Introduction Video
Director Krzysztof Zanussi was present to introduce THE CONSTANT FACTOR and participated in the Q&A session following the screening.
Martin Scorsese presents Masterpieces of Polish Cinema
THE CONSTANT FACTOR (1980)
Directed by Krzysztof Zanussi
With Tadeusz Bradecki, Zofia Mrozowska
Not Rated, 90 minutes, DCP
Polish with English subtitles
Free for ND students. Regular tickets are $4-7 and are available at 574-631-2800 or by visiting performingarts.nd.edu.
A young man with a skill for mathematics dreams of climbing the Himalayas as his father had done before him. But he finds his ideals compromised when he takes a job at an international trade company and must care for his ailing mother. Krzysztof Zanussi received the Jury Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival for his powerful existential portrait of contemporary Polish life.
KRZYSZTOF ZANUSSI
Born in 1939 in Warsaw, Krzysztof. Zanussi is a world-renowned director, screenwriter, producer and author. He studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and physics at Warsaw University, before graduating from the Łódź Film School in 1966. Mr. Zanussi is considered one of Europe’s most renowned directors, whose disciplined contemporary dramas focus on the moral choices and metaphysical questions in everyday life.
“My cinema above all comes from literature, and, in this sense, it becomes a kind of a human language. The idea of the visual component in film as dominant has always evoked my scepticism.” — Krzysztof Zanussi for Film magazine, 1992
His feature debut The Structure of Crystals (1969) received many international awards at festivals including the Panama International Film Festival and Mar Del Plata. In the 1970s, Mr. Zanussi wrote and directed some of his finest cinematic masterpieces: Family Life (1971), Behind the Wall (1971), The Illumination (1973), Camouflage (1976), and Spiral (1978) in which he defined his protagonist: a man faced with the temptation to reject his own values and to compromise individual freedom for the sake of day-to-day existence.
Since the 1980s, Mr. Zanussi has established himself as a major figure of European cinema with films such as The Constant Factor (1980), A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984), Wherever You Are (1988), In Full Gallop (1996), Persona Non Grata (2004) and Revisited (2009). His most recent film, Foreign Body (2014), was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival.
Beyond his artistic work, Mr. Zanussi has been the director of TOR Film Studio in Warsaw since 1979. He is a member of the European Film Academy Board and a recipient of numerous Honoris Causa distinctions (All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography VGIK (Moscow), the National University of Drama and Film ìI.L. Cara- gialeî (Bucharest), the European Humanities University (Minsk), Yanka Kupala State University (Grodno) the Bulgarian University (Sophia), the University of Film and Television (St. Petersburg), the Catholic University of Lublin, the Opole University, Peter Pazmany Catholic University of Budapest.
His many awards include the David di Donatello Prize, the Cavalier‘s Cross of Polonia Restituta Order, Cavalier de L‘Ordre des Sciences et Lettres from the government of France, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Film Festival of India in 2012.
He is a Board member of European Film Academy. He has taught at the film schools in Łódź and Katowice (Poland) and the National Film Schools in Great Britain and Denmark. He also directs theatre — from Krakow and Bonn to Milan, Palermo and Rome.