Aleksander Ford - Biography

Aleksander Ford born Mosze Lifszyc (24 November 1908, Kiev, Russian Empire now Ukraine – 4 April 1980, Naples, Florida, United States) was a Polish film director; and head of the Polish People's Army Film Crew in the Soviet Union. Ford became director of the nationalized "Film Polski" company at the end of World War II. In 1948–1968 he was a professor of the National Film School in Łódź (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa), where Roman Polanski was among his students. One of Ford's protégés was the Polish ascent film director Andrzej Wajda. In 1968 Ford emigrated to Israel and from there through Germany and Denmark, to the United States. He committed suicide in 1980 in Naples, Florida.

Professional career

Ford made his first feature film, Mascot in 1930, after a year of making short silent films. He did not use sound until The Legion of the Streets (1932). When World War II began, Ford escaped to the Soviet Union and worked closely with Jerzy Bossak to establish a film unit for the Soviet-sponsored People's Army of Poland in the USSR. The unit was called Czołówka Filmowa Ludowego Wojska Polskiego (or simply Czołówka; spearhead).

After the war, Ford was appointed head of the government-controlled Film Polski and has held enormous sway over the country's entire film industry. With a group of colleagues from the Polish Communist Party they rebuilt most of the film production infrastructure. Roman Polanski wrote in his biography about them: "They included some extremely competent people, notably Aleksander Ford, a veteran party member, who was then an orthodox Stalinist. […] The real power broker during the immediate postwar period was Ford himself, who established a small film empire of his own." For the next twenty years, Ford served as professor of the state-run National Film School in Łódź (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa). He is perhaps best remembered for directing the first postwar documentary Majdanek - cmentarzysko Europy (Majdanek – the Cemetery of Europe) and the feature film Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960), based on a novel of the same name by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Ford, a self-identified Communist, used his films to "express social messages on the screen," as in his documentaries: the award-winning Legion ulicy, (The Street Legion, 1932), Children Must Laugh (1936) and the postwar Eighth Day of the Week (1958) rejected by the communist party censors during the Polish October. Ford continued making films in Poland until the 1968 Polish political crisis. Accused of antisocialist activity and expelled from the Communist Party, Ford emigrated to Israel where he lived for the next two years. He later moved to Denmark and eventually settled in the United States. Ford made two more feature films, both of which were commercial and critical failures. In 1973, he made a film adaptation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, a Danish-Swedish production that recounted the horrors of the Soviet gulag. In 1975 he made The Martyr, an English language, Israeli-German co-production based on the heroic story of Dr. Janusz Korczak. Blacklisted by the Polish communist government, Ford became a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking. Isolated, he committed suicide in a Florida hotel on 4 April 1980.

Selected filmography

• The Martyr (1975)
• The First Circle (1973)
• The First Day of Freedom (Pierwszy dzien wolnosci, 1964)
• Knights of the Teutonic Order (Krzyzacy, 1960)
• Eighth Day of the Week (Ósmy dzien tygodnia, 1959)
• Five Boys from Barska Street (Piątka z ulicy Barskiej, 1954)
• Youth of Chopin (Młodość Chopina, 1952)
• Border Street (Ulica Graniczna, 1949)
• Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe (Majdanek - cmentarzysko Europy, 1945)
• Children Must Laugh (Droga mlodych, 1936)
• Legion of the Streets (Legion Ulicy, 1932)

See also

• Cinema of Poland
• List of Polish language films