Roman Polanski embodied the Lodz School at its most ebullient and defiant. His student films exude the same queasy blend of humor and horror that would distinguish his feature work. From the beginning he was obsessed with violence-with the cruelty inflicted by masters on servants and by men and women on one another, and with our voyeuristic pleasure in watching the suffering such cruelty provokes. (When Polanski told his fellow students he'd be filming their garden party, he didn't tell them he had invited a gang to bust it up, in Break Up the Party.) Polanski felt that the short film should create atmospheric tension visually rather than verbally, and his have a surrealist, almost grotesque attention to detail. His apprenticeship at the Groteska puppet theater in Cracow was probably the inspiration for The Lamp, a sinister tale of an old man who mends broken dolls by lamplight; like The Murder and A Toothy Smile, it is a dark, macabre joke. His famous short Two Men and a Wardrobe is a brilliant declaration of Polanski's thematic obsessions, especially the terror of being confined or entrapped. When Angels Fall anticipates his later films in its effort to penetrate the interior life of a lonely woman. Among Polanski's contemporaries, Andrzej Kondratiuk's Noah is set in a Dali-like postwar landscape, while Janusz Majewski's Rondo stars famed satirist and prankster Slawomir Mrozek in a situation increasingly antic and cruel.