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The
City as Muse: directors sometimes fall in love with a city and
celebrate it in their films, inviting viewers to share in their
aesthetic delight and to explore the wonders of a particular urban
landscape and society. New Yorkers are lucky to have Woody
Allen and Martin Scorsese. Poland has Andrzej Wajda.
The Film Society of Lincoln Center honors the great Eastern
European filmmaker in Truth or Dare: The Films of Andrzej Wajda
(October 17 - November 13). In his 1975 epic The Promised
Land, Wajda brings to life the19th century industrial capital
of Lodz in all its glory.
The
film tells the story of three men who successfully start a modern textile
factory together: Karol, a Pole
(Daniel Olbrychski); Moritz, a Jew (Wojciech Pszoniak); and Max, a
German (Andrzej Seweryn). At the time Lodz was in the midst of a
capitalist boom, an industrial revolution of unprecedented
proportions. The undertaking is not without problems - the
three men come to blows and must make Faustian deals in order to
survive.
In
The Promised Land, Wajda paints a fascinating human canvas
of Lodz and its inhabitants - its old bourgeoisie, its cut-throat
capitalists, and its emerging minorities. This was Lodz and
Poland before the Nazis and before the communists, a dynamic city
emerging from the miasma of medieval poverty as a forward-thinking
modern polis. Wajda's film is a song of lament for the
multicultural Poland of the past and offers a vision of a diverse
city where class and ethnicity took a back seat to ambition and
progress - a vision as relevant today as a hundred years ago.
See:
The
Promised Land, Lincoln Center
Buy:
The
Promised Land
Tags:
film
poland
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