novels.”
“It all started with an anecdote Jerzy Bossak, the head of the ‘Kamera’ Film Studio, read in a newspaper: a bricklayer came to the employment office but was turned away because Nowa Huta only needed workers for the steel foundry. One of the clerks, however, recognized the man’s face – he was a well – known bricklayer leader, the star of the last political season. That wasn’t much to go on, but our artistic director knew who could turn it into a script. Ścibor – Rylski had written The Ashes; I knew he’d also authored Węgiel (Coal), a social – realist novel I hadn’t even tried to read, but I didn’t know he had also written portraits of bricklayers for the so – called ‘Library of Work Leaders’…” – recalled Andrzej Wajda, describing the beginnings of Man of Marble in the early 1960s. Searching for a subject for a contemporary film, Wajda and the screenwriter, inspired by Agnieszka Osiecka (then a student at the Łódź Film School), decided that a young female director working on her graduation film would be the narrative link to the actual story of the bricklayer leader. The script, published in the August 1963 issue of Kultura monthly, attracted interest from numerous Party officials, which led to it being “arrested” and shelved for many years. It wasn’t until 1976 that Minister of Culture Józef Tejchma finally allowed Wajda to make the film – despite facing significant backlash and even risking his position. Wajda cast debutante Krystyna Janda in the lead role. Her portrayal of Agnieszka became one of the most iconic performances in Polish cinema and launched a decades – long career. The film made it to theaters with only minor changes – again thanks to Tejchma’s support. The audience response was overwhelming: more than 2.5 million people saw it in cinemas, with long lines forming and tickets selling out for weeks. The premiere caused political turmoil: the head of the Cinematography Committee was removed from office, and Wajda’s ally, Minister Tejchma, resigned. A series of negative reviews – commissioned by the authorities – appeared in the press. As Trybuna Ludu wrote: “The script, written years ago, is unnecessarily burdened by a tendency to exaggerate and to harshly judge the past – a past we should not be turning our backs on. (…) There is a sense that the structure is internally unbalanced, and the reasoning often lacks legitimacy, as the premises are too narrow.”
At the Gdynia Polish Film Festival, the jury was allegedly instructed to block Wajda’s chances of winning. Krzysztof Zanussi, who received the Golden Lions, declined the award in solidarity with Wajda, who was left with only the journalists’ prize. Critical acclaim continued abroad: the print sent to a French distributor a year later was passed along to the director of the Cannes Film Festival, who screened Man of Marble out of competition. The film went on to win the FIPRESCI Prize, awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics.
Krzysztof Kłopotowski later described the authorities’ reaction to Wajda’s film as “the biggest media campaign against a single artist in the 1970s,” adding that the controversy “divided critics, journalists, and activists, revealing decent people in unexpected places.” In Więź monthly, Wiktor Woroszylski offered perhaps the most resonant interpretation on behalf of the film’s defenders and enthusiasts – people who saw themselves reflected in its story and gained strength from it to later fight for a free Poland: “In the character of Birkut from Nowa Huta, I saw my own generation – with its black – and – white (as black – and – white as the film itself) faith, enthusiasm, and naivety, with its as – yet – unrecognized susceptibility to later disappointment and defeat. I’ve been there – I unloaded bricks at night on a sidetrack in Nowa Huta, walked through the mud, slept with young men in huge dormitories. I wrote a poem about them – as primitive as they were – and read it aloud in the light of a flickering bulb. (…) I don’t recall this out of nostalgia for our youth – I view it with mixed feelings, combining longing with painful irony, shame, and bitterness… So, are we standing on the threshold of a Polish film renaissance? Or something more?” (The final two sentences of the review were crossed out by censors.)
Man of Marble became the first part of a “workers’ trilogy,” later followed by Man of Iron and Wałęsa: Man of Hope. Its symbolism, poetics, structure, and characters would influence numerous Polish filmmakers, including Krzysztof Zanussi (Camouflage), Barbara Sass (Bez miłości), Konrad Szołajski (Człowiek z…), Krzysztof Krauze (Gry uliczne), and Antoni Krauze (Smoleńsk).
Sometimes, a jumble of words is enough to awaken creative inspiration. That was the case with Andrzej Wajda’s acclaimed film, now considered a flagship example of the so – called cinema of moral anxiety, a term coined by Janusz Kijowski. “One day, Daniel Olbrychski came to our house in the Żoliborz district and confided in us about his personal problems,” Wajda recalled. “As he spoke, he kept repeating the phrase ‘without anesthesia,’ meaning that what happened to him came suddenly and without warning. I liked that phrase immediately – it struck me as a powerful way to describe many of our current events.”
Wajda shared the phrase – and the idea for a story about a man whose life collapses in an instant – with Agnieszka Holland. She went on to write a script inspired by real – life biographies: Ryszard Kapuściński, Andrzej Wajda himself, and her father, Henryk Holland, who was persecuted for his political beliefs and died tragically under unclear circumstances. Initially, Holland hesitated. Given how politically engaged filmmakers were in opposition movements, she wasn’t sure if starting from an emotional rather than political crisis was appropriate. But after discussing it with Wajda, she came to see that the protagonist’s emotional breakdown was inseparable from the ostracism he suddenly faced. “Somewhere deep in this story is the portrait of (…) Ryszard Kapuściński,” Wajda said. “There was a time when, for political reasons, he was banned from traveling abroad. Suddenly, his texts stopped being printed, he wasn’t invited on television. He sat at home wondering what to do next.” Wajda appreciated Holland’s script for its clarity and restraint: “I liked Agnieszka’s script because it was very expressive. The dialogue was exceptionally well written. Not everything could be said directly – quite the opposite. The finesse came from the fact that the audience could clearly understand what was happening, even though understated conversations.”
Janusz Wilhelmi, then head of cinematography at the Ministry of Culture and Art, opposed the film and suggested changes that would dilute its message. But after Wilhelmi died in a plane crash in 1978, the way was cleared for Wajda – and other directors – to resume previously blocked projects.
Wajda cast Zbigniew Zapasiewicz in the leading role. His face would become iconic within the cinema of moral anxiety, thanks also to his performances in Krzysztof Zanussi’s films. Despite his inner power and expressiveness, Zapasiewicz plays a largely silent, non – confrontational man – an approach that became the film’s most compelling form of expression, resulting in a deeply memorable role. He was joined on screen by Ewa Dałkowska and Krystyna Janda. Many of their scenes were improvised, with Wajda allowing the actors to rely on their intuition and moral sensitivity. The film was well received by the press, though some critics accused it of being overly journalistic, exaggerated, or of allowing ideological messaging to obscure psychological depth. Nevertheless, audiences who had lived through the People’s Republic of Poland could immediately recognize Jerzy Michałowski’s fate – it mirrored that of countless individuals who had been destroyed by hypocrisy, a culture of mediocrity, and the envy of those in power toward socially influential figures. This universal message resonated abroad as well. Lines such as “Everything can be proven, if needed,” and “Guilt is an elastic notion – everything depends on the lighting,” spoken by the lawyer hired by the protagonist’s wife, were widely understood by international audiences. The film won the Grand Prix at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia (ex aequo with Stanisław Różewicz’s Passion) and received the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
“One follows one’s weakness, while trying to escape from it,” said Andrzej Wajda, explaining his decision to adapt Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s 1932 short story The Maids of Wilko. “Since, as many people say, my films are too expressive, too violent – their power, the power of those that are liked by the audience and spoken about, lies on the outside – I’m probably searching for something that opposes my nature. I try to do what’s most difficult for me: to make a film composed of subtleties.” The early days of production confirmed his premonitions. Wajda found himself unable to shoot anything – his dynamic, expressive style clashed with the story’s contemplative tone and slow rhythm. He later spoke of the experience: “The cinematography authorities were relieved, but for me, misery began. My two previous films – or maybe even three, starting with The Promised Land – were made in high gear, with energy that came through on screen. But the delicate matter of The Maids of Wilko demanded something entirely different. My internal rhythm clashed with the story’s calmness, which created the biggest problems on set. It was my wife, Krystyna, deeply concerned about my state of mind, who helped me realize I was still living to the pace of my previous films. That kind of rush is fine for a political film, essentially an active one, but here, we were doing something entirely different…”
Just before shooting The Maids of Wilko, Wajda had made Man of Marble and Without Anesthesia. The 1970s were drawing to a close, along with major political and social changes in Poland. At that time, Wajda was increasingly drawn to the prose of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, particularly three short stories: The Birch Wood, which he adapted in 1970; Sweet Rush, which he would not return to until 2009; and The Maids of Wilko, which he had been planning to film for nearly a decade: “I had been thinking about it for years, even before Man of Marble. Every fall, we would say again that we should film this story, but we didn’t have a script. The idea for The Maids of Wilko came shortly after The Birch Wood.” The screenplay was written by director and screenwriter Zbigniew Kamiński, who collaborated with Wajda at the “X” Film Studio and would later work with him again on Iwaszkiewicz’s Noc czerwcowa (A Night in June) for the Television Theatre. Kamiński’s version of The Maids of Wilko departed significantly from the literary original, which concerned Anna Iwaszkiewicz, the writer’s wife. To better understand the author’s intent and remain faithful to the story’s essence, Wajda read the volume Ogrody (Gardens), which contained three essays written for Iwaszkiewicz’s friends – Sny (Dreams) for Julian Stryjkowski, Ogrody for Jerzy Lisowski, and Sérénité for Konstanty Jeleński. Reading Sérénité, in particular, proved essential for capturing the atmosphere of The Maids of Wilko. The essay contained motifs that inspired Wajda and offered an interpretive key to understanding Iwaszkiewicz: the dominance of autobiographical experience over fictional reality, the tension between Polishness and Western Europe, the existential weight of aging, and the metaphysical dread of death and nothingness. In October 1978, already on set, Wajda explained in an interview: “Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz wrote The Maids of Wilko in 1932, but he also wrote Ogrody. That’s how we must look at this literary work – and perhaps that’s the way to present it to a contemporary audience. It will be a film about returning to a familiar place. But we are all always returning, just as Iwaszkiewicz does in Ogrody. I want to make an old – fashioned film, a ‘disappearing’ film – somewhere between reality and fiction. If possible, the author himself will appear in it.”
Before filming, Wajda’s crew visited Byszewy with Iwaszkiewicz – the mansion that had inspired the story’s setting. They planned to shoot scenes with the author that would be interwoven into a collage of two motifs: the return of a man after many years of absence, and Iwaszkiewicz’s contemporary visit to the same house. In the end, Wajda decided to keep only two such scenes in the film. The rest was edited into a separate television short titled Pogoda domu niechaj będzie z Tobą (May the Serenity of the Home Be with You). The Maids of Wilko is now considered one of Wajda’s most delicate and nuanced works, often compared to the melancholic subtlety of Chekhov. It was not only well received in Poland but also internationally acclaimed, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Jerzy Płażewski wrote in Kultura monthly: “Andrzej Wajda’s growth is evident where he had not excelled before: he is beginning to move us emotionally. He used to fascinate us, shock us, grab us. But now, he moved me. I left the screening deeply affected. Even more so after the second viewing. And even more after the third. (…) As if the director, usually attacking us with a wide range of expressive tools, decided this time to limit himself to just the highest notes – the violin. Will he remain as powerful in his reign over the audience’s imagination?”
Even after so many years, the answer is still yes.
“In Poland, we were all waiting for a miracle; we were tired and lost in everyday struggles, and we dreamt of an authority – a foreign authority, someone from the West. It could be our compatriot, say, a world – famous conductor who decides to visit his little hometown on a whim to play an anniversary concert. (…) Time accelerated in Poland when John Paul II was elected Pope. After what happened, it couldn’t be a monster who visited us from the West – it had to be someone who would show us how to live! We hadn’t yet started dreaming about John Paul’s visit to Poland, yet this vision was already present in our imagination. Very quickly, both the script and the film itself slipped out of my hands and started to live a life of their own,” said Andrzej Wajda about The Conductor, which he made during the tumultuous period between 1979 and 1980, between the Oscar – nominated The Maids of Wilko and Man of Iron, which went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Andrzej Kijowski’s script – built around themes of love for music, passion, and the desire to succeed at all costs (all magnified and distorted by the optics of a provincial town steeped in jealousy and ambition) – served as a pretext for Wajda to return to Radom, the town where he grew up. From there, he could tell a story from the perspective of a mid – sized city whose aspirations are all the more intense for the nagging sense that it will never truly be part of the “big wide world.” Despite international acclaim – including a Silver Bear for Andrzej Seweryn at the Berlin International Film Festival – the film was misunderstood by many Polish critics, who considered it the swan song of the cinema of moral anxiety. While The Conductor struggled for recognition in Poland, international audiences understood its message more intuitively. One French reviewer wrote: “The conductor and the orchestra are of no interest to the filmmaker – just as in Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal – in terms of what they do (make music) or the quality of that music. Wajda even said he doesn’t find music particularly absorbing. What moves him in an orchestra is its identity as a social structure, a perfect metaphor for society, for organization, and for human relationships. Wajda speaks of an orchestra that is Poland.”
One of the film’s most memorable aspects is its acting – particularly the role played by the great Shakespearean actor Sir John Gielgud, and the leading roles of Marta and Adam, portrayed by Krystyna Janda and Andrzej Seweryn, who were married in real life at the time. In the film, the orchestra’s conductor and its lead violinist are disillusioned about their relationship, and that disillusionment intensifies with the arrival of a world – renowned musician – whom they each respond to in dramatically different ways. Complicating matters further, Janda and Seweryn were undergoing a real – life breakup during the shoot – made more painful by the presence of their young daughter Maria, who also appears in the film. Wajda later recalled: “Janda and Seweryn showed something deeply human about two people separating. I’m not a supporter of mixing life and art, and I don’t like when actors reveal their private pain in front of the camera. But this time, there was something profoundly moving about what they did – something I observed with deep pain and still cannot forget.” Although The Conductor is not often listed among Wajda’s most iconic films, over the years it has gained a dedicated following. Its layered metaphors have made it a constant subject of analysis – whether in terms of the ethics of artistic work, leadership styles, or the fragility of human relationships. It is, at the same time, a complete and compelling cinematic work. Shortly after the premiere, none other than Ingmar Bergman named The Conductor as one of the eleven most important films in the world.
“Workers’ talks with the authorities had been going on for some time in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, yet only snippets of information reached Warsaw. In the meantime, the Filmmakers’ Association – which I chaired – had managed to secure the right to film important historical events for archival purposes, and a delegation was already present at the shipyard. The workers’ guards recognized me at the gate, and one of them said:
– Please, make a film about us…
– What film?
– Man of Iron! – he answered without hesitation.
I had never made a film on request, but I couldn’t ignore this call.” This was the moment when Wajda decided to make Man of Iron. But the year was 1980, and without understanding what had happened ten years earlier, it would have been impossible to tell the story of the present. Wajda asked screenwriter Aleksander Ścibor – Rylski to begin work on the script. Drawing on notes, documentaries, films, and photographs, Ścibor – Rylski built a foundation, while Wajda personally met with Wojciech Jaruzelski to request the use of tanks to film scenes depicting the state of emergency introduced in Pomerania in 1970. The request was denied – ironically, the same tanks would be used just months later to impose martial law. Production on Man of Iron began in early 1981, rushed to capture the social atmosphere of the moment. Structurally, the film mirrored Man of Marble, with its investigative framing device allowing for the inclusion of authentic footage and real historical figures from the August 1980 events, including Anna Walentynowicz, Tadeusz Fiszbach, and Lech Wałęsa. Marian Opania was cast as journalist Winkiel, while Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Krystyna Janda reprised their roles as Maciek Tomczyk and Agnieszka, continuing the narrative begun in Man of Marble. New facts, testimonies, and developments emerged daily, demanding to be incorporated. Agnieszka Holland worked closely with Wajda to adapt the evolving material into a screenplay as they filmed. Determined to maximize the film’s chances of Polish distribution, Wajda cleverly navigated the weakened censorship system. Just one month after completing the film, he sent a copy to the Cannes Film Festival selection committee. Man of Iron was chosen for the main competition and received overwhelmingly positive reviews, ultimately earning the Palme d’Or – Poland’s first. It was later nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, although the Polish authorities withdrew it from the competition. After its Cannes triumph, the film premiered in Poland in July 1981. Jerzy Płażewski, writing in Warsaw’s Kultura, emphasized how the film functioned as both cinema and historical documentation: “Unlike in Man of Marble, here Ścibor – Rylski and Wajda go on a fact – hunt. They use archives: photographs, audio recordings, documents, testimonies, posters, murals, spontaneous songs. They seem to refrain from more sophisticated cinematic devices, so as not to remind the audience of the presence of intermediaries – no matter how talented – who might distort the reality.” Western critics hailed Wajda as “a virtuoso in turning the most contemporary events into a cinematic masterpiece,” while the Soviet press dismissed the film’s Cannes win as a politically motivated gesture, calling its protagonists driven by “unstoppable, overwhelming hate.”
Despite mixed responses abroad, Man of Iron was quickly recognized in Poland as a symbol of resistance and the struggle for freedom. After martial law was declared later that year, it gained new significance as a courageous cinematic act of witness. Even critics who acknowledged its imperfections, like Małgorzata Szpakowska in Kino, recognized its historic importance: “Man of Iron is something more than a film – it is a social fact, and its full meaning is still impossible to grasp. (…) Never before in our cinematography has a historical event become the subject of a film almost in statu nascendi. And not a documentary, but a feature. Wajda entered a race with memory (…) and he was on time. He caught up with history. He overtook writers, poets, playwrights. He created the first synthesis of the August events that was made outside of journalism. By being first, he didn’t just present his version – he became a co – author of history. It’s hard to imagine one could achieve more by making a film.”
“The unforgettable adventure of Danton began three years earlier at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, outside Paris, where I first saw Gérard Depardieu on stage. I was supposed to be watching my friends Daniel Olbrychski and Wojtek Pszoniak, who, for the first time, had taken the risky step of performing in French. They were both excellent, but it was Depardieu who captured my attention. I immediately saw Danton in him – with that unstoppable life force, powerful enough to withstand anything… except premature death. My fascination with Danton dated back to 1975, when I directed Stanisława Przybyszewska’s play The Danton Case at Warsaw’s Teatr Powszechny, with Wojciech Pszoniak playing Robespierre. The production was suggested by Krystyna Zachwatowicz, a set designer who had previously encountered the play.” – wrote Andrzej Wajda about his inpirations that led to the making of Danton.
For the film version, Wajda collaborated with renowned screenwriter Jean – Claude Carrière, known for his work with Luis Buñuel, Louis Malle, Jean – Luc Godard, and Miloš Forman. Carrière later worked with Wajda again on The Possessed, which featured Isabelle Huppert, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, and Omar Sharif. “If I had worked on a script about the French Revolution with a French director who had read the same books and had the same background, I wouldn’t have written anything worth reading. I couldn’t say no to working with Andrzej for three reasons: he was Polish, he was a great director, and he lived under a communist regime. And a fourth: the text we were adapting had been written by Stanisława Przybyszewska – a woman’s view on Danton and Robespierre. I had never seen anything like it before,”
– Carrière recalled.
Originally, the film was to be produced by the Gaumont studio and shot in Poland. But when martial law was declared on December 13, 1981, the plan collapsed. Through quick negotiations, the project was moved to Paris, along with part of the Polish cast and a small group of Wajda’s close collaborators. Gérard Depardieu personally appealed to the French Ministry of Culture to help finance the film. The political repression in Poland only made the story more resonant and urgent. The film was shot on location in authentic interiors and exteriors – where the actual historical events took place two centuries earlier. The performances of Depardieu as Danton and Pszoniak as Robespierre became legendary, a true cinematic duel. Before filming began, Depardieu traveled to Poland – just as Solidarity was gaining strength – to witness a modern revolution firsthand. Wajda described this moment:
“I wanted Depardieu to see the face of the Revolution – exhausted, with eyes wide open, suddenly dreaming of something that can never happen. Krystyna Zachwatowicz took him to the Mazovia Region headquarters. He stood there for a long time, where history was being made. No words, no director, could have introduced him to the role of Danton better than what he saw with his own eyes.” Production began with scenes involving the Polish actors speaking their native language. These were later post – synced in French. Wajda was aware that his career upon returning to Poland might depend on the film’s success. Reception varied by country. In France, some critics claimed the film lacked historical nuance and that its protagonists were abstracted from the broader social context. However, the central drama between the two men was widely praised. Reviews noted that “The film powerfully evokes the sense that history moves not because of its great actors – but in spite of them.”; called it “A masterful historical drama – everyone with eyes should open them wide.”. “We are the last chance for freedom,’ says Danton. Wajda’s film shows how fragile that freedom is. Whoever doubts it should look at the Berlin Wall.” “Wajda’s steady hand turned what could have been a verbose political debate into an awe – inspiring film.” Importantly, Wajda did not side with either revolutionary idealism or pragmatism. Instead, he conveyed the grim inevitability of historical momentum. Neither Danton’s realism nor Robespierre’s purity could halt the machinery of violence. “Wajda doesn’t deliver a verdict on the struggle between moderation and extremism. He simply observes. The speed of revolutionary change is so great that no individual – no political faction – can slow it. Not even the people’s will can stop the guillotine. That’s the bleak truth Wajda takes from 18th – century France. It applies equally well to his own Poland.”
Danton received numerous accolades, including BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film, César Award for Best Director, National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor (Gérard Depardieu). Ironically, the film was disqualified from the Polish Film Festival for its supposed “non – Polish character” – despite being one of Wajda’s most politically resonant and internationally lauded works.
“I wanted to make this film because in all my previous films – A Generation, Kanał, or Ashes and Diamonds – the Germans were used as living shields. Somebody shot them, they fell – and that’s all. That’s how Germans were usually shown in Polish post – war cinema. That’s why the possibility of saying something new about them intrigued me so much. I wanted to make this film because it’s a story of Germans far from the war front. Not about those brutal, armed people that we had seen during the occupation; not about the army, the torturers of the Polish nation. It was supposed to be a story of how Germans behaved at home,” said Andrzej Wajda about the genesis of Love in Germany. “A real event from the time of war, which was described by Rolf Hochhuth, seemed a great idea for a film. The story of a Polish war prisoner from 1939, his love for a German woman, and his tragic death on the gallows was easily transferred to the screen.”
Wajda wrote the script with Agnieszka Holland and Bolesław Michałek. The film was co – produced by France and Germany. Yet the director was anxious about the fact that the script was based on a rather concise, brief novel, and he felt unable to fully recreate the atmosphere and reality of life in a German town during the war. Years later he noted: “My Polish films always spoke of a fate that was also my own. I judged the Poles, but as one of them I had the right to do so. Sometimes I defended the Polish lost cause, and as a Japanese samurai I was ready to commit hara – kiri. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be as generous when making Love in Germany, I couldn’t truly engage with the German theme. As a result, I feel as if I had ripped open my neighbour’s belly to save my own honour… And it turned out to be ridiculous!” The film wasn’t received well in Germany, and the director wasn’t particularly surprised. It was considered clumsy and chaotic; Wajda was accused of not directing his actors effectively, and the film was seen as a shallow analysis of “the German soul” and a mere caricature. At the same time, the film was nominated for prestigious awards: it participated in the main competition at the Venice International Film Festival and was also nominated for the National Board of Review prize. Volker Schlöndorff stepped up in defense of his colleague, seeing more in the film than the German critics did: “I didn’t particularly like the author, Rolf Hochhuth: he had good intentions, but he was always pedantic, never too bright, always quite boring. I was wrong. His book speaks of a shocking event that inspired Wajda to make one of his most beautiful movies to date. A film that is very uncomfortable for us Germans. (…) The noble passion of the film is hidden not in the love story, but in Wajda’s style. It’s a cruel settling of accounts not just with Hitler’s Germany, but with Germanic stupidity, which the Poles had to endure long before Nazism and which always refers to the ‘purity’ of German villages. These caricatures are also present in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Wajda desacralized Hitlerism and its enduring nightmares because imbecility is universal and timeless.”
“At last, I too was struck by the infinite boredom of martial law, so I frantically began to look for some shelter where I could find myself. I returned to the novel by Tadeusz Konwicki, which I had read years before, and, with the author’s consent, I started work on A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents. (…) Writing the script wasn’t easy. Even though Konwicki is a director himself, he doesn’t write for the screen. He’s in his element when he uses language, which he shapes masterfully, leaving the adaptation of his work to the filmmakers. It was difficult, and today I don’t think I coped with it as well as I could have,” Andrzej Wajda recalled of the idea for adapting A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents.
The film was shot in Przemyśl, which stood in for pre – war Vilnius, as Polish authorities didn’t allow the director – who had returned to Poland after a period of emigration (he had shot Danton in France) – to work in Lithuania, although, as Wajda recalled, a few other Polish productions had been granted this possibility. Trying to reconstruct Konwicki’s vision, the crew also filmed in Drohiczyn, Siemiatycze, Warsaw, Lublin, and Bogusławice, where they used horses from the local stud farm. Wajda wasn’t allowed to collaborate with the Polish Army, which turned out to be a significant obstacle, since preparations for the war in 1939 needed to be depicted. Once more, as with The Ashes, the director was helped by Polish horsemen who came from all over the country with their stallions to represent the 13th Vilnius Uhlan Regiment.
Another challenge mentioned by the director was transferring the spirit of Konwicki’s prose to the screen and assembling the cast: ‘It’s not an easy task to revive the land of childhood years on screen, as either it is hidden from others in our memory, or it bores, as it is too similar to someone else’s childhood. This wasn’t the only difficulty: finding actors to play the young couple turned out to be even harder. The months I had spent abroad had removed me from observing what was happening in Polish theatres and on screen, and, most importantly, in drama schools. I made many test shots, and yet I couldn’t decide who should play Witek and Alina.’ In the end, Wajda chose two non – professional teenagers – Paulina Młynarska and Piotr Wawrzyńczak. Tadeusz Konwicki also appears in the film as the Stranger – the spirit of the past. Wajda considered his scenes the best in the film; in one of them, a very personal memento also appears: a photograph of the director’s father, Jakub Wajda, who was murdered in Katyń (used as a photo of the protagonist’s father). Years later, Wajda recalled that, as with The Maids of Wilko, it was hard for him to shift gears from the dynamic, violent, and rebellious energy of his previous political films to immersing himself in memory, introspection, and the slow observation of life passing by – all of which were key to the atmosphere of A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents.
“Despite external similarities, we are quite far from Wajda’s adaptations of Iwaszkiewicz. This is not a film about death questioning the meaning of human existence, as in The Birch Wood. Nor is it a film about time, which destroys people’s feelings and dreams, as in The Maids of Wilko. Here, the protagonists’ fate is truly decided by (…) history written with a capital “H”. Yet we look at it from a particular perspective,’ wrote critic Jerzy Niecikowski. In another review, Maria Malatyńska observed: ‘It is as if one artist (Wajda) offered his skill to another artist (Tadeusz Konwicki), who is the true author and owner of the world conjured up on screen. Rarely has such a deserving and amazing filmmaker been so modest. Rarely has he decided to step into the shadows. Here, the form of his narrative and the protagonists that have been chosen all mark the fact that he has now awakened a world that is not his, a childhood that is not his, an alien memory, a beauty that wasn’t memorized by his own eyes.”
‘The road to filming The Possessed was long and hard. From 1974 to 1984, I encountered nothing but failure. I thought I knew a lot about this novel – more than I did about some others that I had adapted. Most of all, I understood the power of The Possessed on stage – I awakened that power myself. And so, I had no doubt that I would be able to do it again, and that The Possessed would win over the screen and the audience at the cinema. Yet the first unsuccessful version of the script should have warned me and pushed me in a different direction than the stage adaptation. Dostoyevsky’s prose is theatrical because his protagonists talk all the time, trying to make sense of the world and other people with the thoughts they put into words. The stage is a place where people talk a lot. A director who lets them talk without trying to express their thoughts through staging has the chance to come close to the essence of the things presented by this ‘cruel talent’ in his stories,’ said Andrzej Wajda about his attempts to film Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s prose.
Wajda staged The Possessed many times: in Japan, in Germany, in Russia, in Israel, and in the US, yet the most important was the staging at Teatr Stary in Kraków in 1971, which brought him international recognition. Critics wrote about the production that: ‘(…) it is a milestone that confirms the supremacy of theatre over other fields of art, as a tool for active philosophy and a force that has a sudden, sensual effect.’ The film was made in 1987 and based on a script that was written by Wajda in collaboration with Edward Żebrowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Jean – Claude Carrière, famous for his work with such cinema giants as Louis Buñuel, Louis Malle, Jean – Luc Godard, Miloš Forman, Volker Schlöndorff, Michael Haneke, and Julian Schnabel. It was yet another adaptation of great literature by the Polish director. Five years before, also in France, he had made Danton, which, just like The Possessed, dealt with the tragedy of European history: terrorism, ideological demagoguery, nihilism, and politics that serve violence. Despite a predominantly French cast, as a co – production between Poland and France, the film was mostly shot in Poland, and many well – known Polish actors played supporting roles. One of them was Jerzy Radziwiłowicz as Sjatov, who unexpectedly becomes one of the main players in the film’s dramaturgy. After the premiere, a shift of emphasis was noticed – while Stavrogin was Dostoyevsky’s hero, Wajda chose Sjatov as the only revolutionary who tried to cut ties with the secret organization, seeing that the revolutionary urge could only lead to further evil. The director himself, critical of his film, thought it was one – dimensional and too anti – revolutionary.
In the Tygodnik Kulturalny weekly, Zbigniew Bieńkowski asked: „(…) What is this force in Dostoyevsky’s literature that resists film? Each of his novels has a marvelous, consistent dramaturgy, a fascinating intrigue, characters filled with varied emotions. It would seem easy to just pick your plot and shoot. That’s what filmmakers did, and the results are well known. Why? Because all of these intrigues, all the passions, all Dostoyevsky’s characters have a double life: a life of reality and a life of ideas. This literature, so deeply rooted in reality, in facts and problems of its time, so concrete that it seems brutal, so real that it seems tabloid, is impregnated with thoughts, ideas, a reflection on God, on religion, on the world, on society, the human condition, the human soul. (…) Every ambitious director probably dreams of adapting Dostoyevsky. And yet film does not give the same possibilities that literature gives. Or maybe they are blinded by the haughtiness of technique? (…) Not to betray Dostoyevsky’s work, one should also film his philosophy, his metaphysics, his ethics. (…) The resistance of his work clearly shows what literature is and what its unity and greatness consist of. We owe the memento of its range – the highest range in the art world – to Wajda and his The Possessed as well. And we should be thankful for it.”
“I believe I gave all my energy and abilities to Korczak, although the 1989 elections happened during the time I was making the film, and not long after, I started working at the Senate. Unfortunately, the official Cannes screening at the 1990 festival and the standing ovation at the festival palace were Korczak’s last success. The next day, a review in Le Monde turned me into an anti – Semite, and no distribution company was willing to buy the film or show it outside of Poland,” said director Andrzej Wajda about the fate of Korczak.
It was an important film for him; yet it was even more important for Wojciech Pszoniak, who at first was convinced it was a role impossible to play and changed his mind only after reading notes the doctor made in the ghetto. He was deeply moved by his collaboration with Wajda and portrayed the charismatic doctor, educator, and social activist Henryk Goldszmit, who rose to fame as Janusz Korczak – a multifaceted, tragic character, revered by generations of Polish children and parents.
The author of King Matt the First and Kaytek the Wizard, as well as many pedagogical writings emphasizing children’s right to independence, dignity, and subjectivity, was a person driven by passion and vocation. As a doctor, writer, social activist, and journalist, Korczak decided at the age of 30 to dedicate himself solely to serving children. At the time, he also quit his job in the hospital and became the headmaster of a newly opened Jewish orphanage (Dom Sierot) established by the Pomoc dla Sierot society in Warsaw. From then on, right until the end, he shared his home and life with children, dedicating himself to work that would defend the rights of children – the weak, the excluded, the unheard – as full – fledged human beings. In the orphanage, he tried to create a new, better world, building a community based on democracy and equality, which were reflected in institutions such as a court, a newspaper, or a parliament. Korczak was the first adult to grant children the right to express their opinions in Mały Przegląd – an experimental weekly written by children and teenagers, a supplement to the Nasz Przegląd Daily, which first appeared in 1926. Its last volume was published on Friday, September 1st, 1939.
Even those who aren’t familiar with Korczak’s work know the story of his death – all Poles have heard it at some point in their lives. An educator imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto with his pupils, trying to protect them from the nightmare of the German occupation, hunger, and death, he consciously rejected all offers of salvation from his friends in the Jewish commune – he would never leave his children. On the day of the deportation, August 5th, 1942, during the so – called Grossaktion – the main stage of the deportation and mass murder of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw – Korczak refused to leave his pupils and collaborators. It is unclear whether he knew that Treblinka was an extermination camp, but he was certainly aware that he might not survive deportation to the East. His march toward the Umschlagplatz with the children – whom he continually calmed and comforted, as many bystanders later recalled – became a legendary image. It reflects the indisputable truth of Korczak’s love for children and his profound vocation to serve them, a calling for which he was ultimately willing to give his life. Yet it was the symbolic scene of Korczak’s and the children’s death, interrupted in its naturalistic tragedy with a vision of apokatastasis, in which the prisoners free themselves from the train in an allegory of Heaven and disappear in a bright mist, that caused many bitter accusations toward the author and his film, despite information about the protagonists’ deaths before the end titles. Korczak’s script, written by Agnieszka Holland (whose father, as a young boy, was a collaborator of Mały Przegląd), had waited to be filmed since 1983. It was shortened by Wajda, which led to a reduction of themes concerning Polish antisemitism (Poles are mostly shown as the doctor’s allies), while the dream – like ending scene, which symbolized the protagonists’ death but also their salvation from the nightmare of the Holocaust, was met with disdain by purists such as the author of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann. He accused Wajda of faking the educator’s fate, trivializing the extermination of Jews, and hiding Polish antisemitism, which negatively affected the film’s reception. Critics even questioned whether Wajda, as a non – Jew, had the right to speak about the Holocaust. Yet there were also those who saw in the film, which idealized Korczak as a Polish – Jewish, Christian Saint, the beginning of a Polish – Jewish symbiosis, which was meant to demonstrate the final victory over the nightmare of Nazism.
The subject of war, the destruction it causes in a person, and the verification of identity it leads to accompanied Andrzej Wajda not only right after the war (he began his career with the trilogy: A Generation, Kanał, Ashes and Diamonds), but throughout his entire artistic life. It shouldn’t surprise us that, 50 years after the end of World War II, he returned to the subject of the Warsaw Uprising’s fall and the positions of the Polish Army soldiers who had to make decisions about their continued allegiance in the service of their homeland – decisions that were often a choice between life and death.
The script, based on a manuscript by Aleksander Ścibor – Rylski found after his death, entitled Pierścionek z końskiego włosia (The Horsehair Ring), was a return for Wajda to the subject of difficult choices between communist authority and fidelity to the oath of the Polish Army. ‘Aleksander Ścibor – Rylski’s novel Pierścionek z końskiego włosia was going to be published 20 years after it was written, when Poland was already free. It’s hardly surprising it drew my attention, so I let the publishers write ‘Andrzej Wajda is going to make a film based on this novel’ on the cover. I found so many motifs I knew from my previous films. Most of all – the protagonist and his colleagues from the army. The Warsaw Uprising and the first days of its aftermath. I was home. I was among well – known people and things… And for the first time, I was free from any censorship,’ the director recalled. The film was made, yet it turned out to be a disappointment both for its creator and the audience, despite the lack of economic and political censorship. The script, written by Wajda himself in collaboration with Maciej Karpiński and Andrzej Kotkowski, was meant to be a farewell to the ‘Polish Film School’ – a part of Polish film history that Wajda co – founded, starting with his trilogy at the beginning of his career. The famous scene with the burning glasses from Ashes and Diamonds was even paraphrased in The Crowned – Eagle Ring, but this time we are looking at it from a different perspective. Wajda wanted to openly discuss the struggle between the communist authority and the Polish Army, but – as he soon realized – nobody was waiting for such a film anymore. By the end of martial law, audience demand for cinema content began to shift toward mainstream films – often quite poor – imported from the West. Cinema ceased to be, first and foremost, what it had been for the public throughout the years of communism: a path to freedom of thought and a means of building identity based on the ability to interpret metaphors and independently read veiled, indirect messages that encouraged reflection, including on the nature of good and evil. The interest in the problems of the former intelligentsia faded away. After the premiere, the director noted: ‘What can you learn in 40 years of making movies? What can you know for sure when you’re making your thirty – second film? Not much. Everything that I had done was right for a very different audience, which joined me in searching for an answer to the question: how to live in an enslaved world? Those films were good material for such reflection. Deprived of contact with the West, we were looking for community with Europe in the cinema. Unfortunately, nobody needed my truth about those times anymore, especially no one who went to the cinema now, to watch films that returned to their original function of joking, tricking, and terrifying.’
Jerzy Płażewski wrote in his review for Film und Fernsehen: “The Ring can be seen as the real end of the Polish Film School of the 1950s. When it comes to the idea, it is much more complicated than in Ashes and Diamonds, where the main protagonist dies, killed by accident by soldiers of the branch of the Polish army that came from the East. In The Ring… good and evil are not as radically separate, which led to a much colder reception from the audience. “A Polish Army hero could not collaborate with the communists!” – was the accusation. Even if the deceased screenwriter exaggerated a little, I see in this film a courageous attempt to analyze the genesis of this collaboration with the communists, which the whole nation needed to take part in between 1945 and 1989.”
Others, like Wiktor Woroszylski (in Kino monthly), also appreciated the subject and Wajda’s directorial skill, yet turned their attention to a certain weakness of the film, which was so important and engaging on paper. ‘Seeing everything that is so great about The Ring, it’s hard not to hold a certain grudge that the greatness could not be achieved in every aspect of the film, and on the other hand – the feeling that this might be the only Polish director that we are so critical of, demanding a perfect harmony with our state of mind and a deep knowledge of the national pains and anxieties, therefore giving him a very special place in the nation’s spiritual life.’
“My first experience with Japanese theatre happened during a trip to Osaka in 1970 – that’s when I saw the puppet theatre bunraku for the first time,’ noted Andrzej Wajda. ‘I was fascinated by the mysterious role of kuroko – who are seemingly helpers and servants, yet they are omnipresent on stage and essential to the performance. This view gave me the idea to take these characters – dressed in black and with covered faces – and put them in my version of The Possessed in Kraków’s Teatr Stary.
In 1981, I went to Japan with Krystyna, and in Kyoto, I saw a poster of a very beautiful woman above the theatre door. The play being performed was The Lady of the Camellias. We went in. The performance was supposed to start at 11 AM. I looked around: everybody’s hair was white, and I was the only man. The curtain went up, and the performance started, but in the title role, I saw onnagata – a kabuki actor, a man who looked exactly like the photograph, and I saw actors around him, male, but also female. And yet he was so much more female than all of them. That’s my Nastasya! – I suddenly thought.”
Andrzej Wajda decided to cast Tamasaburo Bando – the greatest onnagata (a kabuki actor who exclusively plays female roles) – in a double role of Nastasya Filippovna and, in his debut as a male character, Prince Myshkin. After a couple of years, in March 1989, thanks to a collaboration between the two artists, the premiere was held at the Benisan Pit theatre in Tokyo. Five years later, after more than a hundred performances in Tokyo and Osaka, it was brought to Teatr Stary in Kraków and registered in Warsaw.
“The film was born out of the theatrical performance Nastasya Filippovna, which had its first version in Teatr Stary in Kraków in 1977,’ Wajda recalled. ‘I based the adaptation of Dostoyevsky on the last chapter of The Idiot, where Myshkin and Rogozhin talk about the past over Nastasya’s dead body. For years, I was convinced that there must be a better solution to a theatre adaptation of The Idiot. Chance came to my aid. When in 1981 I visited Kyoto (…) I met Tamasaburo Bando (…). I am very drawn to the female characters that he embodies because of the idealization of the woman that is also present in Polish culture. That’s also how he sees Nastasya: he uncovers everything that makes her worthy of love for the men (Myshkin and Rogozhin). What’s more, he’s even able to make the audience admire her flaws. This wonderful artist does not create ‘types,’ but an eternal femininity that’s born out of male awe and is neither mimicry nor imitation. This creative form is the most touching feature of Japanese art for us, the Europeans.”
The script for the film adaptation was written by Andrzej Wajda and Maciej Karpiński, based on Dostoyevsky’s work. Tamasaburo Bando played the double role of Nastasya and Myshkin, while Toshiyuki Nagashima was cast as Rogozhin. The cinematographer for Wajda’s vision was Paweł Edelman. The staging, both condensed and simple in its means of expression, was well received by critics. In a review published in the monthly journal Kino, it was written: “Any adaptation of Dostoevsky carries the risk of simplification, even vulgarization. Yet the language of this film reduces such losses to a minimum. The misty, almost hallucinatory, ghostly imagery powerfully conveys not so much the drama, but the tragedy of the situation, which stems from the irreconcilability of values and necessities. Understandably, in such a ‘dense’ emotional atmosphere, feelings become so intensified that they turn into their opposites: love turns into hatred, passion into criminal obsession. (…) The fact that a film by a Polish director, based on a Russian text, is performed by leading figures of Japanese acting (…) needs no further commentary – for the issues experienced here are universal.”
The short story Holy Week by Jerzy Andrzejewski was first published in 1945 in the writer’s postwar short story collection Noc (Night) and was adapted into a film by Andrzej Wajda 50 years later. The original text, written in the spring of 1943 during the tragic Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, had a much more personal, “intimate” tone than the printed version, which was altered in response to the antisemitic events of August 1945 – events that, as it turned out, were only a prelude to the nightmare that would unfold a year later in Kielce. For Andrzejewski, the story of a man torn between the moral duty to save Jews and the memory of a painful personal relationship with a woman he feels compelled to help had taken on a new context. This time, it was not the Germans but the Poles themselves who were portrayed as the tormentors and executioners of their fellow citizens. The 1943 version of the text was lost, and Wajda based his film on the printed 1945 edition. The first version of the screenplay was written in 1967 by the author himself and Andrzej Żuławski, who, after studying film in Paris, gained experience as Wajda’s assistant on the sets of Samson and The Ashes. However, at a time when the remaining Jewish community in Poland – traumatized by the war – was being harassed and expelled from the country, making a film on such a subject was out of the question. This was especially true given that the openly antisemitic Polish authorities of the time claimed a monopoly on interpreting antisemitism itself. Unable to realize the project in Poland, Wajda decided to sell the rights to the German film industry. Later, both his co – writer Andrzej Żuławski and another frequent collaborator, Agnieszka Holland, also considered bringing the story to the screen.
Wajda returned to the project 28 years later after the political breakthrough and the abolishing of censorship. He wrote a new version of the script himself, faithful to the short story. He explained: ‘I believe that the force of the story lies in the fact that the Jewish girl (…) is not a symbol but a real woman who has a very difficult character. (…) But does that mean she shouldn’t be allowed to live?’
Beata Fudalej, for whom the role of Irena was a meaningful film debut, praised by both the audience and the critics, spoke about the director’s idea for her role: “From the very beginning, Mr. Wajda was very adamant about the fact that my Irena should not lick the audience’s boots, that she shouldn’t try to be nice. Somebody wrote after seeing the film that she was the meanest Holocaust victim. I understood his concept: if she was a cute, weak Jewish girl, the film would turn into an accusation of all those people who tormented her, whether German or Polish. I could jokingly say that Mr. Andrzej really made sure I was a monster on set. He wanted the audience to ask themselves during the screening: What would I do? I am supposed to hide a person in the closet, but that person doesn’t want to stay there, goes out and screams so loud that everybody hears her, and even offends her savior. And all of that is happening at a time when whole villages were burned down for hiding one person. I fought with Mr. Andrzej because I wanted to make her more human, but he repeated: ‘It’s not your role in this film.’ Sometimes I was so angry, I didn’t even want to go to set.”
Wajda was able to change the way Jews were seen – not just as passive victims led to slaughter, but also to nuance the moral view of those who tried to save them. Tadeusz Sobolewski wrote about Holy Week in Kino monthly: “Today, in discussions about responsibility for the Holocaust, some are keen to burden Poles with collective guilt for their complicity, while others just as readily absolve the whole nation, countering the Shoah with a vast number of Polish victims. The tragedy of the Holocaust – carried out with diabolical perfidy before the eyes of a powerless society that was assigned the role of a passive witness – can be viewed differently than through the lens of national responsibility: through a disillusioned understanding of human nature, grounded in the Christian sense of guilt. Andrzejewski’s novella – the first literary text written after the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto – was an attempt to confront the moral void which was created in Polish society. (…) Irena – disillusioned, ungrateful, careless – challenges her misfortune (…) Beata Fudalej underlines Irena’s worst features, which cause pity and irritation. And we can find in ourselves the shameful reaction of those people for whom this tragic, persecuted Irena was a ‘trouble’, calling for a sacrifice nobody could make. And even if someone decided to make it, it turned out to be futile.”
In the big anthology of his digitally remastered films, which was published along with a book about the making of all of them a few weeks before the director’s death, Andrzej Wajda did not feature Miss Nobody, along with a few other films from the 1990s. It was a very difficult time for Polish cinema and literature: the freedom that was regained, the incredibly quick political and economic transformation, and a new reality emerging from the chaos – all of this was difficult to capture in a film, especially if you were looking for a mature metaphor. Zdzisław Pietrasik, writing in Polityka weekly, read the film in a metaphorical key: “After the premiere, somebody suggested that maybe Andrzej Wajda didn’t really want to make a film about Miss Nobody, but he intended to create a metaphor about the so – called ‘Miss S.’ It’s a very attractive interpretation. Here’s an example: Miss Nobody moves from the village to the big city – most Solidarity leaders had rural roots. Marysia is very religious – that’s an obvious analogy as well. Kasia is the creative intelligentsia that supports the workers’ movement. Ewa could represent the whole ‘business class’ that did so well in the new Poland. Kasia and Ewa hug each other, cruelly laughing at the naïve Miss Nobody, whom they had cruelly used – that’s a too clear of a metaphor.”
It’s true that Miss Nobody can be read as a metaphor, since it is too simplified and emphatic to be watched as a balanced, credible psychological film about teenage girls. It’s one of the few Andrzej Wajda films where the director attempts to relate to a younger audience. Yet in this story about painful adolescence, there is moral criticism of the present – the Poles’ position towards their spiritual heritage and the material riches of the new era, during such a pivotal time in Polish history. Andrzej Wajda’s admirers can easily notice that it is not his typical film, though even in this instance, the director was able to apply all his talent to adapting the literary text. The script for Miss Nobody was written by Radosław Piwowarski, who left his signature touch on the film, especially in the construction and character of the dialogues. Tomasz Tryzna’s novel, which the script was based on, had previously been the subject of a literary debate, similar to what film critics discussed after the film’s premiere: On one hand, Tryzna’s literary debut was considered a pivotal book of the early nineties, a reflection of Poland’s transformation, confronting the phenomenon of an unfinished, amorphous reality. On the other hand, it was criticized as stereotypical, full of simplifications and pathos – a book that, despite being well – written, was unintentionally funny in its naivety and moralizing tone.
At many key moments in Polish history, Andrzej Wajda was present, simultaneously shaping history with his films, often made ‘in the heat of the moment.’ A significant theme in his work was the tireless search for vivid characters who would become the true heroes of their time, embodying the dilemmas, doubts, and experiences fundamental to the identity of their generation. Regardless of how it was judged, Miss Nobody is an attempt to grapple with the present as it was taking shape, and it remains a vivid document of its time.
“If we return to Pan Tadeusz now, we have a different reason than readers from the past. It’s not nostalgia for a lost, imaginary homeland. Pan Tadeusz is no longer political or social commentary; it has become an existential work of art. Everyone wants to know where they came from, who their parents or their parents’ parents were. It’s easier to make important decisions when you have some knowledge of your cultural heritage. […] A new generation wants to learn about its origins. Pan Tadeusz was born out of a desire to show where we came from, who we are, how we are called, what we like, and what human characters emerge among us. […] Everything is written, and I think the audience wants to see it. ‘This is us!’ – they will say. That’s all. That’s a lot,” explained Andrzej Wajda, reflecting on why he chose to adapt Adam Mickiewicz’s most famous work for the screen. The director was also drawn to the poem by the courage with which Mickiewicz exposed – often ironically and maliciously – the Polish “natural traits” that have so frequently contributed to the nation’s downfall. At the same time, Wajda was unsure whether, at the turn of the century, anyone would be interested in seeing a film with rhymed dialogue. However, producer Michał Kwieciński and the actors convinced him that it would be something intriguing and distinct, especially compared to the action films that dominated the box office. “This undertaking is incomparably more difficult than anything I’ve done before,” Wajda noted. “It’s much easier to adapt a realistic novel like The Promised Land. Cinema thrives in big cities, where important events take place and where people are passionate. Nature, on the other hand, is often trivial on screen. (…) And one more thing: making this movie will require superhuman effort. That’s why I wanted to work with lucky people who make films that bring them success and satisfaction, who provide a certain freedom and ease. I wanted confident actors who are happy and will convey that happiness on screen. The world Mickiewicz describes is a world of happy people…”
Jerzy Trela, Bogusław Linda, Marek Kondrat, Daniel Olbrychski, Grażyna Szapołowska, Andrzej Seweryn, Krzysztof Globisz, Jerzy Bińczycki, Marian Kociniak, Władysław Kowalski, Krzysztof Kolberger, and many others all agreed to star in the film. The casting of the leading roles created a national sensation, attracting large crowds. Eventually, future stars Michał Żebrowski and Alicja Bachleda – Curuś were cast as Tadeusz and Zosia.
Andrzej Wajda enlisted Piotr Wereśniak to help him adapt the poem for the screen. Wereśniak focused on action, romance, humor, and the beauty of nature, while also maintaining Mickiewicz’s dialogue, which would be quickened to suit a more cinematic style. Filming began in the summer of 1998 and lasted nearly three months, with locations including Sierpc, Łomianki near Warsaw, Smolniki, Kazuń, the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the Citadel, and the Modlin Fortress.
The film’s premiere was delayed to avoid coinciding with the release of With Fire and Sword. When it finally hit the screens, it was a triumph, breaking box – office records and surpassing not only Jerzy Hoffman’s film but also Independence Day, The Flintstones, and Titanic.
As a “national treasure,” Pan Tadeusz became the subject of numerous debates – not only among film critics but also among literary critics, cultural critics, and prominent Polish artists and intellectuals. Maria Janion praised the script but found it one – sided, as it mostly focused on the conflict between Gerwazy and Father Robak. She interpreted the resolution of this conflict as an expression of the irony of fate and history, a theme Wajda often explored in his films. Tomasz Jastrun admired the dynamic editing, noting that only in a few moments, such as during Father Robak’s death and the revelation of his identity, did the action pause for a long monologue. Even critical voices did not diminish the reputation of Wajda’s adaptation, and everyone agreed in praising the actors who brought Mickiewicz’s poem to life – an interpretation so difficult to awaken, yet which ultimately became a source of laughter and tears for the audience.
Andrzej Wajda continued to engage deeply with Polish history, especially the war and its aftermath, even after Poland regained its independence many years later. When choosing subjects set in this time – as he himself explained – he sought to speak about the era that shaped him, from a distance, without the interference of censorship. He aimed to give a voice to those whose stories could not be told because the war had ended their lives. At the same time, he repeatedly returned to the morally complex and tragically complicated questions of faith, loyalty, and the difficult choices between death and obedience to ideology and authority that his protagonists often faced.
Stanisław Rembek’s novel The Condemnation of Franciszek Kłos had been a subject of interest for filmmakers for years. The author opposed a German adaptation, and the communist censorship blocked a film proposal by Stanisław Lenartowicz. In the 1990s, however, the writer was rediscovered in the newly independent Poland. Juliusz Machulski was the first director to adapt his work, directing Szwadron (Squadron) in 1992, based on Ballada o wzgardliwym wisielcu (A Ballad about a Contemptuous Hangman). In 2000, shortly after receiving his Oscar, Andrzej Wajda began working on an adaptation of Rembek’s novel, which marked the first appearance of an anti – hero in Polish cinema.
As Marek Nowakowski wrote in his essay about Rembek’s novel: “What interested me the most was how different it was from all other wartime literature. Literature that was filled with heroism, definitive choices in the name of the homeland, martyrdom, and resistance to the occupant. Literature permeated with noble pathos, as Sienkiewicz wrote, ‘to raise people’s spirits.’ The Condemnation of Franciszek Kłos brutally entered this uniform collection, attempting to decompose the unity of the literary vision. We could easily imagine that the protagonist’s otherness, as someone who consciously embraces evil yet grows increasingly restless with his actions, fascinated Wajda. Even though he considered Kłos the most despicable character in Polish literature, Wajda understood that silencing figures like him would only satisfy the former communist censorship, which forbade texts featuring Polish protagonists who could even be suspected of collaboration. Kłos was appealing to Wajda as a tragic figure, akin to Judas, who must finally confront the consequences of his evil actions.”
Mirosław Baka was cast in the title role, and his portrayal of the collaborator was hauntingly intense. The film was well received, but many believe that, had it been made for cinema rather than television, it would have had a longer – lasting impact. Screenwriter Zygmunt Malanowicz recalls that it was Wajda himself who decided that a TV movie would be the most suitable format for this material. While many contemporary viewers find the film’s realization reminiscent of TV theatre, the subject matter and the performances continue to be praised by audiences.
“Making The Revenge was a double repetition for me,” said Andrzej Wajda. “It was made in the 1950s by my teacher from Łódź Film School, Antoni Bohdziewicz, with the splendid Tadeusz Kondrat as Papkin. I later adapted it for the stage at Teatr Stary in 1986, where the same role was played by Jerzy Stuhr and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. One might ask: what was I looking for when I decided to adapt Fredro’s masterpiece for the screen? The answer is simple. There are two immortal plays in Polish theatre: The Wedding, which I had already turned into a film, and The Revenge.”
Fredro’s inspiration for the play came from a real event. In 1828, he received half of a castle in Odrzykoń, Galicia, as a dowry from his wife, Zofia Skarbkowa. As he read through the archives in his new home, he discovered documents about a long and bitter lawsuit between the two owners of the castle – Jan Skotnicki and Piotr Firlej. The dispute, lasting over thirty years, was eventually settled with a marriage between the son of Firlej and Zofia Skotnicka, the daughter of his adversary. Wajda commented: “Unfortunately, Poles haven’t changed much since then. Even though we are sometimes capable of great national harmony – as we witnessed in our times – it never lasts. That’s why I hope that the audience of The Revenge, watching Cześnik and Rejent put an end to their quarrel, will see in this scene a warning about the illusory nature of such conciliatory gestures – one that these characters may undo just moments later, as their typically Polish temperaments prevail once again over common sense.” Wajda decided to take on The Revenge two years after the success of Pan Tadeusz (1999). While the play’s firm roots in Polish cultural consciousness posed a challenge – especially since many had already seen it on stage – Fredro’s text intrigued Wajda because the positions taken by Cześnik and Rejent remain the archetypes of stubbornness, quarrelsomeness, and impulsiveness, traits that often led to Poland’s downfall, most significantly the loss of independence.
To distance the audience from theatrical associations, Wajda chose to set the film in a winter landscape, among the seemingly timeless ruins of a castle in Ogrodzieniec, standing starkly on a plain. Co – writer Jan Prochyra suggested using snow, which helped transport the story away from reality into a realm of symbolism. Thanks to executive producer Kamil Przełęcki and the American company Snow Business, snow was a constant presence on set. The main roles were played by Polish film stars: Janusz Gajos, Andrzej Seweryn, Katarzyna Figura, Daniel Olbrychski, Roman Polański, Agata Buzek, and Rafał Królikowski. Wajda reflected, “Nowadays, when the culture of images dominates, it’s nice to hear the authentic Polish language immortalized in a literary masterpiece, spoken by the best actors. We made this film hoping that it will not only remind us of the beauty and perfection of our language but also something else – the priceless ability to laugh at our flaws and weaknesses.”
“Not many people remember that The Revenge was written at the same time as Pan Tadeusz in 1834. What an amazing year!”, one could say. Yet Mickiewicz was an émigré, desperately missing his homeland, while Fredro was at home and not overly fond of his noble friends. On the contrary, as a European, he viewed the farmers overstaying on their land with both pity and maybe a little neighbourly sympathy. It’s not a portrayal of old Poles we should be proud of at the dawn of the 21st century. When Rejent Milczek prepares for his duel with Cześnik Raptusiewicz wearing his hussar wings, the audience laughs. It is indeed a funny scene because our knight looks as though he’s wearing a fancy dress. Undoubtedly, this is one of the most potent symbols Wajda has ever used – perhaps as important as Rafał Olbromski stuffed with hay in the final of The Ashes. At a time when debates about ‘real’ Polishness and ‘the only right’ patriotism are adorned with worn – out props, Wajda seems to say: these wings aren’t going to take anyone up in the air; they will only weigh you down.” – wrote Zdzisław Pietrasik in a review in Polityka weekly, perfectly recognizing the filmmakers’ intentions.
The film was immensely popular, drawing over 2 million viewers to the cinema.
“The director’s most important work is permeated by one emotion: pain. This pain is shared by the audience. After seeing Katyń, one can only remain silent,” wrote Krzysztof Masłoń in Rzeczpospolita. “Andrzej Wajda believes more films about the Katyń massacre will be made. I disagree. I believe Wajda’s film marks the end of the subject of Katyń in Polish cinema. Nothing more can be added to the shocking final sequence.” What’s most terrifying, Masłoń continued, is the irrevocable end of that Poland. Wajda succeeded in depicting a generation raised on the ideals of Homeland, Learning, Virtue, or, in Biblical terms – Faith, Hope, and Love. The next generation, represented by Tadeusz ‘Tur,’ who dies similarly to Maciek Chełmicki from Ashes and Diamonds, faces a choice: to live or to lie. Having known the pre – war patriotism, they answer, “We only have one life.”
Andrzej Wajda had thought about making a film about Katyń for most of his life – as the son of an officer murdered in Katyń and as a representative of an entire generation of orphaned sons, daughters, mothers, and wives of the victims of Stalin’s orders. It was only in the late 1980s that he learned about his father’s death and the full extent of the Katyń crime.
“I dedicate this film to my parents,” Wajda wrote in 2007, shortly before the film’s premiere. “To my father, who was the captain of the 72nd Infantry Regiment in Radom, arrested by the Soviet army in September 1939, imprisoned in Starobielsk, murdered in Smolensk in 1940, and to my mother, who refused to believe he had died, from 1943 when the crime was revealed, until her own death. Now, many years later, I understand her and feel the same way. Perhaps that’s why I can only make this film now, at the end of my life… A Japanese wise man once said: ‘When you are old, you shall not forget the way your heart felt at the beginning of the road.’ I did everything in my power to recreate the state of my heart at the beginning of my journey.”
Undoubtedly, Katyń was one of Wajda’s most anticipated films. Before the premiere, there was a question hanging in the air: How could the elderly director approach such a painfully personal subject, one that had impacted his life deeply and destroyed his family? Even before shooting began, Wajda faced accusations of monopolizing the subject. Robert Gliński had attempted to make his own film about Katyń at the same time. Yet, as the Rzeczpospolita critic observed, Wajda’s film had such a profound impact on the audience that it silenced all other filmmakers. Wajda’s approach, which avoided accusations or seeking revenge, staying close to the victims and their suffering, resonated deeply. His personal connection to the tragedy added immense weight to the narrative, making it impossible for other directors to follow. Wajda chose to tell the story of the Katyń massacre from the perspective of those left behind – the families who lived in uncertainty, suffering, and pain, unable to honor their loved ones or learn the truth of their brutal deaths. For years, they struggled to find meaning in their grief and in the absence of answers.
“I know all the screenplay attempts made so far, and I believe their weakness lies in focusing on life in the Kozelsk camp, among the victims of the crime,” Wajda said. “Life in the camp, interrogations, waiting for deportation to the West – these events have little to do with the crime itself. The true subject of a film about Katyń is not the victims, but the mystery and the lie that for years made this crime a taboo topic, an ultimate ‘test of loyalty to the USSR.’ What does it matter that today the truth is widely known that the documents handed over by the Russian authorities include Stalin’s order to liquidate the camps? The meaningful subject for a cinematic portrayal of this crime cannot be the victims themselves, but rather their families, who keep asking: ‘Why?’ – and receive no meaningful answer.”
Wajda’s choice to give a face to the suffering caused by the Katyń massacre – focusing on the women who waited, hoped, and lived through the tragedy of uncertainty, and who fought to preserve the memory of their loved ones – was central to the film’s success. Both audiences and critics praised how Katyń captured the emotional weight of this history, offering a profound portrayal of grief, loss, and the search for truth.
In 2009, Andrzej Wajda made the third adaptation of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s prose in his career, yet in Sweet Rush, which turned out to be one of his most moving films, as well as one of the richest when it comes to the narrative, there’s so much more than just Iwaszkiewicz. It’s another – after The Birch Wood – story about dying, yet during the emergence of the film from the idea, there was more death. The short story Tatarak (Sweet Rush) turned out to be too concise to make a feature film, so Andrzej Wajda added a subplot of Sándor Márai’s A Sudden Call to the script – the main protagonist of the film is a terminally ill woman whose only confidante is her doctor husband. The breakthrough came with Krystyna Janda’s proposition to add her private story to the film’s structure: her mourning the death of her husband, cinematographer Edward Kłosiński, who was initially supposed to work on the film. The shooting of the film was postponed to wait for Krystyna Janda, who cared for her dying husband in 2008, and just as Everything for Sale for the director, it became a farewell to a close collaborator, friend, and a way to accompany a friend during their mourning. This subplot added another layer, which might be the most moving of all – a personal story of an actress who talks about her real, private loss on screen. Through this double or maybe even triple role, Janda takes Sweet Rush to a higher level of metaphor which connects fiction and reality and is therefore even more moving. “I didn’t analyze her motives, but then I understood, there is only one – she wanted our film to become a homage to Edward. And that’s exactly what happened, because we dedicated Sweet Rush to him” – said Wajda in an interview about his decision to take intimate diaries given by the actress and incorporating them into the film’s structure. When looking for the right space for Krystyna Janda’s monologue, Wajda reached for inspirations in paintings by one of his favourite artists: “I remembered the work by American painter Edward Hopper, which showed lonely women in empty hotel rooms. In such a space – built in the studio – imitating a room from a Hopper painting, Krystyna talks about Edward’s passing. Cinematographer Paweł Edelman made the brave decision to just leave the camera alone and not interfere with what Krystyna is going to say and how she is going to behave. We left her alone, with her thoughts, with her tragedy. In two days, she told the story the way she wanted to tell it. (…) Thanks to her narrative, death – which is Iwaszkiewicz’s subject – became real and real death takes part in the story created first by the writer, then by those who’ve worked on the film, but most of all by the actor who mourns the death of Sweet Rush’s protagonists, but mourns it being aware of a death that invaded her private life…” – said the director in an interview with Jan Strzałka for Dwutygodnik. The story of Marta, a middle – aged woman who keeps thinking about her sons’ death in the Uprising and who’s unknowingly terminally ill, but shortly comes back to life thanks to an acquaintance with a young boy named Boguś, which then ends tragically, brought Wajda the Alfred Bauer Award at the International Berlin Film Festival for the director who brings new perspectives to the cinematic art. He dedicated the award to Krystyna Janda and the film itself to Edward Kłosiński. Polish critics appreciated the film and called it ‘the return of the Master’.
Before the premiere of Wałęsa, Zdzisław Pietrasik wrote in Polityka weekly: “In the year 2000 I interviewed Andrzej Wajda. Among other things, we spoke about the protagonists of contemporary cinema, and in the end, I asked the director if he would make a film about Lech Wałęsa. The answer was definite. No. ‘I succeeded in showing Solidarity at its best, so I wouldn’t like to be the director of a film that shows how badly everything turned out,’” said the director, referring to Man of Iron. “Let someone else do it.” Yet, eight years later, in an interview for TVN24, Wajda declared that he would like to make the last part of the trilogy started with Man of Marble and Man of Iron, that would have the Solidarity leader as its protagonist. “I have been thinking about such a film for a long time. After those two, this one should be about a man of hope. This would be a good nickname for Lech Wałęsa, because he gave me hope – and I think I don’t only speak for myself.” In another interview, Andrzej Wajda added that despite the risk, he intended to make a film about Wałęsa because he hadn’t yet been portrayed on the screen, and the fact that he was being insulted by his opponents despite his indisputable role in the process that led to regaining freedom seemed awful to him. The film was supposed to be entitled Man of Hope – just as Wajda’s novella in the 2005 film Solidarity anthology film, but when the main character agreed for his name to be used in the title, the original title was turned into a subtitle.
The script, which Wajda received enthusiastically, yet later toned down its ironic humor, was written by Janusz Głowacki, and despite the approval, the subject was quite a challenge for the director, as described in Głowacki’s book Przyszłem, czyli jak pisałem scenariusz o Lechu Wałęsie dla Andrzeja Wajdy (How I wrote a script about Lech Wałęsa for Andrzej Wajda). The director’s former films, which touched on subjects pivotal for the Polish national identity and collective imagination, focused on tragic conflicts and protagonists who lost – Wałęsa’s story in the film is a story of victory, and he is a completely different person from those who have arisen the director’s artistic interest before. Wałęsa’s journey – from a shipyard worker to living legend and savior of the nation, to defiant and at times authoritarian tribune of the people, who was accused by former comrades of having fractured the legendary movement he once led – also foretold controversy. The former president, despite having withdrawn from politics over a decade earlier, continued to stir strong emotions among Poles, and his enemies were ready to attack even before the film’s premiere. Perhaps Wajda, whose films in the 1990s – after the political change, when Wałęsa fell from his pedestal – received mixed reviews, and who, like his protagonist, was struggling (not always successfully) to grasp the essence of the new reality, felt a certain kinship with the Solidarity leader and rediscovered within himself the strength and imperative to tell this story to audiences around the world? Film scholar Iwona Kurz wrote about this shared aspect of Wajda and Wałęsa in dwutygodnik.com: “Wajda’s fascination with Wałęsa, I believe, is based on a certain similarity. The great talent both men had for ruling over hearts and minds came from an intuition that allowed them to respond to the needs and emotions of the Polish people. Both Wajda – as the great national therapist – and Wałęsa – as the great tribune of the nation – possessed this gift, and they both lost it.”
Yet maybe this fate of going up and down and up again, made Wałęsa – whom Wajda actively supported during his presidential campaign – right for the model of “contemporary hero.” And that’s the sort of protagonist Wajda had always passionately pursued.
Robert Więckiewicz and Agnieszka Grochowska were praised for their roles as Lech and Danuta Wałęsa. Yet many thought Więckiewicz’s role was pure imitation and that he had little space for creative improvisation playing the part of a living legend – and a very characteristic one at that. There was more criticism: according to some reviewers, the film omitted Wałęsa’s poor performance as a president and focused on his road to success, which was crowned by the Nobel prize and the speech at the Congress; it justified his flaws and mistakes (such as signing the papers about his collaboration with the Communist police); it was too didactic in the way it narrated the story and felt as if it was made to educate the foreign audience. Even framing the plot around Wałęsa’s conversation with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci – who serves as the conduit for conveying the main character’s perspective to the audience (a role previously played by Agnieszka and editor Winkel in the earlier parts of the trilogy), and who allows him to recount the course of events from his own point of view – did not help the director shed any new or surprising light on the figure of the Polish Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Yet the film was also praised for taking into account a few different perspectives of the narrative – not just the hagiographic or the journalistic, but also the historical and the domestic; after in 2011 Danuta Wałęsowa published her autobiography Marzenia i tajemnice (Dreams and Secrets), he couldn’t do without the latter, since it’s this relationship that uncovers a man who paid a huge price for his political success, just as people he loved the most. Lech Wałęsa trusted Wajda in telling his story on screen. After seeing the movie, he shared his ambiguous emotions, saying “he liked it and didn’t like it,” and complaining that Robert Więckiewicz portrayed him as a buffoon. His son Jarosław Wałęsa, also present at the screening, argued Więckiewicz’s role was a faithful representation of his father’s way of being. The film was the Polish candidate for the Oscars but was not nominated. Yet during the special screening at the US Congress, it received a standing ovation in the presence of its protagonist, reminding everyone that there is still force and charisma in Lech Wałęsa, that make people bow their heads.
‘Was this film born out of rage? No. It was born out of my long experience. Out of the fact that I have witnessed such times and I know what they lead to,’ said Andrzej Wajda before the premiere of his – as it turned out – artistic will, the film Afterimage. Initially, the director planned to tell the story of the difficult relationship between Władysław Strzemiński, Katarzyna Kobro, and their daughter Nika Strzemińska, torn between them. Yet later, he realized he didn’t want to make another psychological film. What interested him most in the story of this avant – garde painter and art critic was his unwavering attitude in his fight for freedom and creative independence, which ultimately cost him his life. Afterimage shows the last years of social realism, which were the most difficult, and Strzemiński’s personal story, which is a typical example of destroying a person who defies the ideology of the party, turned out to be disturbingly relevant. Andrzej Mularczyk’s script reflects this layer of the artist’s biography very well.
Already 20 years before making Afterimage, Wajda knew that if he ever were to make a film about the painter, he would cast Bogusław Linda as Strzemiński. His daughter was played by Bronisława Zamachowska, and their relationship, according to the director, created a moving, personal counterpoint to the political issues that dominate the film.
The film was shot in Łódź – a city that Strzemiński had strong links with and where Wajda studied in the last years of the painter’s and lecturer’s activity. He recalled it was overwhelming and unfriendly. Afterward, Łódź, painted in grey by Wajda’s long – term collaborator Paweł Edelman, became the backdrop for a story about the persecution and intimidation of Strzemiński, whom the authorities deprived of everything: his students, the possibility of doing art, the ability to work altogether, and living a decent life. The contrast between the artist’s position and the authorities and functionaries who torment him is so strong and vivid that it could suggest coming close to a dangerous border where didacticism and a black – and – white vision of the world begin. Yet it hasn’t been crossed. The final, harrowing scene of Strzemiński collapsing in a textile shop window he is trying to decorate carries the emotional impact of Wajda’s most iconic symbolic images – those that have become part of the history of cinema. Meanwhile, the hell endured by the artist’s daughter serves as a painful testament to the nightmare and dehumanization of the era depicted in the film. Janusz Wróblewski wrote in Polityka weekly after the premiere: “The film completes the tragic panorama of Polish fate in a time of violence and fear. The lonely artist, who’s systematically and consistently deprived of his rights, yet remains faithful to himself and to his art until the end, is placed in front of Polish Army soldier Maciek Chełmicki from Ashes and Diamonds and next to work leader Mateusz Birkut from Man of Marble who builds a new world. (…) This film acts as a warning. During the times of the so – called political ‘good change’, Wajda shows the price that must be paid for defending one’s freedom and democratic values. Paradoxically, there is freshness in Afterimage, so rare with such a worn – out subject; there is an originality, an incredible emotional force which leads us to believe we are in front of an important work of art.”
The film premiered after Andrzej Wajda’s death.