Time & Perspective Quote by Andrzej Wajda

A tidy sentence that quietly bristles with judgment. Wajda isn’t praising nostalgia; he’s diagnosing a cultural habit: cinema that keeps reenacting an older “spirit” long after history has made it obsolete. The passive construction matters. “Continued to be made” dodges naming who keeps authorizing these films, which is exactly the point in a Polish context where authorship was never just artistic - it was institutional, political, and often censorial. The line reads like a shrug that doubles as an indictment: the machinery of filmmaking can outlive the ideas it’s meant to serve.

Wajda came of age in a nation repeatedly rewritten by occupation, war, and Soviet-aligned rule, and his own work helped define the Polish School by pushing against officially sanctioned narratives. So “the spirit of the past” isn’t merely aesthetic - it’s ideological. It gestures toward comforting genres and heroic templates that let audiences and authorities avoid the messier question of what the present demands. When a culture is traumatized, “past spirit” can feel like a shelter; Wajda is warning it can also become a trap.

The phrasing is almost bureaucratic, which makes it sharper: it mimics the tone of a system that produces acceptable art on schedule. Underneath, you can hear the director’s impatience with cinema as embalming practice. He’s not arguing that tradition is worthless. He’s arguing that repetition is never neutral - it’s a choice to keep yesterday’s moral weather controlling today’s stories.