Aleksander Ford

Aleksander Ford born Mosze Lifszyc was a Polish film director and head of the Polish Peoples Army Film Crew in the Soviet Union during World War II Ford became director of the nationalized Film Polski company following the Red Army occupation of Poland In 1948 the new communist authorities appointed him professor of the National Film School in Łódź Roman Polanski was among his students Another of Fords protégés was the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda 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 Sovietsponsored Peoples 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 governmentcontrolled Film Polski and held enormous sway over the countrys entire film industry In the process of accumulating power he denounced a fellow film director Jerzy Gabryelski to the NKVD secret police contentiously accusing him of reactionary and antisemitic views which resulted in Gabryelskis arrest and torture Ford and a group of colleagues from the Polish Communist Party rebuilt most of the countrys 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 at the staterun National Film School in Łódź 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 selfidentified Communist used his films to express social messages on the screen as in his documentaries the awardwinning 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 Solzhenitsyns novel The First Circle a DanishSwedish production that recounted the horrors of the Soviet gulag In 1975 he made The Martyr de an English language IsraeliGerman coproduction based on the heroic story of Dr Janusz Korczak Blacklisted by the Polish communist government as a political defector Ford became a nonperson in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking Isolated he committed suicide in a Florida hotel on 4 April 1980 From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia