The 14th annual Polish Film Festival in America, produced by the Society for Arts, continues Friday, November 15, through Saturday, November 30. Screenings are at the Society for Arts, 1112 N. Milwaukee. Tickets are $7; passes, available for $40 (five screenings) and $80 (twelve screenings), are good for all programs. For more information call 773-486-9612. The schedule for November 15 through 21 follows; a complete schedule through November 30 is available on-line at www.chicagoreader.com.
A Write-off and The Book of Complaints
A Lesson in Polish Cinema
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Less a documentary than an illustrated lecture, this TV program features director Andrzej Wajda recalling the emergence of a Polish national cinema, starting in the late 1940s, when such veterans as Wanda Jakubowska (The Last Stop) and Aleksander Ford (Border Street) began to inspire a new generation of directors, and ending in 1960, when the secretary of the central committee lowered the boom on Wajda and his fellow upstarts. Wajda notes the Polish school’s profound debt to the Italian neorealists, a point clearly illustrated by gritty black-and-white clips from such films as Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Celuloza (1953), Jan Rybkowski’s Hours of Hope (1955), Tadeusz Konwicki’s The Last Day of Summer (1958), and Wajda’s own Ashes and Diamonds (1958). The director also clarifies the relative importance of the Lodz Film School, which censored its students’ films before the party could even get a look at them, and the state’s film production units, where he and his contemporaries actually learned their craft. Honored with a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999, Wajda must have seemed the obvious choice to tell this story, but modesty or old age seems to get the better of him: despite some interesting anecdotes, his is a rather academic treatment of a dramatic chapter in world cinema. In Polish with subtitles. 72 min. (JJ) (7:00)
Give Us This Night
Two subtitled Polish TV documentaries. In Piwnica (2001, 58 min.) director Antoni Krauze looks at Piwnica pod Baranami, a popular cabaret in Krakow after World War II. In Wyspianski’s Krakow (30 min.) directors Aleksandra Czernecka and Dariusz Pawelec consider the profound civic influence of painter, sculptor, architect, designer, and writer Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869-1970). (5:00)
Two interrelated documentaries about filmmaking. In the unsubtitled Himilsbach: Truths, Lies, Black Holes, Stanislaw Manturzewski and Malgorzata Lupina create a partly fictionalized story about the autobiographical films of Jan Himilsbach. Rafal Glinski uses their documentary as the hook for his profile of Manturzewski, Mantu…a Free Man, in Polish with subtitles. 83 min. (7:00)
