Wanda jakubowska biography

Quite unjustly so. Jakubowska was judged extremely negatively in the reckoning of the history of Polish cinema between and Nonetheless, she triumphed abroad, both after her debut and towards the end of her life.

Wanda Jakubowska (10 November – 25 February ) was a Polish film director.

Studies in English devoted to world cinema enumerate her right next to Orson Welles 2 and Agnieszka Holland. She was the first to make a feature film set at a concentration camp and one of the first two Polish film directors mentioned in international encyclopaedias of women. With this genre-defining film and her next camp movies, Jakubowska opposed the vision of the world and human relations demoralised by death camps.

She remained faithful to socialist utopia, in which she placed her faith when she was young; neither the Holocaust nor the fall of communism managed to take that faith away from her. Jakubowska belonged to a generation born in Poland under partitions which was the first to attend universities in independent Poland. Not insignificantly, she spent the years — in Russia amid the revolution.

However, she was passing away with the sense of a lost cause, but remained faithful to leftist ideas until the very end. Her professional biography spans two epochs of cinema — the pre-war and the post-war — including the avant-garde and Socialist Realism: two twentieth-century tendencies introduced a programmatic relation between art and politics; the avant-garde did so at the level of critique of the social order, whereas Socialist Realism, conversely, affirmed the new order.

Born in Poland, Wanda Jakubowska was one of the world’s first female directors.

Experienced by two totalitarianisms, women radicalised their beliefs and activities as politicians, artists, philosophers, exploring the roots of totalitarianism on the one hand, and on the other hand — looking for artistic expression for the idea of humanism that would make art possible after the great wars: Hannah Arendt , Frida Kahlo , Simone de Beauvoir , Wanda Jakubowska , Janina Broniewska , Wanda Wasilewska and others.

Longevous and always at the heart of events, Jakubowska appears as a fascinating figure in the history of Polish and global cinema. Such hindsight was underpinned with irony and a sense of moral superiority, regardless of whether individuals or entire groups were involved. The tale of the history of Polish cinema was generally underpinned with irony.