A film festival with a well-balanced, worldly wise, and history conscious sensibility — which the SBIFF is — needs to keep its perspective near, far, and wide. In the past few days, Harold Lloyd’s 1925-vintage silent film The Freshman hit the Arlington’s big screen (with the glorious in-house theater organ in action), and the festival has wisely bowed to cinematic culture by screening the late, great Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s swan song effort, Afterimage.
For Wajda, who died last October at age 90, Afterimage was the final, impassioned, and magnificently made canvas in a remarkable, prolific, and influential life in cinema, as well as a powerful statement that has eerie implications in America, post-1-20-17. Wajda’s tribute to the avant-garde artist and theorist Wladyslaw Strzeminski, whose life unravels in the first wave of fascist rule under the USSR in the late 1940s, is essentially a portrait of an artist as an ostracized “degenerate artist,” in a nation beginning a reign of new tyranny after WWII’s ravages.
It’s a treat for the senses, as well. Aside from cinematographer Pawel Edelman’s rapturous and careful camera work, the dissonance-salted chamber music score by the late Andrzej Panufnik is clearly one of the greatest music scores of the festival so far.