Innocent Sorcerers

(Niewinni Czarodzieje) “We other, young and innocent sorcerers, are looking for poisons to kill our own hopes”: Wajda's first film with a contemporary setting-cowritten by Jerzy Skolimowski and Jerzy Andrzejewski, author of Ashes and Diamonds-brought to light the problems of a new “lost generation.” The young heroes are unscathed by the horrors of war but cannot face the horrors of peace: disillusionment with the present and fear of the future are masked in a blasé pose; yearning is masked in self-deception. Innocent Sorcerers observes a single night in the lives of a young Warsaw doctor (a drummer in a jazz band) and an innocent if sarcastic woman who becomes his partner/adversary in a game of mutual seduction. M. and A. Liehm noted in their book The Most Important Art, “Innocent Sorcerers . . . was the only Eastern European film of its time to disclose certain problems of young people that the official view of reality refused to see. . . . (It was named) as one of the films for which there was no room in Polish cinema.”

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