Aging & Wisdom Quote by Andrzej Wajda

There’s a quiet irony in Wajda’s “on the one hand”: a phrase that sounds like balance but really introduces a cultural compromise. He’s describing a mid-century artistic migration where ambition isn’t abandoning theatre so much as rerouting through a new machine. Television theatre becomes a corridor space, not a destination: close enough to the camera to learn its grammar, still respectable enough to claim stage legitimacy. The subtext is pragmatic and faintly skeptical. These “young theatre directors” aren’t chasing TV for its own aesthetic possibilities; they’re using it as proximity training for cinema, the medium with the higher stakes, the larger audience, the deeper myth.

Context matters. In postwar Europe - and especially in Eastern Bloc cultural economies - the path to film was often gated by institutions, budgets, and politics. Television, with its demand for live or semi-live drama, offered both access and a kind of camouflage: you could practice visual storytelling, rhythm, and intimacy under the banner of “theatre,” which carried cultural prestige and ideological safety. Wajda’s wording also hints at a generational restlessness: they had “studied and worked” in theatre, did the respectable apprenticeship, and still felt the gravitational pull of cinema’s modernity.

The line works because it captures a recurring artistic truth without romanticizing it: creative careers are built less on pure calling than on vectors - where the opportunities are, where the technology is headed, where influence congregates. Wajda frames it as movement toward the future, but the “despite” suggests a cost: a partial betrayal of the craft that formed them, traded for the camera’s promise.