Living in an undescribed world is hard. It's like having no identity. We tried to show these microworlds.-Krzysztof KieslowskiWe were desperadoes, a lost generation, and jazz was our bond. We were going to be the New Wave of Polish cinema.-Jerzy Skolimowski Andrzej Wajda once wrote that in a Communist country a young person had three choices: If he was lucky, he could leave. If he was cunning, he could enter politics. And barring either of these, he could become a priest or a movie director. The first young Poles to enroll at the Lodz Film School were survivors of the war and Occupation; most had had family members killed. Wajda, Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof Zanussi-virtually all of Poland's finest filmmakers trained at the institute, which was founded in 1947 as part of the Communist government's efforts to revitalize the Polish film industry. The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years presents a selection of the inventive, challenging, literate, and technically sophisticated student shorts and features created by these and many other artists.Regarded as one of the world's most prestigious academies for cinema studies and film production, the Lodz Film School offers a rigorous four-year program of training in all facets of filmmaking as well as literature and the humanities. The professors are themselves well-known film artists. Although the school depended upon funding from Poland's Communist government and fell victim to 1968's anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual purges, it managed to retain a remarkable amount of artistic freedom. The retrospective offers a fascinating examination of the ways in which student filmmakers-like other artists-resisted the pressures of censorship, often cloaking their indictments of Stalinism, cynical power politics, and repression in allegorical storytelling and ironical wit. Program Notes by Joshua Siegel, compiled from his essay in the exhibition brochure that accompanies the series. The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years is organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is made possible by a major grant from the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation, Inc.Tuesday March 23, 1999
