This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The Polish Film Institute has made an extraordinary gift to international film culture. In conjunction with WFDiF (Documentary and Feature Film Studios), and with funding from the EU and the Polish Ministry of Culture, it has digitally preserved thousands of post-second world war Polish feature films and documentaries and made them available online, for free — all with English subtitles.

There are 160 feature films, 71 documentaries, and 10 feature-length animations to choose from

That’s right, you can go to 35mm.online, register, make sure you switch the language from PL to EN, then scroll through the extensive list and create a “favourites” playlist to watch at your leisure. There are 160 feature films, 71 documentaries, and 10 feature-length animations to choose from. And they are even suitable to watch on Android and IoS phones. (Though please don’t tell Martin Scorsese.)

The big directorial names are well represented here: Andrzej Wajda, naturally, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Jerzy Skolimowski — who, incidentally, is still going strong and has a new film in this year’s London Film Festival. There are also films by Krzysztof Zanussi and Feliks Falk, both of whom belong, like Kieslowski, to the 1970s movement known as the “cinema of moral anxiety”.

You won’t find Wajda’s war trilogy here, but you will find Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), two of his most famous films, the latter being his depiction of the rise of Solidarity, as well as his French Revolution drama Danton (1983). Kieslowski is represented by his Three Colours trilogy and six other features. Skolimowski wrote the screenplay for Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (1961) and directed Barrier (1966) from his own screenplay — both classics of the Polish New Wave.

The Last Stage (sometimes called The Last Stop), Wanda Jakubowska’s Holocaust movie from 1948, is is the first film to treat the subject as well as the first to be partly filmed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where it is set.

It is remarkable for both its scale of production and its neo-realist approach. (The iconography of the film is copied by Andrzej Munk’s Passenger (1963), also available in this collection.)

One of the block elders, a venal Polish woman, indulges in casual cruelty, while the chief German female guard, a pretty, petit-bourgeois on the make, revels in the process of loading up lorries to fulfill the quota for the gas chamber. One such lorry departs with the women singing “La Marseillaise” as they head towards the chimney which never ceases to emit smoke.

The aim of the inmates is not just to survive but to obtain news from outside and to release information about what is happening inside the camp.

There is a wonderful scene in the hospital block. A middle-aged Jewish woman is praying. Then some of the women start singing patriotic Russian and Polish songs, and some of the younger Jewish women sing Jewish songs and start dancing. “Why are you all so happy?” asks the older Jewish woman. “Haven’t you heard?” says the head nurse, a Russian. “The Germans were beaten at Stalingrad.”

The torture scene, in which an SS officer plays jaunty dance band music on a phonograph while sending the Russian head nurse for first a “cold dinner” (suspension by the wrists from behind), then a “warm dinner” (branding irons), is especially chilling because so much is conveyed by suggestion.

Jakubowska sprinkles the story with piquant details. For example, a scene of inmates conferring is abruptly curtailed by a German officer exercising his horse as he canters between the blockhouses, scattering prisoners and jumping over washing lines.

It is remarkable for both its scale of production and its neo-realist approach

The protagonist is a Jewish woman who is chosen to be an interpreter by the camp commandant and eventually smuggles out evidence of German plans to kill all remaining inmates and eradicate all traces of the death camp.

The somewhat implausible ending, when Soviet planes fly overhead and bomb the camp, thereby thwarting her execution, does not detract from the overall power of the film. The Last Stage is among the top 20 Polish box-office hits of all time and deserves a wider audience among English speakers.

The main character of the Wajda/ Skolimowski collaboration Innocent Sorcerers is a young sports doctor who plays the drums in a jazz band and is a practised womaniser. He tape-records his romantic encounters and plays them back while lying on his bed smoking.

One night he meets his match in a girl whom he picks up on behalf of a friend. She misses her last train to the suburbs and spends the early hours in playful conversation with this cocksure fellow. He has been so charmed by her (so are we) that when he wakes and finds her missing he scours Warsaw on his moped in a fruitless search, only to find on returning to his bedsit that she is there making tea. He resumes his mask of indifference and she leaves. But she is not so easily fooled.

The film’s cool, light-hearted cynicism is expressed by one of the jazzers, who says that “the wise men of ancient times were looking for poisons, medicines, philosophers’ stones”, whereas his generation are “innocent sorcerers” who “want to poison our hopes ourselves”. He also says: “Life is like a tape recording, First, you record something, then you check how it sounds. And at the end you erase everything. Stupid, isn’t it?”