Andrzej Wajda - 'Revenge' - a film about Poles (183/222)

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Polish film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), whose début films portrayed the horror of the German occupation of Poland, won awards at Cannes which established his reputation as storyteller and commentator on Polish history. He also served on the national Senate from 1989-91. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki]

TRANSCRIPT: The success of 'Pan Tadeusz' helped me to understand that there is a cinema audience willing to watch Polish films, although not every one, and perhaps it was my role, as in several earlier cases, to transfer major works of Polish literature, like 'The Wedding' and 'The Promised Land', to the screen. Perhaps my role now was to adapt our great national literature, maybe this was what audiences were somehow waiting for because no one would make those kinds of films if we didn't make them ourselves. So, after 'Pan Tadeusz', I transferred to the screen the best known Polish comedy written in the same year that Adam Mickiewicz wrote 'Pan Tadeusz' in 1842. It was called 'Revenge' and was written by Count Aleksander Fredro, and making this film made me feel like an old classic. Then I remembered how when I'd travelled to Belgrade for the first time after making 'Ashes and Diamonds', I was 31 years old, and very soon my Serb friends, actors and friends who had worked with me on 'Siberian Lady Macbeth' began to say about me, 'Oh, the old classic has arrived'. So I was already an old classic then, but now I realised that perhaps in some way it was my destiny that, at the end of a long life and after so many films, I should be making films that were bringing this audience together. It was an audience that was a little frightened, a little disorientated by the idea that we were going to join Europe, but what were we going to join it with, what would happen, who are we, what are we called? I think this also stirs in an adult audience, because if you get an audience of six million like you did for 'Pan Tadeusz', it's no longer a young audience of people between the ages of 15 and 25. To get this kind of an audience, there must be people there who have come out of their houses who don't watch other kinds of films. They have to take off their slippers, put on their shoes, buy a ticket and come to the cinema. When will they go to the cinema? When there's a film showing that says something to them. I think 'Revenge' was that kind of film and I think it had one other recommendation, namely, that it shows Polish characters better than any other literary work in Poland, because it shows the quarrelsomeness, the inability to be reconciled, a disinterested hatred. This is very typical of the Polish character. It's included in 'Revenge' and the actors love performing this play, vying against each other for these roles.