Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s long gestated film adaptation of Bolesław Prus’ historical novel PHARAOH is an ambitious endeavor, dazzles in its epic scale and formalist gravitas with an exclusive Polish cast, which leads to one prescribed proviso: for purists, it is beggar belief to watch a movie about ancient Egyptians where everyone sports Polish through and through; but other than that, the film is a marvel orchestrated with vigor, mettle and pathos.

The story centers around the story of an apocryphal pharaoh Ramses XIII (a 20-year-old Zelnik graced with haughty handsomeness and solemness), whose hellbent effort to seize power and pecuniary autonomy over an ever-increasingly theocratic clutches of the clergy in the Ancient Egypt.

The movie opens with a static close-up of two scarabs, competing for their trophy, then reveals a throng of Egyptian soldiers marching in an expansive desert, and directly points out the strife between the young Ramses XIII and the High Priest Herhor (Pawlowski), in order to show reverence to the sacred scarabs, Herhor commands the troops to take a devious route which causes damage to the newly-built water channels, and a resultant suicide of the channel digger. The incident enrages Ramses XIII, and he vows to take down the clergy when he assumes the regalia.

That day would not be too long in waiting, but what also awaits him is an Egypt sapping in wealth and sway, the priests arrange unfavorable treaties with the neighboring Assyrians in order to keep warfare at bay, which ostensibly seems like a well-intentioned strategy to save the hoi polloi from the scourge of war, but the truth is, there is large amount of gold and other fortunes being squirreled away in the labyrinth of the priests’ temple, nominally can be only appropriated when in exigency, which the High Priests would never grant in favor of feathering their own nests. This is the touch paper which Ramses XIII deploys to foment the masses against the clergy, in an attempt to take the latter down once for all. Sadly he is still wet in his ears, and the priests are not ready to back down without a fight.

As a historical saga, PHARAOH is unusually lean on action pieces and subdued in its chromatic approach, one could imagine if the story were to be transposed as a Hollywood tentpole in a post-BEN-HUR (1959) era, all the glittering and grandiose would suffuse its majestic set, and battleground bedlam pumped up by polished fighting competence. Here, in a much less ostentatious and more internalised style (costumes are astonishingly designed in its originally exotic verisimilitude), what comes about is a tragic tale of one young man’s over-confidence in his prowess against something far more sinister, deceptive and ruthless than he has ever imagined, with a sideswipe to the benighted mob, when an eclipse crops up, all hell broke loose and burrowing a hole in the ground is their knee-jerking reaction.

Performance-wise, the cast rounds out a mostly po-faced dourness even for those who are laughing in the end (with Pawlowski emanating the highest voltage), sometimes emotes a ghost of urgency but none-too ravishing to be brutally frank. Yet, it is Kawalerowicz’s arduous effort to minutely visualize a mythical epoch when primitivity and obtuseness overlay the world, yet through a tall-tale where a spate of human frailties abound and speak volumes of what one can assimilate into today’s circumstances, it galvanizes new audience with its ritualistic posture and beguiling aesthetic attributes.

Review by Cinema Omnivore

Faraon.AKA.Pharaoh.1966.RERiP.720p.BluRay.DDP5.1.x264-SPiRiT.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 31 min
Size: 	5.71 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x544 
Aspect ratio:  	2.35:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 736 kb/s
BPP: 	0.283
Audio
#1:  	Polish 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 640 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/FBF505589D7A16B/Faraon.AKA.Pharaoh.1966.RERiP.720p.BluRay.DDP5.1.x264-SPiRiT.mkv

Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Faraon AKA Pharaoh (1966) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A man has been found dead after having been hurled from a train. As security agents, police and a medical examiner piece together his identity, three accounts emerge: one set during World War II, one in the immediate aftermath of the war, and one in contemporary Poland.

2.49GB | 1h 34mn | 786×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/49D7584E4E9CEB1/Cien.AKA.Shadow.1956.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/91DC02B669227C3/Cien.AKA.Shadow.1956.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.en.srt

Language(s):Polishh
Subtitles:English

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Cien AKA Shadow (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Polish filmmaker Jerzy Kawalerowicz, who helped define the Polish School of the 1950s and 1960s with Andrzej Wajda, offers a melancholy meditation on the impact of WWII and the Holocaust.Roza and Juliusz marry just before the outbreak of WWII in Poland. When Juliusz is deported to a concentration camp, Roza fears the worst. Convinced he will never return, she falls in love with another man and starts a new life. When Juliusz returns after the war, Roza reluctantly tries to care for him but her life has changed and his scars are too deep. (-Polart)

1.35GB | 1h 25m | 688×478 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/C5EA48F707F6772/Prawdziwy.koniec.wielkiej.wojny.1957.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
or
https://fikper.com/FR4LSsnuoE/Prawdziwy.koniec.wielkiej.wojny.1957.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv.html

Language:Polish
Subtitles:English

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny AKA Real End of the Great War (1957) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In the seventeenth century, Father Suryn arrives in Ludyn, a village on what was then the eastern border of Poland, to perform exorcisms on the Ursuline nuns who are allegedly possessed by the devil. While trying to drive evil spirits out of the body of the prioress, Mother Joan, Father Suryn starts experiencing uncomfortably secular and sensual feelings towards her.

One of the most celebrated achievements of the Polish Film School, this is not a war drama like Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal or Andrzej Munk’s Eroica but a religious and psychological study. Screenwriters Tadeusz Konwicki and Jerzy Kawalerowicz, the latter also directing the film, took a novella by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and retold the famous narrative of the possessed nuns in the French monastery of Loudun by transferring it to 17th century Poland and emphasizing its universal dimension.

This universality on screen is accentuated by the film’s ascetic form, achieved by limiting the set design to just a few sacred and secular buildings, situated in a desert landscape. The black and white images by cinematographer Jerzy Wójcik are dominated by shades of grey, symbolising the ambiguity of reality. Mother Joan of the Angels is a masterfully executed film, with outstanding acting by Lucyna Winnicka and Mieczyslaw Voit, whose characters touch on many problems. The clash between religious dogma and human nature is only one of them.

1.80GB | 1 h 49 min | 756×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/8F11FA8FE90F54E/Mother.Joan.of.the.Angels.1961.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language:Polish
Subtitles:English

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Matka Joanna od aniolów AKA Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Two strangers, Jerzy (Leon Niemczyk) and Marta (Lucyna Winnicka), accidentally end up holding tickets for the same sleeping chamber on an overnight train to the Baltic Sea coast. While handsome, well dressed and rather laconic, Jerzy seems ill at ease, while Marta is not talkative and would prefer to be alone. Staszek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a student and Marta’s spurned lover, and will not leave her alone. When the police enter the train in search of a murderer on the lam, rumors fly and everything seems to point toward one of the main characters as the culprit. [spoiler removed from quote]

This is a more amorphous and ambiguous tale than other contemporary films of the Polish School, and Night Train seems to lack the direct references to recent history and the contemporary political situation of the Poland of the 1950s that are a hallmark of the style. However, the Hitchcockian atmosphere, the unimaginably tight shots and the overall sense of claustrophobia and dread evoke the sense of disappointment following in the wake of 1956 and the end of the ‘Polish Spring’. All of Kawalerowicz’s films deal with individual fate in a society being crushed by overwhelming external forces, whether war or politics, in an attempt to examine moral choice under pressure. Night Train is no exception, only here he has created an allegory of misfits among a society of passengers, a society that is predictable, suspicious of individuality, and eager to punish. All of Poland escaping though the night to the end of the line. Ironically, the film may represent in its way the end of the Polish School as well.

https://nitro.download/view/F5CB25AF0281EB4/Jerzy_Kawalerowicz_-_(1959)_Night_Train.mkv

Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Pociag AKA Night Train (1959) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Austeria takes place during the opening days of World War I, in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. Tag (Franciszek Pieczka) is a Jewish innkeeper whose inn (austeria means inn in the local Polish dialect) is located near the border with Russia. War has broken out and local civilians are fleeing the advancing Russian Army, and several groups of refugees have taken shelter in Tag’s inn for the night. A group of Hassidic jews from the neighboring village arrive, followed by an Austrian baroness on and a Hungarian hussar cut off from his unit…

http://nitroflare.com/view/4450F34DD2F9702/Jerzy_Kawalerowicz_-_%281982%29_The_Inn.mkv

Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Austeria AKA The Inn (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City’s retrospective – History Lessons: The Films of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 30 January to 12 February 2004, screened the major work of this Polish director whose career spanned 50+ years. The programme offered, amidst the veteran’s varied output, a very special, culture vulture/archaeologist’s dream: Pharaoh (aka: Faraon), co-scripted by Kawalerowicz with Tadeusz Konwicki, and based on a novel by Boleslaw Prus. The best cinematic recreation of circa 1100 BC Late New Kingdom Dynastic Egypt ever, photographed on location at authentic sites and environs, the production design, costumes and props were all meticulously researched.

The story, based on actual historic events, concerns an invented ruler Ramses XIII (Jerzy Zelnick) – actually there were 11 Ramses in the archaeological record – plunked into the drama experienced by Ramses XI. While still Crown Prince, handsome, athletically built Ramses yearns to stem the gradual decline of Egypt’s empire and to reform the miserable lives of the huge peasant and labouring classes. Young Ramses’ plans, abiding until his rapidly ailing, aged father Ramses XII’s (Andrej Girtler) death, greatly displease the powerful, numerous sacerdotal caste, particularly its most influential elder, an actual personage – the Sun God Amon-Ra’s high priest Herihor (Pietr Pawlowski), the real, long-term power behind the throne.

Spicing up the political power versus growing, corrupt theoretical influence plot (which really happened), the script adds a romantic element involving Ramses taking as a mistress, Sarah (Krystyna Mikolajewska), a sweet-natured, lovely, naïve Jewish woman. Later, a Phoenician priestess of Astarte, the sultry Kama (Barbara Brylska) gets sent by enemies of the Crown Prince to seduce him, thereby sowing discord in his household. More complications involve threats of war with the Assyrians. Midway through this narrative, the old king dies and the protagonist gets crowned Ramses XIII. His struggle to assert his power brings the conflict with the religious factions into the open, creating tragic consequences building to a shattering, abrupt climax.

The fascinating tale of two vivid, shrewd, utterly opposed personalities vying for power and the intrigues surrounding such efforts, calls for bravura performances and the lead actors and the supporting players deliver. Enhancing all we get dazzling: authentic exteriors and interiors; costumes, props and ornaments – everything expertly photographed by Jerzy Wojcek and complemented by Adam Walacinski’s minimal score recreating the instrumentation of the ancient period. The set decoration and many objects: gorgeous jewellery; furniture; vessels; clothing; weaponry; chariots, etc, directly copy museum pieces or artworks which this armchair archaeologist reviewer gleefully recognised.

Refreshingly far from the usual ridiculous Hollywood kitsch versions of dynastic Egypt, this film still had nits to pick: some grotesquely absurd-looking wigs amidst the accurate ones – a theatrical effect that didn’t work at all. A portrayal of scheming Phoenician and Jewish bankers bordered on caricature but added some needed comic relief. The monarch’s double crown, otherwise the correct shape, here had the red portion done up golden – the gold and white no doubt considered glitzier on screen than the historically proper red and white. At one point, Ramses refers to the 19th Dynasty, an awkward gaff. Egypt’s ancient history didn’t get organised into numbered dynasties until the Hellenistic Greek scholars had analysed texts and structured records well after the Pharaonic era ended. In their life times, Egypt’s pharaohs marked time’s passage by referring to the years of their reigns or those of their predecessors specifically.

The oddest anachronism in this picture was seeing an African civilisation with the prominent personages impersonated by Poles speaking their language. Dark body makeup aside, Polish money financed the organisation of this production and the Poles can be forgiven for putting their own people in the principal roles with locals as extras. Despite such quibbles, Pharaoh’s admirable, almost entirely successful attempt at an authentic depiction of Egypt during the last Ramses’ reign and the social/ political/ spiritual issues of the time, still relevant today, deserves enthusiastic praise. Ideally, all the actors should have been Egyptians, but the Polish thespians acquitted themselves with aplomb and we can hope they inspire indigenous initiated historical cinematic dramas in the future.

This film, the epitome of the next best thing to having a time machine, offering splendid visuals and intelligent presentation of a riveting story – surpasses any other opus dealing with dynastic Egypt. Pharaoh is the one period epic that rules them all!

http://nitroflare.com/view/30BE1E009986543/Jerzy_Kawalerowicz_-_%281966%29_Faraon.mkv

Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English, French

The post Jerzy Kawalerowicz – Faraon (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.