Politics & Power Quote by Andrzej Wajda

There’s a sly trapdoor in Wajda’s opening clause: “One might have thought…” flatters a commonsense assumption only to expose it as naive. He’s not really interested in bookkeeping. He’s interested in how quickly a political fairy tale about “freedom” gets reduced to a question of who pays the bills, as if the rest of cinema - its permissions, pressures, taboos, and ambitions - were somehow neutral.

The intent is diagnostic. Wajda, a director forged in Poland’s communist system and then thrown into the whiplash of post-1989 capitalism, points to a mistaken forecast: that the big story would be new funding sources. That’s the surface-level change a technocrat would track. His subtext suggests the deeper transformation is aesthetic and moral: what kinds of stories become “viable,” what kinds of risk are rewarded, and what censorship looks like when it’s outsourced to market logic. Under communism, the state could throttle a film by decree; under capitalism, the throttle is “bankability,” distribution access, advertising leverage, festival taste, the silent veto of investors.

Context matters: Wajda’s films wrestled with national memory, occupation, compromise - subjects that rarely behave like clean commercial product. So the line carries a faint bitterness, but also a filmmaker’s realism. He’s warning that replacing an ideological patron with a commercial one doesn’t end control; it changes its costume. The most significant shift isn’t the money itself, but the new definition of what counts as “significant” in the first place.