The Andrzej Wajda Centennial

This year marks the centennial of the birth of Andrzej Wajda, who has been called cinema’s great historian of Poland. Born on March 6, 1926, the director received almost every award imaginable, including an honorary Oscar in 2000. Four of his films were nominated for Academy Awards: The Promised Land (1975), The Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyn (2007). The American Film Institute is currently screening several of Wajda’s films. This follows a tribute earlier this year at the British Film Institute. 

What makes Wajda unique is that he did what so many Western filmmakers would not: he mocked, satirized, and criticized Communism. Wajda was born in Suwałki, near the Lithuanian border. In 1940, when he was fourteen, his father was executed along with almost 22,000 other Polish civilians and prisoners of war in the Katyn massacre, a mass killing carried out by the Soviet secret police under orders from Joseph Stalin. (The Soviet Union denied responsibility for this atrocity for fifty years.) Wajda dramatized these events in Katyn, which earned him his final Oscar nomination.

During World War II, Wajda joined Poland’s resistance movement when he was sixteen. After the war he enrolled in the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts to study painting and then moved on to the Łódź Film School. After graduating, he made A Generation (1955), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). Known as the “war trilogy,” these films focuses on the trauma and resistance of the Polish people first to the Nazis, then to the Soviets. Wajda was twenty-seven when he shot A Generation, set in 1942 and starring Tadeusz Łomnicki as Stach, a young man struggling against the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. The film critic Michal Oleszczyk wrote that A Generation “embodies Wajda’s struggle to get his films approved by state authorities while also maintaining their subversive potential.”