- The Illumination.
Polish cinema is a very rich cinema. It has, after all, given us Chinatown, by way of Roman Polanski. This year’s Seattle Polish Film Festival joins Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema and the Northwest Film Forum to screen some of this nation’s leading movies. One such work is The Illumination, which was made in 1972 and directed by Krzysztof Zanussi, and which is much, much, much (soooo much) better than Terence Malik’s The Tree of Life. It’s telling that a Polish film made more than 40 years ago has in its story—which concerns the education and personal development of a young physicist—a deeper understanding of the nature of life, human society, the history of the earth, and the structure of the cosmos than a film made in 2011…
