Polish Film Academy: Breaking Social Realism | Man on Track + People from an Empty Area

TypeHall 1 - Cinema

Hour

25.01

|

Jan 17 |

Lecture: dr Maciej Pietrzak

+ film projection:

Man on Track (80')

The story of an experienced train driver, fired on a delusional charge of sabotaging new working methods. We learn his story from the stories of his associates, told after his tragic death. They depict his figure in different light, so that in the end it turns out that he sacrificed himself to save the train and its passengers from the crash. The film is based on Jerzy Stefan Stawiński's story The Mystery of the Orzechowski Train Driver.

MAN ON THE TRACK, dir. Andrzej Munk, Poland 1956, 80'

People from an empty area (15')

“People of the Empty Area” has nothing in them from a crime chronicle, a hunting letter or a warning poster. The protagonists of this film, young people from Warsaw's Prague, were shown with affection and attention. This is clearly marked by a commentary on the film, avoiding definitive assessments, but asking questions and quoting the statements of the protagonists of the film. At the beginning there is the inscription: “This film is a story about a certain group of young people we have met. The people we show are very similar to many of their peers. It is as if a synthesis of our observations. The intention of the film is to signal a problem whose roots lie deep in the life of society. Implementers”.

Karabasz and Ślesicki attempted in this film to move away from staging individual scenes towards observing events, and above all the behaviors, moods and states of their characters. Already the first shots of the film, shot on the street, through the glass of a car, breathe authenticity, which situations staged in other films of the series are devoid of. The most ambiguous in the rating of the heroes picture of the “black series” was created. The protagonists of the film are young inhabitants of Warsaw's Prague, whom Karabasz and Ślesicki met during the production of “Where the Devil Says Goodnight”.

Many years after the creation of this documentary, its protagonists applied to the Documentary Film Studio. The old vagrants from the streets of Prague have grown into settled townspeople, often quite well-off. They wanted, already as mature people, to see themselves from years ago. This proves, in a way, that they retained a good memory of the film, which captured and preserved some truth about them from those years. People from an empty area ex aequo with Brzozowski and Bossak's 1956 Warsaw and Jan Łomnicki's Old Women's House received a prize at the 1st National Documentary Film Festival in Warsaw in April 1958.

(description by Mikołaj Jazdon comes from a booklet attached to Polska Szkoła Dokumku | Czarna seria)

PEOPLE FROM AN EMPTY AREA, dir. Władysław Ślesicki, Kazimierz Karabasz, Poland 1957, 15'