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DVD Munk

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Premiere of next DVD album of "Polska Szkoła Dokumentu" series published by Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne. Double album of Andrzej Munk's documentaries.

One should look for the sources of the legend that surrounds the person and work of Andrzej Munk (1921-1961) in his untimely and tragic death and, above all, in the belief that what he did create as filmmaker and what he had no time to create contains a mystery. This belief stems from the experience of his films and the feeling that his sudden death put an end to an important current in the history of Polish cinema; a separate phenomenon deprived of spiritual partners and followers. (...) He was fascinated with experiment in art. This is, after all, how his early documentaries have to be seen. In the 1950s, fictionalizing the documentary form - or to put things in the opposite way - employment of the documentary film poetics to depict fictional events, was the mark of his experimental approach, his search for new forms of expression. However, Munk treated formal experiments in a special way. One can safely assume that in most cases - which is particularly evident in the first, documentary period of his work - these formal experiments opposed, in moral terms, the imposed propaganda goals, standardized ideology and aesthetic norms. These became de-mythologized through revealing the presence of real people in the ideologically-programmed un-reality, as well as through his search for forms of cinematic imaging able to destroy certain binding conventions. Andrzej Munk, the rebellious documentary filmmaker, remained one even when he had moved away from the documentary towards feature films.
Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska

Polish School of the Documentary. Andrzej Munk, 2 DVDs
duration: 225 min., subtitles: English, French, German, Russian
1. "Destination Nowa Huta!" 1952
2. "Peasant diares" 1952
3. "The railwayman`s word" 1953
4. "The stars must burn" 1954
5. "The men of the blue cross" 1955
6. "One Sunday morning" 1955
7. "A walk in the old town of Warsaw" 1958
8. Polish Newsreel No. 52/1959 A-B, No. 39/1961 B