★ 8 / 10
Andrzej Wajda's "The Promised Land" is quite fascinating
badelf
Andrzej Wajda's "The Promised Land" is quite fascinating and eminently watchable. The period imagery is superb, capturing late 19th century industrial Łódź…
Andrzej Wajda's "The Promised Land" is quite fascinating and eminently watchable. The period imagery is superb, capturing late 19th century industrial Łódź with visceral authenticity. From the opening shots of choking black smoke enveloping the city, Wajda establishes the visual language of a world consumed by industrial greed. The narrative grows progressively darker and more cutthroat, following the moral degradation of three ambitious men chasing wealth in Poland's textile boom.
The partnership itself—a Pole, a German, and a Jew—is positioned as a study in ethnic dynamics. At times they casually hurl slurs appropriate to each other's ethnicity, which is chronologically accurate for the period. But this authenticity creates an unintended problem: the characters teeter on the edge of caricature. The stereotyping, while historically true, gives the film a faintly farcical quality that undercuts the serious message about industrialization's brutality.
The message about the evils of capitalism and industrialization is clear and seems to be Wajda's intended theme. He tells this story beautifully, showing how the promise of wealth transforms men into monsters, how the factory system devours human dignity along with human bodies. But running parallel is the issue of racism and classism, which never quite integrates with the capitalist critique.
Wajda seems to want to accomplish too much. The result is a film of impressive craft and power that struggles to find its center. Are we watching a Marxist critique? An ethnic tension study? A character-driven moral collapse? The film gestures toward all three without fully committing, leaving us admiring the machinery without understanding Wajda's vision.
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★ 7 / 10
A savage attack on corrupt Polish capitalism of the 1880s
robert-temple-1
This epic film directed by the famous Polish director Andrzej Wajda is not nearly so widely known outside Poland as many of his other films, which have a…
This epic film directed by the famous Polish director Andrzej Wajda is not nearly so widely known outside Poland as many of his other films, which have a broader appeal and are less disturbing and savagely ironical. The film is based upon a novel by the classic Polish novelist Ladislaw Reymont (who died 1925). The novel was published in 2 volumes in English in 1928 but is very difficult to find. Reymont is better known in English for his novel THE PEASANTS (CHLOPI), published in four volumes successively entitled Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. It is usually necessary when trying to acquire it to piece the volumes together separately from different booksellers, as I had to do. This story is harrowing in the extreme, and to a certain extent becomes a caricature of 'the evils of capitalists', primarily speculators. Of course, we all know today how dangerous speculators are, and every major bank seems to contains dozens of uncontrolled and uncontrollable 'rogue speculators', or 'casino gamblers' as they are often called nowadays, who keep bringing about disastrous losses and crashes which effect the entire globe. But this film is a historical drama limited to what took place in the Polish city of Lodz during the 1880s. One presumes that it must have a basis in truth of some kind, but being ignorant of the history of Lodz, I must confess I do not know. The film contains a few 'in jokes'. For instance, there is a scene where an uneducated Jewish moneylender is told that Victor Hugo has just died (which happened in 1885). He says, after looking blank at first, 'oh yes, he wrote that book OF FIRE AND SWORD some portions of which my daughter read out to me.' Polish viewers would laugh their heads off at this, as the book referred to is one of the most famous works of Henryk Sienkiewicz and has nothing to do with Victor Hugo. Wajda's rage when making this film was evidently so intense that he could not resist planting such small ironies as those within the dialogue. The film portrays the most vicious, corrupt, callous and inhuman greed and arrogance imaginable. Mill owners are shown saying: 'Let them die' when their workers are injured by the machines in their factories, and refuse to pay their widows a penny in compensation. They go round the factories choosing the young worker girls they want for sex and forcing them into it with the threat of firing them and their whole families so that they will starve if the girls do not agree. Mangled bodies and body parts flying through the air from whirling machines are shown in the factories without sparing our sensitivities. We see people being beaten to death in the street and no one even notices, we see several suicides by financial speculators and moneylenders who have been 'ruined'. Jews are portrayed very harshly as stock characters who are greedy, vengeful and lascivious. With the exception of one very nice and honourable aristocratic girl named Anka, who tries unsuccessfully to 'have concern for human suffering' by aiding a worker whose ribs have been crushed but is ordered not to do so, just about every character in the story is revolting, rotten to the core, and despicable. This is not an edifying film, and is very much a 'downer'. The title is clearly an extremely ironical one, as 'the promised land' dreamed of by one minor character as a Lodz where everybody gets rich and is happy, is in fact the most brutal nightmare and hell on earth. Wajda used his brilliant film making skills to create a highly watchable and rather mesmerising film, but it turns one's stomach. Of course, that is what he wanted to do. His message seems to have been: 'Can you watch this without being disgusted and horrified?' The answer is no. This story was filmed as a silent film in 1927, but I do not know whether that survives. Reymont's THE PEASANTS has been filmed as a feature film three times, in 1922, 1935, and 1973, and as a television mini-series in 1972. The Poles love their classic writers and poets. Even in the midst of the dialogue of this film, the name of the national poet Adam Mickiewicz bursts through in conversation. Especially at that time, it would have been hard to find a Pole who could go an entire day without referring to Mickiewicz, who was not only the national poet but a passionate supporter of Polish independence and freedom, who spent much of his life living on the Rue de Seine (see his plaque) in Paris as a political exile. With the Poles, their national literature is viewed as such an integral part of their national identity that it means more to them than probably any other European nation. To a large extent this can be seen to be due to the struggle which the Poles have had over the centuries in maintaining a national identity at all, what with the Swedish, German, and Russian invasions, not to mention their tiffs with the Lithuanians. In this film, there are many sarcastic references to and portrayals of Germans resident in Lodz at the time, and they come off worse than even the Jews, as the worst villains and scoundrels. This film pulls no punches, but lets rip in every direction like a mad dog that wants to bite everyone all at once.
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★ 8 / 10
Eminently engaging, sometimes confusing
bandw
This is the story of a time and a place. The time is the 1890s and the place is Lodz, Poland (which, Wikipedia indicates was a client state of the Russian…
This is the story of a time and a place. The time is the 1890s and the place is Lodz, Poland (which, Wikipedia indicates was a client state of the Russian Empire then). Lodz at the time was a center of textile production, nicknamed "The Promised Land." Director Wajda wastes no time in hitting you over the head with the basic theme which is the total contrast between the industrial workers and the textile factory owners. The main images we get of the workers is their crowding to get into work at the factories (ala scenes from "Metropolis") and working at their tedious work stations. The main focus of the film is on the factory owners and wannabes and, in particular, on three friends who are wanting to build a factory--one of the friends is German, another is a Polish aristocrat, and the third is a Jew of a nationality that I never determined.
This is a complicated story of epic sweep featuring a large cast. Trying to keep track of all the characters was a challenge for me, particularly without having any historical background to rely on. Some of the financial wheeling and dealing went over my head. As is the case whenever large amounts of money and power are at stake, there was a lot of backstage jockeying going on--companies trying to poach executives from each other, secret coalitions, factories burned to gain competitive advantage or for insurance monies, coded messages decrypted, and so forth. To complicate matters there were national and personal frictions, with Germans insulting Poles, Poles insulting Germans, and Jews being unliked for their success. Additionally there were fissures within families where the pursuit of money caused people to behave in a manner in opposition to longstanding traditions of honor and integrity. At one point a father says to his son, "You have sold your soul for a golden calf." Some transactions were conducted using rubles while others used marks. Some of the characters speak German, others Polish. I was often confused as to where a scene was taking place. Perhaps to elaborate on all of the complexities would require a ten hour movie.
A case is made against unfettered capitalism, a not altogether irrelevant contemporary topic for debate. In order to satisfy the Soviet censors to get this made perhaps Wajda exaggerated by making all of the upper class characters truly disagreeable and arrogant, but given his later involvement with Solidarity in Poland, his sympathies were clearly with the workers. I wish additional time had been given to examining the personal lives of some of the workers; as presented they appeared mostly as grim oppressed cyphers.
Of the seven of Wajda's films I have seen I found this one to be the most accomplished cinematically, almost to the point where the filming trumps the story. The production values, the acting, and the musical score are all excellent. The scenes in the "several years later" segment are stunning in their use of camera angle, editing, artistic composition, and emotional impact. The creation of a Lodz at the turn of the century is a worthy achievement, on a par with the illusion of authenticity that you get when reading a Dickens novel.
I am puzzled as to why this film has drawn such a small audience over the years.
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· 500 ratings
7.8/10
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