8 × Kawalerowicz

He lived through cinema. He liked to say that it had allowed him to live seventeen times over – because he had made seventeen films. No two of them alike. Tadeusz Konwicki once remarked: “He has a camera under his skull.” Others described him as a “master of form”, an “outstanding recreator of lost worlds”, at once one of the most Polish and one of the most Western of Polish directors.

He began with Gromada, made in keeping with the canons of socialist realism, but after directing Cellulose he came under the spell of Italian neorealism. Soon afterwards, while many of his contemporaries were reckoning with the war, Kawalerowicz turned towards psychological and social dramas such as Shadow, Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels. Later, he moved on to historical spectacles of extraordinary scale, most notably Pharaoh.

Over the years, he repeatedly turned to Polish literature for inspiration, adapting works by Newerly, Prus, Sienkiewicz, Iwaszkiewicz, Zawieyski and Stryjkowski. Through them, he transported audiences to distant worlds, reconstructing and reviving lost civilisations and vanished realities: in Pharaoh, ancient Egypt; in Austeria, the world of Galician Jews; in Death of a President and Cellulose, interwar Poland; and in Quo Vadis, Rome under Nero.

He was called a master craftsman, a master of art cinema, one who – as the French film scholar Professor Louis Leutrat wrote – defended “the European Seventh Art against the invasion of American trash.” In retrospect, he emerges as an eternal seeker – and a fulfilled artist.

We invite you to an encounter with the beauty of cinema and an opportunity to reflect on Polish history, the human condition, and the individual’s place in a world full of contradictions.  

The section is curated by Stanisław Zawiśliński.