Cinema
The Structure of Crystal
Struktura kryształu
Krzysztof Zanussi · 1969
Synopsis
Jan and Marek, promising physicists, were fellow students. Marek, back from a scholarship abroad, begins a brilliant research career in Warsaw; Jan has chosen the countryside, where he works as a meteorologist in an isolated station, with his wife Anna, a village schoolteacher. One winter day, Marek arrives by car, at the request of a professor, to persuade Jan to return to research. The meeting of the two friends becomes the confrontation of two attitudes, two characters and two ideas of the meaning of life.
Context
The first feature film by its author, written with Edward Żebrowski, the film is partly improvised and uses non-professional actors alongside Barbara Wrzesińska, Jan Mysłowicz and Andrzej Żarnecki. It was shot in Puławy and in the Kampinos forest, photographed by Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz to music by Wojciech Kilar. Its author drew on two films confronting the bourgeois ideal with provincial life, among them Chabrol's Le Beau Serge; critics have seen it as a forerunner of the cinema of moral anxiety.
Who it is for
About seventy-five minutes of conversations, without action, in a winter landscape in the countryside.
Prizes and reception
Andrzej Munk Prize in 1969, screenplay prize and Argentine critics' prize at Mar del Plata, and regarded as a forerunner of its movement.
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