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 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."