(1972-90, Second Run, U)
This excellent box set contains a first-rate film from each of the three postwar generations of Polish directors. All are accompanied by a revealing interview. The great Andrzej Wajda (b1926), still best known for his second world war trilogy, is represented by his three-hour 1974 version of Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont's 1898 novel The Promised Land. Magnificently staged and never previously released in Britain, it centres on three friends (a Pole, a German and a Jew) being corrupted by the unrestrained capitalism of late-19th-century Poland when they sacrifice principles and common humanity while establishing themselves as textile tycoons.
The second film, Illumination (1972), directed by the most cerebral Polish director, Krzysztof Zanussi (b1939), is a dazzling, cinematic Bildungsroman about a gifted young physicist, his intellectual and spiritual development, his marriage, fatherhood and intimations of mortality. It's relentlessly serious, unlike the extremely funny political comedy Escape from the "Liberty" Cinema (1990), directed by Zanussi's close associate Wojciech Marczewski (b1944), released just after the collapse of communism. Consciously influenced by Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, it's an absurdist satire on bureaucracy and moral cowardice that turns upon a censor in Lodz coping when the actors in a cliche-ridden hospital movie take over the screen.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/mar/31/polish-cinema-classics-volume-ii
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