In Everything for Sale Andrzej Wajda has triumphantly forged the link between art and reality and, as he prophesied, the process was far from simple. The catalyst seems quintessential both of Wajda and of Poland: the death of a hero, Zbigniew Cybulski. The resulting film is both public and private, a memorial to the dead actor, a personal testament of the director and, crucially, a work which shatters the artistic fetters which have bound Wajda throughout his career. Feeding both on reality and on film, Everything for Sale is Wajda’s meditation on a theme, illusion and reality, which has preoccupied not only some of the cinema’s most vital artists (Renoir, Godard, Antonioni), but also major figures in the other arts (Joyce, Pirandello, Magritte). At one blow he has matured from an extremely interesting, visually exciting artist whose work was fully comprehensible only in the Polish context to an international artist who happens to be Polish.
There are certain facts which must be noted prior to any critical assessment of Everything for Sale. The film-within-the-film bears the same title; the leading players appear with their own names; the director of the film-within-the-film is played by Andrzej Lapicki, is therefore known as Andrzej, and bears some physical resemblance to Wajda. Beata (Tyszkiewicz), Andrzej’s wife in the film, is in reality Mrs Wajda and may have been involved with Cybulski at some time in the past. Similarly, Elzbieta (Czyzewska), Cybulski’s wife/mistress in the film, may have been involved with the real Cybulski. Further many of the characters may be expressing sentiments they hold in reality: it is widely known, for instance; that Bogumil Kobiela’s attack on the making of the film-within-the film accords with his view on the making of Everything for Sale. Clearly these facts indicate the primary level at which film/illusion and reality are interpenetrated, and point forward to the working out of this theme within the texture of the film.
After Cybulski’s death has become known, the leading figures are seen in black, walking with downcast eyes. We assume that they are walking in his cortège until we see that they are in a film studio and following a trolley bearing cans of film, as it turns out the film of Cybulski’s funeral. Like so many of the images of Everything for Sale, this one is complex and resonant. It encapsulates the several expressions of the appearance/reality theme: in terms of the film relationship with the audience, in terms of Wajda’s preoccupation with the dichotomy between art and life, and in terms of the source of Cybulski’s charisma; whether the myth is growing round the man or his celluloid image.
Everything for Sale exemplifies the eternal mystery of artistic creation. Out of a devastating personal tragedy Wajda has wrought a masterpiece. We must mourn with the man and rejoice with the artist.
Colin McArthur, Sight and Sound, Summer 1969
In Everything for Sale, a recurrent situation is the abrupt cessation of action. The screech of train wheels in the opening scene echoes throughout the film as cars, projects, parties and relationships shudder to a halt. At the same time, there are two images which by contrast are emphatically continuous: the spinning roundabout on which Ela imprisons the sophisticated film crowd she loathes, and the surging gallop of horses (also running in circles) which punctuates the film and eventually brings it to a close.
Wajda’s comment is one of paradox: that although everything stops when a man dies, everything also carries on, like it or no. Poland’s leading actor is gone, but a new leading actor is at hand. He may not be the same man, but he’ll fulfil the same function; films, reputations, friends and enemies will still be made, legends will grow and die, the Polish film ‘set’ will continue to ride a merry-go-round of petty intrigue and gossip, and the flow of vitality from newcoming talent will continue to be irresistible. With its lively music track and the racing energy of the scenes with Daniel Olbrychski, Everything for Sale is in fact as much a vote of confidence in the future as a mournful requiem for the past. Which said, it must be admitted that Wajda defines his optimism in relatively simple terms, whereas his requiem is a complex and multi-faceted affair, an attempt to define what has been lost as well as to write its epitaph.
To start with, there’s the need to define Cybulski, the personification of Wajda’s own rise to fame and of the Polish cinema’s international reputation for the decade following Ashes and Diamonds. Easy enough to recall his mannerisms, his clothes, the sort of presents he gave, the way he behaved; and easy enough to say what he represented (one shot of Adam Pawlikowski looking at the flame on a brandy-glass sums it up instantly); but the man himself is completely elusive. Did his war stories come from someone else’s experiences? Was his death really ‘somehow in keeping with his life, somehow as fine as his life’? The film pursues his image with a feverish urgency (sometimes even momentarily seeming to catch up with the man – a glimpse of dark glasses in a crowded room, his picture glimpsed behind his ‘successor’ Daniel, a passer-by with the familiar cut of hair); but by the time Andrzej is kicking bitterly at a dummy in the road, he has recognised that truth is all things to all men. In making a film about someone else he only succeeds in filming himself.
So the second stage of Everything for Sale is a definition of the film director in general and of Andrzej Wajda in particular, symbolism (mirrors, horses, blood and snow), wife, disenchantment, sadomasochism and all. As the opening scene establishes, he and the missing actor are interchangeable in their roles both public and private; they may have felt at home among the grim paintings of Andrzej Wroblewski, but the new Poland has left them all behind, comfortless in their fast-fading glamour and as outdated in their way as the dusty nationalism that Wajda gently satirised in Ashes and Diamonds and saluted in Lotna. Everything they had (or imagined they had) was for sale and they sold it; now Wajda even sells Cybulski’s death, and his own loss of direction, for the sake of the cinema.
The sell-out theme pervades as far as Cybulski’s own idea for a film. Yet the saving grace of Everything for Sale is that it is never contemptuous, either of the cinema or of the people creating it; rather like the study of Beata and Ela as they hear of the actor’s death, the film retreats from voyeurism into a form of meditation (in this example, the beautiful pan through sunlight reflected in the car windscreen). Whatever film may be, Wajda still admits to being involved with it, and if he knows more about the past than he does about the future, he knows most of all about transferring it to the screen.
Philip Strick, Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1969
Warsaw (from Love at Twenty)
Wajda’s last collaboration with Zbigniew Cybulski grapples with intergenerational misalignment.
Warsaw (from Love at Twenty) Warszawa (from Miłość dwudziestolatków
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Production Companies: Film Polski, Zespól Filmowy ‘Kamera’
Assistant Director: Andrzej Zulawski
Screenplay: Jerzy Stefan Stawïnski
Photography: Jerzy Lipman
Music: Jerzy Matuszkiewicz
Poland 1962
25 mins
Digital (restoration)
Everything for Sale Wszystko Na Sprzedaż
Director: Andrzej Wajda
©: Film Polski
Production Company: Zespól Filmowy ‘Kamera’
Producers: Jerzy Bossak, Ernest Bryll, Jozef Krakowski
Production Manager: Barbara Pec-Slesicka
Assistant Directors: Andrzej Piotrowski, Andrzej Kostenko, Krystyna Grochowicz
Screenplay: Andrzej Wajda
Director of Photography: Witold Sobocinski
Camera Operator: Maciej Kijowski
Editor: Halina Prugar
Assistant Editor: Grazyna Pliszczynska
Art Director: Wieslaw Sniadecki
Costumes: Katarzyna Chodorowicz
Make-up: Jadwiga Swietoslawska, Anna Adamek
Music Composed and Conducted by: Andrzej Korzynski
Sound: Wieslawa Dembinska
Cast
Beata Tyszkiewicz (Beata, Andrzej’s wife)
Elzbieta Czyzewska (Ela, the actor’s wife)
Andrzej Lapicki (Andrzej, film director)
Daniel Olbrychski (Daniel)
Witold Holtz (Witek, assistant director)
Malgorzata Potocka (Mala)
Bogumil Kobiela (Bobek)
Elzbieta Kepinska
Irena Laskowska
Tadeusz Kalinowski
Wieslaw Dymny
Wojciech Solarz
Józef Fuchs
Witold Dederko
Andrzej Kostenko
Franciszek Starowieyski
Wanda Warska
Adam Pawlikowsky
T. Baljon
J. Domanski
B. Ejmont
K. Fus
A. Gawronski
W. Hoffman
I. Harasymowicz
B Jarosz
M. Kalenik
J. Karaszkiewicz
B. Lyakowski
E. Nowacka
R. Ostalowski
L. Pietraszak
A. Piotrowski
J. Turowicz
Poland 1968©
99 mins
Digital (restoration)
Restored by Orka and The Chimney Pot
With thanks to
Marlena Łukasiak, Michał Oleszczyk, Jędrzej Sabliński
Presented with the ICA and Ciné Lumière, who will also be hosting screenings of Wajda’s works in February and March
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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