A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 16, 2018

A Generation (Andrzej Wajda, 1955)

Tadeusz Lomnicki in A Generation
Stach Mazur: Tadeusz Lomnicki
Dorota: Urszula Modrzynska
Jasio Krone: Tadeusz Janczar
Sekula: Janusz Paluszkiewicz
Jacek: Ryszard Kotys
Mundek: Roman Polanski

Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Bohdan Czeszko
Based on a novel by Bohdan Czeszko
Cinematography: Jerzy Lipman
Production design: Roman Mann
Film editing: Czeslaw Raniszewski
Music: Andrzej Markowski

There are few more accomplished directorial debuts than Andrzej Wajda's A Generation, with its daring footwork around the Polish censors and its loving portrait of the titular generation, working their way through the wartime years as they try to embrace something that would represent a future after the German occupation. It doesn't have the nerve-stretching tension of Kanal (1956) or the poetic audacity of Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the two films that would constitute Wajda's wartime trilogy, but its gritty authenticity gives it a distinction all its own. The mostly young cast, including the young Roman Polanski, is authentically real. Wajda keeps both the action and the romantic business between Stach and Dorota, whose commitment he finds incredibly sexy, convincingly on the mark. There is a smudge of sentimentality and a touch of agitprop at the film's end, when the torch of rebellion is handed on to a fresh-faced new group, but it's not enough to mar the total effect of the film.
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