- Aleksander Ford
Aleksander Ford (
November 24 ,1908 ,Kiev ,Ukraine –April 4 ,1980 ,Naples ,Florida ,United States ) was a Polishfilm director . Polish filmmaker Aleksander Ford played a key role in establishingPoland 's international reputation for excellent cinema. One of Ford'sprotégé s was perhaps the world's best-known Polish director,Andrzej Wajda .After a year of making short
silent film s, Ford made his first feature-length film, "Mascot", in 1930. He did not use sound until "The Legion of the Streets " (1932). WhenWorld War II erupted, Ford went to theSoviet Union and worked closely withJerzy Bossak to establish the film unit for the Polish military in the East.After the war, Ford headed the government-controlled
Film Polski and held enormous sway over the country's entire film industry. He and a core of dedicated colleagues who were affiliated with the Polish communist party rebuilt most of the film production infrastructure after 1945. While discussing this group,Roman Polanski concluded in his biography: "They included some extremely competent people, notably Aleksander Ford, a veteran party member, who was then an orthodox Stalinist. (…) The real power broker during the immediate postwar period was Ford himself, who established a small film empire of his own."Ford did use his films to voice his discontent and expose the effects of the new regime upon Jews and the poor, as in his documentaries "
Children Must Laugh " (1936) and the award-winning "Eighth Day of the Week " (1959). Both films were banned in Poland. He is perhaps most famous in Poland for directing the film "Knights of the Teutonic Order", based on a novel of the same name by Polish authorHenryk Sienkiewicz . Ford continued making films in Poland until a resurgence ofanti-Semitism during the late 1960s led him to spend two years inIsrael . Ford later lived inDenmark and eventually settled in theUnited States .After leaving Poland in 1968, Ford made two more feature films, both of which were critical and commercial failures. In 1973, he created a movie version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel "
The First Circle ", a Danish-Swedish production that recounted the horrors of the Soviet gulag. In 1975 he made "The Martyr", anEnglish language , Israeli-German co-production based on the heroic story of Dr. Janusz Korczak.After 1968, Ford was blacklisted by the communist Polish government, making him a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking. In "
The Black Book of Polish Censorship ", the basic listing for censors in Poland in 1970s, Ford's name was listed among many other banned names. He left Poland for Germany, later Israel, Denmark and finally the U.S. Isolated, he committedsuicide in a Florida hotel.elected filmography
* "The Martyr" (1975)
* "The First Circle" (1973)
* "The First Day of Freedom " ("Pierwszy dzien wolnosci", 1964)
* "Knights of the Teutonic Order" ("Krzyzacy", 1960)
* "Eighth Day of the Week " ("Ósmy dzien tygodnia", 1959)
* "Five Boys from Barska Street " ("Piątka z ulicy Barskiej", 1954)
* "Youth of Chopin " ("Młodość Chopina", 1952)
* "Border Street" ("Ulica Graniczna", 1949)
* "" ("Majdanek - cmentarzysko Europy", 1945)
* "Children Must Laugh " ("Droga mlodych", 1936)
* "Legion of the Streets " ("Legion Ulicy", 1932)ee also
*
Cinema of Poland
*List of Polish language films External links
*imdb name|id=0285497|name=Aleksander Ford
* [http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/misi032.htm Essay on Ford and post-World War II film censorship in Poland]
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