Innocent Sorcerers

Directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1960. Wajda’s singular New Wave film—shot two months before À bout de souffle but released after—follows a noncommittal hipster through a series of pararomantic encounters in nightclubs, apartments and boxing rings. Dismissed both by early critics and the director (who subsequently called the early ’60s the “most difficult period” of his life), Innocent Sorcerers has since been reappraised as a key entry in postwar Polish cinema. Youth culture, jazz, motorbikes and promiscuity abound in a freshly-thawed Warsaw under the influence of Western capital and culture. History and politics are absent, with Wajda’s attention turned instead to the contemporary music scene he and then-twenty-year-old screenwriter Jerzy Skolimowski experienced at the Łódź Film School. Pianist Krzysztof Komeda composed the electrifying score and played himself in a cameo, where Zbigniew…