A Film School With a Sense of Place

By GINANNE BROWNELL

Published: October 27, 2013

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LODZ, Poland — Andac Karabeyoglu, a third-year student at the Lodz Film School, sat in a campus cafe on a recent day and explained why she had come all the way from her home in Ankara to study in Poland.

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The Lodz Film School

Roman Polanski, center foreground, who graduated from Lodz, in  ‘‘End of the Night.’’

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Part of the draw, she said, was that Lodz was one of the few film schools left in the world where students still learn on 35-millimeter and 16-millimeter film; but another attraction was the school’s unique way of teaching.

“Coming here gives you a different way of looking at things,” said Ms. Karabeyoglu, 27. “We have to write our own scripts, we have to edit, we have to do our own sound, so there is a huge process that you have to learn. The main aim is not the industry but about discovering yourself, what your strengths are.”

On Oct. 11, the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theater, to give the school its full name, marked its 65th anniversary with huge ceremony and a bigger party. The Oscar-winning Austrian director Michael Haneke was awarded an honorary doctorate — Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese are among a handful of other directors who have been granted that honor — and graduates and filmmakers from across the globe were invited to campus to celebrate.

The school counts award-winning film directors like Mr. Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kiezlowski among its graduates, together with renowned cinematographers including Pawel Edelman, Dariusz Wolski and Andrzej Bartkowiak.

“When I was at school, as all other students, we believed we were wasting our time,” Mr. Polanski said by telephone. “But with the perspective of a few years, I realized how much I got from this school.”

“Teaching filmmaking is a paradox,” said the school’s rector Mariusz Grzegorzek, a Lodz graduate who has taught directing there for two decades. “If you are smart enough, you can learn the basics of filmmaking in two months. I don’t like it when film schools say, ‘We will teach you, we will train you — all the wisdom, all the rules.’ The most important thing about our school is this good balance between learning the craft, learning the theory and learning how to get your message across in your art.”

World War II saw Poland devastated by German and Russian invasions. By the time it ended, with the country under Soviet domination, many of its pre-war filmmakers and actors were dead or living in exile.

“1945 was pretty much year zero for the Polish film industry; they had to start from scratch, and Lodz was part of that,” said Michael Brooke, a British film historian and writer. “There was little money for filmmaking,” he added, “so many of the talented people went into teaching — so you had that right from the start, and they have maintained that tradition.”

The filmmakers Andrzej Munk, Witold Sobocinski and Mr. Wajda — whose film “Walesa, Man of Hope” opened this month in Poland and Britain — were some of Lodz’s earliest students, becoming leaders of Polish New Wave cinema in the 1950s.

“The difference between Lodz and other films schools was that students were taught to be very analytical, very precise and very to the point,” said Jozef Robakowski, who teaches multimedia at the school and is one of Poland’s most influential video artists. “That was partially influenced by Soviet art and partially because of strong relations between the school and the Lodz Art Museum, founded by avant-garde artists in 1930. So those things had impact on movie making here.”

Students also learned — mostly from one another — how to use symbolism to put across political views while living in a totalitarian state. “Symbolism is a very big thing in the film language in Poland,” said Kathrine Windfeld, an Emmy-nominated Danish director who studied in Lodz in the early 1990s.

“Everyone, for example, knew that if a white horse crossed through a frame, it meant ‘we want a free Poland.’ I learned the language of symbolism there, that everything in filmmaking has to have layers,” she said.

In the 1980s, during the years of martial law in Poland, innovative teachers including Mr. Robakowski — who had pressed the heads of the school to create a more multimedia platform — were dismissed from their positions or left in protest. But with the collapse of Communism in 1989 came a fresh openness to new technologies and media.