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A Generation
A Generation (Polish: Pokolenie) is a 1955 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the novel Pokolenie by Bohdan Czeszko, who also wrote the script. It was Wajda's first film and the opening installment of what became his Three War Films trilogy set in the Second World War, to be followed by Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds.
A Generation is set in Wola, a working-class section of Warsaw, in 1942 and tells the stories of two young men at odds with the German occupation of Poland. The young protagonist, Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki), is living in squalor on the outskirts of the city and carrying out wayward acts of theft and rebellion.
After a friend is killed attempting to heist coal from a German supply train, he finds work as an apprentice at a furniture workshop, where he becomes involved in an underground communist resistance cell. He is guided first by a friendly journeyman there, who in turn introduces Stach to the beautiful Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). An outsider, Jasio Krone (Tadeusz Janczar), the temperamental son of an elderly veteran, is initially reluctant to join the struggle but finally commits himself, running relief operations in the Jewish ghetto during the uprising there.
“For us, it was a film of tremendous importance. The whole Polish cinema began with it. It was a marvelous experience. The whole crew was very young. Wajda was very young, very sincere...We believed in what we were doing - this was something utterly new in Poland...” —Filmmaker and actor Roman Polanski on A Generation in Hadelin Trinon, 1964
“A Generation featured the first documented use of squibs to simulate bullet impacts in films. For the first time, audiences were presented with a realistic representation of a bullet impacting an on-camera human being, complete with blood spatter. The creator of the effect, Kazimierz Kutz, used a condom with fake blood and dynamite.
The first film of Wajda's “famous war trilogy”, A Generation, was his debut directorial effort at age twenty-seven. Under the influence of the Italian neorealists, Wajda and his production team routinely shot outdoor sequences in less than optimal light and weather conditions, violating earlier Polish production precepts. Wajda recalled:
As we saw it, the studio footage was only meant to round off what we shot on location. For the first time in a Polish film, you saw scenes played in the rain or under a cloudy sky; all this had, for aesthetic or technical reasons, previously been anathema.”
Because at the time it wasn't possible to adapt machine guns to shoot blanks, all shots of automatic weapons were done with live ammunition shot into sandbags off-screen.
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A Generation
A Generation (Polish: Pokolenie) is a 1955 Polish film directed by Andrzej Wajda. It is based on the novel Pokolenie by Bohdan Czeszko, who also wrote the script. It was Wajda's first film and the opening installment of what became his Three War Films trilogy set in the Second World War, to be followed by Kanał and Ashes and Diamonds.
A Generation is set in Wola, a working-class section of Warsaw, in 1942 and tells the stories of two young men at odds with the German occupation of Poland. The young protagonist, Stach (Tadeusz Łomnicki), is living in squalor on the outskirts of the city and carrying out wayward acts of theft and rebellion.
After a friend is killed attempting to heist coal from a German supply train, he finds work as an apprentice at a furniture workshop, where he becomes involved in an underground communist resistance cell. He is guided first by a friendly journeyman there, who in turn introduces Stach to the beautiful Dorota (Urszula Modrzyńska). An outsider, Jasio Krone (Tadeusz Janczar), the temperamental son of an elderly veteran, is initially reluctant to join the struggle but finally commits himself, running relief operations in the Jewish ghetto during the uprising there.
“For us, it was a film of tremendous importance. The whole Polish cinema began with it. It was a marvelous experience. The whole crew was very young. Wajda was very young, very sincere...We believed in what we were doing - this was something utterly new in Poland...” —Filmmaker and actor Roman Polanski on A Generation in Hadelin Trinon, 1964
“A Generation featured the first documented use of squibs to simulate bullet impacts in films. For the first time, audiences were presented with a realistic representation of a bullet impacting an on-camera human being, complete with blood spatter. The creator of the effect, Kazimierz Kutz, used a condom with fake blood and dynamite.
The first film of Wajda's “famous war trilogy”, A Generation, was his debut directorial effort at age twenty-seven. Under the influence of the Italian neorealists, Wajda and his production team routinely shot outdoor sequences in less than optimal light and weather conditions, violating earlier Polish production precepts. Wajda recalled:
As we saw it, the studio footage was only meant to round off what we shot on location. For the first time in a Polish film, you saw scenes played in the rain or under a cloudy sky; all this had, for aesthetic or technical reasons, previously been anathema.”
Because at the time it wasn't possible to adapt machine guns to shoot blanks, all shots of automatic weapons were done with live ammunition shot into sandbags off-screen.