Saturday marked the start of Kino Polski V, a series of contemporary Polish film and video screenings presented by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center through Oct. 11.
Kino Polski V focuses on representations of history by artists working in Poland as well as expatriates. Narrative, documentary, and experimental films by over two dozen artists are featured, including works by Lech Kowalski, Yale Strom, Zophia Kulik, and Wojciech Has. The series is co-sponsored by the UB Department of Media Study.
The series opened Saturday at the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center with Andrej Wajda's "The Revenge" ("Zemsta"), a major hit in Poland. The film is an adaptation of Aleksander Fredro's comic nineteenth-century play and stars Roman Polanski, director of one of last year's most stunning offerings, "The Pianist." That Polanski is such an accomplished director makes the wonderful performance he delivers here all the more impressive. It is also interesting to note that fifty years have passed since Wajda and Polanski last worked together on a film.
"The Revenge" revolves around two disputing neighbors (perhaps more than neighbors, they share a castle split down the middle by a brick wall). The conflict is enriched by the presence of Papkin (played by Polanski) and a pair of young lovers, all three of whom are involved in the quarrel by association.
The characters do not hesitate to turn towards the camera for a soliloquy, revealing either how ridiculously foolish they are or how they plan on taking advantage of another character's similar foolishness. Apart from dragging slightly in the second half, Wajda's film is an entertaining and charming comedy of errors.
The remainder of the series is both varied and enticing. Coming up on the schedule are documentaries about young punks from Krakow setting up their own shoe factory (Lech Kowalski's "The Boot Factory"), a selection of short films made by Polish women throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and an adaptation of a Polish novel about a man recounting his own past while visiting his ailing father in a strange sanatorium (Wojciech Has' "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass").
The centerpiece of the series is "Polish Avant Garde Films Between the Wars." This touring program of 35mm shorts, organized by the Polish Cultural Institute in NYC and the Pacific Film Archive of the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, brings with it several films previously unseen outside of Poland.
Since its inception in 1974, Hallwalls has become a truly central force in Buffalo's art scene and is recognized for this excellence both nationally and internationally. The organization stays true to its mission: "bringing the newest and most challenging work in the contemporary arts to the interested public, whether in painting and sculpture, conceptual art, performance, fiction, jazz, new music, experimental film, video art and activism, documentary film, or any number of other art forms which have come to make up Hallwalls' eclectic programming mix."
David Brody's "Descent," Jennifer McMackon's "imaginationsaft," and "Invisible Archives Volume 4: 120 Years of Landscape" will all be opening the night before the next screening. Hallwalls' installations rarely fail to impress.
A detailed schedule of Kino Polski V, as well as of all Hallwalls events, is available at www.hallwalls.org.
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
