The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
The Museum is open 11:00 – 19:00
Cinema is closed now
The Devil
A film and lecture by Michał Oleszczyk
29.11.2026 12:00
On this St. Andrew’s Day afternoon, we invite you to two screenings featuring the most famous “Andrzejs” of Polish cinema! Throughout their creative careers, Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Żuławski maintained a dynamic, complex relationship and an unconventional artistic dialogue.
Wajda was a role model for Żuławski (Żuławski’s master’s thesis was devoted to Kanał), a mentor (thanks to his work as an assistant on Wajda’s sets, notably on Ashes), and ultimately also an antagonist, when both fought for the presence of their cinema on the international stage (both Żuławski’s Possession and Wajda’s Man of Iron were screened in the 1981 Cannes Film Festival competition). Many of their films come in pairs. Both adapted Dostoevsky’s *Demons* in France (Wajda in *The Possessed*, Żuławski in *The Public Woman*). Both drew on the same author’s *The Idiot* (Wajda in Nastazja, Żuławski in his earlier Mad Love) and both made films about young working-class women experiencing spiritual and physical torment in Poland during the transition period, set to the rhythm of Andrzej Korzyński’s music (Szamanka vs. Miss Nobody).
This St. Andrew’s Day, we’ll take a closer look at their first, unexpected duet…
Wajda was a role model for Żuławski (Żuławski’s master’s thesis was devoted to Kanał), a mentor (thanks to his work as an assistant on Wajda’s sets, notably on Ashes), and ultimately also an antagonist, when both fought for the presence of their cinema on the international stage (both Żuławski’s Possession and Wajda’s Man of Iron were screened in the 1981 Cannes Film Festival competition). Many of their films come in pairs. Both adapted Dostoevsky’s *Demons* in France (Wajda in *The Possessed*, Żuławski in *The Public Woman*). Both drew on the same author’s *The Idiot* (Wajda in Nastazja, Żuławski in his earlier Mad Love) and both made films about young working-class women experiencing spiritual and physical torment in Poland during the transition period, set to the rhythm of Andrzej Korzyński’s music (Szamanka vs. Miss Nobody).
This St. Andrew’s Day, we’ll take a closer look at their first, unexpected duet…
Before both films, Michał Oleszczyk (Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw) will give a lecture.
Separate tickets are required for the screenings.
Produced as part of Film Group X (led by Andrzej Wajda) in 1972, but shelved until 1988, Andrzej Żuławski’s historical phantasmagoria depicts the Second Partition of Poland as a kind of macabre excess in which national and sexual energies become hypnotically intertwined.
At the center of the story stands the demonic and seductive Jakub (Wojciech Pszoniak), an agent of chaos and change, moving between the strata of a disintegrating Polish society. Unfolding mainly under the cover of night, The Devil, pulsating to the rhythm of Andrzej Korzyński’s music, is a cinematic ritual performed over the body of a nation torn between life and death; between unity and disintegration…
[Michał Oleszczyk]
At the center of the story stands the demonic and seductive Jakub (Wojciech Pszoniak), an agent of chaos and change, moving between the strata of a disintegrating Polish society. Unfolding mainly under the cover of night, The Devil, pulsating to the rhythm of Andrzej Korzyński’s music, is a cinematic ritual performed over the body of a nation torn between life and death; between unity and disintegration…
[Michał Oleszczyk]