Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema

6/14/14 to 8/21/14

"An incredible opportunity to discover for yourself the great power of Polish cinema on the big screen in brilliantly restored digital remasters," says Martin Scorsese of this touring series, which he helped organize. Spanning the years from 1957 to 1987, Masterpieces of Polish Cinema features films by Wojciech Has, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, and more.

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Past Films

Man of Iron
- Thursday, August 21 7 pm
Andrzej Wajda (Poland, 1981) Digital Restoration! Wajda's loose sequel to Man of Marble is an inventive feature shot during the very event it portrays, the 1980 Solidarity shipyard strike in Gdansk. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. (154 mins)
A Short Film About Killing
- Friday, August 15 7 pm
Krzysztof Kieslowski (Poland, 1987) Digital Restoration! This absolutely uncompromising attack on capital punishment follows the movements of three apparently unconnected characters whose paths mysteriously cross: an unemployed adolescent, a taxi driver, and a young lawyer. (86 mins)
The Constant Factor
- Saturday, August 9 8:35 pm
Krzysztof Zanussi (Poland, 1980) Digital Restoration! An idealistic young graduate in Communist Poland dreams of scaling the Himalayas, but must settle for barely clearing the hurdles of everyday life, in Zanussi's searing condemnation of a world of utter conformity. (91 mins)
Camouflage
- Wednesday, July 23 7 pm
Krzysztof Zanussi (Poland, 1976) Digital Restoration! A naïve young teacher gets schooled in the social order by a disillusioned older professor in Zanussi's powerful parable of blending in, selling out, and sucking up. (101 mins)
The Promised Land
- Thursday, July 17 7 pm
Andrzej Wajda (Poland, 1975) Digital Restoration! Wajda's epic, this Dickensian portrait of greed in turn-of-the-century Lodz is “a prophetic vision of the industrial revolution impinging on the pastoral life of Poland”(Variety). (170 mins)
The Hour-Glass Sanatorium
- Thursday, July 10 7 pm
Wojciech Has (Poland, 1973) Digital Restoration! A young man searches for his father in a distant sanatorium in this surrealist epic, and finds instead a world where “death” and “time” have little meaning. An adaption of the works of cult author Bruno Schulz. Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes. (125 mins)
Night Train
- Sunday, July 6 5 pm
Jerzy Kawalerowicz (Poland, 1959) Digital Restoration! Several strangers find themselves on a speeding train with a murderer on board in this fascinating resetting of an American film noir in socialist Poland. Best Director and Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. (99 mins)
Innocent Sorcerers
- Friday, June 27 7 pm
Andrzej Wajda (Poland, 1960) Digital Restoration! A jazz-playing, motorcycle-riding doctor represents Poland's lost generation of the fifties, who survived the war but couldn't face the peace. (88 mins)
Mother Joan of the Angels
- Wednesday, June 25 7 pm
Jerzy Kawalerowicz (Poland, 1961) Digital Restoration! A real-life devil possession in medieval France forms the basis of one of the most visually striking Polish New Wave films, “a protest against all dogmatism” (Jerzy Kawalerowicz). (101 mins)
Black Cross
- Sunday, June 22 6:30pm
Aleksander Ford (Poland, 1960) Digital Restoration! Honorable knights, fair maidens, and sadistic villains battle for glory and love in this epic adaptation of one of the great works of Polish literature. “A super spectacle” (The Guardian). (173 mins)
Eroica
- Friday, June 20 7 pm
Andrzej Munk (Poland, 1958) Digital Restoration! Composed of two separate stories, Munk's breakthrough film was heralded as capturing “the heroic gesture and bitter irony of Polish fate.” (85 mins)
Ashes and Diamonds
- Sunday, June 15 6:30 pm
Andrzej Wajda (Poland, 1958) Digital Restoration! On the last day of the war, a young Resistance fighter (Zbigniew Cybulski) is caught in a Hamlet-like quandary: to kill or not to kill. (104 mins)
Saragossa Manuscript
- Saturday, June 14 7pm
Wojciech Has (Poland, 1964) Digital Restoration! Alice in Wonderland by way of Napoleon, this surrealist Polish fantasy was a favorite of both Luis Buñuel and Jerry Garcia. An army officer during the Napoleonic Wars gets lost-waaay lost. (184 mins)

Martin Scorsese Presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema

6/14/14 to 8/21/14

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. Spanning the years from 1957 to 1987, Masterpieces of Polish Cinema reveals the work of those who chose the last option, and thereby created some of the most fascinating and challenging cinema of the late twentieth century, all while working under varying waves of oppression, crackdowns, and censorship. You will find films by well-known names such as Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski, but you can also revel in the rediscovery of such lesser-known (in the West, anyway) filmmakers as Andrzej Munk, Wojciech Has, and Krzysztof Zanussi, artists who once dominated their decades but have recently slipped into the cracks of film history.

For BAM/PFA audiences, the series offers another chance...

For BAM/PFA audiences, the series offers another chance to see Has's two surrealist masterpieces, The Saragossa Manuscript and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (based on writings by Jan Potocki and Bruno Schulz respectively); both films were screened here to great acclaim in the late 1990s. Other discoveries include two films by Zanussi, a physicist/mathematician who became a key figure of Poland's “Cinema of Moral Concern” of the 1970s, whose works like The Constant Factor and Camouflage tackle the great themes of morality, conformity, and rebellion.

"There are many revelations in Masterpieces of Polish Cinema,” writes Martin Scorsese, who helped organize this touring series after visiting the famous National Film School in Lodz, Poland. His group The Film Foundation worked with Milestone Films and several Polish film archives and restoration companies, and Scorsese personally chose many of the titles. “Whether you're familiar with some of these films or not, it's an incredible opportunity to discover for yourself the great power of Polish cinema on the big screen in brilliantly restored digital remasters."

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Thank you to Amy Heller and Dennis Doros of Milestone Films.