Knife in the Water

^director Roman Polański
^screenplay Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski, Jakub Goldberg
^{director of photography} Jerzy Lipman
^music Krzysztof Komeda
^with Leon Niemczyk, Jolanta Umecka, Zygmunt Malanowicz
^awards
 Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, 1963
 FIPRESCI Prize, ‘Cinéma 62’ (French film magazine) Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, 1962
 Grand Prix at Prades Film Festival, 1963
 New West German Critics’ Award at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for Best Feature Film Debut of a short film director, 1964
 3rd Prize, Bronze Dolphin, at the International Festival of Educational Films in Teheran, 1965
 FIPRESCI Prize at the International Film Festival in Panama (together with ‘Mother Joan of the Angels’), 1966
 ’Film’ magazine Readers Award, Golden Duck (Złota Kaczka), 1962

[DIALOGUE FROM THE FILM]

The Boy: I’d prefer to tell you how I was speeding in such a car from Warsaw… Andrzej: And if I had not stopped the car? The Boy: Then there’d be a dead body on the road. Andrzej: You’re doing it for the kicks? The Boy: Otherwise, life would be boring, wouldn’t it? Krystyna: How old are you? Andrzej: I could’ve run over a kid, and made to answer for a man.

MAREK HENDRYKOWSKI, MODERN JAZZ, ‘KWARTALNIK FILMOWY’, 1997, NO. 17

The composition of ‘Knife in the Water’ is based on an unceasing, fascinating conflict, engulfing the three protagonists. It is this conflict that infuses the whole scene with dynamism and turns everything that hits our eyes or ears into an piece of a film improvisation on the assigned subject. The same feature of its construction determines the fact that the screen characters become elements of discordant situations. (…) Additionally, they are furnished with the ‘a wardrobe of the soul’ (term applied by Karol Irzykowski), comprising a variety of: poses, masks, self-representations, auto creations of the three heroes.(…) ‘Knife in the Water’ belongs to the most brilliant debuts of Polish cinema. It exerted a major influence on the development of the Polish film art of the Sixties.