A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Alexander Ford
Mosze Lifszyc
Александр Форд
Birthplace:
Kijów, Imperium Rosyjskie (obecnie Ukraina)
Born:
November 24, 1908
Died:
April 4, 1980
Aleksander Ford (born Mosze Lifszyc) was a Polish film director; and head of the Polish People's Army Film Crew in the Soviet Union during World War II. Ford became director of the nationalized Film Polski company following the Red Army occupation of Poland. In 1948 the new communist authorities appointed him professor of the National Film School in Łódź. Roman Polanski was among his students. Another of Ford's protégés was the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda. Ford made his first feature film, Mascot in 1930, after a year of making short silent films. He did not use sound until The Legion of the Streets (1932). When World War II began, Ford escaped to the Soviet Union and worked closely with Jerzy Bossak to establish a film unit for the Soviet-sponsored People's Army of Poland in the USSR. The unit was called Czołówka Filmowa Ludowego Wojska Polskiego (or simply Czołówka; spearhead). After the war, Ford was appointed head of the government-controlled Film Polski and held enormous sway over the country's entire film industry. In the process of accumulating power he denounced a fellow film director, Jerzy Gabryelski, to the NKVD secret police, contentiously accusing him of "reactionary" and "antisemitic" views, which resulted in Gabryelski's arrest and torture. Ford and a group of colleagues from the Polish Communist Party rebuilt most of the country's film production infrastructure. Roman Polanski wrote in his biography about them: "They included some extremely competent people, notably Aleksander Ford, a veteran party member, who was then an orthodox Stalinist. […] The real power broker during the immediate postwar period was Ford himself, who established a small film empire of his own." For the next twenty years, Ford served as professor at the state-run National Film School in Łódź. He is perhaps best remembered for directing the first postwar documentary Majdanek - cmentarzysko Europy (Majdanek – the Cemetery of Europe) and the feature film Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960), based on a novel of the same name by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. Ford, a self-identified Communist, used his films to "express social messages on the screen," as in his documentaries: the award-winning Legion ulicy, (The Street Legion, 1932), Children Must Laugh (1936) and the postwar Eighth Day of the Week (1958) rejected by the communist party censors during the Polish October. Ford continued making films in Poland until the 1968 Polish political crisis. Accused of antisocialist activity and expelled from the Communist Party, Ford emigrated to Israel where he lived for the next two years. He later moved to Denmark and eventually settled in the United States. Ford made two more feature films, both of which were commercial and critical failures. In 1973, he made a film adaptation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, a Danish-Swedish production that recounted the horrors of the Soviet gulag. In 1975 he made The Martyr (de), an English language, Israeli-German co-production based on the heroic story of Dr. Janusz Korczak. Blacklisted by the Polish communist government as a political defector, Ford became a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking. Isolated, he committed suicide in a Florida hotel on 4 April 1980. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Creative Director:
1955 A Generation
Dialogue:
1955 A Generation
1960 Knights of the Teutonic Order
Director:
1930 Mascot
1932 Legion of the Streets
1933 Sabra
1934 Przebudzenie
1935 Nie miała baba kłopotu
1936 Children Must Laugh
1938 The People of the Vistula
1943 Przysięgamy ziemi polskiej
1944 Majdanek - Cemetery of Europe
1949 Border Street
1952 Young Chopin
1954 Five Boys from Barska Street
1955 A Generation
1958 The Eighth Day of the Week
1960 Knights of the Teutonic Order
1964 The First Day of Freedom
1966 The Doctor Speaks Out
1973 The First Circle
1975 You Are Free, Dr. Korczak
Editor:
1930 Mascot
1932 Legion of the Streets
1933 Sabra
1934 Przebudzenie
1935 Nie miała baba kłopotu
1936 Children Must Laugh
1938 The People of the Vistula
1943 Przysięgamy ziemi polskiej
1944 Majdanek - Cemetery of Europe
1949 Border Street
1952 Young Chopin
1954 Five Boys from Barska Street
1955 A Generation
1958 The Eighth Day of the Week
1960 Knights of the Teutonic Order
1964 The First Day of Freedom
1966 The Doctor Speaks Out
1973 The First Circle
1975 You Are Free, Dr. Korczak
Screenplay:
1930 Mascot
1932 Legion of the Streets
1933 Sabra
1934 Przebudzenie
1935 Nie miała baba kłopotu
1936 Children Must Laugh
1938 The People of the Vistula
1943 Przysięgamy ziemi polskiej
1944 Majdanek - Cemetery of Europe
1949 Border Street
1952 Young Chopin
1954 Five Boys from Barska Street
1955 A Generation
1958 The Eighth Day of the Week
1960 Knights of the Teutonic Order
1964 The First Day of Freedom
1966 The Doctor Speaks Out
1973 The First Circle
1975 You Are Free, Dr. Korczak
Storyboard:
1930 Mascot
1932 Legion of the Streets
1933 Sabra
1934 Przebudzenie
1935 Nie miała baba kłopotu
1936 Children Must Laugh
1938 The People of the Vistula
1943 Przysięgamy ziemi polskiej
1944 Majdanek - Cemetery of Europe
1949 Border Street
1952 Young Chopin
1954 Five Boys from Barska Street
1955 A Generation
1958 The Eighth Day of the Week
1960 Knights of the Teutonic Order
1964 The First Day of Freedom
1966 The Doctor Speaks Out
1973 The First Circle
1975 You Are Free, Dr. Korczak
Writer:
1930 Mascot
1932 Legion of the Streets
1933 Sabra
1934 Przebudzenie
1935 Nie miała baba kłopotu
1936 Children Must Laugh
1938 The People of the Vistula
1943 Przysięgamy ziemi polskiej
1944 Majdanek - Cemetery of Europe
1949 Border Street
1952 Young Chopin
1954 Five Boys from Barska Street
1955 A Generation
1958 The Eighth Day of the Week
1960 Knights of the Teutonic Order
1964 The First Day of Freedom
1966 The Doctor Speaks Out
1973 The First Circle
1975 You Are Free, Dr. Korczak
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.