Andrzej Wajda

Biography

Wajda's first pictures, “Suburb of Kraków” (1943) and “The Plumber's Brain” (1947), were paintings. Film came later.

He was born on 6 March 1926 in Suwałki, the son of an army officer, Jakub Wajda, and a schoolteacher, Aniela, née Białowąs. In 1934 the family moved to Radom. In September 1939 his father went to war with his regiment, was taken prisoner by the Soviets and was shot near Kharkiv in the spring of 1940; the family did not know this for a long time. The occupation authorities forbade Poles to attend secondary school, and Andrzej finished the seventh year of primary school. He went on to study in secret classes but dropped out for lack of money: with his brother Leszek he worked as a storekeeper, a porter and a cooper's assistant in a German office. From mid-1942 he was a courier for the Home Army in Radom. In the autumn of 1943 he learned that underground members he knew had been caught in a Gestapo ambush, and until the spring of 1944 he hid in Kraków.

In 1946 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. There he joined the Group of Young Artists, which was drawn to primitivism, surrealism and abstraction, and in the autumn of 1948 he began attending the study circle of Andrzej Wróblewski. In July 1949 he left the academy and, together with Konrad Nałęcki, enrolled in the directing department of the Łódź Film School. He finished the course in 1953 but received his diploma only in 1960, because he had no graduation project ready on time. He himself thought his school exercises unsuccessful. After film school he worked with Aleksander Ford on Young Chopin and Five Boys from Barska Street.

His feature debut, A Generation, based on a novel by Bohdan Czeszko, came out in 1955, with Roman Polanski and Zbigniew Cybulski in the cast. Kanał (1957), about the last days of the Warsaw Uprising, drew reproaches for its lack of heroism, but it won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes and gave Wajda an international name. In Ashes and Diamonds (1958) he made the central character not a communist, as in Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel, but a young Home Army fighter, Maciek Chełmicki, played by Cybulski. The authorities kept the film out of the main competition at Venice, but it received the FIPRESCI prize, awarded by film critics. After Lotna (1959) Wajda made Innocent Sorcerers, Samson, Siberian Lady Macbeth in Yugoslavia and a segment for Love at Twenty.

Cybulski's death in January 1967 led to Everything for Sale (1968), in which a director named Andrzej looks for a replacement for an actor who has died. At the same time he made a short science-fiction grotesque, Przekładaniec, based on a story by Stanisław Lem.

In the 1970s he worked especially hard: The Birch Wood, Landscape After the Battle, The Wedding after Stanisław Wyspiański, and The Promised Land after Władysław Reymont, which was nominated for an Oscar. He made Man of Marble (1977) after his speech at the Filmmakers' Forum in Gdańsk in 1975, where, with Krzysztof Zanussi, he accused officials of stifling creative freedom. The authorities tried to block the film and pressed for the name of Agnieszka Holland to be removed from the credits. It was released all the same, and at Cannes it won the FIPRESCI prize. Its heroine, a film student, digs into the fate of a forgotten Stakhanovite, a worker celebrated for record output. From 1972 to 1983 Wajda ran the “X” film unit, where Holland and Feliks Falk began their careers. In 1977–1982 he headed the Polish Filmmakers' Association.

He started shooting Man of Iron in January 1981, in the wake of the August strikes, and finished it before martial law was introduced on 13 December; Lech Wałęsa and Anna Walentynowicz appear in it. The film won the Palme d'Or. Danton had to be shot in France: Gérard Depardieu played Danton and Wojciech Pszoniak played Robespierre. In 1983 the picture brought Wajda a César for direction.

In the 1980s and 1990s he staged Hamlet, The Possessed and Crime and Punishment in the theatre. In 1989–1991 he was a senator, and in 1992–1994 he headed the Council for Culture under the president. The films Korczak (1990), The Crowned-Eagle Ring and Holy Week continued the war theme, and Pan Tadeusz, after Adam Mickiewicz, came out in 1999. He gave his 1987 Kyoto Prize to a museum of Japanese art and technology, Manggha, which opened in Kraków on 30 November 1994 to a design by Arata Isozaki, made free of charge. From 2002, together with Wojciech Marczewski, he ran his own film school in Warsaw. Katyń (2007), about the shooting in which his father died, was nominated for an Oscar. His last film was Afterimage (2016), about the painter Władysław Strzemiński: the very painting with which Wajda had begun he brought back into film.

Wajda died in Warsaw on 9 October 2016. On 19 October his urn was buried in his mother's grave at Salwator Cemetery in Kraków.