Andrzej Wajda - Master Collection (10-DVD's)

Andrzej Wajda
Master Collection (10-DVD's)

Studio: Vision
Number of disks: 10
Condition: Brand New, Sealed, Mint
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: 16:9 / 4:3
Language version: Polish
Subtitles: English, except Popioly, Korczak, and Danton
Region: 2 (PAL). European or multi-system DVD player is required to see this DVD.

A major figure in the world of post-World War II Eastern European cinema, Polish director Andrzej Wajda has chronicled his country's political and social evolution with sensitivity, fervor, and a refusal to make compromises in dealing with his difficult subjects. Once dubbed a symbol for his besieged country, Wajda has repeatedly drawn from Poland's history to suit his tragic sensibility, crafting an oeuvre of work that devastates even as it informs. (Hal Erickson)

This 10-DVD's set includes ten movies:

1. Pan Tadeusz (The Last Foray in Lithuania ), 1999
2. Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of marble), 1977
3. Czlowiek z zelaza (Man of steel), 1981
4. Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land ), 1975
5. Danton, 1983
6. Zemsta (The Revenge), 2002
7. Korczak, 1990
8. Panny z Wilka (Young Girls of Wilko), 1979
9. Krajobraz po bitwie (Landscape After Battle), 1970
10. Popioly (The Ashes), 1965

DVD 1

Pan Tadeusz (The Last Foray in Lithuania ), 1999

Plot: For Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians this is a movie that brings back poignant nostalgia for the glorious past of the Duchy. For everyone else, it is just another historical ballad, based on the classical poem of Adam Mickiewicz. The film, which was made on a three-million dollar budget, beat all records of popularity in Poland.

Cast: Boguslaw Linda, Grazyna Szapolowska, Andrzej Seweryn, Daniel Olbrychski

 DVD 2

Czlowiek z marmuru (Man of marble), 1977

Plot: In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man's friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero. A portrait of Birkut emerges: he believed in the workers' revolution, in building housing for all, and his very virtues were his undoing. Her hard-driving style and the content of the film unnerve her supervisor, who kills the project with the excuse she's over budget. Is there any way she can push the film to completion?

Cast: Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Krystyna Janda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Krystyna Zachwatowicz

DVD 3

Czlowiek z zelaza (Man of steel), 1981

Plot: A worker becomes a "man of iron" forged by experience, a son comes to terms with his father, a couple fall in love, a reporter searches for courage, and a nation undergoes historic change. In Warsaw in 1980, the Party sends Winkel, a weak, alcoholic TV hack, to Gdansk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers, particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an articulate worker whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews people who know Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka. Their narrations become flashbacks using actual news footage of 1968 and 1970 protests and of the later birth of free unions and Solidarity.

Cast: Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Krystyna Janda, Marian Opania, Boguslaw Linda

DVD 4

Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land ), 1975

Plot: At the turn of the century, Lodz, Poland was a quick-paced manufacturing center for textiles, replete with cutthroat industrialists and unsafe working conditions. Three young friends, a Pole, a Jew and a German, pool their money together to build a factory. The movie follows their ruthless pursuit of fortune.

Cast: Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Seweryn, Wojciech Pszoniak, Anna Nehrebecka

 DVD 5

Danton, 1983  (French subtitles only)

Plot: Action opens in November of 1793, with Danton returning to Paris from his country retreat upon learning that the Committee for Public Safety, under Robespierre's incitement, has begun a series of massive executions, The Terror. Confident in the peoples' support, Danton clashes with his former ally, but calculating Robespierre soon rounds up Danton and his followers, tries them before a revolutionary tribunal and dipatches them to the guillotine.

Cast: Gerard Depardieu, Wojciech Pszoniak, Anne Alvaro, Roland Blanche

 DVD 6

Zemsta (The Revenge), 2002

Plot: A winter day at a Polish castle, half owned by a fatalistic notary and half by a volcanic old soldier's niece. The old soldier, Cupbearer, and the notary are sworn enemies, which may doom the love between the niece, Klara, and the notary's son, Waclaw. On this day, the tongue-tied Cupbearer asks a braggart courtier, Papkin, to sue on his behalf for the hand of the widow Hanna. Papkin succeeds and the wedding is set for the next day. In response, the notary plots to marry Waclaw to the widow to upend Cupbearer's plans. When Cupbearer learns of this perfidy, he responds with his own plot. Will there be poison, a duel, kidnapping, and imprisonment; or, will fate bring another solution?

Cast: Roman Polanski, Janusz Gajos, Andrzej Seweryn, Daniel Olbrychski

DVD 7

Korczak, 1990 (No subtitles, Polish language version only)

Plot: Account of the last days of life of the legendary Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak and his heroic dedication to protecting Jewish orphans during the war. Jewish doctor Henryk Goldszmit, known also as Janusz Korczak, is a man of high principles. He is unafraid of shouting at German officers and frequently has to be persuaded to save his own life. His orphanage, set up in a cramped school in the Warsaw ghetto, provides shelter to 200 homeless kids. Putting his experimental educational methods into practice, he installs a kind of children's self-government, whose justice is in a big contrast to what is happening in the outside world. Right in front of the school, dozens of kids are dying or being killed everyday and their naked bodies lie on the street unattended. Ghetto's mayor assures Korczak that the orphanages will be saved. Korczak raises food and money for the orphanage from the rich Jews. In the final roundup he refuses to accept a Swiss passport and boards the train to Treblinka with his orphans.

Cast: Wojciech Pszoniak, Ewa Dalkowska, Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska, Zbigniew Zamachowski

DVD 8

Panny z Wilka (Young Girls of Wilko), 1979

Plot: Set in the late 1920s. A thirtysomething young man, who heads a small factory, faints at the funeral of a close friend. He decides to go home to his aunt and uncle for a while, but gets involved with a family of five women who had been in love with him at one time though he had apparently loved only one, who, unknown to him, has died since his departure. The women are mainly disillusioned with life or estranged from husbands while the youngest has a crush on him.

Cast: Daniel Olbrychski, Anna Seniuk, Maja Komorowska, Stanislawa Celinska

DVD 9

Krajobraz po bitwie (Landscape After Battle), 1980

Plot: Film opens with the mad rush of haphazard freedom as the concentration camps are liberated. Men are trying to grab food, change clothes, bury their tormentors they find alive. Then they are herded into other camps as the Allies try to devise policy to control the situation. A young poet who cannot quite find himself in this new situation, meets a headstrong Jewish young girl who wants him to run off with her, to the West. He cannot cope with her growing demands for affection, while still harboring the hatred for the Germans and disdain for his fellow men who quickly revert to petty enmities.

Cast: Daniel Olbrychski, Stanislawa Celinska, Aleksander Bardini, Tadeusz Janczar

DVD 10

Popioly (The Ashes), 1965 (No subtitles, Polish language version only)

Plot: Set in 19th century, during the time of Napoleon wars, shows how the wars swept over the unfortunate Polish country at the beginning of the XIX-th century. Story revolves around the Polish legion under command of General Dabrowski, who then fought on Napoleon's side with the hopes of Poland's revival.

Cast: Daniel Olbrychski, Boguslaw Kierc, Beata Tyszkiewicz, Pola Raksa

Bio:

Andrzej Wajda was born on March 6, 1926, in Suwalki, Poland. He described his childhood as a happy pastoral country life before the Second World War. His father, named Jakub Wajda, was captain in the Polish infantry and died at Katyn massacre in 1939. His mother, named Aniela Wajda, was a teacher at a Ukrainian school.

Young Wajda survived the Second World War with his mother and his brother in the Nazi-occupied Poland. In 1946 he moved to Krakow. There Wajda went to the Academy of Fine Arts. He studied painting, particularly the impressionist and post-impressionist painting, and was especially fond of Paul Cezanne. From 1950-1954 he studied film directing at High Film School in Lodz under directors Jerzy Toeplitz and Aleksander Ford. Wajda himself described the influential and eye-opening experience from seeing the French avant-garde films, like Ballet mécanique (1924) by artist-director Fernand Léger.

In 1955 he made his debut as director of a full-length Pokolenie (1955), about a generation of youth coming out of age during the Nazi occupation of Poland. His award-winning Kanal (1957) and Popiól i diament (1958) concluded the trilogy about life in Poland during WWII. Although he was under pressure from the Soviet-dominated Polish authorities, Wajda positioned himself as an artist who was above the conflict. He still managed to show the undeclared civil war between the Polish communists and the partisans folk heroes of the Home Army, the two anti-Nazi Polish forces, which were divided by political ideology.

His Oscar-nominated Ziemia obiecana (1975) was a work of multi-layered allegory and Symbolism. Wajda's witty depiction of the 19th century capitalism in Poland actually alluded to the contemporary Communist politics. The shooting of workers in the final scenes was actually demasking of the official politics of killing workers in the Soviet Union in 1962, under Nikita Khrushchev, and in Poland a few years later. The story of a film student who traces the life of defamed "hero" in Czlowiek z marmuru (1977) was a deconstruction of the false impressions that official propaganda was using to brainwash the public. The same main characters in Czlowiek z zelaza (1981) continued unmasking the Communist regime's manipulations against the "Solidarity" labor movement of Lech Walesa.

From 1989-1991 Wajda was elected Senator of the republic of Poland. From 1992-1994 he was Member of Presidential Council for Culture. In 1994 he founded the Center of Japanese Art and Technology in Krakow, and was awarded the Order of Rising Sun in Japan (1995). Wajda was President of Polish Film Assoiation (1978-1983). He was Member of "Solidarity" Lech Walesa Council (1981-1989). He won an honorary Oscar (2000) for his contribution to cinema, and an honorary Golden Bear (2006) at the Berlin Film Festival.