Danton

Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful, intimate depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution. By drawing parallels to Polish “solidarity,” a movement that was being quashed by the government as the film went into production, Wajda drags history into the present. Meticulous and fiery, Danton has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made about the Terror.

France
1983
136 minutes
Color
1.66:1
French
Spine #464

Special Features

New high-definition digital transfer
Video interviews with director Andrzej Wajda, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and Polish film critic Jerzy Plazewski
Wajda’s "Danton," a 42-minute behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Leonard Quart

New cover by Riccardo Vecchio

DVD 2 Discs $31.96 SRP: $39.95

Special Features

New high-definition digital transfer
Video interviews with director Andrzej Wajda, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and Polish film critic Jerzy Plazewski
Wajda’s "Danton," a 42-minute behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film
Original theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Leonard Quart

New cover by Riccardo Vecchio

Cast & Credits

Cast

Gérard Depardieu: Georges Danton
Wojciech Pszoniak: Maximilien Robespierre
Anne Alvaro: Éléonore Duplay
Roland Blanche: Lacroix
Patrice Chereau: Camille Desmoulins
Andrzej Seweryn: Léonard Bourdon
Angela Winkler: Lucille Desmoulins
Alain Macé: Héron
Bogusław Linda: Saint-Just
Lucien Melki: Fabre d’Eglantine

Credits

Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière
Screenplay: Agnieszka Holland
Screenplay: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Jacek Gasiorowski
Screenplay: Boleslaw Michalek
Based on the play by: Stanislawa Przybyszewska
Music: Jean Prodromides
Cinematography: Igor Luther
Editing: Halina Prugar-Ketling
Production design: Allan Starski

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Explore

Jean-Claude Carrière

Writer

A quietly influential force in art cinema throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (also an author, actor, opera librettist, and occasional director) has collaborated with such important screen artists as Luis Buñuel, Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Philip Kaufman, Louis Malle, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, and Andrzej Wajda. He got his start working with the comic filmmaker Pierre Etaix on the Oscar-winning slapstick short Happy Anniversary (1962), which the two codirected; Carrière would go on to cowrite all of Etaix’s 1960s features. Meanwhile, Buñuel enlisted Carrière to cowrite 1964’s Diary of a Chambermaid, the beginning of a grand partnership that would also result in increasingly surreal visions like Belle de jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). (In 2012, Carrière said of working with Buñuel, “How we mixed together is impossible to say. One started an idea, the other finished it.”) As is clear from those productions, he has a way with the absurd, but the versatile and erudite Carrière is also a keen literary adapter, translating such daunting novels as The Tin Drum and The Unbearable Lightness of Being into formidable films. Carrière’s career continues to take surprising turns: he has a small but crucial role in Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 Certified Copy, for example.