#andrzej wajda

[asukvm]

im gonna be working on yaoi requests very soon since i've got a massive art block, so in the meantime a few sketches from when I watched danton (1983)

also maybe unpopular opinion boguslaw linda SERVED looks. the way I was folded the entire movie

[davidhudson]

Andrzej Wajda, March 6, 1926 – October 9, 2016.

On the set of Everything for Sale (1969).

[cosmonautroger]

Ashes Andrzej Wajdand Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda, 1958

[sacredwhores]

Andrzej Wajda - The Maids of Wilko (1979)

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[gucio]

Poeta // Wesele (1973)

część II

[lazzerot]

My Mickey 17 hot takes

(aka I come to realize my experience is about the curse of knowledge and the bliss of ignorance and that I should find a different hobby than reading and thinking about fascism and anarcho-capitalism (like reading the Che Guevara diary my friend borrowed me and thinking about communism and normal anarchism instead))

Content note: minor scene spoilers but not the ending for Mickey 17 below the cut, featuring somewhat graphic discussion of practices in the Auschwitz concentration camps, the Holocaust/Shoah overall and the Katyn massacre later on in the post because I compare watching Mickey 17 with my experience watching The Zone of Interest and watching Katyń

It seems like everyone here on tumblr, one of the friends I went to see Mickey 17 with and all the people who write reviews for it online are convinced that Kenneth Marshall is supposed to be a stand in for Trump and while that may be one way to read the movie it's a pretty boring one and in my opinion part of the reason why it's getting so many mixed to bad reviews which it doesn't fully deserve.

Yeah the pacing of the movie is pretty awful at times, especially the exposition drags on and on. Yeah, the humor doesn't really land; at least for me it's neither dark nor absurd enough to actually be that funny, but maybe that's also due to the fact that it genuinely scared me for the first third of the movie; because none of this seemed like fiction to me. A lot of these ideas aren't futuristic metaphors anymore, they're being planned in reality right now. You just have to stop thinking of Marshall as Trump and start seeing Marshall as a mix of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the plot becomes terrifying.

This movie is specifically about wealth and power; about how capitalism supports fascism, not about Trump or the attempted assassination on him.

And since Musk just retweeted another Holocaust denial post this weird connection that my brain has made between Mickey 17 and The Zone of Interest/Katyń seems somewhat relevant, but more about that later.

I'm pretty sure the hand sign they're doing at the start (in my memory after Mickey signed the contract, but I might be misremembering, but then definitely later when they're on the shuttle that brings them to the planet and are discussing the no sex rule and the white supremacy birth stuff) is supposed to be a stand in for the white power sign, but it also just happens to be the wolf salute, which admittedly is niche knowledge you probably only have if you're like me and spend a lot of your time keeping up with right-wing extremism or Neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists like Attila Hildmann and which definitely wasn't intended as such by Bong Joon Ho.

There's so many other examples that are reminiscent of the things billionaires do or are planning to do that perfectly fit into white supremacy and Nazi ideology that I wanted to discuss here but I've been thinking about this and writing this post for four days now and at this point I don't trust my memory with this anymore. I had a whole point about the sauces representing the objects Nazis created out of the human remains of the prisoners and not necessarily imperialist oil claims (though the movie definitely also is about imperialism) like someone on tvtropes.org wrote, about how water and thus liquids in general are luxury goods, but I'm not too confident about that now that my memory of the movie is deteriorating. So I'm not gonna continue this here, I just want to be able to publish this post so I can finally stop thinking about it for just a second.

If you want to read an actual good complete analysis just read someone else's or check out the tvtropes.org entry, idk.

What initially compelled me to write this post was that this whole experience reminded me of when I was watching The Zone of Interest with a friend: I sat in horror looking at the opening shot because I instantly recognized that bit of wall as part of Auschwitz because I stood in front of a wall just like that when I visited Auschwitz, while my friend next to me had no reaction until the camera panned out and revealed the whole height of the wall including the barbed wire and garden set up.

There's a lot of scenes like that in The Zone of Interest that you don't really get the severity of unless you have background knowledge about how Auschwitz was structured and operating. Take the scene where Hedwig Höß receives the watches for example; I don't remember there being context clues that these are watches from prisoners that got selected for her at the Kanada warehouses; so to someone who has no knowledge about Auschwitz she might as well be receiving an order she placed at some jewelry shop.

In that way ignorance is bliss, yeah, but it also robs you of a full understanding which I think is the case for many people who watched Mickey 17 and thought it's about Trump. I'm not saying that to gatekeep or to say I'm smarter than you. I'm someone who has no real pop culture knowledge, who constantly has references flying over her head. I'm saying sometimes you need additional knowledge to fully understand art, and if you don't realize that you might end up watching something and coming away with the feeling that it was bad or boring or had no point. And thinking Mickey 17 is about Trump does make the movie pretty boring.

Similarly this experience reminded me of when I thought it was a good idea to watch Katyń on a random weekday night: I knew what the movie would be about, I knew what would happen, I had read about the Katyn massacre, but to me there's a noticeable difference between reading about something and seeing something in visual art, because my own visual imagination is pretty bad. So after I had watched Katyń I couldn't sleep for hours and I had classes early in the morning the next day. The same thing happened with Mickey 17 except luckily I'm still on my semester break and had nowhere to be and could spend half of the night drafting whatever the hell this is.

All in all great movie, just some aspects of it might not live up to your expectations if you're going into this expecting another Parasite or if you're basing your expectations on the trailer. Which the adults of the 6-8 year old children who sat in our screening also had to realize after the movie turned to exploring the morality of death and dying as the main topic. They left very quickly after that, but these poor kids...

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Ashes and Diamonds, Andrzej Wajda, 1958.

[babuszcats]

Jerzy Radziwiłowicz as Mateusz Birkut in Człowiek z marmuru (1977), dir. Andrzej Wajda

[seldonhari]

“Rzeczywiście miałem wielki zaszczyt i przyjemność grania w swetrze, który miał na sobie Lech Wałęsa podczas strajku w stoczni…” / Indeed, I had the great honour and pleasure to wear the exact same sweater that Lech Wałęsa had on during the strike.

Robert Więckiewicz demonstrates how he used to light cigarettes on set while wearing a sweater that literally belonged to a musem (x)

[lafiguraentutapiz]

Ashes and Diamonds. Andrzej Wajda. 1958

[filmap]

Powidoki / Afterimage Andrzej Wajda. 2016

Polska YMCA Stanisława Moniuszki 4A, 90-111 Łódź, Poland See in map

See in imdb

[sacredwhores]

Andrzej Wajda - The Maids of Wilko (1979)

[drowningparty]

There is a better way of uniting the group. Tell me, how many are there? / Five. Les possédés (1988)

[romanbymarta]

Warsaw, June 23, 1981, Roman Polański with Andrzej Wajda after the premiere of the play Amadeus at the Teatr na Woli. In the pic also Gustaw Holoubek and Janusz Morgenstern. Photo by Bogdan Borkowski

Warsaw, June 23, 1981, Roman Polanski as Amadeus by Andrzej Wajda

[favnas]

Musiałam zebrać najzabawniejsze i najbardziej randomowe momenty z Wesela