December 2008
The Museum of Modern Art honors award-winning film and TV director and screenwriter Agnieszka Holland with a month-long exhibition spanning her three-decade career, from her roots as a highly political contributor to Polish New Wave cinema, through major English-language releases such as The Secret Garden and Washington Square, and her most recent work as a director for the American television series The Wire.
As a filmmaker, Holland has traveled from Europe to Nova Scotia and the streets of Baltimore; she has tracked German culture from the sublimity of Beethoven to the absurdity of the Hitler Youth; and she has turned the keenest of eyes on Poland, with its many splendors and contradictions.
Agnieszka Holland: Europa/America runs in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters.
The exhibition is organized by Charles Silver, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Hanna Hartowicz, Director of The New York Polish Film Festival.
Although presently Holland ranks as one of Poland's most prominent filmmakers, she was rejected by the famous Lodz film school.
At 17 she made her way to the Prague Film and TV Academy (FAMU), where she was exposed to the work of Milos Forman, Ivan Passer, and other figures of the Czech New Wave.
Her political activities led to her arrest and brief imprisonment during the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1971, she returned to Poland, where she worked with such prominent Polish filmmakers as Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and soon began a close collaboration with Wajda’s film unit.
Holland's first major film, Aktorzy Prowincjonalni which won the International Critics Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, chronicled the backstage tension among actors in a small-town theater company as a metaphor for Poland's contemporary political situation.
She directed two more major films in Poland—Gorączka and Kobieta samotna before emigrating to France, just before martial law was declared in Poland in December 1981.
Holland’s response to this turmoil—and to her native country’s cataclysmic experiences with Nazism, Communism, and anti-Semitism—can be seen throughout much of her work.
In To Kill a Priest, made shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Ed Harris plays Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a Polish priest who supported the Solidarity trade union movement, in which Holland was personally involved. Europa Europa, perhaps Holland's best-known and well-regarded film, is based on the biography of a Jewish teenager who fled Germany for Poland following Kristallnacht in 1938.
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