The Wedding

In adapting Stanisław Wyspiański’s seminal 1901 poem-play of Polish national discord, Wajda created the first truly psychedelic Polish extravaganza, rivaled at the time only by some passages from his protégé’s slightly earlier Third Part of the Night (1971). As a class-crossing wedding takes place in a peasant hut near Kraków (in what is still-partitioned Poland, with no statehood or independence to speak of), the spectacle of societal intermingling becomes more and more fervid, aided by Witold Sobociński’s vertiginous camerawork. In Wajda’s vision it’s not only The Intellectual (Daniel Olbrychski) marrying a Peasant Woman (Ewa Ziętek), it is Poland’s vital juices that are churning in front of an ever-moving camera, to the rhythm of Stanisław Radwan’s hypnotic score. This ultimately tragic death dance of Polish national phantoms is one of Wajda’s finest achievements.