Education Quote by Andrzej Wajda

A shrug disguised as a diagnosis: Wajda sets up a neat binary and lets the discomfort do the talking. “On the one hand” is the language of compromise, but also of quiet indictment. He’s describing an ecosystem where success is measurable in bodies in seats - “big audiences, adults as well as primary and secondary school students” - a line that sounds inclusive until you hear the bureaucratic undertone. Schoolkids don’t just attend; they’re delivered. The spectacle isn’t only popular, it’s institutionally endorsed, safe enough to be assigned.

Then he drops the other hand: “attempts to create contemporary Polish film.” The word “attempts” carries the whole critique. It implies effort without infrastructure, ambition without permission, artists pushing against a cultural machine that prefers pageantry or historical grandeur to the messy present. Wajda isn’t condemning spectacle as craft; he’s pointing at what spectacle becomes in a pressured media landscape: a substitute for risk. Contemporary cinema, in this framing, isn’t a genre but a stance - an insistence on depicting the lived contradictions of Poland now, not Poland mythologized.

Context matters because Wajda’s career sits in the fault line between art and authority: postwar trauma, state cultural policy, censorship, and the recurring temptation to launder politics into “heritage.” The quote reads like a director mapping the terms of survival. You can fill theaters, or you can tell the truth. If you want both, you’ll be negotiating with forces that prefer you choose the former.