Rok 1863
About Rok 1863
In the January Uprising of 1863, Prince Odrowąż is badly wounded. Salomea Brynicka and her father hide him and feed him at the risk of their own lives. The prince's mother then intervenes, and that intervention decides the love between Salomea and the prince. The film adds living pictures from Artur Grottger's cycles Polonia and Lithuania, and it ends on a group of uprising veterans in an independent Poland.
Cast & crew
More about Rok 1863
Edward Puchalski directed and wrote the script. Albert Wywerka photographed it. It is the first filming of Stefan Żeromski's 1912 novel Wierna rzeka. The Polish premiere was July 7, 1922. Aleksander Zelwerowicz plays Aleksander Wielopolski, Ryszard Sobiszewski the prince, Stanisława Chrzanowska the princess, and Maria Hryniewicz Salomea.
Themes
Background
The January Uprising of 1863–64 had failed. By 1922 Poland was independent, and the film shows the veterans in that later country.
Making
Puchalski staged Grottger's drawings as tableaux inside a story taken from Żeromski, then closed on living veterans rather than on the novel's last page alone.
Look
Albert Wywerka photographed the film.
Music
Silent.
Preservation
An incomplete later version was long the only copy known. The 1932 reissue had rearranged the film. A 2003 copy was identified as the original, and the Filmoteka Narodowa used it to restore the first version.
Notes
- Antoni Bednarczyk and Helena Marcello-Palińska play the Rudeckis. Stanisław Hryniewicz plays Antoni Brynicki. Henryk Rydzewski plays an officer.
- For the seventieth anniversary of the uprising, the film was recut and put back into theaters in 1932 in a different form, with shots and whole sequences moved.
- A copy that reached the Polish archive in 2003 proved to be the original. An earlier archive copy, from 1957 and 1964, was the later version and was missing two acts.
- The Filmoteka Narodowa restored the original order from the comparison of the two copies.
Scenes
- Salomea and her father shelter the wounded prince.
- The last shot gathers veterans of the uprising in independent Poland.
Influenced by
- Wierna rzeka (Stefan Żeromski)
- Artur Grottger's Polonia and Lithuania
