When Andrzej Wajda announced, back in 2012, that he was going to direct a film about Lech Walesa, no one was surprised. It was obvious, almost imperative, that it was he who brought to the cinema the story of a character so important for the contemporary history of poland. Not only by the admiration explicit that he had for the struggles of famous Solidarity trade union, pursued doggedly by the communist regime of his country. Also because, seen in perspective at that time-and even now, when we just heard the news of his death, at the age of 90, as a consequence of respiratory failure-, the career of this filmmaker’s sensitive and committed is a detailed chronicle of the political path of Poland, full of setbacks and seizures.
Wajda had given its first steps in the cinema of the hand of Aleksander Ford, his great teacher in the School of Lodz, which began as “a stalinist orthodox” (as defined by Roman Polanski, another of his disciples) and ended up denouncing the horrors of the soviet gulag. Over a career of 60 years, Wajda reflected to your so many events keys to their country and also began to support communism and ended up faced with the rigidities and the authoritarianism of the regime consolidated after the agreement of Potsdam, which attempted to reorder Europe after the war in 1945.
The work of Wajda is a kind of manual that runs key events of the history of his country: the Polish independence (Pan Tadeusz), the ghetto of Warsaw (He), the massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers by order of Stalin (Katyn), the resistance to nazism and anti-communism (Ashes and diamonds, powerful closing of a trilogy dedicated to the miseries of the war that completed the Generation and Kanal) and, finally, which would be his farewell, Walesa, an ardent portrait, armed from the crossing between fiction and documentary, of the trade unionist who ended up being president between 1990 and 1995.
Continuity is necessary, in addition, The iron man, a film dedicated to telling the origins of Solidarity in the shipyards of Gdansk and Gdynia, which took the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1981 and consolidated at the international level.
The margin of the Oscar honorary, which he won in 2000, there were three films from Wajda nominated by the Academy for the category designed to reward the best film not in the English language: promised Land (1975), The iron man (1981) and Katyn (2007). But it is likely to be Ashes and diamonds (1958) the movie that merged with greater effectiveness and clarity of his style: in the intelligent opposition to the canons of socialist realism, the film denounces the passivity of Russian in the Warsaw uprising against the nazis and, at the same time, he underlined the role played by the army in underground Armia Krajowa in the resistance against the violence of the forces of hitler.
“Has to be understood as the film’s most significant of the Polish school of post-war, by the presence of symbols and themes such as individual freedom, the need for a political definition and the idea of an antihero,” he noted at the time of its premiere in our country the review of THE NATION.
As in that film, Wajda clearly showed one of his virtues most well-known and celebrated: the intelligence to be sharp and provocative without falling into the obviousness, nor in propaganda.
In his extensive filmography dazzle other titles of unique formal beauty, such as The young girls of Wilco (1979) and Danton (1983).
A constant of the conduct artistic and political Wajda was put in crisis every certainty that he had played before. A species of cartesian doubt permanent which reached even to his revered Walesa, who contributed decisively to the film-maker to be elected a senator in your country.
Tireless, before you leave, Wajda left finished a feature film, Powidoki, biopic the painter of the avant-garde Wladyslaw Strzeminski, who this year was chosen by Poland to the race for the Oscar.
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