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Andrzej Wajda: Andrzej Wajda'
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Andrzej Wajda is without doubt among Poland's most celebrated citizens. hailed as the essential Pole, a filmmaker who not only put his nation on the international map of cinema, securing a place for himself in the first rank of European directors, but ... devoted his life's work to illuminating the Polish character on screen. His work is a fusion of artistical, historical and philosophical strengths; his images display a forceful sense of composition and powerful interplay of light and shadow; and his scripts often achieve a well-nigh literary depth and complexity."
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Polish director Andrzej Wajda had a habit of switching gears between socially conscious films and pure box-office entertainments. The Conductor, released in Poland in 1979 as Dyrygent, falls into the latter category. John Gielgud stars as an old and venerated orchestra conductor, making his annual personal appearance in a small Polish town. Violinist Krystyna Janda, who like the guest conductor is a devotee of Beethoven, finds her entire life altered by Gielgud's brief stay. The film made a few allegorical points about making oneself accessible to change, but otherwise The Conductor is all that it seems to be on surface: A simple story, simply told. English-language prints of The Conductor are blighted by the poor dubbing of the principal characters--with of course the exception of John Gielgud.
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The recipient of an honorary Oscar at the 1999 Academy Awards, Polish director Andrzej Wajda (pronounced "Ahn-jay Vai-dah") stands as a long-overlooked cinematic pioneer. One of the first students at the Lodz Film School, Wajda stumbled into film by accident. Strangely enough, a bout of weather pointed him in the direction of cinema, replacing his original aspirations to be a painter, a career he became disillusioned with after the jackboot of communism began to regulate his expression. The creator of the "Polish School," Wajda's work has certainly been underrepresented on DVD. Along comes the power of the Criterion Collection, who continues their stellar work with this boxed set of three films; this is Wajda's "war trilogy," a series of WWII dramas that benefit greatly from their immediacy. Upon the beginning of their production, barely a decade had passed since the shadow of fascism made life unbearable.
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A Generation is the first of Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda's "underground trilogy"-and ... Wajda's first-ever feature film. Originally titled Pokolenie, the film dissects the impact that World War II had on the youth of Poland. Tadevsz Lomnicki plays an impressionable young Warsaw resident who falls in love with resistance leader Ursula Modrzinska. The passion they feel towards their cause is inextricably entwined with the intensity of their feelings towards one another. During several crucial moments, the director contrasts the "official" version of wartime events with the actual facts (many experienced first-hand by Wajda), partly as a means of explaining the peacetime disillusionment of so many young Poles. As a result, the film was subject to an overabundance of government interference when it was first released.
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Andrzej Wajda was born on March 6, 1927 in Suwalki, in the northeastern corner Poland. By far the best-known film director working in Poland, Andrzej Wajda has achieved the status, both in his life and his work, of a symbol for his beleaguered country. The son of a cavalry officer killed in WWII, Wajda joined the Resistance as a teenager. Later, he studied painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow for three years before transferring in 1950 to the newly opened Lódz State Film School.Wajda's first feature film, A Generation (1954), traced the fate of several young people living under the Nazi Occupation. It was followed in 1957 by Kanal, a grim tribute to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when Red Army units were unable or unwilling to come to the aid of the city.
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Andrzej Wajda is considered one of Poland's - many would say the world's - greatest film directors. During the thirty-five years of his activity in film, theatre or television, his work, whether strong or weak, always arouses strong emotions and provokes intense debates in the media. His films deal with historical and political issues concerning Polish character and the nature of political power. Controversial, painful, stimulating and cinematically beautiful, they never fail to fully engage the spectator. This is particularly true for his major political films, which form the basis of the study. Applying Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the author shows how a creative interaction between the image on the screen and the viewer is established through Wajda's films.
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