Background
Andrzej Munk was born on 16 October 1921 in Cracow, Malopolskie, Poland.
Andrzej Munk was born on 16 October 1921 in Cracow, Malopolskie, Poland.
Graduated from the National Film School in Łódź.
After studying at Lodz. Munk worked for six years in doeumentarv; Man on the Track was his first feature; Eroica the clearest expression of his skeptical approach to Polish heroics. Passenger is by far his most interesting work, pregnant with the fact of Munk’s death and the stills that were used to complete it, not to mention its concentration- camp setting.
Until the more dramatically absurd death of Zbigniew Cybulski in a railway accident, the loss of Munk in a car crash was the tragedy of sixties Polish cinema. No doubt that he had an ironic, antiheroic Hew that was unusual in Poland, and no question of the feeling and care in his work. Even so, the argument remains that the best Poles are the ones who left—Polanski and Skolimowsld— and that Munk never fully shed the mantle of tasteful social consciousness that is in all but the best Polish cinema. Just as Wajda's A Generation seems like a marvelous student film, so the lessons of Lodz hang over Polish cinema—the sense of working according to doctrine. Even early Polanski looks like argued-out storvboards duly put on film. And in the famous Munk shot—of a deserting soldier drinking and the bottle mimicked bv a tank's gun looming over a ridge behind him—there is something of a seminar’s self-congratulatorv rightness.