"Night Train"
Sewers
Manuscripts of Zaragoza
Heroes
Sister Joanna
A Generation
◎ Black Selection Ming
The future is not expected, nor is it polite
In the early 1990s, the "father of Polish cinema", the distinguished guest of Cannes, Venice, Berlin, the Oscars, the winner of the three lifetime achievement awards, and the world-class director Anjj Vajda, suddenly found himself out of the scene.
This was something he never expected.
You know, Vaida, who made "Marble Man" and "Iron Man", is a hardcore supporter of Solidarity. However, after the Polish change, what he did not expect was that the audience quickly abandoned him, and the audience that had put him on the altar in the past quickly became the "public", and was no longer interested in the "Polish Film School" full of national distress. American soap operas, popcorn movies or erotic films on television quickly took them captive. Shooting a new film? The seemingly reasonable phrase "the market has the final say" easily sent him away.
Another story comes from Milan Kundera. The writer Donno cites this allusion in The End. The protagonist of "The Unbearable Lightness of Life", Elena, who went into exile in France after the upheavals of Eastern Europe, returned to Prague to join the alumni association after 20 years. She brought 20 bottles of French red wine. However, she found that this made her old classmates very uncomfortable, and no one wanted to listen to her for 20 years. Suddenly a female classmate said, "Let's drink Czech beer!" The atmosphere was immediately enlivened. In the end, they still drank her red wine in order not to waste, but also to enjoy the light, but they drank it in the same way as they drank Czech beer. Elena felt frustrated that she had been amputated by them, first cutting off 20 years of her life and then rejoining her into a monster.
This is certainly not a question of "who to blame". Waida, who waited for Solidarity to come to power, was actually like Elena, who had only 20 bottles of French wine in her suitcase, and had long been full of expectations to prepare "the past with you". Unexpectedly, the audience he was expecting only replied to him with a sentence of "Don't mention the past again."
What's the problem? One explanation makes sense, and that is that even great artists like Vaida have a misunderstanding of so-called linear time. They did not expect that the future was unpredictable, and on the contrary, the future was not polite. It does not care about any "necessity", but tells you that it is nothing more than a projection of your own ideals.
And Wajda may not have realized at the time that the glory of Polish cinema in the second half of the 20th century (consisting mainly of two time periods, the "Polish Film School" and the "Moral Anxiety Film"), was precisely related to a certain taboo. As Vajda himself put it, Polish artists are adept at using superb artistic metaphors to bypass censorship — most of the masterpieces of the "Polish Film School" have this kind of forbidden, wondrous charm. And when the taboo disappears, the charm disappears, which is completely reasonable.
The Lodz Film School is Poland's lucky
The "Polish Film School" Master Exhibition held in Shanghai recently showed a number of films, and we can also deeply feel this from it. Poland's proud cultural traditions, the importance that intellectuals attach to culture, and the particularity of film culture here and now are the main reasons why Polish cinema was able to have a place in the 1950s and 1960s.
This is closely related to the Rhodes Film School. It is Poland's good fortune to have a film school that is crowded by real intellectuals, educators, thinkers, rather than speculators of all kinds. This is not an exaggeration. Filmmakers cannot say enough about their contribution to the second half of the 20th century, or even to polish cultural history as a whole.
Before World War II, Polish cinema did not stand out. In 1945, a group of amateur filmmakers (including Jerzy Toebryz, Wanda Yakubowska, Alexander Ford, and others) not only rebuilt the post-war Polish film industry, but more importantly established a film school in the industrial city of Łódź. The wonderful thing is that the official investment in the film school is due to Lenin's famous saying that a school for the training of propaganda cadres should be established ("Of all art forms, film is the most important to us"), but the teachers of the school put the training of world-class film artists and producers first. In particular, the rector, Jerzy Toepriz, not only saw cinema as a true art, telling his students that Polish cinema was part of the European cinematic arts, but that his school was open-minded and inclusive. In the city of Lodz, slightly off the center of politics, the film school formed a wonderful aura. The artists produced by this academy all have an intellectual character, including, of course, Vajda, who transferred from the Academy of Fine Arts.
Vajda and the "Polish School of Cinema"
The "Generation" and "Sewers" screened this time are Wajda's early masterpieces and his wonderful debut in the world film world. It is clear that "A Generation" has the shadow of Italian neorealism, while "Sewerage" has the color of existential philosophy.
A Generation was Vajda's first official film and is considered the founding work of the "Polish School of Cinema". The story is a combination of How Steel is Made (which also features a Juhlai-style revolutionary enlightener of the working class, starring Vajda's teacher, Tadyush Vomnitsky) and The Young Guard (apparently filmed in relation to the film of the same name by the great Soviet director Gerasimov). The story tells that the youth of the civilian area by the railway were killed because they saw their friends pickpocketing the Train transporting coal by the German army, and under the enlightenment and leadership of the Resistance Organization, they fought against the German army from spontaneous to consciousness. Although it doesn't seem to be much different from other revolutionary stories, it is still "new", and as a graduate of the Rhodes Film School, this film announces the arrival of a new "generation". It not only tells a story of the main theme of the revolution in a new film language, but also reaches a "consensus" of a new generation of Polish young people through this film. This consensus is not only very different from the language of previous Polish films, but also carries out the lyricism of "to cruel youth", presents a fresh neo-realistic style, and establishes the aesthetic consciousness of a new generation of young people in line with international standards.
More importantly, there is a subtle consciousness in this consensus, that is, unlike the traditional revolutionary narrative of Soviet cinema, it takes the exploration of human nature, human freedom and dilemma to the extreme, that is, the choice between the aesthetic ideas of Soviet and Italian cinema, which has since become the main ideological tendency of the "Polish Film School".
Sewers is a masterpiece that brought worldwide fame to Polish cinema and is probably Vajda's best-known work. The film is set in the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Resistance Army before the end of World War II, and the lieutenant sneaks into the sewers with a small detachment in order to join the reinforcements, but the reinforcements are delayed... Desperate, conflicted, and exposed to the weaknesses of human nature, the exhausted squads either committed suicide or tried to break through and were brutally killed by the Germans, or killed by the other side.
The spatial metaphor of the sewer is clear, and it explores the existentialist proposition of "human nature in a desperate situation". But it carries a deeper metaphor that Poland, as a pawn in the postwar geopolitical game, is usually an "outcast." This ideology is even more evident in his next work, Ashes and Diamonds.
Andrey Munch: "The Hero" of the "Anti-Hero"
Vajda had this to say about his contemporary, Anjay Munch, who was the same name: "If he hadn't died prematurely (in a car accident), he would have taught art films at all film schools. He was a gifted educator and one of the most insightful graduates of our Rhodes Film School. ”
Director Munch's work is rarely introduced in China. This screening includes his "Hero", which is a very precious screening. Munch was Jewish, had participated in the Warsaw Uprising, and had gone to war. The most surviving work of his life is documentaries, and there are very few feature films. It is not difficult to see his study of Italian neorealist films, especially Rossellini's "War", and the style of "wartime news features" is very prominent, such as "The Man with the Blue Cross" and so on.
The hero also has Rossellini's shadow in narrative style, and the originally short film consists of two "wartime news features" short films that are not related to each other. But the film clearly highlights the philosophical character of the Polish film school. What is a hero? Can ordinary people, even cowards, grow into heroes? Also set against the backdrop of the Warsaw Uprising, Munch's film presents a poetic style that is very different from Thata's. He is more "realistic", calm, and a bit of a black humor.
It's more like an "anti-hero" movie, subverting a certain conceptual hero image of high, sharp, loud, and hard. Every little person, even an alcoholic, has the potential to become a hero in a certain situation, because human nature itself has a side to yearning for the sublime. It is convincing to tell this by Munch, as a warrior.
Munch's other masterpiece, The Man on the Rails, is somewhat similar to Rashomon: an old train driver is killed on the tracks. The traffic lights at the scene were destroyed, and it is suspected that someone caused the accident. The old driver was retired early because he was unwilling to use secondary coal. An investigation was launched around the accident, but the results were unclear. Unfortunately, the film was not screened.
Jerzy Kavalelovich:
Suspense, horror and metaphor
In addition to Italian neorealism, the master of suspense Hitchcock also had a great influence on the "Polish School of Cinema". Among them, the big director Jerzy Kavalelovich is the most obvious in Hitchcock's style (the other is Roman Polanski). There are two masterpieces by Kavalelovich in this screening, "Night Train" and "Sister Joanna".
Kavalelovich, an Armenian-american, was born in a ukrainian village where most of them were Jewish, and perhaps the memory of the Holocaust gives his films a psychological sense of horror. A strange thing is that the elements of suspense, tension, and horror are often interpreted as metaphors in Kavalelovich's films, which is precisely what Poland's "taboo" brings.
The eerie music at the beginning of Night Train and the eerie bird's-eye view of the train station give an atmosphere of suspense. The handsome man and the beautiful woman met in the train box, but the two were nervous for some reason, the man wore sunglasses all the time, and the woman was always hiding something, until a long time later they broke the deadlock. There are all kinds of people on the train, young couples, gossip middle-aged, frivolous young women, not to mention any "positive characters", but they are all wonderful and vivid. There seems to be an atmosphere of mutual vigilance between people, and when they learn that a fugitive is hiding on a train, this vigilance is intensified, and the suspicion is directed at the man and woman, in fact, the man is the doctor who doubts life because of the failure of the operation, and the woman is avoiding the man's entanglement because of the impasse in the intimate relationship. In the end, when the truth comes out and the travelers return to their vacation life, the film leaves a long afterglow, and it seems that they should still have a "story" (because some of the clichés that the audience expected did not happen).
By the way, this story can be changed to a French or German, Italian background, in fact, can be established, "others are hell" is a common symptom of modernity. However, the introduction to the film on the Internet has copied and pasted a sentence that "reflects the oppressive atmosphere of the socialist Polish period." Visible taboos give it some kind of attraction.
Joanna the Nun is one of the most famous films of the "Polish School of Cinema" and one of the most controversial Polish films, and the Pope even declared guilty of going to the cinema that year. Kavalelovich maximised his ability to create an atmosphere of psychological tension and suspense. The story is of a black-clad monk in the 17th century who is known for his quiet behavior and is sent to an infamous convent to "exorcise demons". The abbot, Joanna, was very beautiful, and she claimed to be often possessed by Satan. Several monks who had come to exorcise demons had been caught instead, committed sins, and had been caught alive and burned alive on the cross. The newcomer seemed determined, but he was not only captivated and impressed by Joanna's Satan, but also committed murderous crimes in the name of God's love. Just looking at the introduction is a lot like a Cult B-movie, but the real art is precisely what can't be quickly browsed through the introduction or three-minute short video. The struggle between god's love and Satan's love (temptation) is a very profound subject of religious philosophy, such as Godard's Father Leon Mohan and Maurice Piara's Under the Sun of Satan. There are also many film critics who interpret the sense of depression and confinement in Kavalelovich's work as a kind of innuendo to reality, of course, it is only a matter of opinion.
Vojceh Haas: "Dreamlike"
One of the surprises of the festival was the presence of Polish film maestro Vojceh Haas's Zaragoza Manuscript. Haas seems to be a little further away from the "Polish School of Cinema", whose creations have a strong postmodern character. His films are truly "dreamlike", as if the camera footage is embedded in his subconscious.
The original novel of the Zaragoza Manuscript is a veritable "divine work" that is considered to be comparable to the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights. The author Jan Podocki is an 18th-century Polish aristocrat, traveler, and theologian, and the Zaragoza Manuscript is a work of infinite brains, combining fantasy, grotesqueness, magic, gothic, adventure, and love, and its novel genre is extremely unique, a bit like the "string of sugar gourd" structure of classical Chinese novels, and also like "Decameron", everyone is telling small stories, and everyone is being told by others. Such a complex novel, only Haas can make it among the world's directors. The countless small themes under the six major themes, the interlocking nested structure, are in fact inexhaustible to watch once — even the proud Buñuel said that this was the only movie he had seen three times.
The year 1965 is generally seen as the end of the "Polish School of Cinema". However, the fine tradition of Polish cinema did not end, it once again won the world's attention in the 1970s with a more powerful "moral anxiety film", and another generation arrived, who were also artists trained by the Rhodes Film School.