France, Italy, Germany – these are the countries most represented in lists of European cinema’s most beloved films. There are exceptions, yes – you have your Ingmar Bergman movies and your Andrei Tarkovsky pictures, but the trend is unmistakable. A new series that recently debuted in Los Angeles, however, threatens to destroy the notion of these countries’ supposed cinematic superiority.
“Masterpieces of Polish Cinema,” presented by Martin Scorsese, is an ongoing program exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Cinefamily through May and June. The series is a revelation; although it features movies from some of the most famous Polish directors, like Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski, it also has a variety of works from largely unknown Polish filmmakers. Many of these films have never before been screened in the United States.
A couple weekends ago, I hitched a ride to The Cinefamily on a whim to see one of these films, “The Illumination,” by the criminally underrated director Krzysztof Zanussi. I was thoroughly blown away by it, and every subsequent film in the series so far – Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s “Night Train” and Wajda’s “Ashes and Diamonds” – has been similarly gripping.
In my mind, this series is the best retrospective going on in Los Angeles over the next couple months. For the sake of briefness, I will highlight two screenings that I feel are of particular interest.
“Innocent Sorcerers” (1960)
Friday, 7:30 p.m.
LACMA, $5 ($3 for students)
Shot on the streets of Warsaw, Poland, Wajda’s “Innocent Sorcerers” follows womanizing doctor Bazyli (Tadeusz Lomnicki) through the smoke of late-night jazz bars and bohemian dinner parties. After meeting the beautiful Pelagia (Krystyna Stypulkowska), Bazyli takes her back to his place for drinks, cigarettes and deep conversation until the early morning hours.
Bazyli leaves his apartment to meet up with friends when Pelagia falls asleep, but when he returns, she has vanished. He then goes around the city on his bicycle in an attempt to find her.
The influence of the French New Wave is stamped all over this film. Its jazz score, its use of on-location shooting and even a prolonged sequence between the two lovers conversing in a room evoke the seminal coolness, spontaneity and intellectualism of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” one of the movement’s best-known works earlier that year.
There are also cameo appearances by screenwriter Jerzy Skolimowski, famed composer Krzysztof Komeda and a young Roman Polanski before he made his directorial debut with 1962’s “Knife in the Water.”
“The Hourglass Sanatorium” (1973)
June 8-11, 7:30 p.m.
The Cinefamily, $12
Wojciech Has, the director behind the cult movie “The Saragossa Manuscript” (which will also be screening as part of the series), delivered another wild, surrealistic masterpiece with “The Hourglass Sanatorium.”
Jan Nowicki stars as Józef, a young man who takes a train to visit his ailing father at a decaying hospital, which looks as though it came from some sort of nightmare. From there, the film becomes a series of hallucinatory dreams and memories in which Józef relives his life thus far. During this strange journey, he encounters a slew of eccentric characters and odd environments, from men dressed as birds to a mausoleum of human wax figures.
Based on a collection of short stories by Bruno Schulz, a Jewish writer who was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942, “The Hourglass Sanatorium” reflects on the Holocaust and Jewish identity at length. Because of the rampant and institutionalized anti-Semitism in Poland at the time, Has was forbidden by the Polish government from submitting his film to festivals abroad because of this “controversial” subject matter.
The rebellious filmmaker, however, smuggled a print of “The Hourglass Sanatorium” out of Poland and had it screened in competition at the 1973 Cannes International Film Festival, where it took home the Jury Prize, the festival’s third highest honor.
– Ian Colvin
What classics films would you like to see receive their time in the limelight?