Friday, May 17 at 7:30: POWIDOKI by Andrzej Wajda (2016) Drama / Biography 98 minutes
Powidoki is the final film by the great Polish director, Andrzej
Wajda, and a story about another great Polish artist, an avant-garde painter
and art theoretician, Władysław Strzemiński. The film covers the post-war
period of Strzeminski’s life who, in the Stalinist era of social realism and
art’s servitude to the collective, dares to believe in artist’s autonomy and
abstract art. Despite his fame, communist past, and a war hero status, Strzeminski’s
refusal to compromise leads to his persecution, dismissal from his professorial
position, and erasure from the museums’ walls. De-credentialed as an artist, he
is unable to continue his work. The story of Strzeminski becomes the story of Polish
artists, their struggle to maintain artistic integrity and their resistance
against intellectual tyranny. It is worth noting that Wajda selects for the
film the music of another great Polish artist of this era, a modernist composer,
Sir Andrzej Panufnik, who chose a different path and defected from Poland to
the United Kingdom frustrated by the very same climate of socialist realism
that ruined Strzeminski.
The screenplay is written by Andrzej Mularczyk, a renowned
Polish writer and screenwriter and it is titled after one of Strzeminski’s
artistic theories.
“Looking at an object, we receive its reflection in our eye.
The trace of an object. Because a person can only really see what he is aware
of.”
Cast:
Bogusław Linda, Bronisława Zamachowska,
Zofia Wichlacz, Krzysztof Pieczynski
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