Andrzej Zulawski
(Lvov, 1940) Polish film director.He lived the first years of his life on horseback between Czechoslovakia and Poland and later chose France for his studies.At the end of the fifties, the Institute of Advanced Film Studies in Paris (IDHEC) put him in contact with the cinema, but his real apprenticeship began in the following decade, when he worked as assistant director to Andrzej Wajda.
Andrzej Zulawski
In 1970 he made his directorial debut with the adaptation of a novel by his father, Miroslav Zulawski. Trzeciej czesci nocy chose the framework of the occupation of Poland during the Second World War, to focus on a character whose flight and survival become a search for his own identity.Two years later he directed Diabel (1972), in which he took up the theme of the Polish invasion, but this time by the Prussian army in 1793.His themes: conspiracy, betrayal, betrayal...made the film was banned in Poland, a fact that prompted Zulawski to emigrate again to France, the country of his formation.
His first French production, The important thing is to love (1974) , is based on the homonymous novel by Christopher Frank.A love triangle, cinema and theater-which also function as two different loves-combine to award a César in 1976 to the actress Romy Schneider.This film partly establishes the constants of Zulawski's early French period: love surrounded by additional circumstances, as in L'amour braque (1986), which also pretends to be a tribute to the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and his novel The Idiot ; the literary adaptation (repeated with Dostoevsky in The Public Woman , which won the Special Jury Prize in Montreal); and the discovery or rediscovery of actresses (Romy Schneider, Valérie Kapriski or Isabelle Adjani).
Precisely, Adjani starred in Zulawski's foray into horror cinema with the feature film Possession (1981), which also had part of German production and was not left in effectism of the genre.Indeed, the film has a psychological dimension that made it worthy of various awards: the English Academy awarded it a BAFTA, Adjani won a César for best actress and the director, the Critics Award at the Sao Paulo Film Festival.
A scene of Possession (1981)
The important thing is to love was the film that it gave him more success in this period.With such baggage behind him, he returned to Poland to shoot Na siebrnym globie (1987), a futuristic fable, fierce criticism of society and its class divisions, which once again showed him that Poland was not yet ready for her cinema.When the film was almost finished, the Polish Ministry of Justice ordered to stop filming and destroy the material.The negative was nevertheless able to be saved and Zulawski later finished the film to show it at Cannes in the late eighties.
France was again his destination country.In My nights are more beautiful than your days (1989) he took up the theme of love as a shelter for misfortunes, with a terminally ill character who breaks with his schemes to live his last days as if they were a whole lifetime. Boris Godounov (1989) put the historical element at his service again.The film was based on Mussorgski's musical about the opera of the same title and was shot by Zulawski as a theatrical performance for the viewer.However, Boris Godounov was nothing but the foot for a broader intention: to review the dictatorships of the 20th century.
La note bleue (1992), again a co-production Franco-German, introduced into his life Sophie Marceau-with whom he had a son-and immersed him in the world of Chopin, Georges Sand, Delacroix and Turguenev.With his latest title, Szmanka (1996) or La chamane , he delves into esoteric terrain.
The important female presence in Zulawski's cinema is not accidental.Apart from some setback-in the early eighties he offered a project to Nastassja Kinski that she rejected as pornographic-the director has always enjoyed an extraordinary understanding with his actresses.In her own words, "acting is a female occupation", something she learned according to him in the French film school.Those things that torture him serve as the director's theme for his stories, and the woman functions here as a medium, as a priestess, something that is fully evident in his latest film.
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