Andrzej Wajda, a Polish filmmaker who defied a repressive communist government and captivated global audiences to become one of the most revered directors in international cinema, died Oct. 9. He was 90.
Capable of conveying immense visual and narrative power, Mr. Wajda was widely considered a director of the first rank, even if his name resonated less with Western audiences than contemporaries such as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. Director Martin Scorsese hailed him as a "master filmmaker," and Mr. Wajda's movies earned top prizes at festivals in Cannes, Berlin and Venice. In 2000, Mr. Wajda received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
His films, he told the Associated Press shortly before receiving the Oscar, were collectively “a great mural depicting Polish history,” from the dramas of the country’s 19th-century gentry to the horrors of World War II, the subsequent Soviet occupation and the rise of a democratic Poland under the Solidarity labor leader and later president Lech Walesa.
Mr. Wajda established himself at the vanguard of international cinema in the 1950s, when he released a trilogy of films that dealt with the closing days of World War II: “A Generation” (1955), about a group of young resisters to Nazi occupation in Warsaw; “Kanal” (1957), about the 1944 resistance uprising in Warsaw that played out, in part, in the city’s sewers; and “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958), set on the day of Germany’s surrender as a small Polish city prepares for life under new overlords, the Soviets.
Based on a best-selling novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, who co-wrote the screenplay with Mr. Wajda, “Ashes and Diamonds” catapulted the director to wide acclaim. A resistance fighter, played by the charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski, spends the day reminiscing about his wartime losses and searching for a rising communist leader whom he plans to assassinate.
"Wajda is putting forth here something more than a trenchant observation of a highly dramatic episode," New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote. "His camera takes in a shattering sweep of the litter of a lost and ruined country at the symbolic dawn of a new day."
The film was not openly contemptuous of the new communist regime, which controlled filmmaking in Poland and carefully screened each release for politically subversive content. But like many of Mr. Wajda’s subsequent releases, it employed symbolic imagery and complex characterizations to question the state’s authority and myths of wartime heroism.
“A picture is harder to censor than words,” Mr. Wajda told Newsweek in 2000, explaining his filmmaking strategy at the time. Pointing to the ending of “Ashes and Diamonds,” Mr. Wajda noted that censors “thought it was good” that Cybulski’s character “died on a garbage heap because he had killed a communist. But the audiences had a different attitude. They asked themselves: ‘What kind of system is this that forces such a sympathetic lad to die on a garbage heap?’ ”
Mr. Wajda found mixed success following his war trilogy but returned to prominence with films such as “The Ashes” (1965), about Polish freedom fighters during the Napoleonic Wars; “Everything for Sale” (1968), which was inspired by the death of Cybulski in a train accident in 1967; and “The Promised Land” (1975), a historical drama about Industrial Revolution-era Poland that was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film.
Mr. Wajda’s work became more openly subversive with “Man of Marble” (1976), about a fictional bricklayer who became a Soviet propaganda symbol, and “Man of Iron” (1981), which told the story of a labor leader based loosely on Walesa, an electrician who in 1980 helped found the Solidarity labor movement during a strike in Gdansk.
Although "Man of Iron" drew global attention to the strikes and was acclaimed at the Cannes film festival, Mr. Wajda's work suffered in the ensuing months. Martial law was instituted under Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, and Mr. Wajda's state-funded film company, Unit X, was closed down. In response, he moved to France.
Among the films Mr. Wajda made in self-imposed exile was “Danton” (1983), which paralleled Poland’s political crisis with that of 18th-century France and starred Gérard Depardieu as the revolutionary title character.
Mr. Wajda returned to Poland in 1989 after the Soviet-backed government’s fall. By then, the political atmosphere had calmed and democratic elections swept Walesa into office. Encouraged by Walesa, Mr. Wajda made a short foray into politics, serving a two-year term as a senator before returning to filmmaking exclusively.
Andrzej Wajda (pronounced ON-jay VY-da) was born in Suwalki, in northeastern Poland, on March 6, 1926. When he was 13, the country was invaded by Nazi Germany and then by the Soviet Union, sparking World War II. He soon began working as a resistance fighter for the Home Army, an experience that partly inspired “Kanal.”
Mr. Wajda’s father, a cavalry captain, was killed in 1940 in the Katyn Forest, when more than 4,400 Polish prisoners of war were executed by Soviet forces. The bodies were discovered in mass graves three years later by the German army, but until 1990 Soviet leaders insisted that the massacre was committed by the Nazis.
After the war, Mr. Wajda studied painting at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts. He soon switched to filmmaking, studying the emerging neorealist style of Italian directors Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica at the Lodz Film School. He graduated in 1953 and apprenticed with leading Polish director Alexander Ford before embarking on his own work, beginning with a series of propaganda-like documentaries.
Mr. Wajda was married four times. Survivors include his wife of 41 years, the set and costume designer Krystyna Zachwatowicz, and a daughter, Karolina, from an earlier marriage to Beata Tyszkiewicz.
Mr. Wajda’s career suffered after the fall of communism, when state-funded studios were shuttered, movie theaters were closed around the country and audiences seemed captivated mainly by American blockbusters.
He broke through in an unlikely way with “Pan Tadeusz” (1999), an adaptation of a 19th-century epic poem by Polish writer Adam Mickiewicz. The period-piece drama — which used the rhyming verse of its source material to tell the story of clashing noble families — was a critical and commercial hit in Poland.
His final works included the acclaimed “Katyn” (2007), about the World War II massacre, and “Walesa: Man of Hope” (2013), a well-received biopic. His last film, “Afterimage,” based on the life of a Polish avant-garde painter, was chosen as Poland’s entry for the 2016 Oscar for best foreign language film.
Despite facing restrictions on his filmmaking, Mr. Wajda said he never thought seriously of leaving Poland, or of making films that set aside the country’s history.
"I think I have things to say, but they are only important if I say them from Poland," he told the Times in 2000. "We cannot tell a story about a man and a woman without dealing with all our history. It would be nice to make a love story without all this history, but it's not possible."
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