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Watch Hundreds of Polish Films Free Online: Feature Films, Documentaries, Animations
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Internetado
Jul 28, 2022, 12:01:04 PM7/28/22
to
The Polish film industry has produced a few
internationally-known auteurs, including Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof
Kie›lowski, and Roman Polanski, but a handful of critically-lauded
directors cannot represent the scope of any national cinema. Without a
wider appreciation of Poland';s film history, we lack crucial context
for understanding its most famous artists. Now, a new archive called
35mm.online gives us hundreds of films and animations by Polish
filmmakers, a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in the country';s
cinematic art like never before.
Polish film history can broadly be divided into films made before WWII
and those made after, when the country came under strict Communist
control. The first period includes a silent film industry that began
with the origins of cinema itself and made a star of actress Pola
Negri, whose films were screened in Berlin with German-language title
cards. Many movies made in the sound era took direction, no pun
intended, from filmmaker Aleksander Ford, a champion of Communist
aesthetic theory. "Cinema cannot be a cabaret," he once told the
Soviet Kino magazine, "it must be a school." Ford made realist films
about social issues and propaganda films during the war.
In 1945, Ford took control of the Polish film industry as director of
the nationalized state production company, Film Polski. The company had
a monopoly on production, distribution, and exhibition, and in Poland,
as in most Eastern Bloc nations in the Cold War, the challenge of
evading censors put far more pressure on filmmakers than market
demands. "Under the Communist regime," Dark Kuzma writes at Movie
Maker, "Polish authorities waged war on moviemakers.... Any critique of
the Soviet Union or the Polish People's Republic was silenced,"
beginning with a 1945 film titled 2×2=4, by Antoni Bohdziewicz.
Ford didn't last long as an administrator, though he returned in the
50s to help advise and oversee productions. Film Polski became the
Central Office of Cinematography in 1951, and enforced even stricter
controls on Polish filmmakers. But as control of the film industry
centralized, academic bureaucrats took over for savvy filmmakers like
Ford. "Polish censors," Kuzma notes, "were highly literary, capable of
deciphering even the most sophisticated 'subversions' in books,
newspapers and other written forms - but they were quite impotent when
it came to evaluating images."
Polish filmmakers could not make any overt narrative critiques and
"were forced to learn how to say something without saying it directly,
how to depict a reality that did not officially exist," says
Oscar-nominated Polish cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski. Necessity
led to a creative symbolic language viewers had to decode:
This was a responsibility we all felt: to create layered images, images
with double meanings that dared viewers to interpret them differently.
It was all in the details - like using wider lenses to show things you
would not be able to show any other way. Something may be occurring in
the background, slightly blurred. Sometimes all the film needs was
to not include something or someone in the frame.
The need for clandestine cinematic methods became fully apparent in
1982, when a commission met and determined even stricter rules for
Polish film, partially in reaction to the filmmaker Ryszard
Bugajski's Interrogation, an unsparing depiction of "Stalin-era
political life." (See an excerpted scene at the top). A transcript of
the proceedings, which included Bugajski, made their way out of the
country in secret and was reported on in The New York Times. Bugajski
feared his film would not see release, and he was right,
though Interrogation circulated in samizdat VHS form for years,
attaining cult status. It was eventually released years later and would
become one of the most popular films of the time.
After Interrogation, Polish filmmakers began to employ even more
distinctive symbolic vocabularies, from sci-fi satire in 1984's hugely
popular Sexmission (trailer above), to the use of heavily saturated
colors, a feature so many Polish films of the 198os and 90s share and
which characterizes the work of Kie›lowski, perhaps the most revered
Polish director among Polish and non-Polish cinephiles. Best known for
his early 90s trilogy Three Colors: Blue, Red and White, the director
began using specific colors to convey meaning earlier in his career.
Camera operator Sawomir Idziak, who worked on Kielowski';s 1988 A Short
Film About Killing (see trailer above), remembers, "I shot the film in
this hideous yellow-greenish color to subtly hint at the director's
idea that the country could be a killer, just like the main character.
I remember one reviewer in Cannes writing that because the screen
assumes the color of urine, it encapsulates the reality of Communist
Poland. That was beautiful."
https://youtu.be/0TLfIVR4bK0
Filmmaker Barbara Sass went on to make several films in which specific
color plays significant roles, starting with her 1980, festival-winning
debut Without Love. She surrounds her yellow-haired main character,
played by Dorota Staliska, with a sickly hospital yellow in a scene
excerpted in the clips above, then immerses her in the dim red light of
a photographic darkroom. The films above represent only a tiny sampling
of the nearly 4,000 Polish films hosted on 35mm.online, a joint project
of the Polish Film Institute and "one of Poland's oldest film studios,
Wytwárnia Filmáw Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF), (Documentary and
Feature Film Studios)," notes The first News.
The collection includes 160 features, 71 documentaries 474 animated
short films, and 10 animated features. We've barely scratched the
surface of Polish cinema history and there are hundreds of animations
yet to watch (read some of their grim descriptions at MetaFilter). So
get to watching at 35mm.online.
Note: To enable English subtitles, click the "Enable Subtitles" button
beneath each film. (The first button.) Then go to the "Setttings"
button and choose English subtiles.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/07/watch-hundreds-of-polish-films-free-online-feature-films-documentaries-animations-more.html
--
Internetado
Brasil <-- Portugal
internationally-known auteurs, including Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof
Kie›lowski, and Roman Polanski, but a handful of critically-lauded
directors cannot represent the scope of any national cinema. Without a
wider appreciation of Poland';s film history, we lack crucial context
for understanding its most famous artists. Now, a new archive called
35mm.online gives us hundreds of films and animations by Polish
filmmakers, a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in the country';s
cinematic art like never before.
Polish film history can broadly be divided into films made before WWII
and those made after, when the country came under strict Communist
control. The first period includes a silent film industry that began
with the origins of cinema itself and made a star of actress Pola
Negri, whose films were screened in Berlin with German-language title
cards. Many movies made in the sound era took direction, no pun
intended, from filmmaker Aleksander Ford, a champion of Communist
aesthetic theory. "Cinema cannot be a cabaret," he once told the
Soviet Kino magazine, "it must be a school." Ford made realist films
about social issues and propaganda films during the war.
In 1945, Ford took control of the Polish film industry as director of
the nationalized state production company, Film Polski. The company had
a monopoly on production, distribution, and exhibition, and in Poland,
as in most Eastern Bloc nations in the Cold War, the challenge of
evading censors put far more pressure on filmmakers than market
demands. "Under the Communist regime," Dark Kuzma writes at Movie
Maker, "Polish authorities waged war on moviemakers.... Any critique of
the Soviet Union or the Polish People's Republic was silenced,"
beginning with a 1945 film titled 2×2=4, by Antoni Bohdziewicz.
Ford didn't last long as an administrator, though he returned in the
50s to help advise and oversee productions. Film Polski became the
Central Office of Cinematography in 1951, and enforced even stricter
controls on Polish filmmakers. But as control of the film industry
centralized, academic bureaucrats took over for savvy filmmakers like
Ford. "Polish censors," Kuzma notes, "were highly literary, capable of
deciphering even the most sophisticated 'subversions' in books,
newspapers and other written forms - but they were quite impotent when
it came to evaluating images."
Polish filmmakers could not make any overt narrative critiques and
"were forced to learn how to say something without saying it directly,
how to depict a reality that did not officially exist," says
Oscar-nominated Polish cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski. Necessity
led to a creative symbolic language viewers had to decode:
This was a responsibility we all felt: to create layered images, images
with double meanings that dared viewers to interpret them differently.
It was all in the details - like using wider lenses to show things you
would not be able to show any other way. Something may be occurring in
the background, slightly blurred. Sometimes all the film needs was
to not include something or someone in the frame.
The need for clandestine cinematic methods became fully apparent in
1982, when a commission met and determined even stricter rules for
Polish film, partially in reaction to the filmmaker Ryszard
Bugajski's Interrogation, an unsparing depiction of "Stalin-era
political life." (See an excerpted scene at the top). A transcript of
the proceedings, which included Bugajski, made their way out of the
country in secret and was reported on in The New York Times. Bugajski
feared his film would not see release, and he was right,
though Interrogation circulated in samizdat VHS form for years,
attaining cult status. It was eventually released years later and would
become one of the most popular films of the time.
After Interrogation, Polish filmmakers began to employ even more
distinctive symbolic vocabularies, from sci-fi satire in 1984's hugely
popular Sexmission (trailer above), to the use of heavily saturated
colors, a feature so many Polish films of the 198os and 90s share and
which characterizes the work of Kie›lowski, perhaps the most revered
Polish director among Polish and non-Polish cinephiles. Best known for
his early 90s trilogy Three Colors: Blue, Red and White, the director
began using specific colors to convey meaning earlier in his career.
Camera operator Sawomir Idziak, who worked on Kielowski';s 1988 A Short
Film About Killing (see trailer above), remembers, "I shot the film in
this hideous yellow-greenish color to subtly hint at the director's
idea that the country could be a killer, just like the main character.
I remember one reviewer in Cannes writing that because the screen
assumes the color of urine, it encapsulates the reality of Communist
Poland. That was beautiful."
https://youtu.be/0TLfIVR4bK0
Filmmaker Barbara Sass went on to make several films in which specific
color plays significant roles, starting with her 1980, festival-winning
debut Without Love. She surrounds her yellow-haired main character,
played by Dorota Staliska, with a sickly hospital yellow in a scene
excerpted in the clips above, then immerses her in the dim red light of
a photographic darkroom. The films above represent only a tiny sampling
of the nearly 4,000 Polish films hosted on 35mm.online, a joint project
of the Polish Film Institute and "one of Poland's oldest film studios,
Wytwárnia Filmáw Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF), (Documentary and
Feature Film Studios)," notes The first News.
The collection includes 160 features, 71 documentaries 474 animated
short films, and 10 animated features. We've barely scratched the
surface of Polish cinema history and there are hundreds of animations
yet to watch (read some of their grim descriptions at MetaFilter). So
get to watching at 35mm.online.
Note: To enable English subtitles, click the "Enable Subtitles" button
beneath each film. (The first button.) Then go to the "Setttings"
button and choose English subtiles.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/07/watch-hundreds-of-polish-films-free-online-feature-films-documentaries-animations-more.html
--
Internetado
Brasil <-- Portugal
Ziggy
Aug 13, 2022, 8:38:44 AM8/13/22
to
Thanks for sharing it with us.
On 2022-07-28, Internetado <inter...@alt119.net> wrote:
> The Polish film industry has produced a few
> internationally-known auteurs, including Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof
> Kie›lowski, and Roman Polanski, but a handful of critically-lauded
> directors cannot represent the scope of any national cinema. Without a
> wider appreciation of Poland';s film history, we lack crucial context
> for understanding its most famous artists. Now, a new archive called
> 35mm.online gives us hundreds of films and animations by Polish
> filmmakers, a unique opportunity to immerse oneself in the country';s
> cinematic art like never before.
>
>
Your Name
Aug 13, 2022, 6:25:09 PM8/13/22
to
> Re: Watch Hundreds of Polish Films Free Online: Feature Films,
> Documentaries, Animations
Once you've seen one person rubbing a table to shine perfection, you've
seen them all. ;-)
> Documentaries, Animations
Once you've seen one person rubbing a table to shine perfection, you've
seen them all. ;-)
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