Identification Marks: None

Sep 12, 2011

(Jerzy Skolimowski, 1964, Poland, 35mm, 73 min)

 Skolimowski scraped his first film together from bits and pieces of film he picked up during his coursework at the Lodz Film School, crafting an independent feature at the height of state-funded film. The first piece in an Antoine Doinel-style semi-autobiographical quartet, Identification Marks: None follows Andrej Leszczyc, an alienated and aimless student who must finally face the Polish draft board. Skolimowski himself plays the lead role in a subdued performance that gives a bleak view of life in communist Poland, fraught with boredom and mistrust. Already apparent in his first film is the hard-hitting, methodical style that characterizes his entire body of work and placed him at the center of the Polish New Wave.

“A bold and increasingly experimental catalogue of the frustrations of youth in postwar communist Poland.”—Anthony Paletta, The Wall Street Journal

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