RIP: Director Andrzej Wajda dies at 90

I came here to post the news.

An extraordinarily strange thing occurred to me. This film had a formative influence on my academic life; I watched it perhaps a hundred times back in the 80's. When I went a different route in education, I didn't rewatch it because of its incessant grimness. Last night before the Presidential debate, I found it on Hulu while looking for a different French film and began watching it for the first time in thirty years. (I still had the dialogue memorized.)

Then I wake up this morning and see the obituary, and that Wajda perhaps died while I watched the movie. The coincidence jarred me.

The one thing I regret about "Danton"--at the time, in the 80's, I just assumed it was how Eastern European directors and perhaps all non-American directors handled nudity--was the unnecessary scene in the beginning with the child being bathed and slapped. I almost turned the film off then, as in years following, I saw that this kind of nudity was not the norm. "Danton" is an extremely disturbing movie; and it's hard to imagine that contemporary Poland (in the 80's) was quite that ugly.