Aleksander Ford

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Aleksander Ford

Aleksander Ford (born November 24, 1908, Kiev, the Russian Empire, now Ukraine; died April 4, 1980, Florida, U.S.A.) was a Polish film director.

Polish filmmaker Aleksander Ford played a key role in establishing Poland's international reputation for excellent cinema. One of Ford's protégés was perhaps the world's best-respected Polish director, Andrzej Wajda.

After a year of making short silent films, Ford made his first feature-length film, Mascot, in 1930. He did not use sound until The Legion of the Streets (1932). When World War II erupted, Ford went to the Soviet Union and worked closely with Jerzy Bossak to establish the film unit for the Polish military.

After the war, Ford headed the government-controlled Film Polski and held enormous sway over the country's entire film industry. He and a core of dedicated colleagues who were affiliated with the communist party rebuilt most of the film production infrastructure after 1945. While discussing this group, Roman Polanski concluded in his biography: "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."

Ford did use his films to voice his discontent and expose the effects of the new regime upon Jews and the poor, as in his documentaries Children Must Laugh (1936) and the award-winning Eighth Day of the Week (1959). Both films were banned in Poland. He is perhaps most famous in Poland for directing the film Knights of the Teutonic Order, based on a novel of the same name by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. Ford continued making films in Poland until a resurgence of anti-Semitism during the late 1960s led him to spend two years in Israel. Ford later lived in Denmark and eventually settled in the United States.

After leaving Poland in 1968, Ford made two more feature films, both of which were critical and commercial failures. In 1973, he created a movie version 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, an English-language, Israeli-German co-production based on the heroic story of Dr. Janusz Korczak.

After 1968, Ford was blacklisted by the communist Polish government, making him a non-person in contemporary discussions and analysis of Polish filmmaking. In The Black Book of Polish Censorship, the basic listing for censors in Poland in 1970s, Ford's name was listed among many other banned names.