Aleksander Ford Wiki, Biography, Age, Net Worth, Contact & Informations

Aleksander Ford
Wiki, Biography, Age, Net Worth, Contact & Informations

Here you can learn about Aleksander Ford’s career and private life facts, read the latest news, find all the awards he has won and watch photos and videos.

PERSONAL DATA OF ALEKSANDER FORD

Born in: KIEV, Ukraine (Russian Empire)
Born on: 24/11/1908
He dies at: NAPLES, Florida (USA)

BIOGRAPHY OF ALEKSANDER FORD

Film director. He is considered the founder of Polish cinema after the Second World War: not only for his work as a director, but also for his activity of stimulating and cultural organization and, above all, as a teacher. Born with the name of Moyshe Lipshutz in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, to a Jewish bourgeois family, he studied Art History at the University of Warsaw. He has been active in cinema since the late 1920s, with some documentary short films shot in the style of the Soviet avant-garde in Łódź and focusing on the daily life of the workers. His first feature film is “Mascotte” (1930). In the Thirties he made several documentaries and films on social issues. Among these are “Przebudzenie” (1934; tl Risveglio), co-directed with Wanda Jakubowska, on the life of three girls from a working-class family, “Sabra” (1933; tl Cactus), shot in Palestine on the theme of Zionist settlers and their conflicts, distributed in Polish and Hebrew and “Mirkumen on” (1936, tl Arriamo), about orphaned children in the poor Jewish neighborhoods of Warsaw, filmed in Yiddish. “Legion ulicy” (1932; tl The legion of the streets) obtained considerable success with audiences and critics, so much so that it was considered the best film of the year and won the gold medal of the weekly Kino. Interviewed about the good result of the film, Aleksander Ford replies by pointing out the importance that according to him political and moral teaching must have in a film: «Cinema cannot be a cabaret. It must be a school ». Between 1929 and 1930 he was one of the founders of START (Stowarzyszenie Propagandy Filmu Artystycznego, the Association of Art Film Supporters), together with the historian Jerzy Toeplitz and the progressive and socialist ideological directors Wanda Jakubowska, Eugeniusz Cękalski and Jerzy Zarzycki . START made a notable contribution to the development of cinema in Poland until the year of its dissolution, 1935. In 1937, Aleksander Ford and other START members founded the SAF (Spółdzielnia Autorów Filmowych, Cooperative of Film Authors), which with the his funds allowed Ford to direct his greatest commercial success of the period, “Ludzie Wisly” (1938; tl People of the Vistula), a work directed with Jerzy Zarzycki on the sailors of the great Polish river. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he finds refuge in the Soviet Union, where he initially shoots a series of films aimed at military education. With the creation of a Polish army supported by the Soviet Union (the Ludowe Wojsko Polskie, the People’s Army of Poland) Aleksander Ford becomes the director of the film section. Together with Jerzy Bossak, another Polish director, also one of the founders of START, he shoots some documentaries, including one of the very first on Nazi concentration camps: “Majdanek, cmentarzysko Europy” (1944, tl Majdanek, cemetery of Europe ). Back in Poland, from 1945 to 1947 he was director of Film Polski, the state company that unites all the previous production companies in a new organization of Polish cinema, now nationalized. In recent years he has played a central role in the reconstruction of the film production system in Poland, with the creation of the studios in Łódź, for many years the only ones active in the country. On March 8, 1948, he was one of the founders of the Higher School of Cinema, also in Łódź. For 20 years he taught in this prestigious institution: among his students there are future great masters of cinema such as Andrzej Wejda and a young Roman Polanski. At the Venice Film Festival in 1948 he presented “Flames over Warsaw”, the story of the uprising in the ghetto of the Polish capital: the country was so devastated in the early postwar years that the feature film was shot in Czechoslovakia, in Prague. The Stalinist climate subsequently influenced the opera “Chopin’s Youth” (1952, presented at the XIII Venice International Film Festival), in which the great Polish musician is presented as a “friend of the people”. In 1954 “I cinque della via Barska” wins the International Award at the Cannes Film Festival: here the assistant director is a young Andrzej Wejda, author of whom Ford supervises the debut feature film “Generation” the following year. From 1955 to 1968 he directed Studio, one of the eight sections into which Film Polski was divided after being reformed. In 1958 he participated for the third time in the Venice Film Festival, presenting in competition the film “The eighth day of the week”, in which the actor Zbigniew Cybulski gets one of his first leading roles. One of the director’s most ambitious works dates back to 1960, as well as one of the most expensive films in the history of Polish cinema: “The Teutonic Knights”. Following the anti-Jewish campaign promoted by the government chaired by Władysław Gomułka in 1968, he lost all his positions and in 1969 he emigrated first to Israel, then to Denmark, where he directed “The First Circle” (1972), based on a novel by Sol¿enicyn, and then in Germany. Finally he went to the USA, where he sought in vain for funding. In 1980 he committed suicide in Florida.