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Andrzej Wajda - Why did Reymont write 'The Promised Land'? (119/222)

1,223 views · Published 26 October 2017 · 2:56 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Entertainment

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To listen to more of Andrzej Wajda’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFy6EEYt468zst0wxZgLIw2T

Polish film director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016), whose début films portrayed the horror of the German occupation of Poland, won awards at Cannes which established his reputation as storyteller and commentator on Polish history. He also served on the national Senate from 1989-91. [Listener: Jacek Petrycki]

TRANSCRIPT: The idea for a film can come from very varied sources. What's important is to have your ears open and to listen to what other people are saying because it's impossible to read every story that a film director should know and even if you've read them, you can't have an idea for a film. Sometimes these ideas appear quite by accident, which is what happened here. Andrzej Żuławski, who'd read everything including 'The Promised Land', a little known work by Reymont - his other stories are better known, particularly 'The Peasants' for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; it's a very dark tale a bit like Scandinavian stories. However, few people know 'The Promised Land'. This is a book that passed almost unnoticed, but unnoticed by us many years later, because when Reymont was writing it, he was writing for a commission. The right wing wanted to show the hopelessness of the Poles' struggle against foreign capital, that there was no way they could win. Łódź was a good example of this. It's interesting that the author of this story, Reymont, received money for writing it from the right wing who allowed him to do very good research in Łódź, after which he travelled to Paris for a year or two where he wrote the novel. It was a complete surprise because Polish literature wasn't familiar with that photographic degree of realism. The fantastic thing about 'The Promised Land' as opposed to 'The Wedding' which is made out of cobwebs through which you need to peer, so to speak, to see what's behind it, is that here everything is sharply defined as if caught in a lens, everything is precise, named, evident, virtually with a price-tag.

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