Slideshow
ROUGH TREATMENT (WITHOUT ANESTHESIA)
Bez znieczulenia
Poland, 1978
Directed by Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay by Agnieszka Holland
Starring Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Ewa Dałkowska, Andrzej Seweryn, Krystyna Janda
Approx. 131 mins.
A television journalist’s career and personal life unravel simultaneously in this Kafkaesque political drama and paranoid thriller that was the first of five Wajda films scripted by Agnieszka Holland. Made just before the rise of the Solidarity movement, Wajda considers this to be one of his most directly personal and politically timely works, “I made it at a time when the regime realized that other authorities—such as the authority of art—were threatening it, so it had to undermine them all in order to assert its own. Suddenly, there was no longer a social life in the department of the university where I taught. I had to react against it.”
Presented with support from The Ashes and Diamonds Fund for Eastern European Film
Reviews
“Jerzy’s growing panic is beautifully illuminated in Mr. Zapasiewicz, who manages to find heroic stature in a character who has always compromised. One of the more provocative movies of the year to date.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times