Jerzy Radziwilowicz

Quote:
Kazimierz Kutz realized with great attention to details a pathetic fresco about those dramatic events. His film, of unquestionable artistic value, is also a tribute to the courage and determination of miners who did not hesitate to give their lives for the ideals of August Uprising. Katowice, the night of December 12-13, 1981. Military units occupy strategic points in the city. General Jaruzelski is about to announce martial law on television. A group of henchmen, breaking union security, drag the chairman of the works committee of the Solidarity trade union in the “Wujek” mine out of his apartment. The news of this quickly spreads to the miners. Initially surprised, they soon react with a spontaneous protest. On December 14th a strike breaks out in the plant. The workers demand the lifting of martial law and the release of the chairman. Negotiations with the authorities end in a fiasco. The army, ZOMO and the militia prepare to storm the mine.Read More »

This little film was shot by Jean-Luc Godard in 1981 when he was visiting Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco, where Coppola was directing One from the Heart. It stars Andrei Konchalovsky reading a book about Cézanne, while a crew is trying to fix the light to film a painting by Georges de La Tour, Le Nouveau-né.

A few seconds of this film are included in Godard’s Les trois désastres.Read More »

Julien lives alone with his cat. He dreams of Marie, and a few minutes later, he sees her on the street and makes a date. He asks her to move in with him, and she does. Her boyfriend is dead, the rest of her past a mystery. Although they quickly seem to fall in love, she sometimes pulls away suddenly from Julien, is distant, and spends the night in a hotel. She also dreads something imminent and warns Julien that if he missteps, he will lose her and all memory of her. Julien responds by digging into her past: what explains her remodeling an upstairs garret room, her nightly dreams, her fears? What can Julien, now desperately in love, do when he learns why? Can either rescue the other?Read More »

Synopsis:
In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man’s friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero. A portrait of Birkut emerges: he believed in the workers’ revolution, in building housing for all, and his very virtues were his undoing. Her hard-driving style and the content of the film unnerve her supervisor, who kills the project with the excuse she’s over budget. Is there any way she can push the film to completion?Read More »

Quote:
Wajda’s remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists – who also happens to be the son of the hapless ‘Marble’ worker-hero. But, tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of ’68 and ’70, these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by subsequent events.Read More »

Quote:
Sylvie Rousseau, a scientist working on a cancer vaccine, is informed by her brother Paul of the death of their father, Pierre-André, head of the world-leading armaments company Pax Industries. At first, the cause of death was believed to be an accident, but Sylvie learns that her father was instead pushed off a train by his colleague Walser. Seeking vengeance, she becomes a modern-day Electra, austere and energetic, acting in place of her brother, a weak and unwilling Orestes. But nothing goes according to plan.Read More »