The man Roman Polanski called "my teacher and mentor" tragically died at age thirty–nine, having made only four feature films. In that short time, director Andrzej Munk (Polanski's advisor at the Lodz Film School) created a body of work so in tune with the tragedy, absurdity, and history of his native Poland that it has been credited with helping define and refine postwar Polish identity. Documenting the lives of individuals baffled by a life and history beyond their comprehension, much less their control, Munk's cinema (often compared to the literature of his compatriot Witold Gombrowicz) showcased how ordinary people go about making sense of extraordinary times; if sense could not be found, his films implied, then absurdism and biting satire should take its place. "It's no fun living between Germany and Russia," one of his characters mutters, putting into words the Polish postwar zeitgeist of being continually overrun, invaded, and occupied, and also the eternal feeling of being buffeted by powers so huge-and so impossible to control-that reality itself seems to dissolve.
In 1961 Munk was driving back from-of all places-Auschwitz, where he was filming Passenger, when he was killed by an onrushing truck. The absurdity of a Polish Jew and resistance worker surviving the war, only to be killed minutes from a place so emblematic of wartime history, is a twist of fate almost too mordantly ironic for words, and one which deprived Poland-and the world-of a singular voice. Munk would have been eighty this past October; forty years after his death, his films and his concerns still speak to a world as tragic, war–torn, and absurd as ever.
-Jason Sanders
