Product Description
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In 1999, Polish director Andrzej Wajda received an Honorary
Academy Award for his body of work - more than thirty-five
feature films, beginning with A Generation in 1955. Wajda's
second film, Kanal, the first ever made about the Warsaw
uprising, secured him the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and
started him on the path to international accl, secured with
the release of his masterpiece, Ashes and Diamonds, in 1958.
These three groundbreaking films ushered in the "Polish School"
movement and later became known as the "War Trilogy." But each
boldly stands on its own - testaments to the resilience of the
human spirit, the struggle for personal and national freedom, and
Wajda's unique contribution to his homeland and to world cinema.
The Criterion Collection is proud to present this
director-approved edition, with new transfers of all three films
and extensive interviews with the director and his colleagues. A
Generation: Stach is a wayward teen living in squalor on the
outskirts of Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Guided by an avuncular
Communist organizer, he is introduced to the underground
resistance?and to the beautiful Dorota. Soon he is engaged in
dangerous efforts to fight oppression and indignity, maturing as
he assumes responsibility for others? lives. This coming-of-age
story of survival and shattering loss delivers a brutal portrait
of the human cost of war. Ashes and Diamonds: On the last day of
World War Two in a small town somewhere in Poland, Polish exiles
of war and the occupying Soviet forces confront the beginning of
a new day and a new Poland. In this incendiary environment we
find Home Army soldier Maciek Chelmicki, who has been ordered to
assassinate an incoming commissar. But a mistake stalls his
progress and leads him to Krystyna, a beautiful barmaid who gives
him a glimpse of what his life could be. Gorgeously photographed
and brilliantly performed, Ashes and Diamonds masterfully
interweaves the e of a nation with that of one man, resulting
in one of the most important Polish films of all time. Kanal:
"Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their
lives," announces a narrator, foretelling the tragedy that
unfolds as a war-ravaged company of Home Army resistance fighters
tries to escape the Nazi onslaught through the sewers of Warsaw.
Determined to survive, the men and women slog through the hellish
labyrinth, piercing the darkness with the strength of their
individual spirits. Based on true events, Kanal was the first
film ever made about the Warsaw Uprising and brought director
Andrzej Wajda to the attention of international audiences,
earning the Special Jury Prize in Cannes in 1957.
.com
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Andrzej Wajda's first three features form a landmark in Polish
cinema, and a monument of that great decade of European movies,
the 1950s. Working mostly during a thaw in Soviet control over
his homeland, Wajda and his collaborators created three films
that looked back at the Second World War from the perspective of
a new generation whose youth was defined by the catastrophe of
Nazi occupation and Soviet control. The first film is titled A
Generation (1955), as though to sum up the collective feeling.
It's set in Warsaw in 1943, as young workers join the anti-Nazi
resistance movement (including an attempt to help Jews escape
from the ghetto). in real locations, but with an
expressionistic eye, A Generation is especially drawn to the
ambiguous supporting character played by Tadeusz Janczar, a much
more conflicted and modern character than the nominal hero.
(Roman Polanski plays one of the fighters.)
Kanal (1957) tracks the final hours of the Warsaw Uprising, a
rebellion by the Poles and their Home Army against the Germans.
(The Russian army, parked on the other side of the Vistula River,
allowed the Poles to be wiped out without interference.) First we
meet the characters in a last stand at a bombed-out field of
urban rubble, then follow them in a miserable escape through the
dank, -filled sewers beneath the city. The desperation of
final heroic acts, and Wajda's ingenuity in finding new ways to
shoot in the sewer sets, keeps the film balanced in
nerve-wracking suspense.
Set on the final day of World War II, Ashes and Diamonds
explodes with mixed-up passion and anger, and with the
deliberately James Dean-like performance of Polish icon Zbigniew
Cybulski. Wadja expands his range here with a visual dynamism
that includes a heady use of symbols and striking borrowings from
Citizen Kane and film noir. The nervy, dark-spectacled Cybulski
plays a Home Army member out to assassinate a Communist official,
an assignment bungled in the opening sequence. So the job still
needs completing, but the would-be assassin is diverted by a
melancholy barmaid and the possibility of turning away from
violence... but this is Poland, and wry alism prevails. The
doomed national feeling is maintained in powerful fashion in
these three movies--which are not, technically speaking, a
trilogy, though they have always spiritually been of-a-piece.
Criterion assembled this DVD set with Wajda's approval, and he
appears in illuminating half-hour interview segments on each disc
(along with filmmaker Janusz Morgenstern and critic Jerzy
Plazewski). Valuable production stills and s, Wajda's
film-school short "Ceramics from Ilza," and essays are included.
Most importantly, the digital transfers themselves are perfectly
stunning. --Robert Horton