I am trying to recall the name of the Eastern European film maker -- Polish? Hungarian? Czech? -- who said, of his courageous dissident work under the Soviet regime, something like this: State censorship is difficult, but you can get around it or under it or fool it somehow; but the censorship of money is almost perfect, it is much harder to get around that. Anyone remember this man or the correct quotation? it was on a printed flyer for a showing of one of his films, a bit of ephemera which I had in my office about 2 yrs ago and which has since sunk into the midden layers. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
There's no such thing as freedom in any film industry,'claims Soviet emigre director Andrei Konchalovsky. 'Filmmaking requires an enormous amount of money, and it doesn't matter if that money is state money or corporate money. People who pay for the music order the tune. It's the censorship of power or money.'
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Wajda once said to me, when I asked him whether he would prefer the freedom of Western film-making to the artistic constraints of the Eastern bloc, that there were always ways of getting round political censorship but no way to avoid the censorship of money. Later in his career, when his disillusion with the Communist party was complete, he showed - with Man Of Iron, Man Of Marble and several other outstanding films - exactly what he meant.
