Realized by Polanski as his final project at the State Film School in Lodz, Poland. The short film, told mostly in flashback, portrays a washroom attendant who reminisces about her former life: her first love, her newborn child and the war.
The vicissitudes of the main character, Witek, are told in three different ways, according to how his destiny could have been: three different lives, three different attitudes towards reality and history, three different politics choices and moral consequences: political activist, militant, "peacefull man" dealing with scientific research and not politics. The provocatory en...
The film features two men, who emerge from the sea carrying a large wardrobe, which they proceed to carry into a town. Carrying the wardrobe, the two encounter a series of hostile events, including being attacked by a group of youths. Finally, they go back to the beach and then disappear in the sea.
An elderly dollmaker works in his shop by the light of an oil-lamp.
Two men, a sledge, a barren winter landscape and the eternal struggle for existence and power.
During a battle in Saragossa, a French officer finds a large book with strange drawings that capture his attention. While he is looking at it, an enemy officer tries to arrest him but ends up translating the book for him. The second officer recognize its author as his own grandfather. The book and the movie tell about the life of Alfonso Van Worden, who was a captain in the...
One man gets stabbed while he is sleeping in his bed. Polanski's first short movie.
Routine lavorativa di un’impresa di pompe funebri, alternata alle immagini di gente che passa nella strada di fronte. Il film si chiude in una corsia d'ospedale, dove i neonati sono contrassegnati ciascuno con il proprio numero d’ordine.
A man walks down the exterior staircase of some building. He passes a small window and sees a young woman standing at a washbasin, drying her hair with a towel that covers her face. Fearing to be seen, the man starts down the stairs, only to return to the window afterwards. He again looks in the same window and this time he sees a man brushing his teeth who gives him an uns...
Jòsef, the main character, visits the sanatorium where his parents, he himself as a child, the emperor Francesco Giuseppe and other characters lived. The allegoric entrance to the building is the entrance to the world of fantasy, a dreamlike and labyrinthic dimension. In this strange sanatorium, time has stopped, or better, time has gone backwards. Here, Jòsef can explore th...