A tale of medieval quest for a golden harp called “The Knight”.
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THE KNIGHT (RYCERZ), 1980. Poland.
With Piotr Skarga, Daniel Olbrychski. A haunting, austere ballad about a knight’s quest for a gold-stringed harp whose sound is said to bring peace and harmony. The film’s imagery is inspired by medieval icons. 81 min.Read More »
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“Valley of the Gods,” which stars Josh Hartnett, John Malkovich, Keir Dullea, Bérénice Marlohe and John Rhys-Davies, presents the clash between the ancient civilization of the Navajo and the ultra-modern, high-tech world of multi-billionaires.
The Navajo “live in really very harsh conditions and their territory is surrounded by this super civilization, the Roman Empire of today, with this epitome of technical innovation,” Majewski told Variety. “I don’t know whether there is another place in the world that has this kind of absolute opposite sides.”Read More »
This movie focuses on a dozen of the five hundred characters depicted in Bruegel’s painting. The theme of Christ’s suffering is set against religious persecution in Flanders in 1564.Read More »
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THE KNIGHT (RYCERZ), 1980. Poland.
With Piotr Skarga, Daniel Olbrychski. A haunting, austere ballad about a knight’s quest for a gold-stringed harp whose sound is said to bring peace and harmony. The film’s imagery is inspired by medieval icons. 81 min.
New York Film Festival
London Film Festival
Los Angeles Film FestivalRead More »
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Working from his own novel Metaphysics, writer-director Lech Majewski (Glass Lips, Gospel According to Harry) crafts magic in The Garden of Earthly Delights intimate passion plays, which are filled with loving detail (Village Voice) and creates a luminous, highly erotic treatise on art, love and death (Chicago Reader). When London art historian Claudine (Claudine Spiteri) meets engineer Chris (Chris Nightingale), it is love and lust at first sight. But their spiritual and erotic connection is threatened by a devastating and deadly illness.Read More »
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This dialog-free film, originally presented as 33 short films, is an experimental, bizarre set of meditations and flashbacks of the grotesque.Read More »
From The Lumiere Reader:
THIS frankly marvelous film by Polish/American director Lech Majewski concerns a real-life cult of Polish working-class painters who were given three Fátima-like prophecies upon the death of their spiritual leader in the thirties – upcoming were a great war, a red plague and a death ray from Saturn that would destroy the earth. Their behaviour in response results in all sorts of shenanigans. Angelus hasn’t achieved much international coverage since its release in 2000, but it’s unclear why this hilarious, loving tribute to human folly and ambition was so ignored. A revelation that only a Film Society can dredge up, Angelus reveals Majewski’s painterly visual touch, and his wry sense of humour.Read More »
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The film is a video-art para documentary following Adam, a literature scholar who has a hard time in making a connecting with the surrounding world after he survives an accident. He quits his job and becomes a store cashier in order to have more time to study Dante’s Divine Comedy. The film is both a visual experiment and a tribute to Majewski’s beloved city Katowice.
“These are intimate visions, things that are in my head that are taking place in Katowice. Why Katowice? I was born there, I lived all over the world, but the visions that I have are usually connected with this place,” Majewski told FNE.Read More »
A portrait of socialist Poland circa 1971 that recounts the last years of Polish poet Rafal Wojaczek, a rebel who became a legend.
Review from the New York Times
Wojaczek is a charming, maddening poète maudit whose every waking moment is a rebellion against the world around him. That world, Poland in the late 1960’s — the real Wojaczek died in 1971, at the age of 26 — is presented in gorgeously grim black and white. Mr. Majewski’s camerawork has an almost classical austerity, and for its first half the movie seems as static and distant as his shots. But just as Wojaczek’s nihilism has a core of passionate wit, so too does the movie as it moves deathward, picking up glimmers of humor amid the gloom. The funniest scenes — which might have come from the imagination of Jim Jarmusch or the young David Lynch — take place at a cavernous literary cafe, where a band called the Secret performs deadpan pop tunes while Wojaczek glowers and rants. Mr. Majewski’s view of him is candid, but also unmistakably romantic; he would rather present Wojaczek’s enigma than unravel it.Read More »