“Wajda’s masterpiece takes us to the very heart of Polish reality. [...] At first glance, it deals with an atmosphere of happiness in which the camera participates without restraint. Like an invited guest it clings to dancers, gets drunk on folk music, cuts into conversations, highlights the replies, looks closely at faces, and then rushes to dance again. Untiring, curious, mad, but hopelessly incisive. [...] This is Poland exposed in its contradictions. [...] Poland drunk with alcohol and with words, suffering from the nobility’s fantastic and ridiculous heroism, rigidly resigned and Catholic, a true likeness of the messenger who gallops on horseback through a nonexistent countryside.”
Raymond Lefèvre
“The short dialogue between the councillor’s wife from Krakow and the widow of the village head illustrates the clash between the two lifestyles, urban and rural. The different clothes are visual symbols of difference. The townspeople are dressed as most of the rich bourgeois in the western world of the early 20th century. The peasants − men and women − wear the richly decorated attire of their region. Very significantly, the two women, sitting side by side, do not look at each other. Their brief exchange of words reveals the ignorance of the councillor’s wife when she asks: ‘How are things in the field? Is planting over?’ and the other woman replies: ‘Nobody is planting in this season’.”
Andrea Grunert
