Andrzej Munk - Polish School of Documentary Movies (2-DVD)

Polish School of Documentary Movies
Andrzej Munk

Number of disks: 2
Condition: Brand New, Sealed, Mint
Total time: 225 minutes
Languge version: Polish
Subtitles: English, French, German, Russian
Region: 2 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.

"Andrzej Munk" 2-DVD set is the part of NInA Publishing's series "Polish School of Documentary Movies". Each volume of he series, which is edited by Tadeusz Sobolewski, is devoted to different Polish documentary filmmaker and contains selected documentaries from his/her artistic output. Series includes the presentations from the body of woks of recognized film directors, as well as from some of the forgotten masters and débutante directors.

Content:

1. Kierunek Nowa Huta, 1951
2. Pamietniki chlopów, 1952
3. Kolejarskie słowo, 1953
4. Gwiazdy musza plonac 1954
5. Niedzielny poranek, 1955
6. Blekitny krzyz, 1955
7. Spacerek staromiejski, 1958
8. Polska Kronika Filmowa Nr 52/1959, A-B, Nr 39/1961, B

About Andrzej Munk:

Film director, also script writer and cameraman. Born in 1921 (or, according to some sources, 1920) in Krakow. Died tragically in 1961.

The future director's youth fell on the war and Nazi occupation years. He graduated from secondary school in Krakow just before the war, and moved to Warsaw during the occupation. He took part in the armed resistance movement. During and just after the war he took on various jobs, working as a labourer and a technician. After the war, he started a course in architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology, and then law studies at Warsaw University, neither of which he completed. He was a student of the cinematography department of the Lodz film school from 1947, but after a time moved to the directing department. He graduated from film school in 1951.

He worked at Warsaw's Documentary Film Studio (WFD) for 5 years, first as a cameraman for the Polish Newsreels, then as a director of documentaries. He debuted as a feature film director in 1956 with CZLOWIEK NA TORZE / MAN ON THE TRACKS. In 1958 he made the first of his most famous films, EROICA, followed by the second in 1960, ZEZOWATE SZCZESCIE / BAD LUCK. From 1957 until his death he was a lecturer at the Lodz film school. He was killed in a car crash in 1961, leaving the unfinished film PASAZERKA / PASSENGER.

Since 1965, the Lodz film school has granted an annual Andrzej Munk Award for the best directing debut.

Andrzej Munk received many awards for his films at major film festivals, including Venice - for the film SPACEREK STAROMIEJSKI / A WALK IN THE OLD CITY OF WARSAW (1959), BLEKITNY KRZYZ / THE MEN OF THE BLUE CROSS (1955), and PASSENGER (1964), and in Cannes for PASSENGER (1964). Polish film critics chose his films MAN ON THE TRACKS (1957), EROICA (1958), BAD LUCK (1960), and PASSENGER (1963) as the best feature films of the year.

Andrzej Munk began his career directing films that followed the spirit of the times when they were made. His documentaries, NAUKA BLIZEJ ZYCIA [SCIENCE CLOSER TO LIFE], or KIERUNEK NOWA HUTA [DESTINATION NOWA HUTA], were pure propaganda productions. His slightly later films, like KOLEJARSKIE SLOWO / A RAILWAYMAN'S WORD, or GWIAZDY MUSZA PLONAC [STARS MUST BURN], made together with Witold Lesiewicz, were perceived as breaking with the schematic formula of socialist realism. What was clearly very obvious for his contemporaries, however, is not necessarily so obvious today, half a century later.

In a monograph on the WFD published a few years ago ("Chelmska 21", Warsaw 2000), Bozena Janicka included an essay on Andrzej Munk, titled "Between Truth and Lies", in which she discussed the present-day worth of the director's once-famous documentaries. Thanks to those films, Munk gained the reputation of a great documentary maker. One needs to remember, though, that these films were made in Poland, in the 1950's tainted by the imposed style of socialist realism, most of them before the political thaw of 1956. Bozena Janicka's question as to whether Andrzej Munk's documentaries are still great films all those decades later, and whether they really marked a breakthrough, is fully justified.

A RAILWAYMAN'S WORD is a story about the work of railwaymen who overcome obstacles to carry out their task - getting a "guaranteed train" carrying a shipment for the steel mill to its destination on time.

According to the critics (including Aleksander Jackiewicz in his book "Moja filmoteka. Kino polskie" [My Film Archive. Polish Cinema], 1983, and Ewelina Nurczynska-Fidelska in "Andrzej Munk", 1982) this film was inscribed into the socialist realism pattern but at the same time opposed it, showing the railwaymen's efforts and the value of human labour.

It is worth seeing what the director had to say:
"These fictionalised films", he said in an interview, "were a response to the official tone of the documentaries of the time, to their laconic, over-optimistic tone. I tried to show issues that had been made banal, I wanted to show the hardship, sacrifice, heroism, beauty of everyday work. In 'A Railwayman's Word' I said - which seems very trite today, but at the time such simple issues were ignored - that the work of railwaymen was hard, that it required great effort". (Stanislaw Janicki "Polscy tworcy filmowi o sobie" [Polish Filmmakers About Themselves], 1962)
Today, believes Bozena Janicka not without reason, it is very hard for us to notice certain nuances, to understand the difference between complying with the pattern and breaking with it. After seeing this film, the modern viewer may well ask with some surprise, writes the essay's author, what the socialist-realist model documentary was like that Munk was breaking with in A RAILWAYMAN'S WORD. After all, the working people's "self-sacrificing struggle for victory" culminating in success, as shown by Munk, was precisely compatible with the socialist-realist model. One most likely needs to accept that it is hard to feel the spirit of those times today, admitting like Janicka does that "the abyss of time is shockingly deep".

Further on, Bozena Janicka writes:
"Andrzej Munk - and only he - grasped the vibration between official propaganda, which used methods imported from the east to encourage people to work hard, and the genuine commitment of the people, who would have done what they did even without the propaganda, declarations, campaigns, and dull speeches. Munk knew that the imposed propaganda ritual could conceal the real truth about people who act out of a genuine, not forced sense of responsibility for themselves and others. This was an inconvenient conclusion at the time, as it questioned the grounds for the authorities' sense of being the masters, and it is not very convenient today, as it reminds us that political judgments do not reach the deeper layers of reality, which itself is never one-dimensional".
In 1952 Andrzej Munk made PAMIETNIKI CHLOPOW [PEASANT DIARIES], a film that was meant, to put it briefly, to show what people were told to believe about the wonderful lives that Polish peasants led in post-war Poland. In his book " Moja filmoteka. Kino polskie" [My Film Archive. Polish Cinema] Aleksander Jackiewicz wrote that though he found the film to lack a hint of a shadow on the picture of those times to make it truly authentic, as clearly People's Poland could not include peasants who were not successful, even so one could find in it "a tiny bit of authenticity that was absent from the works of other directors".
"Looking at us from the screen", wrote Jackiewicz, "are not illustrations, but faces from the real world, and what flows from the loudspeakers are chaotic stories, tainted with the idyllic tone of their endings but still - not imagined".
One could say that Munk at least partially managed to tear audiences away from the imaginary and non-existent world about which they were constantly told under Stalinism in Poland, and made to believe that they were living in a land of happiness, though at every step their everyday experience belied this fairy tale.

Apart from breaking with the ideological model, Munk's documentaries were also valuable for their innovative and sophisticated form. Aleksander Jackiewicz, writing about A RAILWAYMAN'S WORD, points out how the theme - movement, the train's motion - influences the drama of the film which is based precisely on movement.

"Munk highlighted the photogeny of the railways", Jackiewicz writes, mentioning the artistry with which the director builds the drama, juxtaposing movement with immobility, using sound as a counterpoint to the image. He does this in different ways, depending on the sequence. Below is an example of a description Jackiewicz gives of one of them:
"The steam engine's immobility, emphasized by very busy editing registering the men's tense faces against elements of the machine and the wheel's rhythmic breath, which seems to count the passing minutes, forms a psychological plane: the impatience of those who vouched for the machine. But this is also the 'machine's psychological plane', with the machine more closely bound to the people than earlier, exploding with the accelerated turn of the wheels and the rumble of steam when the semaphore is lifted".
Similarly, the critic finds that Munk's short from the film GWIAZDY MUSZA PLONAC [STARS MUST BURN] is a good example of the formal mastery of the director who - this time filming men going down to an old coal mine shaft - finds a way to extract the drama of the natural scenery.

Paradoxically, Munk achieved the unquestioned authenticity of his films by making not pure documentaries but fictionalised documentaries, using staged scenes.
"A documentary - this most often means a true film. Looking at my documentaries, I see that none of them met this criterion... The documentary part was that the setting was real, the steam engine was real, and the engine driver was a real engine driver, but the rest was staged", said the director in the interview granted to Stanislaw Janicki, quoted earlier.
Gradually fictionalising his films, calling them "dramatized documentaries", Andrzej Munk moved away from documentaries to feature films, doing this so fluidly and imperceptibly that THE MEN OF THE BLUE CROSS (the last film made at the WFD) was called Munk's last documentary by some, and his first feature film by others.

THE MEN OF THE BLUE CROSS was based on a literary text, but one that was about real events. It featured professional actors but also, like a documentary, genuine people re-enacting past events in which they had taken part. The film was not a success, both critics and audiences giving it a cool reception. As Aleksander Jackiewicz wrote, the drama so characteristic of Munk's filmmaking was lacking. However, THE MEN OF THE BLUE CROSS was a necessary step on the director's road to feature films.

Having played an unquestionably important role in Polish documentary filmmaking, Andrzej Munk soon became one of the most valued makers of feature films, as the director of films that were once the object of heated discussions and are classics today, such as EROICA, BAD LUCK and his last, unfinished film PASSENGER. Next to Andrzej Wajda, he was the main author of the restoration-oriented trend in Polish cinema, dubbed the "Polish school", which was a refreshing breeze after the suffocation of socialist realism.

MAN ON THE TRACKS from 1956, a film about a railwayman who is fired, though a feature film in one hundred percent, was still similar in style to his documentaries, in its form and the problems it touched. This film marked the start of the director's cooperation with script writer Jerzy Stefan Stawinski, whose name is also linked to the formation of the "Polish school".

The "Polish school" emerged in the mid-1950's, first of all out of the need to shed the burden of the socialist-realist model, and secondly out of a need to settle accounts with the Romantic origins of national myths.
"This was", wrote Zygmunt Kaluzynski, "an account-settling with foolhardy heroism, with the cult of blind, stupid patriotism, with the heritage of parochial thinking". ("Film" 48/1959)
Films from the "Polish school" reached for the motif of armed action and heroism requiring sacrifice, but showed these issues in a de-mythologized way, different from the usual approach taken by Polish culture and its inclination for mythologization. Such films include Andrzej Wajda's KANAL, in which, as Jerzy Plazewski wrote, the director showed the Warsaw Uprising in such a way as to "pay homage, but in a topsy-turvy way, insisting on showing the uprising as it fell, pushed into the stench and darkness of the sewers..." ("Historia filmu dla każdego" [A History of Film for Everyone], 1977). The next director (also, like the director of KANAL, working with J.S. Stawinski) to reach for the theme of the Warsaw Uprising was Andrzej Munk in his EROICA, which was described as an "anti-heroic" film.
"We wanted to show how the overall atmosphere of foolhardy heroism influences even those individuals who do not have that 'hero culture', and turns them into heroes. Dzidzius commits acts requiring great courage, despite his 'rationalism' he is a hero. When he ultimately joins the uprising, this is a catharsis, a purifying factor", said the director about his film and its protagonist in the interview quoted earlier.
Ever since KANAL and EROICA were released, the names of Wajda and Munk have denoted two opposite trends within the "Polish school". Munk has often been compared to Wajda and contrasted with him.
"The latter", wrote Jerzy Plazewski about Wajda, "presents imagination, fantasy, subjective vision and a strong dramatic backbone. Munk presents an objective view, a passion for discovering a specific world, a perverse struggle with outdated national myths. In opposition to Romantic realism [he offers] provocative rationalism, which is much further from the average Pole's mentality; and more needed".
The importance of Andrzej Munk's work was also appreciated by Aleksander Jackiewicz when he wrote that apart from Munk no other filmmaker of the "Polish school", despite its criticism, ever went beyond the Romantic model.
"Munk's style", Jackiewicz wrote in his book, having EROICA and BAD LUCK in mind, "clearly dissociated itself from the lyricism of almost the entire 'school'. In terms of genre his films evoke associations with an 18th-century philosophical tale rather than, as Wajda's works do, with an epic poem. The tissue of Munk's new films was a realistic tissue, with a tendency for quasi-documentary figures... when metaphors were used in Munk's works, the technique was like the surrealism in the comedies of Chaplin rather than - as was the case with Wajda - Bunuel".
The critic emphasized that BAD LUCK was a work which accented Munk's anti-Romantic role in the "Polish school" even more clearly than EROICA.
"Making 'Eroica' and 'Bad Luck' ", wrote E. Nurczynska-Fidelska, "Munk stood next to those who play the role of 'mockers' in processes of shaping national and cultural awareness. Their scorn and mockery fulfils a cleansing function, though, aimed at rejecting mythologized values and developing new ones".
In PASSENGER, his last and unfinished film, Munk reached for a different, serious, far from mocking language, but again to speak about heroism. He was fascinated with a story about two women, a guard and a prisoner of a concentration camp, presented in a radio programme by Zofia Posmysz-Piasecka. He used the theme twice, first in a TV play and later in the film. He was fascinated by Marta, a prisoner who, as Jackiewicz put it, "creates her beautiful humanity within the confines of imprisonment... Contrary to the officers of 'Ostinato Lugubre' in 'Eroica', Marta does not even create a myth of freedom. I repeat: the freedom is inside her", the critic emphasized, saying that Marta's heroism in defending freedom was her private cause, not a national one.

Filmography

Documentaries and short films:

1949 SZTUKA MLODYCH [ART OF THE YOUNG] (documentary) graduation film.
1950 ZACZELO SIE W HISZPANII / IT BEGAN IN SPAIN (documentary). A film built of footage from different newsreels.
1951 NAUKA BLIŻEJ ŻYCIA [SCIENCE CLOSER TO LIFE] (documentary), script Artur Miedzyrzecki. A propaganda image, full of optimism, of science in People's Poland.
1951 KIERUNEK NOWA HUTA [DESTINATION NOWA HUTA] (documentary). A film about the construction, begun in 1948 where a village near Krakow used to be, of the city of Nowa Huta and the metallurgical plant there. A propaganda picture about the flagship construction project of People's Poland.
1952 BAJKA [THE FAIRY TALE] (documentary). A film about a concert by the Warsaw Philharmonic orchestra at the factory club of the tractor manufacturer Ursus, where Stanislaw Moniuszko's symphonic poem BAJKA was performed.
1952 PAMIETNIKI CHLOPOW [PEASANT DIARIES] (fictionalised documentary). Using the language of pure propaganda, the film, based on the narratives of the heroes, confronts life in the countryside before and after World War II. Munk found the writers of some famous diaries published before the war, and then compared their lives in the two inter-war decades with the post-war period. Of course he stressed the benefits (prosperity, educated children) that Poland's rural residents had gained thanks to the new political system and communist rule.
1953 KOLEJARSKIE SLOWO / A RAILWAYMAN'S WORD (fictionalised documentary). A film about the work of railwaymen working hard and with dedication to make sure a train carrying coke from the south of the country reaches the coast and the Szczecin steel mill.
1954 GWIAZDY MUSZA PLONAC [STARS MUST BURN] (fictionalised documentary), script and directing with Witold Lesiewicz. A two-part film. The part made by Munk is about the work ethos again, this time the work ethos of miners. It is a story about people from the mine's management who want to fulfil the production quota, which is at risk of not being met, and go down an old, unused mine shaft to look for coal. The film is schematic in plot but interesting as to form. (Awards: 1955 - Special Mention from the State Award Committee)
1955 NIEDZIELNY PORANEK. SCHERZO / ONE SUNDAY MORNING. SCHERZO (short film). An impressionistic image of Warsaw rebuilt after the war and its residents. A kind of lyrical film version of a feature article, full of warm humour and enriched with observations of everyday life. (Awards: 1955 - 9th International Film Festival, Edinburgh, Honorary Diploma, 5th World Festival of Youth and Students, Warsaw, Gold Medal; 1956 - 5th Cultural and Documentary Film Week, Mannheim, Film Critics' Award)
1958 SPACEREK STAROMIEJSKI / A WALK IN THE OLD CITY OF WARSAW / A VISIT TO THE OLD CITY (short film) based on an idea of composer Andrzej Markowski. A lyrical tale of how a teenage music school student wanders among the alleys of Warsaw's Old Town, finding beauty in the ordinary urban sounds thanks to her musical sensitivity. (Awards: 1959 - International Documentary Festival, Venice, first prize in the documentary-feature category, 13th International Film Festival, Edinburgh, special mention; 1960 - 6th International West German Short Film Days, Oberhausen, diploma, 10th International Festival of Tourist and Folklore Films, Brussels, award for best fictionalised tourist film; 1961 - 4th IFF Vancouver, honorary mention)
1959 POLSKA KRONIKA FILMOWA [POLISH NEWSREEL] No. 52 A-B, special edition

feature films:

1955 BLEKITNY KRZYZ / THE MEN OF THE BLUE CROSS, script with Andrzej Liberak based on his short story. Though based on a literary original, this film is more like a documentary, reconstructing authentic events and featuring the real-life participants next to professional actors. It presents a daring operation by the Tatra Mountain Rescue in the winter of 1945, helping the wounded in a field hospital organized in a mountain cabin in Slovakia. The wounded are carried across Nazi lines. (Awards: 1955 - 16th International Film Festival, Venice, Bronze Medal, 4th International Mountain and Travel Film Festival, Trent, second prize - Silver Rhododendron)
1956 CZLOWIEK NA TORZE / MAN ON THE TRACKS, script with Jerzy Stefan Stawinski. An elderly engine driver is killed by a train, having been retired as punishment for his alleged hostility towards the political system. A special commission tries to shed light on the circumstances of the death. To reveal the truth gradually, the director shows the viewers different versions of events from the viewpoint of several people. (Awards: 1957 - 10th International Film Festival, Karlovy Vary, for best director, 1958 - Warsaw Mermaid Polish Film Critics' Award for best Polish film of 1957)
1957 EROICA. HEROIC SYMPHONY IN TWO PARTS. (part I SCHERZO ALLA POLLACCA, part II OSTINATO LUGUBRE) Script by J.S. Stawinski based on his own short stories "Wegrzy" [The Hungarians] and "Ucieczka" [The Escape]. EROICA was planned as a film comprising three parts, but ultimately the director decided not to include the part titled CON BRAVURA, based on J.S. Stawinski's short story "Zakonnica" [The Nun], seeing it as being weaker artistically. The premiere took place in 1972 on Polish Television. All the parts were about Nazi occupation times.
Part one tells how circumstances transform Dzidzius Gorkiewicz, a practical man who does not like to take risks, from an anti-hero into a hero. As the Warsaw Uprising draws to its tragic end, rather by accident Dzidzius undertakes a task aimed at enabling some Hungarians wanting to join the uprising to contact its commanders. Dzidzius's brave deed, which involves risking his life travelling from Zalesie near Warsaw to the fighting Polish capital, then further similar trips, fail to bring the expected alliance. Dzidzius, however, most likely not understanding his own actions, and going against his principles, gets more and more involved in the lost cause, ultimately consciously behaves like a hero, and joins the insurgents in the end.
Part two is set in an POW camp where Polish officers are being kept by the Nazis. To keep up the spirits of their fellow prisoners, two of them invent the legend of the heroic escape of Lieut. Zawistowski from the camp. In reality they hide the alleged hero in an attic where the man falls ill, suffers a breakdown following the death of his friend, and ultimately dies. The legend's inventors continue to uphold the story of the escape, seeing the beneficial influence of the legend on their fellow prisoners' morale, and secretly get rid of the body.
Part three, rejected by the director, tells the story of a female courier working for the underground, travelling between Hungary and Poland dressed as a nun.
(Awards: 1959 - Warsaw Mermaid Polish Film Critics' Award for best Polish feature film of 1958, 1st Mar del Plata International Film Festival, film critics' award with a special mention for the director, FIPRESCI award and award for the best festival set of films together with Jerzy Passendorfer's ZAMACH / ANSWER TO VIOLENCE)
1959 ZEZOWATE SZCZESCIE / BAD LUCK, script by J.S. Stawinski based on his own novel "Szesc wcielen Jana Piszczyka" [Six Incarnations of Jan Piszczyk]. A comic take on the story of a man (from the pre-war years, through the war and occupation, to the 1960's) whose life is a series of fiascos. Piszczyk says he is unlucky, and blames bad luck for his sad fate. In reality, in his drive for success he behaves like an unprincipled opportunist, which combined with his innate stupidity guarantees a series of life catastrophes. " 'Bad Luck' is not just a tale about an opportunist's life but also, or perhaps primarily, a tale about the country's history which made such opportunism possible", wrote A. Jackiewicz. (Awards: 1960 - 14th International Film Festival, Edinburgh, special mention, 1961 - Warsaw Mermaid Polish Film Critics' Award for best Polish feature film of 1960)
1961-1963 PASAZERKA / PASSENGER script with Zofia Posmysz-Piasecka (writer of a radio play and novel telling the same story). After Munk's death Witold Lesiewicz put together the unfinished materials. The film shows a psychological duel between a perpetrator and a victim, a German woman who was a guard at a concentration camp and a Polish woman who was a prisoner there. The weaker party - the prisoner - comes out of the struggle victorious. The story is told through the reminiscences of the German, who is travelling with her husband and thinks she recognizes her former victim, Marta, on board the ship. (Awards: 1964 - 16th International Film Festival, Cannes, Jury's Special Mention, FIPRESCI award, International Film Festival, Venice, special mention for a film outside the competition, award from the Italian Journalists' Association, 15th Czechoslovak Festival of the Working People, Prague, Main Prize, award from the Czechoslovak Union of Anti-fascist Fighters, award from the Club of Friends of Film Art, Warsaw Mermaid Polish Film Critics' Award for best Polish feature film of 1960; 1965 - Helsinki, award from the Finnish Film Critics' Association)

Andrzej Munk also directed the following Television Theatre productions:

1959 - WIECZORY GENERALSKIE [GENERALS' EVENINGS] by Ksawery Pruszynski
1960 - HARLEQUINADE by Terence Rattigan
1960 - PASSENGER by Zofia Posmysz-Piasecka.

At the Teatr Polski in Warsaw in 1960 he staged George Bernard Shaw's THE APPLE CART.

Andrzej Munk was the cinematographer for the etudes and documentaries: STRACONE ZLUDZENA [SHATTERED ILLUSIONS] (1947) dir. Silik Sternfeld, TRYUMF [TRIUMPH] (1949) dir. Maria Chybowska, PIELEGNIARKI [NURSES] (1950), dir. Zofia Dwornik, MARIA RZECKA (1950), dir. Zbigniew Kociuba, co-cinematographer for the film MAJ - PRACY, WALKI I POKOJU [MAY - A TIME OF WORK, STRUGGLE, AND PEACE] (1951) dir. Maksymilian Wroclawski.

He was also the subject of the films: EUGENIUSZ CEKALSKI. ANTONI BOHDZIEWCZ. ANDRZEJ MUNK (1978) directed by Wladyslaw Wasilewski, and OSTATNIE ZDJECIA. BRULION / THE LAST PICTURES (2000) directed by Andrzej Brzozowski.

(all text courtesy of Ewa Nawoj and Culture pl)