Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context [1 ed.] 9781580464680, 2013043808

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“This interesting and lively volume identifies and fills a gap in the study of cinema in general and Polish cinema in particular: that of Polish cinema’s transnational dimension. The book’s consideration of the long-standing relevance of transnationalism to this important cinematic tradition is overdue.” — PA U L C O ATES , professor of film studies, University of Western Ontario

E WA M A Z I E R S KA is professor of film studies at the University of Central Lancashire. M I C H A E L G O DDA RD is senior lecturer in media at the University of Salford.

Cover image: From Walerian Borowczyk, Goto, Island of Love (1969): Ligia Branice and Jean-Pierre Andréani.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.urpress.com

I N A T R A N S N AT I O N A L C O N T E X T

Contributors: Peter Hames, Darragh O’Donoghue, Helena Goscilo, Dorota Ostrowska, Charlotte Govaert, Eva Näripea, Izabela Kalinowska, Ewa Mazierska, Alison Smith, Lars . Kristensen, Jonathan Owen, Michael Goddard, Robert Murphy, Kamila Kuc, Elzbieta Ostrowska

POLISH CINEMA

Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context addresses this lacuna in film studies, offering extended analysis of this national cinema’s global influence. Contributors assess the reception of Polish films in Europe and North America, Polish international coproductions, the presence of Polish performers in foreign films, and the works . of subversive émigré auteurs like Andrzej Zuławski and Walerian Borowczyk. The collection presents familiar films and filmmakers in a new and revealing light, while also focusing on lesser-known filmmakers and aspects of Polish cinema. The resulting volume moves the discussion beyond the border of Polish national belonging.

Mazierska and Goddard, eds.

The opening up of Poland economically and politically to global influences after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, coupled with the rise of transnational approaches to the study of film, presents ideal conditions for examining Polish cinema from a transnational vantage point. Yet not only have studies of Polish cinema remained largely within a national framework but Polish cinema, as well as many other Eastern European cinemas, has been virtually excluded from new research in transnational cinema.

IN A

WP OALG N D TV I IC I SN H E C IR N EA MA R AE N SN N AT O NE AL CONTEXT

FICTIONALIZED Edited by

Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

Var iations on a Theme

J O H N W. B A R K E R

POLISH CINEMA IN A TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT

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Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe Series Editor: Timothy Snyder, Yale University (ISSN 1528-4808) Post-Communist Transition: The Thorny Road Grzegorz W. Kolodko Globalization and Catching-up in Transition Economies Grzegorz W. Kolodko Polish Formalist School Andrzej Karcz Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772–1914 Jolanta T. Pekacz Ideology, Politics and Diplomacy in East Central Europe M. B. B. Biskupski, Ed. Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient Izabela Kalinowska The Polish Singers Alliance of America 1888–1998: Choral Patriotism Stanislaus A. Blejwas A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960 T. David Curp Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization Edited by Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism Jonathan Larson Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia Laurie R. Cohen Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context Edited by Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

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POLISH CINEMA IN A TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT

Edited by Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

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Copyright © 2014 by the Editors and Contributors All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2014 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-468-0 ISSN: 1528-4808 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Polish cinema in a transnational context / edited by Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard. pages cm. — (Rochester studies in East and Central Europe, ISSN 1528-4808 ; v. 11) Partially based on a conference, Polish Cinema in an International Context, held in December 2009 at Cornerhouse, Manchester. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58046-468-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures— Poland—History—20th century—Congresses. I. Mazierska, Ewa, editor of compilation. II. Goddard, Michael, 1965- editor of compilation. PN1993.5.P7P56 2014 791.4309438—dc23 2013043808 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Polish Cinema beyond Polish Borders Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

vii 1

Part One: The International Reception of Polish Films 1

2

3

4

5

West of the East: Polish and Eastern European Film in the United Kingdom Peter Hames

23

The Shifting British Reception of Wajda’s Work from Man of Marble to Katyń Darragh O’Donoghue

37

Affluent Viewers as Global Provincials: The American Reception of Polish Cinema Helena Goscilo

56

Polish Films at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals: The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s Dorota Ostrowska

77

How Polish Is Polish? Silver City and the National Identity of Documentary Film Charlotte Govaert

95

Part Two: Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films 6

7

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Postcolonial Heterotopias: A Paracinematic Reading of Marek Piestrak’s Estonian Coproductions Eva Näripea Poland-Russia: Coproductions, Collaborations, Exchanges Izabela Kalinowska

115

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8

Train to Hollywood: Polish Actresses in Foreign Films Ewa Mazierska

9

Polish Performance in French Space: Jerzy Radziwiłowicz as a Transnational Actor Alison Smith

10 Polish Actor-Directors Playing Russians: Skolimowski and Stuhr Lars Kristensen

153

174

194

Part Three: Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors 11 An Island Near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank Filmmaker Jonathan Owen

215

12 Beyond Polish Moral Realism: The Subversive Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski Michael Goddard

236

13 Polanski and Skolimowski in Swinging London Robert Murphy 14 The Elusive Trap of Freedom? Krzysztof Zanussi’s International Coproductions Kamila Kuc

258

275

15 Agnieszka Holland’s Transnational Nomadism Elżbieta Ostrowska

289

Selected Bibliography

311

List of Contributors

319

Index

323

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Acknowledgments

This book is in part based on papers presented at the conference “Polish Cinema in an International Context,” which took place in December 2009 at Cornerhouse, Manchester. We would like to express our gratitude to the institutions that financially supported this event: the Polish Film Institute, the Polish Consulate in Manchester, the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. We also want to thank all our colleagues and friends who helped us organize this event and those who attended, presented papers, or listened and commented on those given by others. The lively discussions at this conference affected in a significant way the shape of this volume. We are also grateful to Elżbieta Ostrowska and Lars Kristensen, who, on top of contributing chapters to this collection, commented on the early draft of its introduction, and to Adam Wyżyński from the Polish Film Archive for helping us to access some of the stills and other secondary source material used in this book.

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Introduction Polish Cinema beyond Polish Borders Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard The idea for this book originated in our observation that while there is a growing body of innovative work dealing with transnationality in world cinema,1 studies devoted to this phenomenon tend to omit Eastern European cinemas, including Polish films, which is an area of special interest to the editors of this volume. For example, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s Transnational Cinema does not include even one chapter devoted to films or filmmakers from Eastern Europe.2 They are also typically omitted from the studies of “world cinema.” Similarly, histories of Polish cinema, whether written by Polish film historians working in Poland,3 Polish émigré authors,4 or non-Polish authors,5 tend to ignore transnational phenomena or do not account for the differences between films made within Polish borders and those made elsewhere in the world. Arguably Paul Coates’s consideration in The Red and the White of the “temporary exile” of filmmakers like Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, and of the more permanent exilic condition of filmmakers like Jerzy Skolimowski and Agnieszka Holland, is an exception to this rule.6 However, at best this is only a start; ultimately, time will tell whether the “prolonged absence” of these directors from the national cinema scene “may sap the will and—more importantly—the ability to speak for one’s countrymen.”7 Despite the promise of a consideration of Polish cinema post-1989—that is, “the question of co-production”8—such consideration is only a preamble to the main focus of the chapter on the cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski. But even here, the transnational dimensions of his work are deempahsized, authorized by a reading in terms of Kieślowski’s supposed “demotion of politics.”9 Ultimately, this points to the need to expand the consideration of transnationality, coproduction,

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and exile beyond the limits of their current articulations in relation to Polish cinema. In order to account for these double exclusions or marginalizations— of Polish and Eastern European cinemas from the studies of transnational cinema, on the one hand, and of transnationalism from the discussions of Polish and Eastern European films, on the other—we have to first distinguish the two crucial concepts involved: national cinema and transnational cinema. As Stephen Crofts observes, prior to the 1980s critical writings on cinema adopted commonsense notions of what constituted national cinema. “Along with the name of the director-auteur, nationality has served as a means by which non-Hollywood—most commonly art films—have been labeled, distributed, and reviewed. The ideas of a national cinema that underpinned most of these studies remained largely unproblematic until the 1980s, since which time they have grown markedly more complex.”10 We will discuss several reasons for this growing complexity, which has led to the development of “transnational cinema” studies as a subfield of film studies and the means of rethinking the concept of national cinema as itself, in a sense, transnational. One important factor in this discussion, pointed out by Crofts, is the reworking of the very concept of the nation-state by such authors as Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, and John Hutchinson, who have departed from its essentialist concept, pointing to factors like “invented traditions” and the use of the media in the creation of nations and polities.11 If nation-states are unstable, then their cinemas are also inevitably in a state of flux. Poland, one can argue, fits this paradigm very well, due to its turbulent history, including a long period when it lacked national sovereignty and had its borders frequently changed. Consequently, an early part of Polish film history (prior to 1918, when it regained independence) inevitably belongs also to the histories of other states, such as Germany and Russia, and thus is transnational in the most basic sense. The second reason why the idea of national cinema became so complex is the growing importance of transborder communities and institutions and their influence on identities of groups and individuals. Although, as Arjun Appadurai observes, “the world has been a congeries of large-scale interactions for many centuries, . . . today’s world involves interactions of a new order and intensity.”12 The term “transnationalism” refers to these multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states. Ulf Hannerz and Steven Vertovec list among them social formations spanning national borders, such as ethnic diasporas and social networks transcending geographical boundaries, facilitated by modern technologies such as the Internet. These networks allow

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the re-creation of national cultures on foreign soil and enable the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that are entirely independent of the appropriation of space. They lead to the emergence of a “diaspora consciousness,” marked by dual or multiple identifications and loyalties. Those who possess such consciousness might feel simultaneously “here and there,” connected to their neighbors but also tied strongly to those living elsewhere. “Transnationalism” can therefore be perceived as a mode of cultural reproduction. In this sense it is associated with the fluidity of social institutions and everyday practices, which are often described in terms of creolization, bricolage, cultural translation, and hybridity.13 Vertovec quotes Stuart Hall, who observes that the production of hybrid cultural phenomena manifesting “new ethnicities” is to be found especially among transnational youth whose primary socialization has taken place with the crosscurrents of differing cultural fields. Among such young people, facets of culture and identity are often self-consciously selected, syncretized, and elaborated from more than one heritage.14 Yet, as Vertovec and other authors argue, some groups and places are likely to be more transnational than others—and the researchers of transnationalism need to explore these differences. For example, within immigrant groups, there is also variation in the frequency, depth, and range of transnational ties, strongly related to questions of unequal economic and cultural capital. Again, Poland, with its large transborder population, consisting of millions of people with different degrees of assimilation to their host countries and varying ties to their country of origin, lends itself perfectly to treatment as a “transnational nation.” Equally so its cinema, which, as we have already mentioned, includes many émigré filmmakers, invites treatment in terms of transnationality, cultural translation, and hybridity. The third reason why there is a turn toward transnational cinema is that since the 1980s cinema across the world and in Europe especially has experienced a profound change, marked by the decline of the auteurist paradigm in favor of genre and popular cinema and the growing importance of international coproductions and international distribution. This is in large part a response to the expansion of neoliberal capitalism, which has changed the way films are financed, such as closing down some sources of national funding while opening up financing for those films whose production involves more than one state. Moreover, traditional modes of film exhibition, in cinema theaters visited by members of the local population, are declining, and national films increasingly reach audiences via exposure at international film festivals. As a result of these changes we also observe a shift from studying film as a purely

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textual phenomenon, to the inclusion of the study of film production and film audiences. Including these factors leads to the conclusion that a particular film can be national on one level—for example, by being produced in a single country—and transnational on another—by reaching a transnational or even global audience.15 Hence, there many different forms of cinematic transnationalism, a plurality that must be acknowledged for it to be a critically incisive term rather than just a catchall way of stating the obvious. In particular, Mette Hjort argues for distinctions between “weak and strong” as well as “marked and unmarked” modes of cinematic transnationality, according to the extent to which the transnationality of production, distribution, reception, and formal characteristics are significant and marked aspects of the film in question. After all, almost all Hollywood films could be said to be transnational in terms of their distribution, but this is usually a weak, unmarked transnationality, disguised as a presumed universality.16 Hjort goes on to give no less than nine modalities of a typology of transnational cinema, a list that is by no means exhaustive.17 Another set of problems with transnational cinema is identified by Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim in their introduction to the first issue of Studies in Transnational Cinema. While equally concerned to counter the lack of clear definition of transnational cinema, they are especially sensitive to the ways in which some affirmative uses of transnationality such as Andrew Higson’s, which champion the overcoming of the limiting aspects of national cinema paradigms, have the “potential to obscure the imbalances of power (political, economic, and ideological) in this transnational exchange.”18 In the case of Polish cinema this means acknowledging its place in an unequal transnational political economy of film distribution and exhibition, a situation that colors the transnational exchanges that Polish cinema enters into. Other approaches to transnationality as a kind of regionalism, such as applies to multiple Chinese-language cinemas, beg the question of whether the term “transnational” is even preferable to simply referring to a regional or linguistic community. While not applicable to Polish cinema in terms of a transnational linguistic community, strategies of regionalism such as those based around Visegrad or the concept of the “Second World” discussed below fit into this regionalist approach. These strategies, however, have not really gained enough traction to constitute a dominant tendency for tackling transnationality in the Polish context. Finally Higbee and Lim refer to approaches focusing on postcoloniality, migration, and diaspora such as are offered in Hamid Naficy’s An Accented Cinema (2001). While treatment in such terms addresses

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the political problematics of unequal transnational exchanges, these approaches are often quite prescriptive about the kinds of cinema they engage with. Moreover, the insistence on marginality itself risks becoming a marginalizing gesture, incapable of incorporating popular and mainstream forms of transnational cinema.19 In the Polish case, these questions of diasporic and exilic cinema are only just beginning to be addressed, and hence not yet prone to these same problems and biases. Furthermore, while the experiences of diaspora and exile of Polish filmmakers are by no means easy, they differ from those of the filmmakers from Third World countries who find themselves subject to multiple forms of exclusion in Europe or North America that constitute the majority of examples in An Accented Cinema. While Polish filmmakers in exile experience economic marginalization in many instances, their marginality has a different accent and has rarely resulted in explicitly political modes of cinema but rather in forms of aesthetic experimentation. However, it is still important that attention to Polish diasporic cinema not be limited to transgressive auteurs such as Walerian Borowczyk or Andrzej Żuławski, but also be extended to more popularly oriented filmmakers like Agnieszka Holland, in order to avoid any possible prescriptiveness about what Polish exilic cinema should be. Ultimately, what Higbee and Lim are calling for in their article is a more nuanced approach to cinematic transnationalism, which they describe as a “critical transnationalism.”20 It is our hope that the chapters in this volume address just such a kind of nuanced transnationalism in relation to Polish cinema. Let’s now move to the question of the place of transnationalism in the studies of Eastern European cinemas and Polish cinema in particular. In the 1980s, when the shift to transnationalism occurred in Western historical research, Eastern European historians wer still clinging to the “national” paradigm. This was in part a consequence of such factors as the widespread rejection of an “enforced transnationalism”; that is, of the superpowers’ efforts stemming from the Yalta Conference in 1945 that divided Europe into the capitalist West and socialist East, thus ensuring the subjugation of Eastern Europe to the imperial power of the Soviet Union. Under such conditions, the nation, treated in essentialist terms, was a powerful means to resist the new transnational narrative of “brotherhood of socialist nations and people.” Poland, with its strong Catholic tradition and active Catholic Church that allowed for the development of a parallel civic society, had a markedly different experience from all remaining socialist countries; consequently, the reason to perceive its history in national and nationalistic terms was particularly strong. This enforced cohabitation of countries and nations of different traditions,

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many of which had stronger connections to Western Europe than to the East, was also an obstacle to creating a regional, Eastern European identity that the inhabitants of this region would recognize as their own. Moreover, in the state-supported film industries that were the rule in Eastern Europe, national cinemas and director-auteurs were the dominant paradigm practically until the collapse of communism. National, auteur cinemas functioned, as Tim Bergfelder noted with reference to all European auteurist traditions, as a passport to the international or supranational European cinematic community, usually via the leading European festivals, in Cannes, Venice, and Berlin.21 This was particularly the case since popular and genre cinema, and its specific traits, such as the star system, were looked at unfavorably in Eastern Europe as an ersatz of American popular cinema, the appetite for which could not be fully fulfilled due to various economic and ideological restrictions.22 In Poland, which was the largest “satellite” of the Soviet Union in terms of its population and surface area, these factors were at play to an even larger degree than in other Eastern European countries, such as East Germany or Bulgaria. Polish cinema under communist rule, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was little competition from television and home VCRs were not yet dreamt about, was an important national institution, as exemplified by the success of films such as Teutonic Knights (Krzyżacy, 1960) by Aleksander Ford and Pan Wołodyjowski (1969) by Jerzy Hoffman. Consequently, historians’ interest in these films as emanations of national culture overshadowed their relations with any non-Polish cinematic paradigms or their reception abroad. At the same time, Polish auteur directors were very successful on the European art house scene thanks to their talent in developing a “Polish idiom,” deeply rooted in Polish literature and philosophy. This was especially the case with Andrzej Wajda, who was celebrated at the European film festivals because he perfectly represented a national style, with its focus on the country’s history and politics, even coming to epitomize the position of the dissident artist who actively resisted the cultural hegemony of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, under the communist regime certain aspects of Polish cinema that reached beyond national borders were not looked on favorably by the political authorities. This is especially the case of the work of directors who left Poland for, broadly speaking, political reasons, such as Jerzy Skolimowski, Roman Polanski (for Polish viewers Polański), Walerian Borowczyk, and Andrzej Żuławski. With the exception of Polanski, these directors were considered to have been both aesthetically and politically compromised by their decisions to work in the West, and

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their subsequent films were considered inferior to their Polish works, if not outright betrayals of national values and standards. Although they stayed in contact with their former country, each of them returning to Poland to make at least one film at a certain point in their careers, their works produced abroad were rarely critically examined in Poland. If they received notice at all, the usual line adopted by the film historians and critics was that abroad the directors lost their talent and that none of their “foreign” works match their “Polish” achievements. Such an opinion was common even among those critics who were hostile to the communist regime, and in the case of Skolimowski, the artist himself expressed so much.23 No doubt the critics used the claim about these artists’ loss of talent to in turn criticize the state for forcing them to waste their talent abroad. Paradoxically, none of them were accorded the privileged dissident status of filmmakers like Wajda or Zanussi, even if several of their works were more daring aesthetically, and even arguably politically, than these recognized dissidents. The only exception to this rule was Kieślowski, whose much later exile in the context of postcommunism seemed to be exempted from this accursed status, due to its being an expression of a new mode of European belonging that was suddenly considered acceptable. An additional reason why the transnational approach was marginalized is a narrow definition of what is “truly Polish” cinema and art. In the eyes of many influential critics and historians, Polish cinema ceases to be Polish when it ventures too far from a realistic style and moves into the realm of fantasy, bad taste, or cult cinema or crosses borders between film and other audiovisual forms.24 As a consequence of this approach certain Polish films were regarded as “foreign” even when made in Poland— examples being some films by Wojciech Jerzy Has, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Piotr Uklański, or Lech Majewski.25 In fact, the term “art cinema” was reserved for these filmmakers’ works as well as the experimental cinema of such filmmakers as Józef Robakowski or Ryszard Waśko, whose work was more appreciated abroad than it was in Poland. In Poland, leading national filmmakers like Wajda were at times scathing about these modes of cinema “without any audience,” despite Wajda’s own forays into at least New Wave forms of experimentation in his own work. The majority of justifications for excluding Polish cinema in its transnational manifestations from film studies disappeared with the fall of communism. One key factor is the diminished state protection of Polish cinema within Poland’s borders. One-screen cinemas that belonged to the state largely gave way to multiplexes, owned by multinational companies that had no reason to support Polish cinema—they only operate

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to support profitable films, which by and large means those made in Hollywood. Consequently, Polish films had to compete with foreign products on a previously unheard-of scale, a situation exacerbated by the multiplying of avenues through which films could be accessed, including not only cinema theaters and televisions but also DVD and, more recently, the Internet. Moreover, the privileging of the auteurist paradigm during the period when Poland was under communist rule left its cinema badly equipped to respond to the shifts in European, and indeed world, cinema toward catering to the tastes of a different type of audience: younger and looking for entertainment rather than art. All of the above led to what critics such as Marek Haltof have described as the “freedom shock” of 1989, rather than the sought-after liberation from state control and censorship.26 Of course, these changes have occurred over time, and the impact of some of them is not yet fully appreciated by either filmmakers or film historians. Nevertheless, twenty years after the collapse of communism, looking at Polish cinema in an international context has become the “order of the day.” This development is demonstrated by the fact that the Polish Film Institute, the main institution supporting Polish cinema in all its aspects, has created special programs to facilitate international coproductions and assist the promotion of Polish films abroad. The receiving of awards by Polish films at the leading international festivals (or, more often, not receiving them) also is now an important theme of film criticism in Poland. A comprehensive discussion of recent books devoted to Polish cinema, published outside Poland, was featured in a 2010 issue of Kino, the leading film journal in Poland.27 Parallel to this is the recent appearance of a number of volumes on Polish cinema that deal with filmmakers outside of the usual auteurist canons and that are aimed explicitly at an international readership. These range from the cataloglike volumes Young Polish Cinema and Polish Cinema Now!, to more challenging works such as Polish New Wave and Surrealism in Polish Cinema.28 These last two volumes both pay special attention to the work of directors regarded as foreign or marginal to the canon of Polish films, and although produced in Poland, they are bilingual editions. The postcommunist situation of Polish cinema has also enabled a fresh look at the work of Polish émigré directors. This is in part because Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Andrzej Żuławski have made films in Poland or as Polish coproductions after 1989. Examples include She-Shaman (Szamanka, 1996) by Żuławski, The Pianist (2002) by Polanski, and Four Nights with Anna (Cztery noce z Anną, 2008) and Essential Killing (2010) by Skolimowski. Some even returned to Poland

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for good and set up new homes there. This “return” of these filmmakers has also been accompanied by a belated return to critical attention with major retrospectives and critical publications being devoted to their work, in some cases for the first time, partly as a means to encourage younger filmmakers to emulate their international successes. The previously mentioned competition with foreign films that Polish films encounter in Poland as well as abroad forces both filmmakers and those funding their films to think about Polish cinema as a cinema that has to be transnational on many levels in order to survive as a national institution. So while Polish cinema has benefited from the formation of the national Polish Film Institute (PISF), which itself is partially funded by both Polish and transnational television networks, film production has also received considerable support from the EU MEDIA and Eurimage programs.29 Finally, Polish society has significantly changed in the last twenty years, not least because more than 2 million Poles left their country after 2004, adding to the already large Polish diaspora. Hence, the Polish “nation” has become more and more, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an “imagined community,” rather than one attached to a particular territory.30 Cinema plays an important role in “imagining” this community, not only by forging links between those who live in Poland and those staying beyond its borders but also by catering specifically to the tastes of Polish diasporas through, for example, producing films about migration. It should be mentioned here that Polish emigrants have traditionally been at the forefront of Polish cultural creativity, and this is still the case now, as the successes of Skolimowski and Holland demonstrate. However, as we already indicated, while Polish cinema has always been, in a sense, transnational, thanks to the strong presence of Polish directors on the international scene, this is barely reflected in the studies of transnational or world cinema. In this respect Poland shares a similar fate with other Eastern European countries. This exclusion reflects primarily the lack of knowledge and interest in the cinema of this region by the specialists of European or world cinema.31 Paradoxically, the fall of the Berlin Wall, instead of bringing Eastern Europe closer to the center of Europe and to European film history, in fact abetted this marginalization. This is because nowadays Eastern European cinemas and Polish cinema especially no longer appear to be exotic enough to deserve the special treatment they enjoyed during the communist period, when they were regarded as speaking for the oppressed peoples and cultures, or central enough to illustrate specific pan-European or global tendencies. The geopolitical transition in global power relations in the postcommunist period can also be seen as a shift from the East-West dynamics of

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the Cold War to a North-South divide based primarily on economic factors, accompanied by the rise of new economic powers such as China, India, and Brazil. It is hardly coincidental that these locations have also seen a renewed vibrancy in their national cinemas, which in each case reached transnational audiences, especially Chinese martial arts cinema and Bollywood. As a result, these cases are often used to illustrate transnational cinema.32 They also occupy a privileged position in the studies of “world cinema.” The very term “world cinema” stands today for films produced outside Europe and Northern America, rather than in the whole world. This does not mean that the former Eastern bloc cinemas have no chance to circulate beyond their national borders, as the recent successes of Romanian and Estonian films show. Nevertheless, the privileged space formerly occupied by Eastern European cinemas in global cinema of “Other,” or “dissident,” cinema has fragmented as they have been supplanted. Hence, the cinemas of the region have been obliged to reinvent themselves if they want to attain an international audience and even retain domestic viewers. Indeed, we observe attempts to counter this exclusion both in the sphere of theory and cinematic practice. One such attempt is considering Eastern European cinemas as “Second World” cinema. In particular, Anikó Imre in her introduction to the East European Cinemas collection argues that “postsocialist film cultures offer unique opportunities to study the role that visual media play in a monumental cultural shift of global significance. In order to consider the cinematic developments of the region . . . it is necessary to keep the designation Eastern Europe . . . conditionally and contingently, acknowledging the region’s shifting boundaries, internal differences, and constructed identities.”33 This approach has the dual goal of resisting both national essentialisms and the erasure of regionally shared histories and subjectivities. The recently established journal Studies in Eastern European Cinema (SEEC), following in the wake of earlier, more national cinema–oriented journals dealing with Eastern European cinema like Kinokultura, shares these transnational, “regionalist” goals. Arguably this type of approach has also led to more circumscribed attempts at defining smaller regional identities such as the Balkan or Baltic regions or, in Poland’s case, the Visegrad region. Such attempts at a new regional realignment of Polish cinema are demonstrated by the International Visegrad Fund, which supports cooperation between Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian cinemas. However, such initiatives typically encounter internal resistance, resulting from the legacy of “enforced cohabitation,” that discourages the filmmakers who endured it in the past to treat others from the same region as their allies.

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Moreover, the closer collaboration within a subregion of the former Eastern bloc brings the risk of a growing distance from the remainder of the region—in the case of Poland, for example, from the Balkan countries and the republics belonging previously to the Soviet Union. This volume is intended to address both the lack of studies situating Polish cinema in a transnational context and the aforementioned changes in the production, circulation, and perception of Polish cinema that have occurred over the last twenty years. Its structure reflects an argument, presented by many authors, that in order to account for the national and transnational character of any cinema, we have to move beyond the study of texts, adding to the analysis such categories as production, distribution, and reception. It will achieve this objective by offering detailed studies covering three distinct, albeit connected, areas. The first area is that of the transnational reception of Polish films in both Europe and North America. The second section will examine two interrelated transnational phenomena—namely, Polish international coproductions and the presence of Polish performers in foreign films. This section is therefore more focused on production and looks at the ways in which Polish filmmakers and actors have been present in transnational contexts throughout the modern history of Polish cinema. The final part will analyze the work of a range of Polish émigré and subversive auteurs, examining how, in each case, aspects of Polish identity have been combined with the potentials and limitations of specific transnational contexts to generate cultural production that is at once Polish and foreign, national and transnational. We will also be presenting arguments against the critical neglect that many of these cinematic works have suffered, which is at least partially due to this liminal situation of their having been produced “beyond the border” of Polish national belonging. The first section begins with two different yet related accounts of the British reception of Polish cinema. Peter Hames situates Polish cinema in the context of Eastern European cinema at large, which during many decades served as Western European cinema’s main Other. Hames’s meticulous account pays attention to key film distributors of Polish films like Contemporary Films, as well as the chief film institutions, filmmakers, and critics that enabled the dissemination of Polish films, especially from the 1950s onward. He argues that there was a “leftist” political project behind the promotion of Polish film in the United Kingdom between the 1950s and the 1970s, and that the relative decline of this project and the reduced number of screenings of Polish films in the United Kingdom are interlinked. Nevertheless, Hames expresses a guarded optimism about new tendencies in both academia and DVD distribution that point to the

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reemergence of interest in Eastern European films, beyond the distortions of any preset ideological agenda. A different yet related account of the British reception of Polish cinema is given by Darragh O’Donoghue, who traces the decline of interest in the work of Andrzej Wajda from the 1960s and 1970s to the present and suggests some of the reasons for this shift. For O’Donoghue, like Hames, the early critical reception of Wajda’s work by Lindsay Anderson and others tended to be skewed in favor of realism, humanism, and universality, with critics using the allegorical nature of the films as license to project their own “vision of what a Polish filmmaker should be.”34 This is in marked contrast to the present decline in interest in Wajda’s work, which is especially evident in the fact that Katyń (2007), as classical a Wajda film as any produced in the 1950s, initially had difficulty finding UK distribution. O’Donoghue tracks these changes between these two situations of reception, considering whether the impact of the recent influx of Polish migration to the United Kingdom might be a positive new factor in the distribution of films by Wajda and other Polish filmmakers. On the other side of the Atlantic, the North American situation for the reception of Polish film presents even more obstacles; these are comprehensively explored in Helena Goscilo’s chapter. Goscilo points to the ways in which the dominance of Hollywood, audience preferences for popular narrative action films, and resistance to foreign-language films have made the distribution and reception of Polish films, especially in the post-1989 period, virtually impossible. Goscilo then focuses on the one partial exception to this tendency, the cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski. She follows the North American fortunes of films made across his career, from the early documentaries and features of the 1970s and 1980s to the much better known films he made outside of Poland in the 1990s. As she points out, Kieślowski’s reputation, in the United States, which has also considerably heightened since his death, was largely based on his last four films that were produced abroad and only retrospectively applied to earlier works such as the Dekalog series. Nevertheless, as the exceptional Polish filmmaker who was able to make some inroads into American film reception, he provides a fascinating case study of how this is at least possible. International film festivals have been and remain a key arena of film reception that, as specific and crucial sites of transnational cinematic distribution, are sites that have also recently been attracting considerable critical attention.35 In this context, Dorota Ostrowska’s chapter examines the shifting reception of Polish films in the key European international film festivals of Venice and Cannes over the 1940s, 1950s, and

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1960s. Ostrowska’s chapter tracks how the strategies of Polish cinema intersected with those of the festivals themselves, resulting in a shifting set of fortunes for Polish films over the three decades after the World War II. Again, Ostrowska points to the ways in which the reception of Polish films was accompanied by forms of projection onto the Eastern European Other, and therefore both profited from and were distorted by specific political agendas. These agendas have both enabled and limited the exposure of Polish films to transnational audiences. This first section ends with a chapter that engages with reception in an entirely different way, via a reflection on the modes of viewing of a transnational documentary film, with both Polish and non-Polish elements. In this chapter, Charlotte Govaert presents a case study of her own documentary Silver City (2008), which engages issues of Polish diasporas and questions the limits of what constitutes a Polish film. Using social research informed by Jakobson’s theoretical approach to communication and reception, this chapter clearly demonstrates how films like Silver City, which are transnational not only in terms of their subject matter but also in their mode of production, raise vital questions of what defines a film as national and as transnational. All of the chapters in this section examine how Polish cinema has circulated beyond Polish borders in a variety of contexts and has affected a range of international audiences. Part 2 of the book engages with the phenomenon of Polish international coproductions and the Polish presence in foreign cinemas. These chapters represent a shift toward a focus on the transnational dynamics of film production, a shift that is also taking place within contemporary film studies as evidenced by the rise of production studies, which has recently been extended to approaches to film production in EastCentral Europe.36 This focus is pursued in this section via two areas of engagement. The first three chapters examine the phenomena of Polish coproductions, which, far from being posttransition phenomena, have a long if somewhat buried history. Eastern connections are emphasized in the first two chapters by Eva Näripea and Izabela Kalinowska, respectively. Näripea examines two of Polish director Marek Piestrak’s science fiction coproductions with Estonia, as seminal examples of cult or “paracinema” in Poland and Estonia. In this way she offers an original account of Piestrak’s films, which are among the greatest box-office successes of Polish cinema both within Poland’s borders and abroad, and yet have received little in the way of critical attention. Moreover, her argument explains the critical neglect of Piestrak’s films as not fitting the privileged categories that were most often used in discussions of Polish films. Hence, it can be used as a blueprint for analysis of other examples

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of “forgotten” Polish cinema in Poland and abroad. Kalinowska discusses the changing relations between Russians and Poles as reflected in two coproductions made in different periods, one before and one after the fall of communism: Remember Your Name (Zapamiętaj imię swoje, 1974), directed by Sergei Kolosov, and Krzysztof Zanussi’s Persona Non Grata (2005). Her article takes issue with the influence of politics on the production and circulation of cinematic texts in different cultural spaces. Even while these two case studies illustrate the profound differences between transnational production practices before and after the postcommunist transition, they also point to the ways that both films constitute an intercultural transnational dialog “beyond the conditions of economic cooperation.”37 The remaining three essays in this part of the book deal with the presence of Polish actors in foreign films. Ewa Mazierska’s essay looks at four examples of Polish actresses—Lucyna Winnicka, Krystyna Janda, Katarzyna Figura, and Alicja Bachleda-Curuś—who have all appeared in films made in other European countries and the United States, using approaches from transnational film studies, star studies, and gender studies. She attempts to account for the reasons why actresses of different generations sought success abroad and discusses the meaning of their performances for different types of audiences. While the career trajectory of each of the actresses studied represents larger issues affecting Polish and transnational cinema in a particular decade, taken together they point to the fact that while the road to Hollywood remains as attractive as ever, it is no less twisted than it was in the past, and often must pass via various European detours. The following two chapters focus on male Polish actors who have performed in transnational contexts. Alison Smith reads the performances of Jerzy Radziwiłowicz in non-Polish films in the context of French cinema and the international reception of Wajda’s films. Beginning with the French reception of Radziwiłowicz’s starring role in Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977), Smith tracks his performances in a range of French art films, beginning with Godard’s Passion (1982). Smith analyzes the performances of Radziwiłowicz, who was always a liminal figure within French cinema, in meticulous detail, elaborating his unique set of both physical and expressive resources and “unique performing presence on the French screen.” Lars Kristensen’s chapter discusses the case of actor-directors Jerzy Skolimowski and Jerzy Stuhr. Both men tended to play Russian characters, but whereas Skolimowski performed in Western cinema, notably in White Nights (dir. Hackford, 1985) and Eastern Promises (dir. Cronenberg, 2007), Stuhr appeared in

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several Russian films, largely unknown to Western audiences. Kristensen approaches these performances by adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” to the study of transnational performance. Apart from redressing the serious neglect of acting in critical work on Polish cinema, these chapters bring out the ambivalence inherent in performing foreign identities in transnational surroundings. The final section examines a range of émigré and subversive directors, several of whom have been marginalized if not virtually excluded from the canon of Polish film authorship. Even when this has not been the case, the transnational dimensions of these directors’ work have not been fully accounted for in either Polish or international film criticism. Consideration of the work of these directors is vital for any transnational approach to Polish cinema as an “accented cinema,” denaturalizing territorial conceptions of Polish national identity in favor of a more complex and “nomadic” account of Polishness as constituted in relation to a range of transnational contexts and exchanges. As such, the analysis of these exilic works of Polish filmmakers also has the added effect of a “making strange” of Polish cinema more generally, in the sense of revealing the transnational constitution of national identities and forms of cultural expression such as cinema. In cases such as Borowczyk and Żuławski, these complexities of national and transnational identity are expressed via a singular and subversive cinematic aesthetics; however, in others such as Agnieszka Holland, there is rather the attempt to approach a stylistic invisibility, in complete adaptation to the adopted context. The work of Skolimowski and Polanski would no doubt be located between these two poles. Nevertheless, in all these cases it is a question of an “accented cinema” in which Polish and transnational elements encounter each other, resulting in a range of hybrid modes of cinematic expression. The first two chapters in part 3 engage with the “accursed” émigré directors Walerian Borowczyk and Andrzej Żuławski, whose work abroad is barely acknowledged as being a part of Polish cinema by either Polish film historians or major cultural institutions, at least until very recently. Jonathan Owen’s essay examines the émigré cinema of Borowczyk as a series of surrealist “heterotopias” (a concept also used by Näripea in the context of Piestrak’s films), challenging the reductive dismissal of his work as being characterized by a decline in aesthetic values or even as a descent into pornography. Situating Borowczyk’s work in the already complex and transnational context of French “Left Bank cinema” of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and others, Owen uses the concept of heterotopia to locate Borowczyk’s films as taking place in a liminal space that articulates larger dynamics of difference and identity, order

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and chaos. Michael Goddard’s chapter explores the subversive film practices of Andrzej Żuławski in relation to both Polish and transnational contexts, arguing that his Polish and exilic films alike explore and transgress the limits of Polish national cinema. In his Polish films, this meant producing works that were at the limit of what was expressible in the context of Polish national cinema, going against the realist tendencies evident in films of both the Polish school and the later Cinema of Moral Concern, by means of a cinematic excess that was already transnational in its combination of Western cinematic styles with Polish subject matter. The censorship of Żuławski’s second and third films is evidence of this excess in relation to the norms of Polish national cinema, an excess that was continued in his films made outside of Poland, that were composed out of more explicitly transnational elements. Nevertheless, Goddard argues that even in the films Żuławski made in Berlin and France there is a continuation of the engagement with the limits of Polish national cinema, though in combination with a shift in attention from male romanticism toward female performativity. These chapters are followed by Robert Murphy’s contribution, which situates Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski in the context of “Swinging London.” Murphy shows that Polanski’s and Skolimowski’s relations to this temporarily adopted environment were at once ambivalent and complex. While both filmmakers certainly continued to develop their distinctive authorial styles in this new environment, they also adapted to the milieu in different ways, much more so than the directors examined in the previous two chapters. The case studies that Murphy presents of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Skolimowski’s Deep End (1970) show the successes and failures of this process of adaptation. He emphasizes that even in Polanski’s attempts to make a cliché Hammer horror film, the result remained an accented and anomalous work in relation to British cinema. Despite the greater cultural value accorded to these filmmakers both within Poland and abroad, the transnational dimensions of their work in the United Kingdom is only now being fully articulated. Kamila Kuc’s chapter, in contrast, examines three of Krzysztof Zanussi’s coproductions made outside of Poland during the 1980s—namely, Imperative (Imperativ, 1982), Bluebeard (Blaubart, 1984), and Paradigm (Paradigma, 1985). Zanussi, as a key filmmaker of the Cinema of Moral Concern, is hardly a marginalized figure; in fact, he is regarded as a central figure in the canon of Polish national auteurs, if less well known internationally than Wajda or Kieślowski. Nevertheless, as Kuc argues, these transnational productions of Zanussi tend to be neglected by Polish film historians, and she therefore proposes a critical revaluation of their significance.

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Finally, Elżbieta Ostrowska’s chapter is an exploration of the transnational dimensions of the work of Agnieszka Holland. While Holland has worked successfully outside Poland, the ways in which she has engaged with foreign contexts raise important issues about transnational film work. In particular Ostrowska argues that, in contrast to other nomadic Polish filmmakers like Polanski, rather than benefiting from the transnational nature of her work, Holland has instead been rendered relatively marginal because of it. Referring to Hjort’s typology of marked and unmarked forms of transnationality, Ostrowska points out that while transnationality is marked in some of Holland’s films, such as Europa, Europa (1990), in many of her films made in the United States it is barely marked at all. Nevertheless, Ostrowska argues that all of Holland’s cinema can be seen as a form of cosmopolitan transnationalism and emphasizes the importance of Holland’s Polish-Jewish origins as a basis for the complex nomadic identities evident in her films. Rather than producing a revised canon of Polish filmmakers, this section, like the previous ones, serves to problematize the assumptions involved in constructing national cinemas through film history and criticism. As such it emphasizes that the national and the transnational are always interwoven and argues for a nuanced, open, and critical approach to Polish cinema in a range of transnational contexts. All of these aspects of Polish cinema are worthy of a critical reevaluation and in combination present a different account of Polish cinema to that which has so far emerged within a national cinema framework; for example, by foregrounding the relatively marginalized, antirealistic, surrealist, and antinationalistic traditions in Polish cinema. As such this book brings together a range of fresh approaches to Polish cinema that include postcolonial studies, the concept of accented cinema, methods used in visual culture and architecture, cult cinema, star and gender studies, as well as the application of semiotics to areas where it has never before been used in Poland, such as coproductions and documentary film. In many cases the authors interrogate the very notion of the national in cinema while at the same time emphasizing the persistence of Polish thematic and aesthetic tendencies in films produced and consumed in a range of international contexts. Equally, they question the dominant ideas in the history of Polish cinema and about Polish history, especially the notion of the dominance of romanticism in Polish history. In an era of advanced globalization, this critical recontextualization of Polish cinema is a timely and necessary one. The transnational character of this study is also demonstrated by the diverse nationalities of the authors and their interests. Contributors

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include Polish émigré scholars, as well as authors from countries including the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Estonia. For some, Polish cinema is their main area of specialization; others study it to widen their knowledge of a different national cinema or as an example of a different, nonnational phenomenon. The majority are film scholars, but some are practicing artists and archivists. Their joint effort here testifies to a richness and a complexity that can only be beneficial for a fuller appreciation of Polish cinema in a global context, both historically and in the present. It also testifies to the need to include Polish and other Eastern European cinemas in future studies of transnational and world cinemas, as well as in other domains of film studies such as studies of cinematic performance, production, and reception.

Notes 1. On transnationality in world cinema see Stephen Crofts, “Concepts of National Cinema,” in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tim Bergfelder, “National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies,” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 3 (2005): 315–31; Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, eds., World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2010): 7–21. 2. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). 3. Tadeusz Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego: Tworcy, filmy, konteksty (Katowice: Videograf II, 2009). 4. Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002). 5. Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). 6. Ibid., 204–6. 7. Ibid., 204. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 207. 10. Crofts, “Concepts of National Cinema,” 385. 11. Ibid., 385–86. 12. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 47–65.

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13. Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996); Steven Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 447–62. 14. Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” 461. 15. Crofts, “Concepts of National Cinema”; Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 63–74; Mette Hjort, “Themes of Nation,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 103–17. 16. Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (London: Routledge, 2010), 13–14. 17. Ibid., 15–30. 18. Higbee and Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” 9. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Bergfelder, “National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema?” 315–31. 22. Anita Skwara, “‘Film Stars Do Not Shine in the Sky Over Poland’: The absence of popular cinema in Poland,” in Popular European Cinema, ed. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1992), 220–31. 23. This opinion was conveyed in an interview conducted by Ewa Mazierska in 2008. 24. Kuba Mikurda and Kamila Wielebska, eds., Dzieje grzechu: Surrealizm w kinie polskim / A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema (Kraków: Korporacja Ha! Art, 2010). 25. Łukasz Ronduda and Barbara Piwowarska, eds., Nowa Fala: Historia zjawiska, którego nie było / Polish New Wave: A History of a Phenomenon That Never Existed (Warsaw: Instytut Adama Mickiewicza, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2008). 26. Haltof, Polish National Cinema, 180–82. 27. Beata Pieńkowska and Adam Wyżyński, “Polonica z różnych stron,” Kino 12 (2010): 86–88. 28. Mateusz Werner and Lech Kurpiewski, eds., Young Polish Cinema (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2007); Mateusz Werner, ed., Polish Cinema Now! (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2010); Ronduda and Piwowarska, Nowa Fala; Mikurda and Wielebska, Dzieje grzechu. 29. Jerzy Płażewski, “Polish Cinema—A Return to Market Economy,” in Polish Cinema Now!, ed. Mateusz Werner (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2010), 157–60; PISF, Polish Film Institute website, accessed February 24, 2012, http://www.pisf.pl/en/film-production-guide-1/film-industry. 30. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (1983; London: Verso, 2006).

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31. Ewa Mazierska, “Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 1, no 1 (2010): 5–16. 32. Higbee and Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema.” 33. Anikó Imre, ed., East European Cinemas (New York: Routledge, 2005), xvii. 34. Darragh O’ Donoghoe, chap. 2 of this volume. 35. Thomas Elsaesser, “Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 82–107. 36. Olof Hedling, “A First of Its Kind Production Studies Meeting in Brno: Screen Industries in East-Central Europe, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 11–13 November 2011,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 3, no 1 (2012): 119–23. 37. Izabela Kalinowska, chap. 7 of this volume.

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Part One

The International Reception of Polish Films

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West of the East Polish and Eastern European Film in the United Kingdom Peter Hames British insularity with respect to cultures originating on the European mainland scarcely needs comment. It is very rare for foreign-language films to receive coverage in even the most ambitious television arts programs or in the pages of weekly political reviews such as the New Statesman. In 2008, according to a UK Film Council report, foreign films represented less than 4 percent of the total UK market. Of this, 2.3 percent of the market was devoted to European films, which was apparently three times the 2002 figure and the highest yet recorded. To be more specific, 527 films were released overall, of which 188 were foreign language. Without including every country listed, there were 51 Hindi films, 32 French, 10 Japanese, 9 German, 4 Russian, 2 Romanian, 2 Polish, 1 Czech, and 1 Hungarian. If we review the history of the reception of foreign films in the United Kingdom, it is clear that we are looking at an elite market or—if we exclude Hindi films—a linked collection of niche markets.1 In examining the ways in which Polish films have been received in the United Kingdom, I am drawing principally on personal experience, which includes working with film societies, regional film theaters, and film festivals, as well as working in film education and, of course, watching television. If we look at the concept of reception, it should also be recognized that this is not a unified phenomenon. Reception can be considered under a number of headings. These include commercial reception (where there has not been a significant market share); reception by film societies, film theaters, and regional arts cinemas (which have expressed a good deal of interest); and television reception. There are also two further categories— reception by film critics and journalists and reception within the field of film studies and film education. There is a tendency to assume that there was no exposure in Britain to Central and East European film until the 1950s, but, in a far from

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systematic examination of films reviewed in the 1930s, I discovered the following much earlier films: from Poland, Josef Lejtes’s Dzien wiekiej przygody (Day of the great adventure, 1935) and Joseph Green and Jan Nowina-Pryzybylski’s Yidl mtn Fidl (Yiddle with his fiddle, 1935); from Czechoslovakia, Martin Frič’s Hej-rup! (Heave-ho!, 1934) and Jánošík (1935); and from Hungary, George Hoellering’s Hortobágy (Life on the Hortobagy, 1936). However, it is unlikely that they were shown very much outside of London. For foreign-language film, the key interwar development was the foundation of the Film Society in London in 1925, which was primarily recognized for its import of the Soviet classics of the 1920s and the major films of German Expressionism. This marked the beginning of what was to become a nationwide movement that enjoyed considerable expansion in the period following World War II. This was mainly a result of the development of 16mm projection, which allowed for a much wider dissemination of film in societies, schools, clubs, trade unions, and other organizations. By the 1950s the number of societies had risen to 250; it rose further to 400 in the early 1960s and nearly 700 in the 1970s.2 Most societies would have a minimum of 100 members, and many would have substantially more. Following the Festival of Britain in 1951, a decision was made to build the present National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank), and the London Film Festival was established in 1957. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the British Film Institute (BFI) also set up a network of regional film theaters in many major towns. Polish cinema first attracted significant attention through exhibition of the “Polish school” films in the 1950s and early 1960s. Their principal showcase in London was the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street, and their principal distribution outside of London was via film societies. Two film distribution companies specialized in Central and Eastern European film: Contemporary Films and ETV (Educational and Television Films). Looking at their catalog for 1973, Contemporary Films lists 25 Polish, 25 Czech, 8 Hungarian, 2 Bulgarian, and 47 Soviet films.3 The ETV catalog lists 82 Czech and Slovak films, 1 Bulgarian, and 52 Soviet.4 If titles from smaller companies are added, the overall figures are 110 Czech and Slovak films, 26 Polish, 11 Hungarian, 4 Bulgarian, 1 from the GDR (German Democratic Republic), and 104 Soviet films. There were no films from Romania and only one—Andrzej Wajda’s Sibirska Ledi Makbet (A Siberian Lady Macbeth, 1961)—from Yugoslavia. This makes a surprising total of 153 films from Eastern Europe and, including Soviet films, an Eastern bloc total of 257 features.

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Contemporary Films used to claim in their advertising that it had more than 1,000 films in forty different languages, and it was undoubtedly the most significant independent distributor of the period. The 1973 catalog boasts sections devoted to Zbigniew Cybulski, Aleksander Ford, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Wajda and included the main films of the Polish school and the Czech New Wave. Contemporary worked very closely with the Academy Cinema, which was run in the post–World War  II period by George Hoellering, who moved to London in 1944. The Academy was later run by Ivo Jarosy, and for a period the films of Miklós Jancsó seemed to take up almost permanent residence. Contemporary later owned its own cinemas: initially the Paris-Pullman and later the Phoenix East Finchley. While undoubtedly left wing in its orientation, Contemporary Films was an orthodox “art house” distributor, much like Artificial Eye or New Wave Films today, drawing films principally from the award winners at European film festivals. ETV, on the other hand, was closely linked to the Communist Party and did not normally purchase commercial rights. Many ETV features would have quite limited exposure, whereas Contemporary Films provided the staple diet of film societies. The number of films available, which will come as a surprise to many, does much to explain why, for film enthusiasts raised in the 1960s, seeing a Polish or Czech film was little different from seeing one from France or Sweden—Wajda, Jancsó, and Miloš Forman were as familiar as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, or François Truffaut. Despite the efforts of specialist DVD distributors, it is likely that more people were exposed to Eastern and Central European films in the late 1960s than in 2010. If one moves forward to 1990–91, there appears to have been little change in the availability of films to film societies. With the exception of a number of Czech films withdrawn for political reasons, many of the films from the 1973 catalog remained available. According to BFI’s Films on Offer 1990–91, the approximate figures for 16mm availability at that time were 78 Czech and Slovak, 45 Polish, 15 Hungarian, and 103 Soviet films.5 But the figures are partly illusory, since 22 of the Polish films were released through the Polish Cultural Institute to an extremely limited market, and many of the older Russian and Czech films in the ETV collection would have had similarly limited exposure. The position of Contemporary Films had declined and its role in the market had been taken over by Artificial Eye. At this time Artificial Eye accounted for thirteen of the “East European” titles (nine Russian, three Polish, and one Hungarian). East-Central European film had nothing like the presence that had existed in the late 1960s. Another company that made a limited

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foray into the market was Pan European Films, which released Wajda’s Wesele (The wedding, 1972) and Andrzej Żuławski’s Trzecia część nocy (The third part of the night, 1972) with limited response.6 As we consider television, it is clear that the screening of foreign films was relatively rare before the formation of Channel 4 in 1982. But it should also be remembered that there was only one channel in the United Kingdom until 1955, two between 1955 and 1964, three between 1964 and 1982, and four between 1982 and the late 1990s. Screenings of Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevskii (Alexander Nevsky, 1938) or Andrzej Munk’s Błękitny krzyż (Men of the Blue Cross, 1955), to cite two personal memories, would have reached a much larger unsuspecting audience in the 1960s than any screening on a niche arts channel would today. Prior to Channel 4, the notion of programming anything other than the odd “World Cinema” season of around ten titles did not occur often. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the BBC programmed an Andrzej Munk season in 1966, consisting of Men of the Blue Cross, Człowiek na torze (Man on the tracks, 1957), Eroica (1958), and Zezowate szczęście (Bad luck, 1960). Throughout the history of British exhibition, interest in Polish cinema has focused principally on the Polish school, and primarily on Wajda. Pokolenie (A generation, 1954), Kanał (1957), Popiół i diament (Ashes and diamonds, 1958), Lotna (1959), and Wszystko na sprzedaż (Everything for sale, 1968) were all released by Contemporary Films, and Polowanie na muchy (Hunting flies, 1969) was shown on television. Then came Człowiek z marmuru (Man of marble, 1976), Człowiek z żelaza (Man of iron, 1981), and Bez znieczulenia (Rough treatment, aka Without anesthetic, 1979) between 1978 and 1981. After Wajda, the next Polish director to attract sustained attention was Krzysztof Zanussi, particularly with Życie rodzinne (Family life, 1971), Iluminacja (Illumination, 1973), Bilans kwartalny (Quarterly balance, 1975), Barwy ochronne (Camouflage, 1977), and Constans (The constant factor, 1980) between 1975 and 1981. Zanussi’s typically low-key style and attention to individual moral and philosophical issues earned a continuous “art house” following over a number of years, as well as contributing significantly to the Cinema of Moral Concern. Subsequently, there was Krzysztof Kieślowski, whose major impact came from the BBC screening of all ten episodes of his Dekalog (The Decalogue, 1988). His earlier Polish films, such as Amator (Camera buff, 1979), Przypadek (Blind chance, 1981), and Bez końca (No end, 1985), were mainly shown on television, and his cinematic arrival was marked by the Three Colors trilogy. Other Polish films shown on television included Marek Piwowski’s Przepraszam, czy tu biją? (Excuse me, is

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Figure 1.1. Screenshot from Ashes and Diamonds (dir. Wajda, 1958): Zbigniew Cybulski and Ewa Krżyzewska

it here they shoot people? 1976), Agnieszka Holland’s Aktorzy prowincjonalni (Provincial actors, 1980), and Feliks Falk’s Wodzirej (Top dog, 1978) and Był Jazz (And then there was jazz, 1981; released 1984). Over a fifty-year period, around ninety Polish features were available to British audiences, and approximately seventy of these were fairly easy to see for those who were interested. From the 1950s until the fall of communism, Polish cinema was well represented in commercial distribution—much more so than Czech or Hungarian cinema and the almost nonexistent coverage of films from Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany. Film critics such as Derek Malcolm in the Guardian and David Robinson in the Times and the Financial Times provided sympathetic support as did the British Film Institute’s quarterly journal, Sight & Sound. Since 1989, however, interest in Polish and Central and Eastern European cinema generally has waned. There has been an elite interest in Alexander Sokhurov in Russia and Béla Tarr in Hungary, but until the recent critical success of Romanian cinema at Cannes, the area has been all but ignored. If we turn to the development of film studies, it is worth recalling that the first degree-level courses in the United Kingdom were not approved until 1976, all of them at what were then termed Polytechnics (all are

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now universities). The first formally recognized school-level qualifications were introduced a little earlier. It is interesting in this connection to look at the BFI publication Film Teaching, which included articles by Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, and Alan Lovell, among others.7 The book reminded readers of the important early work of Paul Rotha, who published his groundbreaking The Film till Now: A Survey of World Cinema in 1930 (updating it in 1949), and Roger Manvell, whose books Film (1944) and The Film and the Public (1955) were highly influential in the early postwar period.8 The Art of the Film, by the curator of the National Film Archive Ernest Lindgren, appeared in 1948 and was based on lectures he had given at the British Film Institute’s summer film school, which he had founded in 1943.9 Among the sample courses listed at the end of Film Teaching is one on national cinemas, featuring six weeks on Polish cinema, almost certainly the first official coverage of any cinema from East-Central Europe. By that time, the British Film Institute had also inaugurated a series of film study units, each centered on a feature film and supported by related film extracts. The first ones focused on topics such as war, realism, young people, silent comedy, and the British New Wave. The seventh in a sequence of eighteen was devoted to Polish cinema, the only unit then centered on a national cinema other than Britain’s. The feature selected was Andrzej Munk’s Eroica, with extracts from Wajda’s War Trilogy (A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds) as well as his film Lotna (1959), and from Skolimowski’s Bariera (Barrier, 1966). Extracts were also available from Aleksander Ford’s Młodość Chopina (The youth of Chopin, 1952) and Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap (The last stage, 1948); all the film extracts were supplied by Contemporary Films. The BFI Education Department also produced a dossier of essays entitled Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema to accompany a season of films held at the National Film Theatre in 1970.10 It was the only collection on Polish cinema published originally in English to appear until the late 1990s. It was in many ways exemplary, including an essay by Neil Morris on “The Uses of History,” a major essay on Wajda by Bolesław Sulik, two interviews with Wajda, and pieces on Everything for Sale and Lotna by Colin McArthur. According to McArthur, the objective was to move away from a reception of Wajda’s films “as isolated and mutually irreconcilable fragments.”11 Undoubtedly, the dossier’s prime interest lies in Sulik’s extended discussion of the War Trilogy, which analyzes the ways in which A Generation transcended socialist realism, provides a discussion of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) as an essential context for Kanal, and outlines the wide

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range of specifically Polish cultural references in Ashes and Diamonds. In Ashes and Diamonds, Sulik argues, Wajda created a symbolic drama that, while not exactly timeless, reached beyond concrete boundaries. Sulik and McArthur both worked for the left-wing magazine Tribune, and it is likely that their association began there. Sulik was also a pioneer in film education and contributed key analyses of Citizen Kane and Ashes and Diamonds to the magazine Screen Education (the precursor of Screen). He subsequently worked with Skolimowski on his Englishlanguage productions Deep End (1971) and Moonlighting (1982), as well as with Wajda on his Anglo-Polish adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line, publishing a book on its production.12 The only other Eastern bloc cinema to attract attention at this time was the Czech New Wave, and this was largely through the British Federation of Film Societies. Langdon Dewey published a number of articles in the federation’s magazine Film, following these up with An Index on Czech Directors, detailed program notes on Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), and eventually a book, An Outline of Czechoslovakian Cinema, still the only English-language publication to attempt such a historical account.13 Given the plethora of books in circulation today, it is difficult to imagine being back in the 1950s and 1960s when so few were available that French-language books were frequently the only source of criticism and information on international cinema. The first British book to deal with the development of auteur cinema was John Russell Taylor’s Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-makers of the Sixties in 1964.14 Interestingly, virtually all of Taylor’s bibliographical references are to French sources, with particular reference to the Cinéma d’aujourd’hui series published by Seghers. No filmmaker from Central or Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union was included. When Peter Cowie began publishing the International Film Guide in the same year and his Tantivy Press monographs in 1965, they, not surprisingly, also followed the format of the Cinéma d’aujourd’hui series. The Movie Paperbacks series, inaugurated in 1967, followed a similar model. In 1969 Tantivy Press published Nina Hibbin’s Eastern Europe, a dictionary of East European filmmakers—it would be more than two decades before there was another—and in 1973 it published Bolesław Michałek’s The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda.15 Tantivy Press also published Ronald Holloway’s book on Croatian animation, Z Is for Zagreb, and distributed Graham Petrie’s History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema and Holloway’s The Bulgarian Cinema.16 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there appeared to be an expanding interest in Central and Eastern European cinema, particularly that

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of Poland and Czechoslovakia, while critical studies (although not monographs) were appearing on Skolimowski, Jancsó, and Dušan Makavejev.17 It would have been logical to expect some progression in this, but it did not happen—perversely, one suspects, because of the influence of the events of May 1968 in Paris. Following the example of Cahiers du cinéma, Screen turned toward theory, and the field of film studies as we know it today began its development. The French experience left a political and theoretical legacy, whereas the suppression of the Prague Spring in August by Warsaw Pact troops did not. Put simply, the genuinely radical films of the Czech New Wave were seen as bourgeois and elitist representatives of “art cinema,” which was pretty much the same view as that taken by the Stalinist normalizers of the East. There was greater interest in films that might subvert capitalism than in those that questioned the practice of “actually existing socialism.” A curious situation also developed in the 1970s whereby educational organizations such as the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) and the BFI Education Department became seemingly opposed to what were perceived as representatives of “dominant” culture. Perversely, these included other departments of the British Film Institute such as the National Film Theatre and Sight & Sound, the Academy Cinema, the British Federation of Film Societies, and broadsheet newspaper film critics. While each “side” habitually simplified the objectives of the other, the agencies that had provided the primary support for Central and Eastern European film were, at the very least, no longer at the cutting edge. One by-product of all this was an almost total disappearance of Central and Eastern European film from the educational agenda. Emphases on theory at this stage seemed to imply the study of Hollywood and of commercial cinema, on the one hand, and the promotion of Third cinema and Counter-Cinema, on the other. Accusations were launched of Marxist plotting in academia, letters were written to ministers, and directors such as Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey, and Kevin Brownlow launched an attack on virtually the whole spectrum of developments in film studies (see, for instance, Anderson’s article “Critical Betrayal”18). In these years Anderson, who was a former critic (he was one of the founders of Sequence and a frequent contributor to Sight & Sound), was one of the few to continue to support an interest in Central and Eastern European cinema. In the 1960s he had made his documentary Raz dwa trzy (The singing lesson, 1967) in Poland and had a walk-on role in Jan Němec’s Czech New Wave film Mučedníci lásky (Martyrs of love, 1966). Němec’s cinematographer, Miroslav Ondříček, photographed all three of Anderson’s next films—The White Bus (1966), If . . . (1968), and O

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Lucky Man! (1973). Anderson also introduced a number of Polish films on television, including works by Piwowski and Kieślowski. One of Anderson’s last major essays on international cinema was an article in the Guardian titled “Commitment in a Cold Climate,” a review of David Paul’s collection Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema.19 Anderson includes much personal reflection, including reference to the importance of Piwowski and the overwhelming impact of seeing A Generation at Cannes in 1957. A Generation, Wajda had earlier noted, was more appreciated in the United Kingdom than in Poland. Anderson also discussed his experiences with the possible censorship of The Singing Lesson. “Why are the people in the street so miserable?” he was asked, and “Why is nobody smiling?” Then people around him began to talk about how his ending might also be a reference to Wyspiański’s play Wesele (The wedding). This is, perhaps, further evidence of Wajda’s contention that Polish critics tend to overinterpret. Interestingly enough, Anderson’s films have tended to be more highly regarded in Poland and Central Europe than in the United Kingdom. The limited perspective offered on the cinemas of Central and Eastern Europe is still reflected in film studies, as is evident from such influential titles as The Oxford History of World Cinema, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, and more recently, the latest edition of The Cinema Book.20 While all such volumes involve editorial constraints, the choices are nonetheless indicative of preferences. It can be assumed that the missing information is considered unnecessary, unimportant, or unlikely to lead to any practical educational purpose. The Oxford History of World Cinema completely excludes any consideration of Bulgaria and Romania, and The Oxford Guide to Film Studies refers only to Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Cinema Book, which was first published in 1985, is very much the bible of film studies. Its first editions did not address the issue of national cinemas at all, which, in a sense, was fair to everyone. However, its 2007 edition does so explicitly, with entries on Australia, Britain, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Spain. Despite a significant cultural and cinematic heritage, there is no coverage at all of Central and Eastern Europe, and the coverage of Russian film is limited to the 1920s. Recent publications by the British Film Institute also reflect a similar neglect. This lack of consideration in books that are, in other respects, encyclopedic and inclusive is, on the face of it, inexplicable. Many of the countries included in The Cinema Book have shorter production histories and have produced many fewer films than the countries of East-Central Europe.

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While it is speculative, one could conclude that, as in the tabloid and broadsheet newspapers and television media, the cultures of East-Central Europe have simply not been part of the mind-set of a particular generation. While aspects of these viewpoints would have existed between the world wars (recall Neville Chamberlain’s reference to Czechoslovakia as “a far-off country of which we know little”), Soviet occupation led to a situation in which the countries of the Eastern bloc remained undifferentiated to those in the West. One should also consider the role of film festivals and the fact that the history of cinema outside of the “dominant” cultures is largely written in terms of festival award winners, specifically by the Cannes festival, and of the causes espoused by French critics. Thus Poland’s Cinema of Moral Concern and Wajda’s Man of Marble attracted attention, but little else did. Neither should one rule out political interference. The Czech government routinely denied access to films both new and old. Věra Chytilová’s Hra o jablko (The apple game, 1976) was both denied and then allowed international festival screenings, and Václav Gajer’s Kateřina a jeji děti (Catherine and her children, 1975) was shown at the London Film Festival in 1976 on the express condition that no press coverage would be permitted. Similarly, the Polish authorities allowed a screening of Kieślowski’s film No End in London in 1986 only on condition that Roman Wionczek’s progovernment, anti-Solidarity film Godnośč (Dignity, 1984) be shown as well. Whether the categorization “Eastern Europe” or “East-Central Europe” or even “Central Europe” is advantageous in this connection is arguable since it tends to encourage dismissive, generalized, undifferentiated, and ill-informed judgments. It also flies in the face of the majority of filmmakers who regard themselves as part of a national culture and is certainly of little help to those attempting to preserve a national screen heritage. Here it is worth considering Elizabeth Ezra’s view that “very few film-makers set out to make a German film or a Taiwanese film or an American film” and that films often acquire their identities retrospectively.21 While it is probably true that the majority of filmmakers do not set out to make “nationalist” films, I would argue that many are conscious of working within a national culture and often specifically address local audiences. If one looks at cinema historically, then the promotion of national identity has often been of primary importance (for example, British cinema during World War  II and Polish and Eastern European cinemas under communism). But this is not to suggest that Polish and Eastern European cinemas have not been influenced by Bergman, Kurosawa, or the British New Wave. Useful “regional” and “cross-regional” comparisons can be

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made and “transnational” approaches can also be adopted, but this is no more or less appropriate than is the case with all cinema.22 Ewa Mazierska notes that a recent study of masculinities in European and Hollywood cinema completely excludes Eastern Europe.23 One can be reasonably certain that the notion of including “Eastern Europe” in the idea of Europe never occurred to the book’s editors. It is only with the expansion of the European Community and, significantly, the expansion of financial and coproduction interests that one has any sense of change. To adapt Mikhail Gorbachev, we are not yet part of a “common European home.” And that raises another and much wider issue—the position of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Since 1989 Central and Eastern European film has not reemerged from this obscurity. Filmmakers are constantly asking themselves what they need to do in order to penetrate the international market, how to gain admittance to the competitions at Berlin, Cannes, Venice, San Sebastian, and so on. The Czech film Kolja (Kolya, 1996) did win an Oscar, but that was very much the exception. Romanian cinema has succeeded in breaking through in recent years although this has not converted into commercial or domestic success as yet. In the twenty years since the fall of communism, Polish cinema has made no impact in the United Kingdom. Two of Wajda’s films, Korczak (1990) and Katyń (2007), have been released, and in recent years Dogwoof Pictures has released a number of features, including Krzysztof Krauze’s Mój Nikifor (My Nikifor, 2004), but without attracting significant attention. In fact, the objective has been primarily to provide entertainment for Polish immigrant workers. However, attitudes toward Central and Eastern Europe have not remained static, and this has largely been due to the enterprise of independent publishers and DVD companies. On the publishing front, one can point to the efforts of such publishers as Flicks Books, Wallflower Press, and Berghahn Books. Flicks published Frank Bren’s book on Poland as one of the first books in its World Cinema series in 1986, following this with monographs on Kieślowski, Švankmajer, and Jancsó’s Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971). Besides focusing on recognized “auteurs” such as Wajda, Polanski, and Kusturica, Wallflower Press published works on Central and East European film in general as well as on Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, and Russia/the Soviet Union. Berghahn Books has focused primarily on Poland, with a more overt emphasis on gender and political issues. The situation is clearly changing, though this is not really a British phenomenon (albeit often British originated) since most of these books would not be published without access to a North American and international

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market. (Also, Flicks ceased publishing in 2003, its first and last books on Polish cinema.) But enthusiasm and commitment is not lacking, and while academics can reach readers, the possibility and the foundation for the study of Central and Eastern European film exist. The important point about these publication programs is not that they specialize in the area, but that it is not excluded—and that suggests a changing mind-set. If one turns to the DVD market, there have been highly significant developments in terms of availability, again largely due to the efforts of individuals and enthusiasts. While Facets Video, based in Chicago, has long championed Central and Eastern European film in the United States, in the United Kingdom the task has fallen to Second Run DVD. Here the releases from Poland include works by Ford, Kawalerowicz, Munk, Żuławski, and Ryszard Bugajski, with similar selections from Czech and Hungarian cinemas. Many of Wajda’s films (e.g., the War Trilogy and Katyń) are available from other distributors, and almost everything by Kieślowski from Artificial Eye. The important thing here is that the availability of DVDs of high technical quality is both creating new markets and providing the materials that allow for the development of specialist courses and the integration of Central and Eastern European film into the wider framework of film studies. In conclusion, I would argue that the promotion of Central and Eastern European film in the 1950s and 1960s was largely a project of the Left and of those with some kind of link to the national cultures. In the early years critical interest in Polish cinema was supported by Paddy Whannel, Bolesław Sulik, and Colin McArthur, and distribution by Charles Cooper (Contemporary Films). At the present time Yoram Allon at Wallflower Press provides a sympathetic ear, and the increasing number of Polish academics working in British universities is expanding the research base. But despite all this, the loss of certain key individuals, be they publishers or scholars, could easily change the picture for the worse. The academic front notwithstanding, the principal effects of cinema lie in exhibition. It is almost certainly the case that most audiences do not remember the national origins of films that they see, and the impact of seeing a film may not lead to any wider cultural links for which one might hope—the film experience, to recall McArthur, remains fragmented. Certain films like Ashes and Diamonds or Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely observed trains; dir. Jiří Menzel, Czechoslovakia, 1966) may live in the memory, like a Bergman or an Antonioni, because of their originality and visual imagery—as might The Decalogue or the Three Colors trilogy. They do not, however, lead automatically to an awareness or interest in the literatures and history of the area of origin.

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Far from encountering East-Central Europe, to use Hubert Ripka’s phrase, as a heterogeneous mix lacking in a common tradition, moviegoers are much more likely to interpret their viewing experiences as a spectrum of Slavonic or postcommunist culture, with Romania the latest phase of an interchangeable succession.24 But the films do reveal something beyond the headlines, and deeper than the stereotypes of the press and the media, and that is a vision worth maintaining. Growing research, networks of scholars, film festivals, and the work of national cultural institutes can all affect the perceptions and values of the mainstream. After all, in the 1950s and 1960s, film itself was not considered a fit subject for academic study.

Notes 1. UK Film Council, UK Film Council Statistical Yearbook, 2009 (London, 2009). 2. Peter Cargin, “A Brief History of Film Societies and the Federation,” Film, ser. 2, no. 31 (October–November 1975): 21–23. 3. Contemporary Films Catalogue (London: Contemporary Films, 1973). 4. 16mm Feature Cartoon and Puppet Films (London: Educational and Television Films, 1973). 5. Nigel Algar, ed., Films on Offer 1990–91 (London: British Film Institute, 1990). 6. Michael Darvell, “Pan European: Tapping the Minority Audiences,” Film, ser. 2, no. 5 (August 1973): 9–10. 7. Paddy Whannel and Peter Harcourt, eds., Film Teaching (London: British Film Institute, 1964). 8. Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith, The Film till Now: A Survey of World Cinema, 4th ed. (London: Vision Press, 1963); Roger Manvell, Film (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944); Roger Manvell, The Film and the Public (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). 9. Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film, rev. ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963). 10. Colin McArthur, ed., Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema (London: BFI Education, 1970). 11. Ibid., 4. 12. Bolesław Sulik, A Change of Tack: Making the Shadow Line (London: British Film Institute, 1976). 13. Langdon Dewey, Outline of Czechoslovakian Cinema (London: Informatics, 1971). 14. John Russell Taylor, Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear: Some Key Film-Makers of the Sixties (London: Methuen, 1964).

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15. Nina Hibbin, Eastern Europe (London: Zwemmer, 1969); Bolesław Michałek, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (London: Tantivy Press, 1973). 16. Ronald Holloway, Z Is for Zagreb (London: Tantivy Press, 1972); Graham Petrie, History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema (Budapest: Corvina, 1978); Ronald Holloway, The Bulgarian Cinema (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986). 17. Michael Walker, “Jerzy Skolimowski,” in Ian Cameron, Jean Chabot, Michel Ciment, Robert Daudelin, Andi Engel, Michael Walker, and Robin Wood, Second Wave (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 34–62; John Russell Taylor, Directors and Directions: Cinema for the Seventies (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975); Robin Wood, “Dusan Makavejev,” in Cameron et al., Second Wave, 7–33. 18. Lindsay Anderson, “Critical Betrayal,” Guardian, March 2, 1981, reprinted in Lindsay Anderson, Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, ed. Paul Ryan (London: Plexus, 2004), 271–76. 19. Lindsay Anderson, “Commitment in a Cold Climate,” Guardian, May 7, 1984, reprinted in Anderson, Never Apologise, 583–89; David  W. Paul, ed., Politics, Art and Commitment in the East European Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1983). 20. Geoffrey Nowell Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Pam Cook, ed., The Cinema Book, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2007). 21. Elizabeth Ezra, “National Cinemas in the Global Era,” in ibid., 170. 22. See Dina Iordanova, “Transnational Film Studies,” in Cook, Cinema Book, 508–9. 23. Ewa Mazierska, “Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 1, no. 1 (2010): 13n4. 24. Hubert Ripka, Eastern Europe in the Postwar World (London: Methuen, 1961), 1–31.

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Chapter Two

The Shifting British Reception of Wajda’s Work from MAN OF MARBLE to KATYŃ Darragh O’Donoghue Perhaps at a deeper level, British critics were not really interested in Wajda or more accurately, were interested in him for the wrong reasons. —Colin McArthur

The period in contemporary Polish history that began with the strikes at Gdańsk shipyard in August 1980, leading to the Solidarity movement, and ending with the imposition of martial law on December 13, 1981, dominated the Western media at the time. It also coincided with Andrzej Wajda’s greatest visibility as a filmmaker in the United Kingdom. From April 1981 to January 1982 he was rarely off London screens with his two most outspoken works, Rough Treatment (Bez znieczulenia, 1978) and Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza, 1981), together with revivals of the War Trilogy—A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955), Kanal (1957), and Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958)—which first made a name for him among British audiences, and Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977), the film whose frankness startled British critics familiar with the “coded” approach to contemporary politics practiced by most Eastern European filmmakers. Wajda gave the Guardian Lecture at the National Film Theatre in November 1980.1 A new Arena profile was broadcast with Rough Treatment in a prime-time slot on BBC Two in September 1981; while BBC Two and Channel 4 came to a “historic” agreement to broadcast the Man diptych over that Christmas/New Year period, just after martial law was imposed. More significantly, Wajda moved out of the film columns onto the foreign affairs pages of newspapers—his links with Solidarity were frequently mentioned, in particular his staging of the ceremony unveiling the monuments to workers killed in the 1970

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Gdańsk riots, which also featured his preferred actor Daniel Olbrychski.2 This British attention peaked in May 1981 when a photograph of Wajda appeared on the front page of the Guardian, showing him receiving the Palme d’Or for Man of Iron.3 By 2008 Wajda was a virtually “invisible” figure.4 Very few of his films are available on DVD. Only the War Trilogy and Danton (1983) get occasional TV screenings; the trilogy is dutifully acknowledged in retrospective articles or the odd “best of” list.5 Paul Coates’s offer to write a monograph on Ashes and Diamonds in the “BFI Film Classics” series was rejected.6 Only one Wajda film, Korczak (1990), had received British distribution since 1985. Claire Binns, director of City Screen, “Britain’s biggest independent film exhibition chain,” announced, upon its release, that she would not be screening Wajda’s latest film, Katyń (2007).7 What happened to Wajda’s reputation in the intervening period? This chapter will look at the British reaction to Wajda’s cinema, focusing primarily on the Solidarity era and Wajda’s subsequent decline. But before discussing his career from Man of Marble onward, the question arises, why did Wajda achieve such prominence in 1980–82? It was not the first time that Wajda experienced loud acclaim in Britain followed by a period of scant distribution and critical neglect.

Early Acclaim Wajda himself has acknowledged Lindsay Anderson’s Living Cinema review of Kanal and A Generation as crucial in introducing his work to the West.8 At that time, Anderson was both an influential, polemical critic trying to reinvigorate the staid British film industry and one of the leaders of the Free Cinema documentary movement. Kanal’s “tragic power” and “obsessive picture of a nightmare world” were contrasted with an “embarrassing,” politically naive, stiff-upper-lip British war film shown at the same Cannes festival.9 Anderson’s reading of Wajda—praising the mix of different registers: humanism with nightmare, idealism with obsession—anticipates his own features to come. When he released Britannia Hospital in 1982 to critical disdain in Britain, Wajda wrote him a letter that said “it was the best Polish film he’d seen for a long time.”10 Unfortunately, most British critics after Anderson followed the more sentimental terms of his review—in effect, his praise of the War Trilogy’s poetic realism—and disparaged those aspects that did not suit them, using phrases like “overindulgence,” “gratuitously arty,” or “mechanically contrived” as abuse.11 When it became clear that the visual tactics

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critics dismissed as distracting irritants from this “realism” actually comprised the heart of Wajda’s vision—starting with the “baroque” Lotna (1959)—they simply ignored or disparaged his work, and continued to praise their vision of the “great” War Trilogy as authentic and even as “documents”;12 in their view, Wajda unaccountably strayed until his “comeback” in the late 1970s.13 An ominous indication of this trend can be found in a 1960 Monthly Film Bulletin review of A Generation, the first of the trilogy but the last to be released in Britain. Four times in two paragraphs variations on the term “realism” are used, with A Generation being praised for having a “tighter link to reality” than the previous (i.e., later) films. Without saying it directly, this reviewer disliked where Wajda’s cinema was heading; his use of “realism” as the ultimate epithet says more about British cinema at the time—when the British New Wave, or “kitchen sink” film, was emerging—than about Wajda.14 Nevertheless, Polish films were hugely fashionable in the period 1957–61 and were regularly reviewed; film columns often had headlines like “A Polish Masterpiece,” “Outstanding Film from Poland,” or simply “From Poland.”15 In November 1961 Films & Filming published a special issue on Polish cinema, which included articles by Wajda and Alina Janowska, who was about to appear in Samson (1961); an interview with Zbigniew Cybulski; and a script extract from Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960), his latest film in British release.16 In addition, the Łódź Film School was often praised to denigrate the absence of such an institution in the United Kingdom.17 Once British critics realized that Wajda’s art wasn’t as “universal” as they had believed, they had three options when evaluating his films:18 (1) to point to their parochial or local content, which a British viewer would need a “substantial background knowledge” of Polish culture and so on to “fully appreciate”;19 (2) to reduce them to allegories, full of “indirection, sly hints, veiled analogies, between-the-lines readings” designed to “out-fox local censors”;20 or (3) to lump them as part of the heritage of “world cinema,” generically “humanist,” with Wajda as the Polish peer of Bergman, Fellini, and Satyajit Ray. The first approach required too much absorption in Polish literature, painting, history, and so on in order to understand Wajda’s range of allusion, analogy, and symbolism. Without this knowledge, reviewers felt powerless to interpret the films, so dismissed them as too parochially Polish to interest British audiences. Indeed, Wajda’s 1973 adaptation of The Wedding (Wesele), Wyspiański’s “hermetically Polish” play, was only released in Ealing, where there lived a large Polish immigrant population.21 It is not as if critics had no opportunity to learn some context; the

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British Film Institute’s 1970 study guide Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema and Bolesław Michałek’s 1973 monograph on Wajda both offer excellent backgrounds to the Polish culture and history that feed into the films and the critical debates in Poland surrounding them;22 British newspapers often printed articles by eminent Poles discussing politics and culture. But as Kazimierz Brandys, author/screenwriter of Samson, observed, “The Poles have a local complex. They know they speak in a code language that foreigners have no interest in deciphering.”23 The second critical approach—allegory—gave the power to the critic, allowing him or her to decipher “coded messages” and thus impose interpretations on the director’s perceived design, safe in the knowledge that the Eastern European filmmaker could not very well answer back.24 So Wajda and his films were called “oblique” or “careful.”25 Whereas in the first “parochial” paradigm, Wajda used Polish epistemes to talk to Poles, in the second, non-Polish reviewers were given free play of interpretation. In a sense, British critics projected their vision of what a Polish filmmaker should be onto Wajda, and it is worth taking this into account when considering his sudden reemergence in the late 1970s, when he seemed to answer specifically Western curiosities about Poland. A rare negative view at this time came from BBC correspondent Eric Rhode, who attributed the Western acclaim of Wajda during the late 1950s and early 1960s to the Cold War.26 He accused the early Wajda of bad faith, criticizing the lack of “historical accuracy” in the War Trilogy, which elided Russian brutality and the role of Polish anticommunists in favor of myth.27 Innocent Sorcerers in 1962 was the last Wajda film to get general distribution in Britain until the delayed release of Man of Marble in 1979. This gap of nearly two decades, the apparently new dynamism in his filmmaking, and the frankness of his films’ content, led critics to proclaim Wajda’s return as a kind of resurrection—“Wajda Redux” was one headline28—despite the fact that some of his greatest achievements or experiments, such as Everything for Sale (Wszystko na sprzedaż, 1969), Landscape after Battle (Krajobraz po bitwie, 1970) or Promised land (Ziemia obiecana, 1975), were made in the intervening period. It would be inaccurate to state that Wajda was completely absent from British cultural debate in these seventeen years. Like Ingmar Bergman, he maintained a parallel and prestigious career in theater, and coverage of his productions in the United Kingdom—in particular his stagings at the London World Theatre Season of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in 1972 and 1973 and Wyspiański’s November Night in 1975, and his 1981 Edinburgh Festival production of Nastasya Filippovna (based on the climax of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), where he won a special award—received

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far wider media coverage and critical acclaim (including feature interviews) than his films ever did.29 This highlights a snobbery or hierarchy in the British arts world, where literature is privileged over “popular” arts such as the cinema; one reviewer, discussing a Wajda production, proclaimed the “supremacy of theatre over the other arts, as a vehicle of active philosophy and a force of instantaneous emotional reaction.”30 Michael Billington would later, after John Jones, call Wajda’s style “apocalyptical naturalism” by which he meant a visually and aurally intense theater “uniting verse, music, dance, psychological realism, and heroic action” that was innovative in acting, direction, design, and stage practice;31 Billington’s view was taken up in a theoretical or polemical way by critics seeking to shake up the “plodding dependence on realism” in British productions.32 This way of reading Wajda’s theater as an alternative to “realism” in effect reversed film critics’ initial appreciation of his “realism,” and once again shows how Wajda’s work has been interpreted through contemporary British concerns.

The Solidarity Period Why did the West take such an interest in the events of 1980–81? Dissident historian—and later colleague of Wajda’s, as editor of a post1989 Solidarity newspaper—Adam Michnik suggested: “To a certain extent the fate of Europe depends on the situation prevailing in Poland: the existence of implacable totalitarianism in one part of the continent must threaten the continuation of democracy in the other.”33 Less diplomatically, Jedrzej Giertych argued: “It is obvious that a great part of the Western public opinion has been animated during these recent events not by good will towards Poland but by the hope that eventually Poland’s new misfortunes will bring some advantages to the Western world.”34 Before discussing the reaction to Wajda’s films from Man of Iron to Danton, it might be useful to look at the context in which these films were released in the United Kingdom. In a situation straight out of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, there were many small Polish groups operating in this country, reacting to the various crises from 1976 to 1982 with pamphlets, books, and newspapers printed by small presses.35 One pamphlet published by the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party in April 1981 justified the possibility of Soviet military intervention “to defend Poland,” but most were expressions of dissent unthinkable in communist Poland.36 The most outrageous of these was a collection of Andrzej Krauze’s explicit caricatures that openly satirized Gierek and the Polish

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Communist Party, press censorship, Soviet interference, and so on, most of which were banned by the Polish press, and repeated in a different medium some of Wajda’s ideas in Man of Marble.37 The Roman Catholic Church at this time was frequently referred to as the “moral” or “legal” opposition in Poland—and features prominently in Man of Iron—so, unsurprisingly, many of these émigré volumes were either Catholic in approach or published by Catholic presses.38 Unfortunately, some of these became vehicles for unsavory ideas, where dissident nationalism accommodated pro-life or anti-Semitic stances; it becomes easier to understand why a film like Katyń—to Wajda’s horror— was hijacked by the far right in Poland.39 Further research would have to be done on these groups and presses to uncover their precise standpoints. For instance, a collection of open letters compiled by the Association of Polish Students and Graduates in Exile and signed by prominent intellectual and cultural figures was printed as Dissent in Poland in 1977 by the Polish Catholic Veritas Foundation Press; it featured Wajda collaborators such as Jerzy Andrzejewski, author/screenwriter of Ashes and Diamonds, Innocent Sorcerers, and Gates to Paradise; Brandys; Małgorzata Braunek, star of Hunting Flies; and Olbrychski.40 The Veritas Foundation also made In Defense of My Country by selfconfessed anticommunist, “traditionalist Catholic and nationalist” émigré Jędrzej Giertych. This was a history of Poland written in response to perceived Western exploitation of the Solidarity strikes; among other things, it denies Polish involvement in the Holocaust and accuses Jews of persecuting “the local Polish population” during the Soviet occupation of World War II.41 The Experience and Future Discussion Group (DiP) convened in November 1978 as a forum for intellectuals and Party members to meet; the severity of criticisms led the Party to forbid further meetings. The DiP produced Report on the State of the Republic (1979) and Which Way Out (1980), based on questionnaires issued to Party members, Catholics, and dissidents; the British edition was introduced by academics from the University of Glasgow and the London School of Economics.42 Like the Man diptych, it shows how the mass media in Poland was a “basic instrument of governance,” controlled by the Party through “recommendations and directives,” “appointments to key positions,” and censorship.43 A book published by the LSE attacked Polish censorship and police brutality and reproduced many documents produced by social activists (including Solidarity members) hostile to the ruling communists.44 Polish Free Trade Unions, published by Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, collected underground bulletins, papers, and interviews with the Solidarity strikers.45

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These works, however, would have had a very select readership. Norman Davies’s widely reviewed God’s Playground, still the standard English-language history of Poland, was published in 1981 with a “stop press,” slightly pessimistic epilogue about Solidarity and presented a thorough record of postwar communist Poland.46 At the same time, Wajda associate Bolesław Sulik—who wrote the script for The Shadow Line (Smuga cienia), his 1975 drama-documentary on the Polish-English writer Joseph Conrad, a coproduction between Thames Television and Film Polski, and who had “extensive contacts in the dissident loyal opposition community”47—wrote the Solidaritysponsored, Granada Television drama-documentary Strike! (1980), directed by Leslie Woodhead, about the Gdańsk upheaval. Strike! was based on one hundred hours of “tape-recorded verbatim material about the whole period of the strike” as well as interviews with Solidarity members in London.48 Woodhead specialized in subjects about dissidents in Eastern Europe and the rest of the communist world.49 In a 1981 issue of Sight & Sound that also carried an interview with Wajda, Sulik and Woodhead discussed the difficulties of explaining these Polish events to a British audience. Said Sulik: “It was almost impossible to devise a structure that would absorb a large amount of archive material without creating really a culture shock. You have to translate it into English idiom”; “There are some incongruous things about Solidarity, and that dimension is difficult to communicate to an English audience”; Added Woodhead: “The strike in Gdansk was as much a cultural event as a political event . . . a kind of freedom festival which could only be expressed in those traditional cultural terms which are, after all, very exotic to the Western audience. I’ve realised more than ever during the last two weeks, that there is very little one can do to translate it into the British cultural structures, that what one needed was a kind of emotional charge to bridge that gap.”50 So, before the release of Man of Iron, there was already a wealth of information and opinion in the United Kingdom about Gdańsk, Solidarity, and contemporary Polish communism, and much debate on the best way to present such discourse to a British audience.51 But why did Wajda emerge for Britons as the key cinematic chronicler of these times? After all, the films with which he made his reputation were rarely praised for social criticism and, as Eric Rhode implied, could even be read as serving Polish communist interests. I suggested earlier that the “coded messages” of Wajda’s films and other Eastern European cinema often flattered the interpretative fancies of the Western critic; however, in 1980–81 the British, like the rest of the world, wanted to know what

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exactly was going on in Gdańsk; the “oblique” approach simply wouldn’t suffice. So whereas other films of the era, such as Kieślowski’s Camera Buff (Amator, 1979) and Zanussi’s The Constant Factor (Constans, 1980), continued using the “ambiguously useful device of working through loaded metaphors,” Man of Iron was praised as a “forthright attack” that “deal[t] directly with the issues involved.”52 In the 1960s Wajda’s films were seen as having an educative function—a poll in the Observer suggested Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds should be shown to British comprehensive students.53 This aspect is heightened in the films of this period; Gavin Miller’s praise of Man of Iron as “instant, and accurate, history” was echoed widely;54 according to Gustaw Moszcz, the film offered “the most succinct and compelling analysis of the background to the Polish upheaval” and summarized “the Byzantine complexities of the Polish state.”55 With its mixture of documentary and fiction, one reviewer claimed, “Historians of the future . . . will find it difficult to tell which is ‘drama’ and which is ‘truth.’”56 Wajda became a sort of foreign correspondent for the Western media; his cameras were allowed into the shipyards when TV crews were not.57 Wajda’s moral stature—already established with what was called the “testimony” of the War Trilogy58—increased with an awareness of the risks he was taking to make these films. Rough Treatment was said to be based on the systematic degradations he suffered after Man of Marble.59 Wajda was seen—not quite accurately—through the prism of English individualism as a kind of heroic thorn in the authorities’ side; the press reported his battles with censorship, his opposition to martial law, and subsequent attacks on him by Jaruzelski’s government and the official press. There were also reports of his forced resignation as president of the Polish Film Union, the disbanding of his film unit, and his staging of plays banned by the government. To highlight this “artist against the system” aspect, an interview with Wajda in August 1981 had the following epigraph taken from the “Black book” of rules used by Censor’s Office in Poland, smuggled to the West in 1977, and subsequently published: “His theatrical and film output and the interviews he gives demonstrate that, in ideological and political terms, he is not with us.”60 His perceived exile from Poland after martial law—actually, he continued to live and work in theater there—added further to this romantic aura.61 What did not enhance the aura was the fact that Man of Iron was in fact “swiftly” approved by the minister of culture, and thus played freely, frequently, and widely in Poland; nevertheless, only two writers— both Poles—mention this.62

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Figure 2.1. Screenshot from Man of Marble (dir. Wajda, 1977): Krystyna Janda and Bogusław Sobczuk

Figure 2.2. Screenshot from Man of Iron (dir. Wajda, 1981): Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz

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Man of Marble and Man of Iron were each cut before they were screened in Britain; the former was delayed for three years because the Polish authorities refused it an export license. There are contradictory accounts of these cuts in British periodicals, which alerts us that we must be careful when reading Wajda’s comments of the time. As always, these may have been uttered with an eye toward eavesdroppers back home. He told Peter Cowie that he himself cut the sequence in Man of Marble where it is revealed that Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz) was murdered during the 1970 riots;63 he told Moszcz that its removal was done “on the advice of friends who persuaded me that otherwise the whole film would have been stopped.”64 In another article, Moszcz claims this sequence was “sliced by the censor . . . [as] being too politically dangerous.” Man of Iron also had a sequence cut that originally showed the drowned body of a dissident student murdered by the secret police.65 The media scrutiny surrounding Man of Iron led perhaps to an overdetermined interpretation of Wajda’s next film, Danton, which critics insisted on seeing—or self-consciously not seeing—as an allegory for the confrontation between Lech Wałęsa as Danton and General Jaruzelski as Robespierre.66 Wajda has frequently denied this—at most conceding that Robespierre represented Eastern Europe (his supporters are played by Polish actors), and Danton the West (his friends are played by French)67—but it should be mentioned that a revival of Wajda’s production of The Danton Affair, the play on which the film was based, took place in Gdańsk in 1980. Its director, Maciej Karpiński, stated: The play opened immediately after the strikes that started the Solidarity trade union movement. The pervading atmosphere of agitation could literally be called revolutionary. The play became at once a running commentary on actual events, and a warning that certain elements, if unleashed, could get out of control. Although siding with the Revolution, it did not provoke simple affirmation from the audience. Instead, bitterly and controversially, it exposed the age-old conflict between man’s desire for perfect freedom and the imperfectability of human nature.68

Karpiński also said that Polish audiences themselves read the film Danton “as a distinct metaphor of their current situation”;69 lead actor Gerard Depardieu proclaimed himself during filming as pro-Solidarity and “entirely anti-Soviet,” while Andrzej Seweryn, who played the traitor Bourdon, formed a Solidarity Coordination Committee in France when martial law was declared.70

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“Paling Out of Significance” Wajda’s last sustained visibility in the United Kingdom was in 1985, with the successful London run of A Love in Germany (Eine Liebe in Deutschland, 1983), helped by a prestigious international cast; while his eight-part TV series As the Days Pass, as the Years Pass (Z biegiem lat, z biegiem dni . . . , 1980) was broadcast on Channel 4 as part of its Pictures of Poland season. Proudly stoic British critics began to feel embarrassed for their emotional reactions to Man of Iron, and claimed it was overrated.71 Wajda’s appearances in the British media have become scarcer. He has tended to be noted more for his involvement with Polish politics than for his films—for example, his interrogation in 1987 for signing Lech Wałęsa’s proposals for a civil détente;72 his candidacy and election as a Solidarity candidate to the Polish senate in 1989;73 and his involvement with a Polish peace convoy to Sarajevo in 1993;74 with his receipt of an honorary Oscar in 2000 being acknowledged more widely.75 Such was Wajda’s continued prestige that his collapse from illness in 1990 made the news recaps.76 But as a creative artist, Wajda no longer existed for the British. It was not just his cinema that declined; a review of his 1989 Edinburgh Festival staging of Solomon Ansky’s The Dybuk was headlined “Paling Out of Significance,” and described as a “dead . . . museum piece.”77 Why was Wajda so thoroughly eclipsed from the mid-1980s on? In a blog entitled “If age didn’t wither our great lost directors, what did?” Ronald Bergen posits some reasons for directors like Wajda falling out of favor, such as changes in fashion, the production of a series of flops, wider political change, and exhaustion of inspiration.78 Most of these can apply to Wajda. It was its “old-fashioned” quality that led Binns to reject Katyń for distribution. Wajda himself throughout his career admitted that he needed to be working in Poland for inspiration, that abroad he became just another “Euro-director.” After 1989 and his return to Polish filmmaking, he filmed a series of old, previously censored scripts that were ignored by Polish, and by extension foreign, audiences.79 It should also be noted that at the time Wajda—who made a 1991 opinion piece for Channel 4 called “Ashes to Diamonds to Ashes,” expressing disgust with the Polish industry’s “move towards porn”80—briefly abandoned film for the theater, and declared Korczak his last work;81 maybe British critics and distributors took him at his word. Wajda himself offered two reasons for the general decline of classic European cinema: the failure of European countries to appeal to audiences in the manner of

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Hollywood films; and the related suggestion that the middle-class viewers most likely to watch art house films do not have the “classical education” available to those who saw the films of Wajda, Bergman, and Fellini in its golden age of the 1950s and 1960s, and so feel less identification with European cinema.82 The year 1985 is the key date for Wajda’s changing fortunes: it marks his last hit in Britain, as well as the release of No End (Bez końca),83 the film that really made Krzysztof Kieślowski’s name outside Poland, paving the way for the international success of the “Short” films—A Short Film about Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu, 1988) and A Short Film about Love (Krótki film o miłości, 1988)—and Dekalog (1989–90). It is arguable that the main reason for the decline in Wajda’s visibility is the simultaneous rise in Kieślowski’s. The latter’s increasing apoliticism and his fondness for formal play and mystification of content were clearly more to the liking of ludic-minded critics and theorists of the late 1980s and 1990s. Even more important, he thrived in international coproduction, which gave him access to wider distribution channels. The Three Colors trilogy—Blue (Trois couleurs: Bleu, 1993), White (Trzy kolory: Biały, 1994), and Red (Trois couleurs: Rouge, 1994)—was arguably the major event in 1990s European cinema. The starting point for this article was the report in Sight & Sound of Katyń’s being rejected for distribution as evidence of Wajda’s eclipse as an internationally significant filmmaker in Britain.84 Rather childishly, I had imagined all sorts of conspiracy theories. Perhaps behind the decision was a reluctance to advertise the United Kingdom’s own shabby relationship to the massacre—its willingness to publish Soviet lies during the war;85 its cover-ups during the war and again in the 1970s;86 the Labour government’s “unsympathetic attitude” to a proposed monument to the victims in 1976.87 All of the above I was going to somehow link with the then Labour government’s struggles as an “occupying” power in Afghanistan and Iraq. But of course, there was no cover-up, and City Screen was doing nothing extraordinary in not distributing Katyń. As mentioned earlier, the last of Wajda’s films to be released in the United Kingdom came out in 1990, and in fact only eleven of his nearly fifty feature films have ever received proper distribution here.88 The initial British reviews of Katyń at the time of its Polish release in September 2007, both positive and negative, conceded that while of great significance for Polish audiences, it was likely to confuse Western viewers—one critic, in an article subtitled “Why Eastern Europe Needs Hollywood,” complained that Wajda should have followed the explanatory “broad sweep” of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).89

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So my question now is not, why wasn’t Katyń initially considered worthy of release? but rather, why was it eventually released at all? There has been an upsurge of interest in Polish cinema in the last decade, linked by observers to the arrival of Poles in Britain after Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004.90 The Polish Cultural Institute was founded in 2006 to produce Polish films and promote them abroad.91 The institute has been holding an annual Polish Film Festival since 2003, which has expanded from catering to diaspora audiences to screenings in venues such as the BFI Southbank and Tate Modern; it also hosts retrospectives and film-related conferences and exhibitions around Britain.92 This new demographic, and new awareness of Polish cinema, may have led to Katyń being released after all, or maybe it was the mounting online outrage expressed at Binns’s decision. Perhaps in a country where the History Channel is nicknamed the “Hitler Channel” because of the popular obsession with World War II, it was thought Katyń would introduce a little-known episode of that war.93 In any case, Wajda received his widest media coverage in the United Kingdom since the time of Man of Iron and Danton. Some critics saw Katyń as the culmination of his career, reading his previous films in the light of both it and biographical information not available to British reviewers before 1989—most notably the fact that his cavalry officer father was one of those murdered by the Soviets.94 Encouragingly, many reviews mentioned British culpability in covering up the massacre; one linked to the full text of the 1972 Foreign and Commonwealth Office Butler Memorandum, which advocated covering up the truth in order not to antagonize the USSR.95 Unfortunately, many also practiced historical laxity, with the numbers said to be murdered ranging from 4,400 to 22,000. Failing to learn from its blunders in the past, the Guardian—which had published many Soviet-disseminated lies during the war—at first declared Katyń was a “stirring account of the Nazi massacre that was covered up for decades.”96

Notes Epigraph: Colin McArthur, Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema (London: BFI Education, 1970), 3. 1. Wajda previously gave a lecture at the NFT as part of the John Player series, May 24, 1970. The John Player Lecture Series: Andrzej Wajda, Director, ed. Bolesław Sulik (London: National Film Theatre, 1970). 2. Michael Dobbs, “Poles Remember the Dead,” Guardian, December 16, 1980, 6.

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3. Wajda’s picture also appeared on the cover of the Guardian on May 4, 1983, in relation to his sacking as director of the “X” film unit. “Polish Police Disperse Peaceful Marchers,” Guardian, May 4, 1983, 1. 4. Wajda, quoted in Michael Brooke and Kamila Kuc, “Lest We Forget,” Sight & Sound 18, no. 6 (June 2008): 37. 5. Derek Malcolm, “Warsaw Impact,” Guardian, May 6, 1999, 13; Philip French, “DVD Club: Ashes and Diamonds,” Observer, June 3, 2007; “Treasures from the National Film and Television Archive, Part Two: 1943–1979,” Guardian, June 19, 1993, 31. 6. Ewa Mazierska, Q&A session following Peter Hames, “West of the East: Polish and East European Film in the UK,” keynote speech, Polish Cinema in an International Context conference, Cornerhouse, Manchester, December 5, 2009. 7. Nick James, “The Specialist,” Sight & Sound 18, no. 7 (July 2008): 5. 8. Brooke and Kuc, “Lest We Forget,” 34. 9. Lindsay Anderson, “A New Talent,” Living Cinema 1, no. 3 (Summer 1957): 127. 10. Michael Church, “Is This an Angry and Annoying Man?” Observer, March 15, 1992, 57. 11. Anderson, “New Talent,” 128; Richard Roud, “Review of Kanal,” Monthly Film Bulletin 25, no. 294 (July 1958): 84. 12. Penelope Gilliatt, “Power-House of Poland,” Observer, June 25, 1961, 23; Penelope Gilliatt, “Cannes: The Centre and the Fringe,” Observer, May 21, 1961, 22. 13. Peter Baker called Wajda’s stylistic development after the War Trilogy a “loss of realism.” Baker, “Another Word for It,” Films & Filming 8, no. 2 (November 1961): 11. 14. McArthur, Andrzej Wajda, 3. 15. C. A. Lejeune, “A Polish Masterpiece,” Observer, June 21, 1959, 17; “One That Didn’t Get Away: Outstanding Film from Poland,” Guardian, December 10, 1959, 17; Peter John Dyer, “From Poland,” Observer, February 16, 1958, 13. 16. Andrzej Wajda, “Destroying the Commonplace,” Films & Filming 8, no. 2 (November 1961): 9, 40; Alina Janowska, “Truth behind a Mask,” Films & Filming 8, no. 2 (November 1961): 10, 41; “Personality of the Month: Zbigniew Cybulski, Intellectual Ted,” Films & Filming 8, no. 2 (November 1961): 7; Jerzy Andrzejewski and Jerzy Skolimowski, “Innocent Sorcerers [script extract],” Films & Filming 8, no. 2 (November 1961): 16–17, 41. 17. John Ardagh, “The Secret of Poland’s Success,” Observer, February 9, 1964, 25. 18. Philip French, “The Cardboard Paragon,” Observer, September 30, 1979, 15.

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19. Wajda in the 1960s admitted that this “parochial[ism]” of Polish artists was often a limitation. McArthur, Andrzej Wajda, 51. 20. Richard Combs called this practice of reading Eastern European films allegorically a “Western mythology.” Paul Coates remarked that Polish audiences also read allegorically and, by implication, with distortion. Richard Combs, “In Absentia,” Listener 113, no. 2894 (1985): 29; Paul Coates, The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema (London: Verso, 1985), 142. 21. Coates, Story of the Lost Reflection, 35. A trade magazine, attributing the film’s direction to screenwriter Andrzej Kijowski, called Wesele “a bewildering film for the uninitiated . . . primarily for Polish-speaking audiences . . . where there is a demand for a Polish language film that will bring back poignant memories of the old country.” Marjorie Bilbow, “Review of The Wedding,” Cinema TV Today, May 26, 1973, 24–25. 22. Bolesław Michałek, The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda (London: Tantivy Press, 1973). 23. Kazimierz Brandys, A Question of Reality (London: Blond & Briggs, 1981), 2. 24. Philip French, “Coded Messages,” Observer, April 26, 1981, 36. 25. John Pym, “Review of Bez znieczulenia (Rough treatment),” Monthly Film Bulletin 48, no. 569 (1981): 108. 26. Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema: From Its Origins to 1970 (New York: Da Capo, 1976), 593. McArthur called the general Western interest in Polish art of this time “political,” “an index of the Polish way to socialism,” as well as simply a fashion that wore off with the emergence of the French Nouvelle Vague. McArthur, Andrzej Wajda, 3. 27. Rhode, History of the Cinema, 592–93. C.  A. Lejeune also called Kanal “almost certainly not the whole story.” McArthur’s Andrzej Wajda reprinted Neil Morris’s American-published, extremely hostile 1962 analysis of the War Trilogy, which accused Wajda of dishonesty and of lacking “analytic intelligence.” Lejeune, “A Polish Tragedy,” Observer, June 15, 1958, 15; McArthur, Andrzej Wajda, 6, 12. 28. Peter Cowie, “Wajda Redux,” Sight & Sound 49, no. 1 (Winter 1979– 80): 32–34. 29. Derek Malcolm, “Fright Is Right,” Guardian, May 1, 1972, 10; Ronald Hayman, “Andrzej Wajda: Life and the Arts,” Times, May 27, 1972, 11; Maciej Karpiński, The Theatre of Andrzej Wajda, trans. Christina Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 129. 30. Robert Brustein, “Gallery of the Damned,” Observer, May 27, 1973, 34. 31. Michael Billington, “Wajda’s Vision of a Deadly Kinship,” Guardian, August 11, 1986, 9; Michael Billington, “World Theatre Season at the Aldwych,” Guardian, April 1, 1975, 10.

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32. Nicholas De Jongh, review 1, Guardian, July 12, 1973, 10; Brustein, “Gallery of the Damned,” 34. 33. Adam Michnik, “Vive la Pologne!” Le Monde, December 16, 1976, reprinted in Dissent in Poland: Reports and Documents in Translation, December 1975–July 1977, 2nd rev. impression, ed. A. Ostoja Ostaszewski et al. (London: Association of Polish Students and Graduates in Exile, 1977), 180. 34. Jedrzej Gięrtych, In Defence of My Country (London: Jedrzej Giertych, 1981), 5. 35. Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyń: A Crime without Punishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 134. 36. J. Posadas, The Process of Permanent Revolution in Poland (London: Revolutionary Workers Party, 1981). The author, Juan Posadas, has been dismissed as “eccentric” and unrepresentative of the British left at the time by John Cunningham. Cunningham, Q&A session following “The International Reception of Wajda and Polish Cinema,” Polish Cinema in an International Context conference. 37. Andrzej Krauze, Andrzej Krauze’s Poland (London: Nina Karsov, 1981), 6. 38. Dissent in Poland, 8, 149; Richard Roud, “Triumph of the Polish Will,” Guardian, May 26, 1981, 9. 39. Brooke and Kuc, “Lest We Forget,” 34. 40. Brandys’s 1978 French-language memoir was published in London as A Question of Reality in 1981; it contains much criticism of Polish politics. Dissent in Poland also reported the actions of the English Young Liberal delegation at the European Assembly of Youth and Students held in Warsaw, June 1976, where they read an open letter about political prisoners from the underground Polish Youth Committee for the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement, in spite of obstructions by the communist organizers; Michnik’s 1976 London press conference on police brutality in Poland; and the program of opposition groups. Dissent in Poland, 45–49; 200. 41. Giertych, In Defence of My Country, 5, 244, 293–94. 42. Michael Vale, ed., Poland, the State of the Republic: Reports by the Experience and Future Discussion Group (DiP), Warsaw (London: Pluto Press, 1981). 43. Ibid., 53. 44. Peter Raina, Independent Social Movements in Poland (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1981), 12. 45. John Torode, “Lech Papers,” Guardian, January 17, 1981, 19. 46. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 2, 1795 to the Present (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 720–25. 47. Elizabeth Sussex, “Getting It Right,” Sight & Sound 51, no. 1 (Winter 1981–82): 10–11.

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48. Ibid., 10. 49. Woodhead’s works include The Man Who Wouldn’t Keep Quiet (1970) about Soviet dissident General Grigorenko; A Subject of Struggle (1972) about the Chinese Cultural Revolution; 3 Days in Szczecin (1976) about an earlier Polish dock strike; Collision Course (1979) about an air disaster in Zagreb; and Invasion (1980) about the Soviets in Czechoslovakia in 1968. 50. Sussex, “Getting It Right,” 12. 51. It should be noted that Giertych and Davies both discuss Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre; Coates, however, stated in 1985 that the Polish “cultural elite was decimated by World War Two, a deliberate part of Nazi policy.” Coates, Story of the Lost Reflection, 140. 52. Ironically, for a film so heavily involved with Solidarity and the iconic persona of Lech Wałęsa, it was soon disowned by Wałęsa as “too radical,” “too aggressive,” and “untrue.” Gustaw Moszcz, “In Solidarity,” Sight  & Sound 50, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 275. 53. “Films for Sixth-formers,” Observer, February 5, 1967, 31. 54. Gavin Miller, “Instant History,” Listener 106, no. 2729 (1981): 384. 55. Moszcz, “In Solidarity,” 275; Gustaw Moszcz, “Wajda, August ’81,” Sight & Sound 51, no. 1 (Winter 1981–82): 32. 56. Miller, “Instant History,” 385. 57. Nicholas Wapshott, “Poland through the Looking Glass,” Times Preview, September 18, 1981, viii. 58. C. A. Lejeune, “In the Forcing House,” Observer, June 12, 1960, 24. 59. David Robinson, “In the Picture,” Radio Times 232, no. 3017 (1981): 19. 60. Quoted in Moszcz, “Wajda, August ’81,” 31. 61. For Wajda in exile, see Derek Malcolm, “After Ten Years of Waiting for Godard,” Guardian, September 12, 1983, 11. Les possédés (1988), though a French production, was filmed in Poland with a mostly Polish crew. Wanda Wertenstein, “Burning Blier: Wajda’s Dostoevsky Adaptation,” Sight & Sound 56, no. 4 (Autumn 1987): 237. 62. Gustaw Moszcz, “Diamonds from the Socialist Ashes,” Guardian, September 24, 1981, 8; Waldemar Januszczak, “Poland: A View from the Back of the Queue,” Guardian, November 7, 1981, 9. 63. Cowie, “Wajda Redux,” 32. 64. Moszcz, “Wajda, August ’81,” 33. 65. Before jumping to too many conclusions about oppressive Eastern Europe, it should be noted that Wajda’s A Love in Germany, produced and distributed in the West, was shown in Britain twenty-five minutes shorter than its Venice Film Festival premiere. Philip Strick, “Review of Eine Liebe in Deutschland (A Love in Germany),” Monthly Film Bulletin 52, no. 616 (1985): 157–58.

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66. Gilbert Adair, “Blue Movie,” Sight & Sound 52, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 284; Coates, Story of the Lost Reflection, 152. 67. Derek Malcolm, “A Touch of the Terror,” Guardian, September 15, 1983, 16. 68. Karpiński, Theatre of Andrzej Wajda, 55–56. 69. Ibid., 57. 70. Tomasz Pobog-Malinowski, Wajda’s Danton (1983, documentary). 71. Adair, “Blue Movie,” 284; Coates, Story of the Lost Reflection, 141, 151–52. 72. W. L. Webb, “Pressure Mounts for Reform,” Guardian, July 13, 1987, 21. 73. “Wałęsa Team Chooses Its Candidates for Polish Poll,” Guardian, April 24, 1989, 8. 74. Sarah Boseley, “Celebrity Roulette,” Guardian, July 28, 1993, 7. 75. Stefan Wagstyl, “Moviemaker of Polish Culture,” Financial Times, March 18, 2000, 8. 76. “News in Brief: Wajda Ill,” Guardian, October 4, 1990, 11. 77. Joyce McMillan, “Paling Out of Significance,” Guardian, August 30, 1989, 36. 78. Other directors mentioned in this article include Miklós Jancsó, Michael Cacoyannis, Dusan Makavejev, Nagisa Oshima, Francesco Rosi, Carlos Saura, and the Taviani brothers. Ronald Bergan, “If Age Didn’t Wither Our Great Lost Directors, What Did?” Guardian Film Blog, May 21, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/may/21/ ifagedidntwitherourgreatlostdirectorswhatdid. 79. Wajda, quoted in Brooke and Kuc, “Lest We Forget,” 37. 80. Dominic Lees, “Ashes and Lost Diamonds,” Guardian, July 4, 1990, 25. 81. Philip Strick, “Review of Korczak,” Monthly Film Bulletin 57, no. 682 (November, 1990): 324; Vera Rule, “Watching Brief,” Guardian, February 2, 1991, 46. 82. Wajda, quoted in Wanda Wertenstein, “The Widening Gap?” Sight & Sound 54, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 181; Wajda, quoted in Brooke and Kuc, “Lest We Forget,” 36. 83. Derek Malcolm, “End in View,” Guardian, July 3, 1986, 13; Philip French, “Brotherly Love,” Observer, July 6, 1986, 22. 84. James, “The Specialist,” 5. 85. The German “discovery” of the graves is always printed in wartime reports with ironic “inverted commas”: “Katyn Murders: Soviet Commission’s Report,” Manchester Guardian, January 27, 1944, 5; “11,000 Polish Prisoners Shot by the Germans: Soviet Katyń Commission’s Findings,” Manchester Guardian, January 27, 1944, 6. 86. On the wartime cover-ups see Cienciala et al., Katyń, 235; and Jan Cienski, “All about My Father,” Financial Times, September 15, 2007, 14;

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on later obfuscations see Alex Von Tunzelmann, “Katyń: A Personal Quest for Wartime Truth,” Guardian, June 25, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2009/jun/25/katyn-reel-history. 87. Cienciala et al., Katyń, 244. 88. Wajda’s films distributed in the United Kingdom included the following: Kanal (1958), Ashes and Diamonds (1959), A Generation (1960), Innocent Sorcerers (1962), Man of Marble (1979), Rough Treatment (1981), Man of Iron (1981–82), Young Girls of Wilko (Panny z Wilka, 1983), Danton (1983–84), A Love in Germany (1985), and Korczak (1990). 89. “Horror Films: Why Eastern Europe Needs Hollywood,” Economist, September 27, 2007, 1. 90. Oginia O’Dell, “Polish Film Festival Looks Set to Trigger New Wave of Slavic Cinema in the UK,” Guardian, February 24, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/feb/20/polish-film-festival-kinoteka. 91. O’Dell, “Polish Film Festival.” 92. Ibid.; Polish Cultural Institute, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.polishculture.org. uk/. 93. Wajda’s was not the first film shown in Britain dealing with the massacre; Robert Vas, a Hungarian Free Cinema associate who reviewed Ashes and Diamonds for the Monthly Film Bulletin in August 1959, made a pioneering BBC drama-documentary, The Issue Should Be Avoided (1970); Sulik and Whitehead’s Strike!, discussed above, also asserts Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre. 94. The closest reference is Gordon Gow’s 1973 statement “[Wajda’s] father was killed early in the war.” Gow, “Living in Hope,” Films & Filming 19, no. 5 (1973): 17. 95. Von Tunzelmann, “Katyń.” 96. “Corrections and Clarifications,” Guardian, June 16, 2009, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/jun/16/corrections-clarifications.

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Chapter Three

Affluent Viewers as Global Provincials The American Reception of Polish Cinema Helena Goscilo “Film-making is the same all over the world.” —Krzysztof Kieślowski “Don’t worry about what the American critics are writing on your cinema . . . You and I, we are the best directors in the world!” —Jean-Luc Godard to Jerzy Skolimowski “I understood some time ago that nobody in the West thinks or cares about Poland.” —Krzysztof Kieślowski

Dilemmas of Definition and “Belonging” It is a truism of film criticism that political and financial considerations affect the reception of any national cinema abroad. Accordingly, whatever interest people in the United States evinced in Soviet and Eastern European films during the Cold War era—prompted chiefly by the desire to gauge the fluctuating attitudes toward the West of “the other superpower” and the Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc—evaporated after the demise of the Soviet Union. For Americans, the fascination and challenge of the Soviet empire died upon the latter’s disintegration into a mélange of disparate, embattled states and its satellites’ consequent independence. Indeed, America’s subsequent triumphalism rested on its self-identity as the politically validated, unassailable citadel of democracy and the sole remaining superpower in the world. That perceived superiority shaped

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its responses to European and perhaps especially Slavic culture, including film, even as the post-1989 financial chaos that wracked Russia and Eastern Europe threatened the very survival of their national film industries. Today, while contemporary public discourse indefatigably trumpets globalization, cinema audiences in the United States, with the exception of a minuscule minority, demonstrate an unambiguous preference for Hollywood fare and an indifference to films from Europe—a fortiori from the ideologically dispossessed Slavic world. In analyzing the reception of Polish film in the United States one inevitably confronts several intractable problems of definition that inhere in such analyses. Does reception reference size of audiences in movie theaters and profits at the box office (popularity) or assessments by critics (status)? or reactions of attendees at film festivals and of academics engaged in film studies? Similarly, what constitutes a Polish film? Is it a film with Polish dialogue or one produced in Poland? or a film directed by a Pole, whether on home terrain or elsewhere—in Polish or in German, French, or English?1 Coproductions—with foreign funds, technicians, casts, and languages, as well as locations abroad—further complicate such questions in an increasingly internationalized industry. The trilingual Roman Polanski (b. 1933) exemplifies this taxonomical dilemma. Soon after his impressive directorial debut in Poland with Knife in the Water (Nóż w wodzie, 1962), he migrated to France, spent several years in the United States, subsequently returned to France, and has lived and filmed outside of Poland for more than a half century. Yet many still consider him a Polish filmmaker—an identity reinforced by his Oscar-winning film The Pianist (2002), which adapted the autobiography of the Polish-Jewish musician Władysław Szpilman and was set in Poland, though coproduced by France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom.2 In addition to receiving a special award in 2001 at the annual Polish Film Academy’s Orły ceremony (the equivalent of Oscar night, established to recognize Poles’ cinematic accomplishments), two years later Polanski won the Orzeł not only in the categories of Best Director and Best Film (The Pianist), but also in that of Lifetime Achievements (Osiągnięcia Życia).3 Moreover, in 2011 his The Ghost Writer was recognized by the Academy as Best European Film.4 While Poles manifestly still “claim” Polanski as their own, many Americans view Polanski, especially considering his Oscar-winning megahits Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), as an American director forced to seek sanctuary abroad in 1978 owing to a sex scandal that his admiring colleagues in Hollywood and elsewhere would prefer to bury.5 Indeed, some believe that the 2002 Academy Award for Best

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Director (for The Pianist) served as a sign of forgiveness for that scandal, since Academy voters often “dole out awards as hugs rather than as honest declarations of movie greatness.”6 What potentially lends that view credence is the industry’s protests against the US government’s intransigent refusal to forgive Polanski when in 2009 it unsuccessfully sought his extradition from Switzerland for a three-decades-old crime— in this instance, a case of legal, not cinematic borders. In the meantime, Polanski—in America, for many years the best-known and most popular of “Polish” directors—continues to reside in France and enjoys French as well as Polish citizenship, even as he makes Anglophone films with multinational investors, such as The Ghost Writer (2010), underwritten by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and Carnage (2011), financed by France, Germany, Poland, and Spain. Both films made headlines in the United States and elicited hundreds of reviews by critics and bloggers, for Polanski is a case apart—both American and foreign, both moneymaker and intellectual, both “scandalous” and venerated. On a smaller scale and to a lesser degree, kindred contradictions in the notion of Polishness obtain as regards other directors born in Poland yet given to mobility: Polanski’s early collaborator/scriptwriter the actor/ director Jerzy Skolimowski (b. 1938) has been involved in many coproductions abroad (e.g., in Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom: The Departure [Le départ, 1967], King, Queen, Knave [1972], and Moonlighting [1982]). Skolimowski has lived in Los Angeles for twenty years while often returning to Poland and, in addition to starring in some of his own films, has appeared in several Anglophone movies—most recently as a Russian in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007).7 Krzysztof Zanussi (b. 1939), the sometimes producer and highly intellectual head of the TOR Film Studio since 1979, has shuttled between Western Europe and Poland for decades and in 1983 contracted with a Berlin company and New York’s Teleculture to make The Year of the Quiet Sun (Rok spokojnego słońca, 1984), which met with mixed reactions from Polish audiences and critics but received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe in the United States.8 Agnieszka Holland (b. 1948) resides in France and shoots films wherever her professional interests take her—Poland, Germany, France, or the United States, where she is a member of the film faculty at New York’s Brooklyn College.9 Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941–96), a native and resident of Warsaw until his death, is lionized above all in France and internationally acclaimed not only for the Polish The Decalogue (Dekalog, 1988) but also for his four coproductions abroad toward the end of his life.

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Given these complexities and peregrinations, “transnational” is probably the only designation that captures these directors’ professional profiles, even though most sources, including the huge Internet site IMDb, encyclopedias, and scholarly tomes, label them Polish. And in the context of “Polish film” during the last three decades, only transnational directors originating in Poland have had any impact in the United States, where “foreign” is tantamount to “alien”—in all senses. Symptomatically, the collection of interviews by the American journalist Judy Stone titled Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers (1997) contains only four Polish directors, all of whom are prize-winning and prolific representatives of transnational cinema: Holland, Kieślowski, Andrzej Wajda, and Zanussi. Among the fifty entries for the United States, one finds Alan Rudolph, Barbara Kopple, and Alvah Bessie—hardly on a par with their renowned Polish counterparts. Indeed, even American cinephiles might have difficulty identifying them. A comparable anthology, Yvonne Tasker’s Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (2002), includes only one Polish director—Kieślowski. In short, if Stone and Tasker may be deemed typical, Americans prefer American.

Globalization without Internationalism: American Audiences and Cinematic Conventions Unlike France,10 South Korea, and other countries that impose quotas on foreign (mainly American) films—a strategy futilely advocated by Russian film directors crushed by the population’s clamor for Hollywood movies—the United States has no fear of celluloid imports, for American audiences overwhelmingly favor domestic productions. Six key factors militate against their receptivity to European cinema in general and Slavic films in particular: an insular and arrogant resistance to foreign languages (reinforced by the status of English as today’s de facto lingua franca), which partly manifests itself in an aversion to subtitles; the industrial and commercial dominance of Hollywood, the resented behemoth in world cinema, owing principally to its volume of production and the lucrative popularity of its mainstream films worldwide;11 the near demise of art cinema in the United States and the concomitant marginalization of European auteurs, whose psychological probing and metaphysical concerns have little relevance for the majority of cinemagoers reared on celluloid narratives of action and adventure; the tempo of American editing, so at odds with the long takes inseparable from auteurism;12 Americans’ addiction to formulaic genres, the majority of which dictate a happy or

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unambiguous ending; and, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the perception—not explicitly articulated but strongly held—of the Slavic countries as second-rate cultures. An additional “divider” between the cinematic traditions of America and Europe is the premium placed by Hollywood on performers’ physical endowments, to which acting skills are all too often secondary, while the latter are decisive in Europe, where actors and actresses look like “normal people”—absent the silicone implants, facelifts, and sundry forms of cosmetic surgery—but are trained in the art of embodying an infinite array of onscreen characters. For instance, it is inconceivable that Jerzy Stuhr (b. 1947)—an excellent, versatile actor but utterly unprepossessing in appearance and devoid of gloss—would consistently head the cast in American films, as he does in Polish cinema. Whereas from the late 1950s to the early 1970s directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky commanded a small but enthusiastic following among intellectuals and sophisticated moviegoers, of today’s auteur-directors, Pedro Almodóvar, with his reliance on pop culture, wacky humor, and the lure of sexuality, is probably the only European to attract large audiences in the United States—where, one might note, Spanish has become the second language owing in large part to the increase in the Hispanic population over the last few decades.13 Having lost the modest currency they enjoyed in the United States during the Sixties and Seventies, nowadays auteur films are shown in a limited number of venues—mainly at media-focused international festivals frequented by Americans, such as Cannes (est. 1946), Berlin (est. 1951), Venice (est. 1932), Karlovy Vary (est. 1946), Toronto (est. 1976), New York (est. 1963); at universities with programs in film studies, including NYU, Columbia, Yale, Boston, Pittsburgh, Ohio State, Illinois, Indiana, Texas, UCLA, UC Berkeley; and in large cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, that periodically devote a week or two to a single auteur or a national cinema, frequently through the efforts of nation-specific embassies, organizations, and institutions. Recent examples include the 2009 Fourth Romanian Film Festival in New York City, organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York in collaboration with the Tribeca Film Festival and the Transylvania International Film Festival.14 Similarly, in 2012 the Polish American Film Society hosted the 13th Annual Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles, which featured Wajda as an artist in its VIP Gallery.15 And, of course, screen exports from Poland (like the rest of Europe) consist almost exclusively of auteur cinema, though such offerings as Jerzy Hoffman’s An Ancient Tale: When the Sun Was God (Stara baśn: Kiedy słonce było bogiem,

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2003) and Władysław Pasikowski’s (b. 1959) award-winning, generic action film Pigs (Psy, 1992) occasionally cross the Atlantic, primarily in the form of DVDs, which for the majority of American towns may constitute the sole possibility for viewing foreign films.16

The Video and DVD Revolution Largely for the better and sometimes for the worse, starting in the 1980s, videocassettes, DVDs, Blu-ray, and the Internet have revolutionized access to European films formerly unavailable in the United States. Though not regularly screened in movie theaters, contemporary and older Polish films may be ordered from several distributors, such as PolishMoviesOnline.com, an online division of Polart Video, Inc., in Florida, which has distributed Polish movies in the United States for almost two decades. In Chicago, Facets (Facets Multi-Media, founded in 1975) restores, rents, and sells a wide range of foreign, including Polish, films. Housed in California, MGE Inc. distributes foreign films with English subtitles, including classics and action films from Poland, such as Reich (2001) by Władysław Pasikowski and Sara (1997) by Maciej Ślesicki (b. 1964).17 Since 1984 the distribution company Criterion Collection has been releasing special editions of “cinema classics” from around the globe, accompanied by supplementary material, such as the superb two-disc DVD of Kieślowski’s Double Life of Véronique, encompassing, inter alia, a selection of his documentaries, an overview of his career in Poland, interviews (in original Polish, with subtitles) with Kieślowski and his colleagues Sławomir Idziak (b. 1945), Zbigniew Preisner (b. 1955), and Irène Jacob (b. 1966), as well as a booklet featuring essays on the film and its director.18 Such items, however, appear infrequently, are expensive, and rarely market Polish filmmakers. More accessible and affordable are the DVDs and videos found on such Internet sites as Amazon.com, which offers a huge assortment of random films, including Polish and other Slavic films, in various formats. The foreign film collection available for rental and streaming at Netflix also has expanded appreciably in the last few years. Obviously, availability only matters if a clientele exists, though unavailability indisputably reduces the likelihood of a clientele forming or growing. Of particular interest on Amazon.com is the category of customers’ reviews, which reflects vox populi. Tellingly, if surnames and sui generis grammar may be judged reliable indicators, those purchasing Polish films with subtitles tend to be Polish immigrants or Americans of Polish

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descent. The same applies to the IMDb site (Internet Movie Database), where one finds not only “user” reviews, but also a selection of reviews from professional critics (including from print media). These critical reviews provide specialist perspectives on films presumably seen in movie theaters upon the films’ release, whereas it is impossible to determine whether “average moviegoers” base their responses on in-theater viewing, on DVDs watched on computers, or through streaming. As studies of television and the big screen have shown, the differences in format and conditions of viewing influence to varying degrees the impact made by a visual genre.19 In any event, the two directors most frequently inspiring sales and Internet postings are Polanski and Kieślowski.

Remote Control? Polish cinema does not figure among films regularly screened in thousands of local movie theaters across the United States, which for financial reasons offer what one film commentator calls “feel-good fare . . . where the emphasis is inevitably on formula.”20 Nor are the vast majority of Americans acquainted with the names, let alone the works, of Poland’s major filmmakers. Familiarity, however limited, with the name of Wajda, the most “Polish” and senior member of the Polish Film School, today may be attributed primarily to the honorary Oscar he received in 2000 for his contribution to world cinema (“in recognition of five decades of extraordinary film direction”) and the nomination of his Katyń for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2008. After all, broadcasts of the Academy Award extravaganza attract millions of TV viewers, while aficionados of the Internet can access the results of that glitterati ritual shortly after the event. Wajda’s case reflects general patterns, insofar as Europe—including the United Kingdom—screens, appreciates, and gives awards to European directors incomparably more often than does America. To adduce several eloquent examples, none of the nine Polish films nominated for Oscars in the last half century—Polanski’s Knife in the Water; Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Faraon, 1966); Jerzy Hoffman’s Deluge (Potop, 1974); Jerzy Antczak’s Nights and Days (Noce i dnie, 1976); Wajda’s Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana, 1975), Maids of Wilko (Panny z Wilka, 1979), Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza, 1981) and Katyn (Katyń, 2007); and Holland’s In Darkness (W ciemności, 2011)—won the prize. In the meantime, Europe has heaped awards on dozens of Polish directors and films: Wajda is the recipient of, inter alia, the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival

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for Man of Iron (1981), the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion honorary award (1998), the Féliks European Film Award for Lifetime Achievement (2000), Germany’s Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival (2006), the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival (2009), and the Prix FIPRESCI during the European Film Awards Ceremony for Sweet Rush (Tatarak, 2009).21 Zanussi, awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his Year of the Quiet Sun (Rok spokojnego słonca, 1984), also received the David di Donatello Prize of the Italian Film Academy, the Cavalier’s Cross of the Polonia Restituta Order, and the Cavalier de L’Ordre des Sciences et Lettres. Both Polanski (for Cul-de-Sac, 1966) and Skolimowski (for Le départ, 1967, a Belgian entry!) have won the Golden Bear, and the years 2002–4 witnessed more than two dozen honors showered upon Polanski’s The Pianist in multiple categories: the Palme d’Or at Cannes (2002), the César Award (2003), the David di Donatello (2003), the Fotogramas de Plata (2003), the Goya (2003), the BAFTA (2003), the Italian Golden Globe (2003)—though not the American equivalent—the Czech Lion (2004), and the Japanese Academy Award (2004), plus many others. While Polanski is a singular case, not only the European Union, which Poland joined in 2004, but also a shared history over centuries makes “national” or heritage films (most of Wajda’s) as well as intellectual screen musings (such as Zanussi’s) of greater relevance to the experience of sundry Western European countries and their cinematic traditions.22 Over several decades, France and Germany in particular and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom have enjoyed collaborations and coproductions with Poland. Illustrative of the distance between American tastes and those of Europeans is the decision of some Slavic filmmakers to release two different endings for their films. For example, Kieślowski simplified through explicitness the original conclusion of his Double Life of Véronique (1991) specifically for American audiences, because producer Harvey Weinstein (cofounder of the distribution company Miramax Films, which bought American rights to that film and the three related later coproductions) persuaded him that otherwise they, like Weinstein himself, would be puzzled by its metaphorical conclusion.23 Similarly, Pavel Chukhrai eliminated the “contemporary” coda to his acclaimed Thief (Vor, 1997)— nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film—on the assumption that Americans would prefer a simpler, more dramatic ending than that in the more complex version released throughout Europe. Indeed, ambiguity, openness, and pessimism in film endings hold little attraction for the majority of American viewers, and especially the younger generation that makes up a large percentage of today’s audiences.24 To gauge

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American reception of Polish cinema, one only has to examine American reaction to Kieślowski’s oeuvre. Anomalous in the context of Polish film, the director’s work has endured a fate in the United States that in many respects is typical of Americans’ attitudes toward Polish and other foreign film directors.

Kieślowski as “Typical Exception” or “Exceptional in Typicality” As virtually every scholar and critic writing about Kieślowski notes, in the early phase of his career (1966 through the 1970s) he specialized in documentaries about quotidian life in contemporary Poland, such as the shorts The Tram (Tramwaj, 1966), Factory (Fabryka, 1970), Hospital (Szpital, 1976), Railway Station (Dworzec, 1980), as well as longer documentaries like Seven Women of Different Ages (Siedem kobiet w różnym wieku, 1978).25 These uncompromising explorations of Polish everyday existence elicited respect and enthusiasm in Poland, and increasingly in Europe, where he participated in festivals, and sat on juries.26 In the Eighties he lectured on film in West Berlin (1984), Lausanne (1985, 1988), and Helsinki (1988), while remaining almost completely unknown in the United States. After the censorship of his Workers ’71 (Robotnicy ’71, 1971), which led him to doubt that “truth” could be told under an authoritarian regime, and an unpleasant incident during the filming of Railway Station, when his footage seemed in danger of serving as evidence in a criminal case, Kieślowski decided that fiction permitted more artistic freedom and could portray life more truthfully, having realized that a documentary that attempted to record without bias the human experience of everyday reality could be used against those depicted in the film.27 Furthermore, some areas of human life, and especially intimate or painful moments, he maintained, should not constitute the stuff of documentaries, for invading them violates privacy.28 By contrast, their depiction is unproblematic in feature films, where issues of trespass upon the private domain cannot arise. Though Kieślowski gradually abandoned documentaries for feature films, his first forays into the latter genre—The Scar (Blizna, 1976), Camera Buff (Amator 1979), and Blind Chance (Przypadek 1981, released only in 1987)—whatever their diversity and originality, are anchored in Polish realia and retain documentary features. The dilemmas of martial-war Poland likewise provide the historical-cultural context for the bleak No End (Bez końca, 1984), which, however, for the first time

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anticipates the future Kieślowski as a director fascinated less by social constraints than by psychology and metaphysics. Not only is the female protagonist’s dead husband present as a “witness” to his widow’s behavior, but the conclusion shows her united with her dead husband after she commits suicide—the couple walking hand-in-hand away from the camera. Several of the films won Kieślowski professional recognition in Europe: at the Polish Film Festival, he garnered awards for The Scar, Personnel (Personel, 1975), Camera Buff, and Blind Chance; in Moscow, for Camera Buff; in Switzerland, for From a Night Porter’s Point of View (Z punktu widzenia nocnego portiera, 1979); and in Germany, for Personnel, Camera Buff, and Talking Heads (Gadające głowy, 1981). Needless to say, at the time, these films were generally unavailable in the United States, where they would have been likely to encounter indifference from Americans primarily on account of their Poland-specific orientation and their dark endings: the honest, well-intentioned protagonist of The Scar loses his job and at film’s end faces an uncertain fate; the self-reflexive Camera Buff concludes with Filip Mosz, the title’s eponymous protagonist, alone and gnawed by doubt as he turns the lens upon himself after his wife leaves him, taking their child with her;29 and Witek in Blind Chance, in turn an idealistic member of the Communist Party, a justice-driven dissident, and a devoted doctor and family man, perishes in a plane that shockingly explodes in the very last frame of the film, implying that Poland has no place for a man of conscience. In a sense, No End goes a step further, suggesting that under martial law choosing death remains the sole “happy solution”—certainly preferable to a compromised or loveless life. The centrality of ethics in all four films, as well as the themes of chance, fate, and love, would mark Kieślowski’s subsequent films, the last four conceived in a different modality, however, and boasting a vastly different cast. More than one commentator has recognized that the trajectory of Kieślowski’s on-screen concerns as articulated in genre maps a journey inward, from the portrayal of Polish social realia to universal realiora— an engagement with the metaphysical/philosophical realm, with its paradoxes and inexplicability. In short, Kieślowski shifted from humane document to transcendent mystery, and in so doing lost favor with Polish audiences while finally gaining a measure of American attention through his coproductions of the early 1990s. His reputation in Europe by the mid-1980s notwithstanding, Kieślowski would not have impinged upon Americans’ awareness were it not for his last four films, all produced abroad: The Double Life of Véronique (La Double vie de Véronique; Podwójne życie Weroniki, 1991) and the Three Colors

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trilogy (Trois couleurs)—Blue (Bleu, 1993), White (Blanc, 1994), and Red (Rouge, 1994). His career took a sharp turn with The Double Life of Véronique, an extraordinary film inasmuch as it ideally combines the supreme talents of the major professionals involved: Kieślowski’s intricate elaboration of a spiritual dimension, inaccessible to logic, that through visual means reveals mysterious connections within the world; cinematographer Idziak’s skill in conveying mood and states of mind through angles, filters, and intense colors; composer Preisner’s ability to evoke transcendence and celestial intimations through music informed by earlier religious styles and conventions; and the flawless performance of Jacob in the dual role of the film’s two luminous protagonists. Though some reviewers harbored reservations about Kieślowski’s alleged condensation of “art house clichés,” overall reception in Europe, and especially France, was rapturous. Polish reactions were less favorable—predictably so, for the film is apolitical, does not address national problems, devotes only a short part of its narrative to the Polish Weronika, and relies on a foreign cast headed by a beautiful French newcomer (Jacob, winner of the Best Actress Award at Cannes, subsequently wooed by American directors of unremarkable films, especially after her assumption of the major female role in Kieślowski’s Red (1994)). These features, however, in addition to Véronique’s seductive visual and aural power, are precisely what appealed to American film critics, the majority of whom took their cue from Europe, hailing Kieślowski as an outstanding talent. Though both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, whose uncomprehending Peter Rainer compared the film to a perfume commercial, published negative reviews, the majority of American reviewers showered it with unstinting praise.30 Georgia Brown of the Village Voice somewhat floridly wrote, “Anything I can say is merely a labored minuet around my own ecstatic response”;31 Hal Hinson of the Washington Post labeled the film “a mesmerizing poetic work”;32 having watched the DVD several years later, Jenny Jediny declared, “In many ways, The Double Life of Véronique is a small miracle of cinema; . . . Kieslowski’s strong, if largely post-mortem reputation among the art house audience has elevated a film that makes little to no sense on paper, while its emotional tone strikes a singular—perhaps perfect—key.”33 The film earned $1,999,955 in American box-office receipts, and the average rating accorded it by 13,999 viewers on IMDb was 7.7 out of 10.34 As a point of comparison, John McTiernan’s formulaic action thriller Die Hard, released in 1988, had grossed more than $79 million in theaters by year’s end and added $36 million in rentals within the United States

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alone, while meriting, according to 266,010 votes on IMDb, a rating of 8.3.35 Manifestly, American critics’ perceptions of (and, indubitably, criteria for) quality in films dramatically diverge from those of the entertainment-seeking general public. The glowing reception by critics in Europe of Kieślowski’s work intensified with the release of the Three Colors trilogy, which drew widespread accolades from reviewers and cemented Kieślowski’s reputation as a major auteur. It also spurred critics to investigate The Decalogue, a series made for Polish television, and the award-winning films that expanded two of the The Decalogue’s hour-long episodes: A Short Film about Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu, 1988) and A Short Film about Love (Krótki film o miłości, 1988). Yet The Decalogue had a commercial release only in selected American movie theaters and after considerable delay, appearing at the Lincoln Plaza for five weeks in 2000;36 it had already gone on sale in VHS format in 1999 before being transferred to DVD. Greeted as a sensation by Western European critics and American directors and reviewers who took their cue from Europe, Decalogue is revered by many as the peak of Kieślowski’s achievements—even more impressive than the international coproductions cleverly marketed at various festivals.37 Yet without the media flurry around his last four films, it is extremely unlikely that Americans would have become acquainted with The Decalogue, which was unavailable in the United States for fifteen years, though it ultimately drew unrestrained encomia from the foremost representatives of the US film industry. Stanley Kubrick called the work “the only masterpiece I can name in my lifetime,” created by a director with the gift of “dramatizing ideas rather than just talking about them.”38 The Village Voice declared it Kieślowski’s “masterpiece,” and the two short films based on it “the apex of Kieslowski’s filmmaking,”39 while the New York Times lauded it as “a masterwork of modern cinema, essential viewing for anyone who cares about the movies as a serious art form.”40 Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times called it “one of the indisputably great accomplishments of modern filmmaking,” and the Chicago Tribune concurred that it is “easily one of this century’s greatest films.”41 According to Variety, The Decalogue was “the cinema event of the year,” and Ken Wlaschin of the American Film Institute dubbed it “The Citizen Kane of our time”42—a sacred imprimatur in a country where for decades Orson Welles’s 1941 classic, his first feature film, has topped the roster of the hundred best American films ever made.43 Unlike directors and reviewers, however, American audiences remained ignorant of or immune to The Decalogue, which was tied up in a distribution tangle for years, had limited theatrical runs, and never

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became a regular offering in the country’s numerous movie theaters.44 By late November 2000, it had grossed a paltry $447,093, whereas even (or perhaps especially) a vacuous film like Legally Blonde (2001) earned $20,377,426 during the first weekend of its release.45 Quite simply, European films do not qualify as cinematic “permanent residents” in American theaters, and the existential core of The Decalogue swims against the current of American tastes, which slight engagement with serious issues in feature films, instead favoring fast action, adventure, fantasy, and romance—escapist scenarios that sidestep the existentialist perspective synonymous with Kieślowski’s filmmaking. Shown in select theaters across the country, the Three Colors trilogy fared better than The Decalogue, though, unsurprisingly, White proved the least popular of the three. Set primarily in Poland, it centers not on a lovely young woman but on a male hairdresser, who for much of the narrative appears as a Polish Woody Allen—impotent, unsuccessful, and unwittingly comic (a role superbly realized by Zbigniew Zamachowski, who appears in the tenth episode of The Decalogue). On IMDb, White’s rating was 7.7 (22,520 users), with a reported profit of $1,464,625 in the United States. Though American box-office receipts for Blue (the first in the trilogy) totaled $1,324,974, the rating was slightly higher—7.9 (31,569 users).46 Given the “happy ending” of the final film, Red, it predictably received the highest rating of the three films at 8.1 (32,548 users) and its box-office take of $4,043,686 was more than the previous two Trilogy films together.47 Compared to the millions earned by Hollywood films over a single weekend, none of the three could be considered a financial winner, though Weinstein unaccountably deemed it “a phenomenal success in the U.S.”48—presumably a success only for a foreign, and specifically Polish, film, but certainly not for Hollywood movies. As a representative of the New York Film Festival lamented in an item symptomatically titled “The Top 150 Unreleased Foreign Language Film of the Nineties,” the Catch-22 of foreign films in the American market is that they go unreleased “because there’s not enough public interest,” and “there’s no public interest because the films haven’t been released and therefore written about.” Yet even those that do make it to American screens ultimately draw small audiences. For instance, the distributor Miramax “spent insane amounts trying to convince Americans they wanted to see movies by Kieślowski, and people still didn’t want to see Red, White, or Blue, let alone either of Véronique’s lives.”49 In short, average Americans, who vote with their dollars, are all too often at odds with film critics and academics, precisely the group that hailed

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Kieślowski as a newly discovered cinematic genius (who had practiced his profession for three decades!).

The Posthumous Monument and Polish Film in the United States Hindsight and sentiment tend to smooth wrinkles and pronounce the glass half full. Accordingly, as frequently happens, one’s posthumous reputation far outstrips the status attained during a lifetime. Bibliographies about Kieślowski’s oeuvre list more books and articles—tellingly, most published in Europe—than those devoted to Polanski and Wajda. Excellent monographs by Paul Coates, Marek Haltof, Annette Insdorf, and Joseph Kickasola, as well as studies by Christopher Garbowski and Slavoj Žižek, have appeared in recent years.50 Additionally, in the United Kingdom Alexandre Fabbri has established a comprehensive website titled Kieslowski’s World. And various directors in Poland (Jerzy Stuhr), Europe (Tom Tykwer), and the United States pay Kieślowski homage through their works, in which some detect the stamp of Kieślowski’s sensibility, aesthetic, and concerns. An entire volume, titled After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski (2009), published in the United States, attempts to trace his influence and the events orchestrated in his honor during the last fifteen years: for instance, the retrospective of his works in Boston, Chicago, Hartford, New York, Seattle, and St. Louis in 2006 to mark the tenth anniversary of his death;51 Poland’s proclamation of 2006 as the “Year of Krzysztof Kieślowski”; and sundry exhibitions and conferences orchestrated around his oeuvre.52 The establishment in Poland of the Krzysztof Kieślowski Award, a bust of him in Kielce, and the invocation of the word “genius” in commentaries on his films are additional markers of his haloed posthumous image as “a giant of the cinema.”53 Or, in the words of Richard Williams’s eulogy, “When . . . [he] died . . . it was as though a certain kind of cinema had come to an end along with him. The calm, reflective, compassionate gaze he brought to bear on the dilemmas faced by his characters made him the most humanistic of film directors.”54 Predictably, however, Kieślowski’s legendary status among fellow professionals and the adulation of fans have not translated into increased receptivity toward Polish film in general within the United States. As a benefit of the continued rapid expansion of the market in DVDs and transfers to Blu-ray, it is possible to purchase (and even find in some local libraries) not only Polish classics but also Polish movies imitating

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American genre films, especially action and crime thrillers. Yet viewing a Polish film on the big screen outside key cities on the East or West Coast is as likely as avoiding McDonald’s and other fast-food joints at exits along the expressway. And whereas McDonald’s has infiltrated much of Europe, most Americans’ regular film diet bypasses European, and certainly Slavic, cinema. The biggest moneymakers in the United States over the last decade have been escapist features—children’s films, fantasies for adolescents and alleged adults, adaptations of comics, vampire romances, and science fiction—not exactly philosophical variety à la Stanisław Lem, but in line with the anodyne, special-effects Spielberg model, according to which “all’s well that ends well,” as it invariably must.55 Unless a fundamental revolution in international and above all American cultural priorities eventuates, it is highly improbable that this situation will change in the foreseeable future.

Notes Epigraphs: Krzysztof Kieślowski, Kieślowski on Kieślowski, ed. Danusia Stok (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), xxii. This statement of Godard’s is reportedly from a letter in the late 1960s; see “Le Blog de Zazie: Chroniques Cinéphiles d’une Italienne à Paris, Giovedì 7 Luglio 2011,” accessed December 28, 2011, http://leblogdezazie.blogspot.com/2011/07/jerzy-skolimowskiessential-filming.html. The third epigraph is from an interview conducted by Judy Stone in 1990; see Judy Stone, Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997), 485. 1. Unlike many American films, which tend to have everyone speaking in English—even, improbably, Germans or Russians among themselves— Agnieszka Holland’s commitment to authenticity ensures convincing dialog in two or three languages, spoken fluently: for instance, Europa, Europa proceeds in Polish, Russian, and German. Efforts at linguistic verisimilitude in such American productions as Air Force One (1997) and the BritishCanadian Eastern Promises (2007) have Gary Oldman in the former and Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel in the latter attempting Russian speech that often defies comprehension. The alternative to native Slavic speakers in key roles is the cultivation of laconicism—the strategy Jerzy Skolimowski adopted with Jeremy Irons’s Polish in Moonlighting. 2. Polanski’s command not only of Polish but also of period style cannot be faulted in his bravura portrayal of the ludicrously garrulous miles gloriosus Józef Papkin, in Andrzej Wajda’s heritage film Revenge (Zemsta, 2002), adapted from the farce by the same title (1834) by Aleksander Fredro (1793–1876), with dialog in couplets. For an admiring review of Polanski’s

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enactment of the role, see Edward Guthmann, “Polanski Flaunts His Acting Skills: He’s Stylishly Funny in Zemsta,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 18, 2003. At home Polanski reportedly speaks Polish with his two children, though presumably French with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and has complete fluency in English, as attested by his eloquent interviews with American and British journalists, as well as interviewers involved in the special features added to the DVDs of his films. 3. In 2000 the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement award was Polanski’s mentor, Andrzej Wajda, whose Katyń the Polish Film Academy voted Best Film in 2008. 4. The year 2001 saw Krzysztof Zanussi take away two Orły [Eagles]— for Best Director and Best Film, for Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (Życie jako śmiertelna choroba przenoszona drogą płciową). 5. Chinatown pulled in a clutch of awards, including the BAFTA, Bodil, DGA, Golden Globe, and Sant Jordi for Best Director, as well as the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, by Robert Towne. 6. Tom O’Neil, “Gold Derby: The Envelope,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2009. 7. Skolimowski was the recipient of Orły awards for Best Director and Best Film, for Essential Killing, in 2011. Daniel Olbrychski, the most international of Polish actors apart from Polanski, likewise played a Russian in the relentless action thriller Salt (2010). For those in the audience capable of recognizing native Russian speech, however, Skolimowski does not make the grade, as his accent in Russian is unmistakably Polish. But who, apart from Russian or Polish émigrés and Slavicists, in Anglocentric America can detect that accent? 8. Bolesław Michałek and Frank Turaj, The Modern Cinema of Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 194. 9. Holland’s film In Darkness (W ciemności, 2011), nominated in numerous categories for the Orły awards, was the Polish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards in 2012. 10. The 1989 EU “Television without Frontiers” directive and quotas implemented by the French government limit the number of American films shown in French theaters and on French television. The EU Broadcast Directive was passed in October 1989 in an effort to protect and promote European cultural identity. The directive requires that EU member states reserve a majority (51 percent) of entertainment broadcast transmission time for programs of European origin. France lobbied hardest to pass the EU directive and has since implemented the most stringent quotas within its national system. See Karen Rinaman, “French Film Quotas and Cultural Protectionism,” accessed January 4, 2012, http://www1.american.edu/ted/frenchtv.htm. 11. Hollywood remains the oldest film industry, generating more revenues than any other national counterpart. In recent years, its annual revenues

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totaled approximately $9.25 billion (2006); $9.63 billion (2007); $9.95 billion (2008); $10.65 billion (2009); $10.89 billion (2010); and, with the worldwide economic crisis, $10.06 billion (2011). During the 1990s, when Eastern European cinema seemed in danger of extinction, America’s film industry brought in from $5 billion to $7 billion annually. See “Domestic Movie Theatrical Market Summary 1995 to 2013,” The Numbers, accessed January 2, 2012, http://www.the-numbers.com/market/. It is hardly insignificant that California’s temperate weather and extended light hours make it ideal for shooting films. 12. Already in the 1920s Lev Kuleshov noted the rapid pace of American editing, which he contrasted to European filmmakers’ more leisurely tempo. See Lev Kuleshov, Fifty Years in Films, trans. Dmitri Agrachev and Nina Belenkaya (Moscow: Raduga, 1987), 38–45. Americans reared on fast-moving, plot-driven narratives find the long takes and philosophical ruminations in auteur cinema intolerable. 13. According to statistics on the US population at the Internet site Migration Information Source in December 2010, in 2009 Mexican-born immigrants accounted for 29.8 percent of all foreign-born residents in the United States, by far the largest immigrant group in the country. Jeanne Batalova and Aaron Terrazas, “Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States,” Migration Information Source, a project of Migration Policy Institute, accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=818. One commentator mourns the fact that “the only art-house filmmakers today who can be said to have a popular following are Pedro Almodóvar and Zhang Yimou, whose entire filmographies are in U.S. distribution.” Gavin Smith, “The Top 150 Unreleased Foreign Language Films of the Nineties,” FilmComment (New York: Film Society Lincoln Center, March–April 2012), http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/ article/the-top-150-unreleased-foreign-language-films-of-the-nineties. 14. See “Fourth Romanian Film Festival in NYC,” 2009, accessed December 5, 2011, http://icrny.org/s153-2009-4th_romanian_film_festival_in_nyc. html. 15. See “The 13th Annual Polish Film Festival,” accessed January 4, 2012, http://www.polishfilmla.org/wocms.php?siteID=13&ID=67. 16. Loosely based on Ignacy Kraszewiski’s novel by the same title (1876), An Ancient Tale transforms national myths and legends into paralyzing, Hollywood-influenced drivel. The Anglophone Pigs better renders the metaphorical sense of the original title, which literally means “dogs.” To my knowledge, the sequel, Psy 2: Ostatnia krew (Pigs 2: Last blood, 1994), did not make it to the States. On Polish action films indebted to Hollywood’s genre system, see Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 245–48. Haltof also discusses Pigs, calling it “the incorporation of American models . . . at its best” and “very Polish” (248–54); but, to Haltof,

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“very Polish” simply means a Polish setting and temporality, with its attendant dilemmas; in its generic (and gender) specifics, the formula is all too obviously American. Indeed, its status as a cult film among the young merely confirms its Americanism, for Hollywood holds a particular attraction for young audiences. 17. On average MGE offers approximately two hundred Polish films at any time. See http://www.mge.tv/polish-movies-c-70.html (accessed February 10, 2012). Bogusław Linda, cast as Petronius in Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s extravaganza Quo Vadis (2001), seems to be directors’ gun-toting “tough guy” of choice. 18. Commentary by Jonathan Romney, Slavoj Žižek, and Peter Cowie, with an extract pertaining to the film from Kieślowski on Kieślowski. 19. See esp. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television,” in Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (London: Routledge, 1989), 172–210. For Kieślowski’s opinion on the differences between making films for the big screen and for television, see Stok, Kieślowski on Kieślowski, 153–56. When I first saw Kieślowski’s Short Film about Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu, 1988) the year of its release in Łódź, it made for excruciatingly painful viewing, whereas its overwhelming impact was appreciably muted when I revisited it in 2012 at home on video. 20. Smith, “The Top 150.” 21. For a complete list of his awards, see Wajda’s official website at http://www.wajda.pl/en/nagrody.html (accessed January 15, 2012). The site includes Steven Spielberg’s letter to Robert Rehme, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, requesting that the Academy consider Wajda for the honorary Oscar: “Steven Spielberg’s Letter to American Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences,” November 22, 1999, accessed January 15, 2012, http://www.wajda.pl/en/list.html. 22. Most of Wajda’s films are directly and unapologetically wedded to Polish history or mediated through adaptation of Polish, and less frequently Russian, literature. Moreover, in the Sixties Wajda made several films abroad—in Yugoslavia, France, and the United Kingdom. 23. Amazingly, as Weinstein later recalled, “I just didn’t get the ending. Later on, in Cannes, . . . none of the highbrow critics I asked, nor the socalled intellectuals on my staff, could explain to me what the freeze on Veronique’s hand as she touches a tree meant.” Allegedly, Kieślowski agreed to the American add-on after the party following the New York Film Festival, where he “quizzed some of the guests . . . and realized that if the Fifth Avenue crowd didn’t get his ending, it certainly wasn’t going to play in Peoria.” Miramax was also the American distributor of the Three Colors trilogy. Harvey Weinstein, “In Memoriam—Krzysztof Kieslowski: To Smoke and Drink in L.A.,” Premiere, June 1996, online at http://www.petey.com/kk/docs/smkedrnk.txt (accessed March 14, 2012).

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24. For a breakdown on moviegoers in the United States, see John Fetto, “2010 American Movie-Goer Consumer Report,” Experian Information Solutions, February 20, 2010, http://www.experian.com/blogs/marketingforward/2010/02/20/2010-american-movie-goer-consumer-report/. 25. For a complete list, see Stok, Kieślowski on Kieślowski, 237–64; and Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 166–78. Kieślowski himself describes the professional background for the early phase of his career and discusses his documentaries. Stok, Kieślowski on Kieślowski, 38–43, 44–92. 26. In 1974 Kieślowski received two awards at the National and International Short Film Festival in Kraków, as well as various Polish awards in 1977 and 1979. In 1979 he also garnered prizes for Camera Buff at film festivals in Gdańsk, Berlin, Moscow, and Chicago. Haltof, Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski, 169–71. 27. Stok, Kieślowski on Kieślowski, 81, 86. 28. On intimate details in documentary film, Kieślowski remarked, “I noticed, when making documentaries, that the closer I wanted to get to an individual, the more the subjects which interested me shut themselves off.” Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins, Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 315. 29. Amator’s reflexivity, insofar as the film explores the role, significance, and consequences of capturing “reality” on celluloid, as well as the bold presentation on screen of three alternate life choices for the protagonist of Przypadek, did not fit into the conventions of Polish cinema at the time. Unlike Wajda’s nakedly autobiographical Wszystko na sprzedaż (Everything for sale, 1969)—a homage of sorts to Zbigniew Cybulski— Amator poses more general questions about the power of the camera; that is, the relationship among life, a camera’s (inevitably selective) capture of it, the consequences of producing images, their use as purported documentation of reality, and an artist’s integrity. The difference in orientation between the two films illustrates the contrast between Wajda’s attachment to personal and national issues and Kieślowski’s preoccupation with broader, more philosophical dilemmas. 30. Weinstein, “In Memoriam—Krzysztof Kieslowski.” 31. Cited by Jonathan Romney, in “Through the Looking Glass,” in the booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, 12. 32. See Hal Hinson, “The Double Life of Veronique,” Washington Post, December 13, 1991. 33. Appropriately, Jediny’s review was posted on the website Not Coming to a Theater Near You, accessed March 4, 2012, http://www.notcoming.com/ reviews/2xveronique/. 34. IMDb, accessed August 8, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0101765/.

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35. “Box Office / Business for Die Hard,” IMDb, accessed March 2, 2012, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/business. 36. Stephen Holden, “Divining the Ways of God and Man: 10 Stories Rooted in Commandments,” New York Times, June 9, 2000. 37. One example of Kieślowski’s coproductions is The Double Life of Véronique, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. 38. Stanley Kubrick, foreword to Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), vii; online at “Kubrick on Kieslowski,” The Kubrick Site, accessed March 14, 2012, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0078.html. 39. J. Hoberman, “Urban Legends,” Village Voice, March 21, 2000, http:// www.villagevoice.com/2000-03-21/film/urban-legends/. 40. Holden, “Divining the Ways of God and Man.” 41. Michael Wilmington, “Filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski: Screen Giant Reportedly Was Ready to End ‘Retirement,’” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1996. 42. These opinions are cited on the cover of the five-video set making up The Decalogue released by Facets in 1999. 43. For the top 100 US films list, see the American Film Institute website, “AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Movies,” accessed January 27, 2012, http://www. afi.com/100years/movies.aspx. 44. The Decalogue had its Chicago theatrical premiere on March 22, 1996, at Facets Multimedia. As countless reviewers have noted, scheduling ten one-hour films presents insurmountable problems, for no audiences can tolerate a ten-hour viewing of a series, and showing two films of a foreign series for five consecutive days simply has no precedent in the United States other than at film festivals. 45. For box-office figures for Legally Blonde, see “Box Office / Business for Legally Blonde,” IMDb, accessed March 2, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/ title/tt0250494/business. 46. For these IMDb ratings see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111507/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108394/, both accessed March 2, 2013. 47. IMDb, accessed October 7, 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0111495/?ref_=tt_rec_tti. 48. Weinstein, “In Memoriam—Krzysztof Kieslowski.” 49. Smith, “The Top 150.” 50. Insdorf’s sensitive introduction to Kieślowski was published by Miramax Talk Books, presumably overseen by the director’s US distributor, Miramax. Annette Insdorf, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (New York: Hyperion, 1999). 51. Stephen Woodward, After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 14. 52. See esp. the chapter by Haltof in ibid., 19–33.

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53. Weinstein, “In Memoriam—Krzysztof Kieslowski.” 54. David Hudson, “Kieślowski’s Three Colors,” Daily, November 9, 2011, http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/kieslowskis-three-colors. 55. For the staggering financial success of this technologically sophisticated but simplistic fare, see “Domestic Movie Theatrical Market Summary 1995 to 2013,” The Numbers, accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.thenumbers.com/market/.

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Chapter Four

Polish Films at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s Dorota Ostrowska Throughout its postwar history Polish cinema enjoyed a strong presence at various international film festivals on both sides of the Iron Curtain—not only Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, and San Sebastian, but also Moscow and Karlovy Vary. The careers of individual Polish directors, such as Aleksander Ford, Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Andrzej Munk, Wojciech Has, Agnieszka Holland, and Krzysztof Kieślowski, among others, were consolidated with the help of these film festivals. However, the two important moments in this period of of Polish cinema history, the Polish school in the 1950s and the Cinema of Moral Concern in the 1970s, did not resonate equally strongly at international film festivals. While the Polish school was a resounding success on the film festival circuit, launched internationally thanks to the 1957 Cannes award-winning screening of Wajda’s Kanał (1957), the Cinema of Moral Concern remained virtually unknown abroad as an aesthetic movement and was underrepresented in festival screenings.1 The exceptions were the films of one of its key directors, Krzysztof Kieślowski, which were regarded as the Eastern European festival discovery throughout the 1980s, making him a household name among foreign art house audiences. These winding paths of Polish national cinema on the European film festival map are best followed in the context of the history of the film festivals themselves where the early practice of film selection, which overlapped with the success of the Polish school, privileged the national effort at filmmaking over a single auteur filmmaker. In contrast, Kieślowski’s success in the 1980s occurred at the time when festival selection became independent from national submissions and when festivals were responsible for making their own programming choices. At that time the festivals

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were firmly established as the guardians of the art house cinema epitomized by the films of auteur directors like Kieślowski. This chapter is an attempt to trace the performance of Polish films on the international film festival circuit during the twenty-five years after World War  II when films screened in Cannes and Venice were submitted by countries themselves rather than sought for and selected by the festival programmers. In that period, the politics of the festivals were closely linked to the politics of the Cold War with the festivals being the main cultural arenas where the representatives of the countries from both sides of the Iron Curtain met and often clashed. Although subject to various diplomatic pressures from their own governments, the festivals were obviously trying to maintain in various ways some degree of curatorial independence as the guardians of cinematic art. Polish films made during that period, which were produced in the socialist East and displayed some real artistic flair, provide a sharp lens through which the complex dynamics of festivals, combining Cold War politics and their own aesthetic aspirations, can be explored. Poised between the ebbing tide of Italian neorealism and the encroaching French New Wave, the success of the Polish school in the 1950s was important in the process of the emancipation of film festivals from immediate political pressures, both domestic and international. The Polish school also played a role in the emergence of the category of art house cinema as the dominant one for valorizing postwar European film production. The presence of Polish films in Cannes and Venice raises two sets of questions: on the one hand, I am interested in establishing how the success of the Polish school shaped the festivals themselves, in relation to the tendency to view European cinema in predominantly artistic rather than commercial and generic terms. On the other hand, I want to find out what role Cannes and Venice played in shaping the Polish school through their programming choices and the critical reception Polish films received at these festivals. Did the festivals actually internationally launch the filmmakers of the Polish school?2 Or did they simply approve the choices made by the national selectors in Poland? To address these issues we will first need to understand the process of film selection in Venice and Cannes in the postwar period until the late 1960s. Second, we will have to examine the reception Polish films had in Cannes and Venice before the Polish school emerged. Third, it is important to explore the expectations the festival audiences brought to the viewing of films from Eastern Europe, including Poland, and how the films associated with the Polish school responded to these expectations.

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The Selection of Films at International Film Festivals The ways in which films were selected at the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals were a source of tension between the festival organizers, the respective French and Italian governments, the countries submitting films, and the critics reviewing them. By virtue of the films being selected by national committees, the Cannes and Venice festival committees essentially came to rely and depend on their choices.3 A country that produced fewer than 50 films a year was only allowed to enter one feature film; between 50 and 100, two films; and more than 100, three films. The Venice festival regulations, for example, stipulated that “all nations are free in the choice of the films to be entered, on condition that they have been produced within 12 months previous to the opening of the Exhibition, and that they have not been shown, either in competition or out of competition, at other cinematographic events whether of competitive character or not, and that they have not been shown publicly in Italy.”4 The festival committee interfered with the national selection only in order “to exclude from admission those films that . . . don’t reach an artistic value sufficient to figure at a cinematographic art exhibition, or [that are] offensive to national feelings.”5 The attempts of the Venice festival committee to influence the number and the type of submissions were not welcome by the countries that made a larger number of submissions, in particular the United States, the leading film-producing country in the world. From a 1953 Venice festival report we learn that “the Americans were [said] at one time to be on the point of withdrawing altogether. They were irritated by the festival committee’s insistence on making their own selection of four films from the 11 submitted.”6 For their part, at the same 1953 film festival in Venice, Eastern European countries were disappointed because none of them got the three prestigious screening slots, which were granted to the Americans.7 Pressure on the festival to withdraw films because they were not politically acceptable to certain countries was also a common practice. For example, the Soviet bloc countries “objected fiercely to Hollywood’s Pick-up on South Street (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1953)—a melodrama of espionage in the United States.”8 Objections such as this were not exceptions but the rule, as is evident from numerous press reports from the festivals that contain news of film withdrawals and diplomatic protests against the screening of particular works. But the real problems with the submissions made by a particular nation were the film entries’ political bias and often low artistic level. The festival organizers were striving for independence from the national choices

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and the pressures of the French and Italian governments by emphasizing the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of the films shown at the festivals. The Venice Film Festival reserved for itself the right “to invite, if necessary, extra quota, films of exceptional artistic value, even if they have been shown at other international Film Festivals, on condition that they have been produced in the twelve months previous to the opening of the Exhibition and have not been seen in public performances.”9 The festival’s regulations also stated that its aim was “the giving of solemn recognition to films testifying the progress of cinematography as a means of artistic expression, the spreading of film culture and a contribution to the better understanding among Peoples.”10 In protest against the low artistic level of the national submissions, the jury of the Venice festival even decided in 1953 not to award any prize, which was seen as a sign of its defiance against pressures to accept into competition films that were clearly not suitable to be included. This was seen as a very bold move, one that Cannes never made.11 Aleksander Ford’s The Eighth Day of the Week (Ósmy dzień tygodnia, 1958) was one of the earlier Polish film that benefited from the increasing emancipation of the festivals in terms of their film choices. The Polish Association of Film Producers complained about the inclusion of the film, which they said gave “a wrong picture of postwar Polish youth.”12 The film, about which both the Poles and the Germans complained, was selected after direct dealings with the German producer.13 Hence the festival was establishing its curatorial independence by dealing directly with the members of the industry wherever possible. The possibility of direct dealings with the industry on the part of the festival thus contributed to shaping an art house canon of European cinema.14 In the case at hand, Ford’s film was not withdrawn from the festival despite the pressure from the Polish government. Polish films benefited from this policy of the festivals, which was artistically oriented and contributed to the development of the ethos of the festival as the vehicle for discovering new talent and promoting small films that might have been overlooked by the national selection boards. One of the Venice festival’s surprising discoveries was Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (Nóż w wodzie, 1962) (see fig. 4.1). The film’s contemporary theme and generic frame differentiated it from the mostly historical films that had come to be associated with the Polish school, and for a while Knife in the Water became synonymous with Polish cinema as it was known internationally.15 Perhaps based on the earlier festival success of the historical Polish films, the Polish selectors did not seem to have much hope for Polanski’s debut, which is why they submitted it for a

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less important festival sidebar and not the main competition. The festival jury, however, thought they had found a new Polish gem—quite different from what they had grown used to seeing from Poland: As recently as 1962 a little Polish film turned up in Venice. It wasn’t in competition—the Poles seemed to think it wasn’t big enough to represent them, but they sent it along for what Venice calls the Information Section—films projected in the afternoon to sort of let people know what is going on. No one was more surprised than the Polish representatives when the film won the International Critics’ Award, and was bought by almost every country in the world.16

Interestingly enough, by thus awarding Knife in the Water the international film festival emerged yet again as a forum where the transition to a new period in Polish filmmaking was not just announced but effectively launched. Films by Skolimowski and Has were soon to follow, proving that the new era was indeed upon us. The emphasis on the independence of the festival’s curatorial choices tempered by the pressure from the participating states had implications for the development of various film movements, not just the Polish school, and perhaps explains why the history of art house cinema is embedded in the dynamics of national cinemas, in spite of its international claims. The development of the national film school, or wave, was a result of two centrifugal forces—the agendas pressed by the international festivals and those of the countries submitting films to the festivals. The etymology of national film movements like the Polish school, the French New Wave, and so on reflects both the festivals’ input and that of the participating nations, which together shaped these phenomena. The programming of films from Eastern Europe that had been critically acclaimed was important in the process of developing a film festival ethos that centered on their championing small films heralded as breakthroughs in the history of the cinematographic art. Most of the Polish films shown on the festival circuit from the mid-1950s contributed to this process. Yet Polish films were submitted to Cannes and Venice from the late 1940s. Looking back at the presence of films from Poland, Guardian critic Penelope Gilliat wrote that “in the old days the issues were tritely familiar. On the one hand there was art, which was assumed by a hostile majority to be depressing, unprofitable and in Polish. On the other hand there were the commercial films, which were popularly supposed to be fun and to have something recognisable to do with your life.”17 What was it about Polish films in the mid-1950s that led to this equating of Polish national cinema with art house cinema seen as challenging and

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Figure 4.1. Screenshot from Knife in the Water (dir. Polanski, 1963): Leon Niemczyk and Jolanta Umecka

unprofitable? To understand this process we must have a look at the Polish productions that depressed Gilliat so much.

Polish Films in Cannes and Venice after World War II Between 1948 and 1969 Poland’s film submissions to the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals followed the ebbs and flows of domestic film production and also the thaws and freezes of Cold War politics. Until 1951 Poland submitted only one feature film to Cannes: Unvanquished City (Miasto nieujarzmione, 1950), directed by Jerzy Zarzycki. It was based on a wartime memoir by a pianist, Władysław Szpilman, and was originally scripted by Jerzy Andrzejewski and Czesław Miłosz.18 They disowned the script after the intervention of the Polish censors, which made the film a subject of controversy at home but which did not prevent its being submitted to the Cannes competition. A few Polish shorts were also selected by the festival in this period, including Jerzy Bossak’s Flood (Powódź, 1947), which was awarded a prize in 1947. In the years to follow, Polish submissions were quite irregular, with only one film in

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the main competition in 1954—Five from Barska Street (Piątka z ulicy Barskiej) by Aleksander Ford. The situation was not much different with Venice. In 1948 two newly produced films, The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948) by Wanda Jakubowska and Border Street (Ulica Graniczna, 1948) by Aleksander Ford, were shown with Ford’s film winning a festival prize. Five years later another Aleksander Ford film, Chopin’s Youth (Młodość Chopina, 1952), was sent to the Venice festival. This sporadic presence of Polish films in Venice and Cannes was related to the low level of national film production in the years after the war.19 But more important was the fact that Poles were absent when the Soviet Union decided to cancel its participation at the film festivals in 1947 and 1949, and again in 1952 and 1953, as a protest against the selection of films they found as challenging communism or Soviet policies.20 Hence, given the Cold War climate, Polish submissions were not really considered to be examples of independent national production. Rather, due to the parallels in the political, social, and economic systems among all the Soviet bloc countries, Polish films were regularly judged in the context of Soviet films submitted in the same year. Critics tended to group all films as either from the West or from the “people’s democracies” led by the Soviet Union, noting with some glee the “party veneer which covers all Eastern product.”21 The reception of Soviet films by and large set the tone for the reception of films from Eastern Europe. For example, at the 1953 Venice festival Ford’s Chopin’s Youth was seen as belonging to the same category of films entered by the Soviet Union, which included The Return of Vasili Bortnikov (Vozvrashcheniye Vasiliya Bortnikova, 1952) by Vsevolod Pudovkin, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (Sadko, 1953) by Aleksandr Ptushko, and Rimskij-Korsakov (1952) by Gennadi Kazansky.22 The aesthetics of socialist realism, with their predictable and politically motivated plots and stereotypical characters, were accepted as prevalent in Eastern European and Soviet films, which explains why these films fared rather poorly with the festival audiences and played to halfempty theaters. It was reported that at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, “all tickets for Russian nights were sold as well as others—it was merely a question of holders ankling the screenings or just not showing up, forewarned that entertainment was not the screen fare for that evening. Both Red features shown, ‘Rimski-Korsakoff,’ [a] tedious biog [biopic] of the composer, and ‘Return of Vasili Bortnikof,’ [the] story of a returning vet, were screened to two-thirds filled houses, still another third walking out before the show ended.”23 At the same Venice Film Festival a screening of a propaganda-ridden Polish documentary The Oath caused a scandal.24 The film was about a

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youth rally in Warsaw with “Stalin posters and Soviet flags appearing on screen . . . replete with flags, posters, baby-kissing, rhythmic music, marching forces, and ever-smiling youth.”25 The audiences booed the film and protested against it in part because it evoked for many the German and Fascist propaganda that had been screened in the same theater before and during the war.26 Hence, Polish submissions were easily grouped together with others from behind the Iron Curtain that were seen as pieces of communist propaganda “with entertainment nil, and with such lines as ‘I saw him on his tractor, the Red flag flying over his head—it was love at first sight’ abounding.”27 There was hope that any political change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would likely be reflected in their films, making them more daring and open. In reference to Hungarian cinema affected by the events in Budapest in the mid-1950s, a festival critic noted that “before the aborted revolution, Hungarian cinema showed some stirring of the Western heritage and a more individualistic approach to current problems.”28 In 1955, reporting from Cannes, Lindsay Anderson wrote about the Soviet film A Great Family (Bolshaya semya, 1954) by Iosif Kheifits: “Social responsibilities are not forgotten—the point is sometimes rather laboured—but there is a generally relaxed note to the film that is perhaps evidence of [a] more humane, less nervously propagandistic trend in Russian cinema.”29 He concluded: “It is good to find once again in a Russian film this willingness to admit that all is not always for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.”30 At the time of their reception at Cannes and Venice, Wanda Jakubowska’s and particularly Ford’s films from this first postwar decade were not regarded as expressions of Polish cinema’s independence from Soviet influence. Rather, the focus was on the treatment of the characters as heroic and the predictability of the story lines that characterized films “from the East.”31 Discussing Five from Barska Street, Anderson noted that “all human problems are simplified: work hard and you will happy. All social and moral evils are the result of looking backward, or to the West: no more sinister symptom of debauchery is imaginable than the desire to jitterbug.”32 The more left-leaning critics usually found some redeeming features in the films from the Soviet bloc, often by contrasting them with films from Hollywood.33 In the aforementioned article, Anderson sees the characters as solid as well as having “real humanity in them; they are presented with faith.”34 These elements made Five from Barska Street an ultimately stronger film than any of the Hollywood submissions, in which, for Anderson, “even the new opportunities for magic offered by their recently developed techniques seem to provide no stimulus.”35 Polish films were

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withstanding the comparison with Hollywood, and things were about to get even better with the appearance of films by Andrzej Wajda on the film festival circuit.

The Surprise of the Polish School The year 1957 was feted as a great one for the Cannes Film Festival. The main reason was that two films by a very talented Eastern European filmmaker were shown: A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955) and Kanal (1956) by Andrzej Wajda. The films were “both love stories; but this does not mean that they were mere nostalgic harkings-back to romanticised values of the past . . . It was their spirit that mattered.”36 The films struck a nerve with critics and festival organizers because there was a sense that a different kind of politics was communicated in them and through a different set of formal means. Critics emphasized the fact that “to a foreigner it is not the immediate political significance of the picture that signifies, so much as its intense idealism, its vibrant humanity.”37 Throughout the 1950s, the “political” in Eastern European cinema meant following the dogma of socialist realist aesthetics. Western critics were longing for a different kind of “political”—they wanted to see in Eastern European films a reflection of “socialism with a human face.” Consequently, “humanism” was the key category evoked in relation to contemporary productions from this part of Europe. Humanism in the context of the Cold War harked back to the debates among European left-wing intellectuals about the socialist project in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.38 In the context of the arts and cinema, humanism really meant a desire to see the class struggle played out by full-blooded individuals—passionate, conflicted, or even weak—because they were much more convincing than socialist realist narratives populated with papier-mâché heroes churned by the film industries of the socialist countries. Writing for Positif, a rival of Cahiers du cinéma, Ado Kyrou lauded A Generation: “For the first time, a film about resistance is a film about human beings, for the first time the resistance fighters live and love, risk their lives, without compromising their human nature in the process.”39 In Generation Wajda offered left-leaning film critics in the West an account of history and humanity that was convincing and real to them. A year later in 1958 in Venice, another Polish film, The Last Day of Summer (Ostatni dzień lata, 1958) by Tadeusz Konwicki, was awarded the top prize at the Venice Documentary and Short Film Festival. For

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critics like Paul Rotha the film evoked Italian neorealism in that it was “one of the most moving, most compassionate, most humanly understanding films I have seen in a long time—since, indeed, Umberto D.”40 The fact that “socially and aesthetically the so-called story-film and the true documentary are growing closer together” was seen as a reason why The Last Day of Summer was shown and awarded as part of the documentary sidebar in Venice.41 This prize was further “confirming the impression made recently at the Brussels Experimental Film Festival and elsewhere that a school of cinema is emerging from Poland that provided some of the most stimulating work in the world of film to-day.”42 The success of Wajda’s and Konwicki’s films was thus championing the Polish school on the international festival circuit. The crowning of these triumphs of the 1950s was a retrospective of Wajda’s films at Cannes in 1964. It is telling that the retrospective was introduced through an interview with Polanski about Wajda that appeared in Cinématographie française, a festival daily trade publication.43 By then Polanski had left Poland, and the Polish school itself had waned. But here in Cannes these two filmmakers were contrasted as representing two quite different trends in Polish cinema—historical for Wajda, and contemporary and modernist for Polanski. They defined two different moments in the evolution of Polish cinema, and where better to debate their work, sources of inspiration, and plans for the future than at the international film festival where they were both “discovered.” Importantly, the Polish school was seen not only as a triumph of art and artistic expression over political control, but also as a crucial element in forging a national cinema. Kyrou captured the dynamics of this process in his 1961 article published in the context of the Polish film retrospective in Paris: “One got used to judging Polish films purely according to political criteria. One has been ecstatic faced by freedom which was so different from the films of the Stalinist period, the rhythm, eroticism, etc. Yet in Polish cinema today one finds not only freedom from Stalinism, and the connection between social and moral revolts, but also the nature of the Poles themselves which is made of the Western culture and Slavic passion.”44 The Polish school was thus seen as a step toward emancipating Polish filmmaking from the Soviet bloc, and as the genuine manifestation of Polish national film culture. In this sense we can assume that the Polish school was indeed born on the film festival circuit, and this birth was a political gesture—challenging the cultural homogeneity of the Eastern European countries that had been plunged into the Cold War. In the years following the success of the Polish school, some Polish directors and critics were invited to be part of the festival juries.45 This

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was an important way in which Poles were shaping the institution of film festivals and contributed to the emergence of art house cinema on the festival circuit. As such they were involved in both the making and the judging of national cinematic art with an international appeal.

The Importance of Eastern European Films at International Film Festivals The presence of Eastern European and Soviet films at the international film festivals was significant because the festivals presented a rare opportunity for Westerners to see film production from behind the Iron Curtain and for representatives of the film industries and institutions from the West and the East to come into contact. This was significant economically and politically, and it also shaped the art house cinema promoted through the festivals in a very particular way. The period after World War  II was marked by a number of international film industry agreements. France found itself locked in the Blum-Byrnes agreement with the United States, which flooded French screens with the backlog of Hollywood. In order to stimulate its own production and provide a counterbalance to the Hollywood presence, France signed a very important coproduction agreement with Italy. The relaunching of the Cannes Film Festival after World War II was one way to internationalize the film industry of Europe, in particular that of France.46 The Marché du Film, a meeting place for the industry established in 1959, emphasized the economic and international aspect of festivals like Cannes. This dynamism in the film industry was limited to the American and Western European partners; for political and economic reasons the representatives of the Soviet bloc were not natural partners or participants in the business deals and coproductions. But that did not mean that they were not seen as potentially attractive partners. In fact, there was interest on the part of the West in the economic contacts and exchanges with the East to which they had very limited access outside the festival. For these reasons it is not surprising that the representation of the socialist countries at the festivals was duly noted and commented on. In 1953 in Venice it was observed that “neither Czechoslovakia, Poland nor Hungary has a stand at the festival, though all three have their reps there.”47 But three years later a report from the festival remarked on the size of the official delegations and the ways in which films were being promoted: “Satellite participation was noticeable from the first day of the Festival: Hungary has two large posters up, one outside, the other inside

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the film palace, while Poland has been leading the press handouts with large amounts of colourful material.”48 The publicity generated around particular films and directors at the time of the festival was very helpful in securing distribution for these films abroad, which was a desirable outcome for the “people’s democracies” because next to the prestige that festival participation afforded them, it was films’ foreign sales that would bring in much needed hard currency. French critics who wrote enthusiastically about Andrzej Wajda’s, Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s, and Wojciech Has’s films upon their release in Paris had usually seen them for the first time in Cannes or Venice, where they also established their first contacts with the directors. On their part, the Eastern Europeans “rightly seized upon these expositions (film festivals) as an opportunity for some solid public-relations work.”49 They threw parties, conducted press conferences, and brought in high officials to head their delegations. In 1963 a British journalist remarked that the vagaries of Cold War politics were remarkably evident in the Soviet films selected for the festivals: “The pattern of Russian films at Continental festivals suggests an extension of the cold war. One year they send a simple-hearted film, full of the milk of human kindness; the next year comes a terrifying blockbuster, extolling communist achievement and positively revelling in the display of military strength.”50 Hence, the festivals were also mobilizing cinema as an instrument of an ideological struggle between the opposing camps of the Cold War. The contacts between the representatives of Western film industries with their counterparts from Eastern Europe, including from Poland, were about real economic transactions tainted with politics and benefiting both sides. But Eastern European cinemas made another contribution to the economics of the European art house that was first negotiated in symbolic terms. Films made in the East and the West were seen as two opposing models of cinema and representing two divergent political perspectives. Writing in 1954, Lindsay Anderson argued that there existed “homogeneity within these two groups which provoked comparison: on the one side rigid commercialism, on the other the equally rigid exactions of state socialist propaganda. Judging purely on the vitality and the humane qualities which for this selection at least each of these conventions appears to inspire, there can be no doubt that victory goes East. There is deadness in Hollywood now. One can sense no motive behind its films beyond the coining of money by their exhibition.”51 This view, which contrasted Eastern European and Soviet cinema seen as representatives of artistic and human values with the profit-driven cinema of Hollywood, was particularly popular with the left-wing intellectuals and critics who

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were ambivalent about the politics of the postwar Western European governments closely aligned both politically and economically with the United States. With the artistic success of Eastern European cinemas, and Polish cinema in particular, in the festival arena, the filmmakers of the East emerged not only as guardians of human values in cinema but also as the guarantors of a cinema that was artistically ambitious and uncompromised or uncorrupted by commercial modes of cinematic production; even though political pressures were seen as a significant threat, it was believed they could be dodged from time to time, as the Polish school duly demonstrated. International film festivals nurtured national cinemas in Eastern Europe, which came to be regarded as aesthetically accomplished and untainted by commercial concerns. Thus, Eastern European cinemas provided an economic model for art house cinema in the West to follow: not concerned with box-office success, generally low budget, and requiring some outside support—that is, government subsidies, tax breaks, and so on. Even some of the anti-Hollywoodism of the European art house can be traced back to the particular blueprint that Eastern European cinemas provided in the Cold War period. By focusing on formal concerns, and forgoing economic and frequently political concerns as well, the festivals became a vehicle for the emergence of the category of transnational art house cinema and the formation of a canon of films associated with it. Polish films, in particular those associated with the category of the Polish school, played an important part in this process. Throughout the 1960s, film festivals were freeing themselves from governmental pressures and became freer in their selection of films.52 At Cannes a new important sidebar, “La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs” (Directors’ Fortnight), was established in 1968 that aimed at championing the work of auteur filmmakers, thereby shifting the attention of the festival from the films regarded as expressions of national filmmaking to the cinema of personal and individual expression.53 Was Polish cinema to lose out with the appearance of this new trend? It seems that it did, as the Cinema of Moral Concern never captured the imagination of the festivals the way the Polish school once did.

Appendix 4.1: Polish Films at Venice, 1948–65 1948

Ulica Graniczna (Border Street, dir. Aleksander Ford)—Medaglia della Presidenza del Consiglio des Ministri54

1948

Ostatni etap (The Last Stage, dir. Wanda Jakubowska)

1953

Młodość Chopina (Chopin’s Youth, dir. Aleksander Ford)

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1955

Błękitny krzyż (Men of the Blue Cross, dir. Andrzej Munk)— Medaglia di bronzo

1957

Cień (Shadow, dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)

1957

Kanał (Kanal, dir. Andrzej Wajda)

1957

Pokolenie (A Generation, dir. Andrzej Wajda)

1957

Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny (The Real End of the Great War, dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)

1958

Eroica (dir. Andrzej Munk)

1958

Ósmy dzień tygodnia (The Eighth Day of the Week, dir. Aleksander Ford)

1958

Ostatni dzień lata (The Last Day of Summer, dir. Tadeusz Konwicki)—Gran Premio

1959

Małe dramaty (Little Dramas, dir. Janusz Nasfeter)

1959

Pociąg (Night Train, dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)—Targa d’oro “Georges Melies” dell’Ente Culturale Europeo della Tecnica

1959

Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds, dir. Andrzej Wajda)— Premio FIPRESCI (Federation Internationale de la Presse Cinematographique)

1960

Krzyżacy (Teutonic Knights, dir. Aleksander Ford)

1961

Samson (dir. Andrzej Wajda)

1961

Dziś w nocy umrze miasto (Tonight a City Will Die, dir. Jan Rybkowski)

1961

Ludzie w drodze (People on the Road, dir. Kazimierz Karabasz)—Osella di bronzo per i film educative e di documentazione sociale

1962

Kwiecień (April, dir. Witold Lesiewicz)

1962

Nóż w wodzie (Knife in the Water, dir. Roman Polanski)— Premio FIPRESCI

1963

Milczenie (The Silence, dir. Kazimierz Kutz)

1964

Pasażerka (The Passenger, dir. Andrzej Munk)

1964

Rozwodów nie będzie (No Divorces, dir. Jerzy Stefan Stawiński)

1965

Salto (dir. Tadeusz Konwicki)

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Appendix 4.2: Polish Films at Cannes, 1961–69 1951

Miasto nieujarzmione (Unvanquished City, dir. Jerzy Zarzycki)55

1954

Piątka z ulicy Barskiej (Five from Barska Street, dir. Aleksander Ford)

1956

Cień (The Shadow, dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)

1957

Kanał (Canal, dir. Andrzej Wajda)—Special Jury Prize shared with I. Bergman’s The Seventh Seal

1960

Zezowate szczęście (Bad Luck, dir. Andrzej Munk)

1961

Matka Joanna od Aniołów (Mother Joan of the Angels, dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)—Special Jury Prize

1962

Dom bez okien (House without Windows, dir. Stanislaw Jedryka)—Short Film Special Jury Prize Unanimité and Grand Prix of the CST

1963

Jak być kochaną (How to Be Loved, dir. Wojciech J. Has)

1964

Pasażerka (The Passenger, dir. Andrzej Munk)—International Critics’ Prize by the FIPRESCI and Cannes Tribute

1965

Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, dir. Wojciech J. Has)

1965

Walkower (Walkover, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski)

1966

Faraon (Pharaoh, dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz)

1966

Popioły (The Ashes, dir. Andrzej Wajda)

1969

Polowanie na muchy (Hunting Flies, dir. Andrzej Wajda)

Notes 1. For the patterns of the Polish films’ presence at the international film festivals in Venice and Cannes, see appendixes 4.1 and 4.2. 2. Aleksander Jackiewicz, “Prawo do eksperymentu,” Przegląd Kulturalny (1954): 51–52. 3. The only films that were accepted to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival were products of the countries with which France had diplomatic relations. A country wishing to participate in the festival had to first be invited by a special agency of the French state, and after accepting the invitation it

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could send their films to the festival selection committee, which then, in turn, had to remain very sensitive to the potential political impact of their decision to accept or reject the submissions. See Loredana Latil, Le Festival de Cannes sur la scène internationale (Paris: Cinema & Cie., 2005), 203. It was not until 1972 that the festival gained full control over the films it showed. 4. Venice Biennale XIV International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art Venice, “Regulations,” BFI Microjacket Venice 1953. The bulk of the research for this article is based on the microfiche collection available in the British Film Institute in London (“Venice and Cannes Film Festival Files”). Although I tried to reference the material I consulted there fully, I was not always able to provide page numbers and authors’ names because they were missing from the original material scanned into the microfiche. 5. Ibid. 6. C. Dixon, “Venice 1953,” Daily Telegraph, August 28, 1953. 7. “‘Beautiful’ [The Bad and the Beautiful by Vincente Minelli] Hailed at Venice As Top US Entry; Russo Pic Given Brush,” Variety, September 2, 1953, vol. 191, no. 13, 18. 8. Dixon, “Venice 1953.” 9. Venice Biennale, “Regulations.” 10. Ibid. 11. Latil, Le Festival de Cannes, 155. 12. “Start of Venice Film Festival,” Tripes, August 25, 1958, BFI Microjacket Venice 1958. 13. Ibid. 14. The importance of the relationship between the major film festivals is evident in the growth of the markets alongside them—for example, the Marché du Film in Cannes and the European Film Market at Berlinale. 15. For detailed discussion of Polanski’s relationship to the Polish school, see Ewa Mazierska, Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 16. Richard Roud, “Cannes Ho!,” Guardian, April 30, 1963. 17. P. Gilliatt, “The Funfair under a Volcano,” Observer, May 19, 1963. 18. Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2007) is based on the same memoir. 19. The statistics on film production in Poland for selected years between 1946 and 1965 are as follows: 1946—1 film, 1950—4 films, 1955—7 films, 1960—20 films, and 1965—24 films; see G. Kowalska, ed., 20 Lat Kultury Polski Ludowej (Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, 1966), 29. 20. Latil, Le Festival de Cannes, 110–16. 21. “‘Beautiful’ Hailed at Venice,” 18. 22. Georges Sadoul, “Venice,” Lettres françaises 479 (1953). 23. “‘Beautiful’ Hailed at Venice,” 18. 24. The film is referenced only by its English title. It is likely that the critic means Aleksander Ford’s documentary Przysięgamy ziemi polskiej (1943).

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25. “Polish Documentary ‘Bronxed’ in Venice,” Variety, August 19, 1953, vol. 191, no. 11, 2. 26. Ibid. 27. “‘Beautiful’ Hailed at Venice,” 18. 28. Gene Moskovitz, “The Uneasy East: The Polish Cinema,” Sight & Sound (Winter 1957–58): 136. 29. Lindsay Anderson, “East Meets West,” Observer, April 11, 1954. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. The reports published in The Socialist Worker were particularly focused on the films from Eastern Europe and Soviet Union and were sympathetic to them. 34. Anderson, “East Meets West.” 35. Ibid. 36. “The Arts and Entertainment,” New Statesman and Nation, May 25, 1957. 37. Ibid. 38. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 39. Ado Kyrou, “Le Visage feminine de la revolution,” Positif 21 (1957): 34. The piece was written after a screening of Wajda’s film at the Cinémathèque Française in 1957 that was the result of the director’s success in Cannes. 40. Paul Rotha, “The Last Day of Summer,” Sight  & Sound 27 (1958): 314. 41. Ibid. 42. Paul Rotha, “Three of the Chief Prizes in Documentary Film Festival,” Manchester Guardian, July 30, 1958. 43. Roman Polanski, interview, Cinématographie française 14 (May 12, 1964), n.p. BFI Microfiche Collection consulted August 30, 2013. 44. Ado Kyrou, “Le charme slave: Les Adieux,” Positif 40 (1961): 51. 45. For example, a year after winning the Special Jury Prize for Matka Joanna od Aniołów (Mother Joan of the angels, 1961), Jerzy Kawalerowicz was invited to be in the main Cannes jury. In 1960 the critic, educator, and director Jerzy Toeplitz was part of the Venice jury, and in 1965 of the Cannes jury. In 1966, a year after his film Salto (1965) was in competition in Venice, writer-director Tadeusz Konwicki was invited to serve on the festival jury. In 1973 Bolesław Michałek, a critic and an artistic director of Kadr, Wajda’s film unit, was in the Cannes jury. His appointment followed screenings of a number of Wajda’s, Has’s, Kawalerowicz’s, and Skolimowski’s films (see appendixes 4.1 and 4.2 for details). 46. Latil, Le Festival de Cannes, 95–105.

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47. “‘Beautiful’ Hailed at Venice,” 18. 48. “‘Curtain’ Nations Loom Large in Venice Picture,’ Variety, August 29, 1956, vol. 203, no. 13, 18. 49. A. Knight, “S. R. Goes to the Movies: The Lessons of the Festivals,” S. R., October 8, 1955, BFI Microjacket Venice 1955. 50. P. Gibbs, “Films in Cannes,” Daily Telegraph, May 24, 1963. 51. Anderson, “East Meets West.” 52. Latil, Le Festival de Cannes, 212. 53. Olivier Thévenin, La S.R.F. et la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, 1968– 2008: Une construction d’identités collectives (Montreuil, Paris: Aux lieux d’être, 2008).

54. This list was compiled from Ernesto G. Laura, ed., Tutti i film di Venezia 1932–1984 (Venice: Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia, 1985). 55. This list was compiled from the Festival de Cannes online archives, accessed August 15, 2013, http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/archivesPage. html.

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Chapter Five

How Polish Is Polish? Silver City and the National Identity of Documentary Film Charlotte Govaert For political or economic reasons, it may be useful to categorize a group of films as Polish, but ontologically the concept of a national cinema is problematic. For what constitutes a film’s identity? Is a film Polish if the director or producer is of Polish nationality, if it is produced in Poland with Polish money or personnel, if it deals with a Polish subject, or displays a certain degree of Polishness? Or may a film be described as Polish only if the audience perceives it as such? In 2008 I produced Silver City, a documentary film that looks at Polish immigration from the perspective of two of the approximately 1 million Polish citizens who moved to the United Kingdom after their country joined the European Union in 2004. Although Silver City was not shot on Polish soil—it was filmed in Aberdeen, Scotland—it does represent a particularly Polish experience. The director was not Polish—I am a filmmaker from the Netherlands—but the film was made with the participation of a mainly Polish cast and crew. Silver City’s “mixed heritage” raises questions with respect to the relationship between cinema and nation, which in the past has been approached in myriad ways. In the 1960s, in convergence with auteur theory, the concept of national identity was mainly used as a descriptive category and a means to organize the curriculum of film studies departments; Ingmar Bergman thereby connoted Sweden; Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, France; John Ford, the United States; and so on.1 A more analytical approach emerged in the late 1980s when Andrew Higson, and subsequently Susan Hayward and Stephen Crofts addressed such questions as When is and what makes a cinema “national”?2 Other film scholars displayed a particular interest in the political or ideological dimensions of national cinema.3 For Ella Shohat and Robert Stam and for Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, the question of what national and

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transnational cinema entails was relevant in light of socioeconomic developments such as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalization.4 Despite the variety in approaches, the aspect of reception has received little attention in accounts of national cinemas, even though audiences may read different meanings in a film depending on the cultural context in which they watch it, as Higson notes.5 Most of the attention, furthermore, has been directed at fiction film. By contrast, this study looks at the reception of a documentary. Silver City was conceived as a research tool for Cueing the Viewer, a qualitative and empirical reception study that investigated audience response to reflexive elements in documentary film.6 In order to gauge viewer response, Silver City was edited in four versions that each deployed different forms and levels of reflexivity.7 The variants were subsequently screened and discussed in focus groups. In total, seventy-six students from the student body of the University of Aberdeen saw one version of Silver City. When asked “What is your nationality?” fourteen participants noted they were Polish, while eleven identified themselves as British, nine as Scottish, and one as English. Other participants came from continental European countries (including Germany, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Romania), Asia (in particular China), Africa, and the United States. One of the results that stood out was that viewers who knew the filmmaker’s national identity responded differently to the film’s claim to the real than viewers who did not know that I am Dutch. This observation was possible because two versions of Silver City revealed my nationality as part of the reflexive strategies employed while two versions did not specify this information. In particular, Polish and British viewers had concerns regarding the film’s authenticity, which in some cases were mutually exclusive. This chapter investigates these responses, thereby unraveling some of the dynamics that may be at work in transnational cinema. It is based on the assumption that documentary meaning is not fixed but fluid and lies in the interaction between sender, text, receiver, context, contact, and code, as Roman Jakobson’s communication theory proposes. Silver City is therefore considered in light of Jakobson’s six functions of the communication process by addressing the author’s intentions; the historical context in which the film was produced; the text’s formal structure; the production process; as well as its reception by Polish, British, nonPolish, and non-British viewers. As such, it is a conscious effort to reappraise Jakobson’s communication model, which was proposed in 1956 but has not received the attention it arguably deserves in the area of film studies although it was influential in the area of media studies via Stuart Hall (see below).

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Jakobson’s Communication Paradigm The six fundamental elements that Jakobson identified must be present for communication to be operable.8 Universal in scope—the schema applies to all cultures at all times9—these factors are constitutive of any act of communication, including art. A sender sends a message to the receiver. This process takes place in and with reference to a certain context. The communication process furthermore requires a code, a language that is at least partially common to addresser and addressee, and a contact, “a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.”10 CONTEXT SENDER MESSAGE RECEIVER CONTACT CODE A sender and receiver, who have a common code, can send a message via a channel between them about the context or world. The constituents of communication do not have fixed meaning but acquire meaning only in relation to the other elements. It is this interaction that produces meaning. Each element furthermore corresponds with one of the functions that communication may have, which are hierarchically integrated with one function being dominant.11 REFERENTIAL EXPRESSIVE POETIC CONATIVE PROCEDURAL METACINEMATIC As each element of the communication process is integrated with all other elements, they are best understood in relation to each other. The sender in documentary communication is the “originating subject,” a person of flesh and blood whose vision drives the production process as well as the instance whose existence is implied by the text and assumed by the viewer.12 The filmmaker’s vision comprises not only ideas about reality, but also their individual poetics—that is, a cluster of opinions about what documentary is and what it should do in relation to the intended audience. The message is understood to be a text, a construction that was devised by an author in order to be consumed by an audience. It is also

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the result of a production process that involves the capturing of moving images. A text does not have fixed meaning as intended by the filmmaker, produced through the film process and its relation to an external reality or the viewer’s interpretation alone. It is merely a form of meaning potential that was envisioned and produced in relation to a particular context, and is made available for consumption by the interested viewer. This meaning potential is presented in the shape of a narrative, a formal structure that is subject to conventions and aimed at informing, entertaining, or influencing an audience. The context refers to the world as we know it, which, as Bakhtin pointed out, does not present itself directly to us but only through the filter of particular ideologies. Film is “a mediated version of an already textualized socio-ideological world,” a filmmaker’s reconstruction of a social construction.13 Context also refers to potential procamera activity, as well as the filmmaker’s object and the interpreter’s frame of reference. The receiver is the interlocutor who interprets the text and reciprocates the encoding process by decoding the available meaning potential. Readers transform the text’s meaning potential into actualized meaning, which is unique for each separate reading. Although reception is a separate stage in the meaning-making process, the receiver already exists, at least subconsciously, in the author’s mind during the production phase as the intended audience. The receiver furthermore is implied by the text, which requires interpretation in order to fulfill its function. The code in documentary communication is film language, a term that refers to the moving image as well as cinematic conventions. The grammar of this specific language consists of a preexisting, finite number of categories that include mise-en-scène, framing, focus, camera movement, lighting, and color. Elements that belong to these categories have the capacity to convey specific forms of meaning, just as nouns, adjectives, or verbs do in natural languages. The art of the sender consists of choosing, combining, and producing these elements in order to make a statement in relation to the world, a process that results in a multilayered pattern of meaning potential that is subsequently made available to audiences for consumption.14 A particular form of signification that is exclusive to audiovisual media exists in the relationship between the images and is created through editing. Splicing, too, is subject to conventions, such as the use of establishing shots and the maintaining of spatial continuity, as well as the filmmaker’s personal style and the effect she or he intends to achieve. A separate but important aspect of code is autonymy; that is, communication’s capability to comment on its own workings. This metafunction manifests itself by foregrounding the role of the author, the film’s

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relationship to the real, the production process, particular textual properties, or the viewer’s interpretation in the encoding and decoding process. In practical terms, the previous means that filmmakers will bring their conscious as well as subconscious assumptions about the world to the production process, as well as their competence as a director/producer, their ideas about documentary in general and this film in particular, and the audience they intend to reach. The viewer, for her or his part, will mirror the filmmaker’s encoding process by drawing on the elements of the communication process to construct a frame of reference, whereby one of the functions is dominant. This interpretive tool is strictly individual and employs not only knowledge about the social world, acquired through personal experience or media consumption, but also structural competence or knowledge about documentary production processes, conventions and opinions about what documentary is or should do, as well as assumptions about the film’s or the filmmaker’s intentions, either based on intra- or extratextual information. Jakobson’s model is to be understood as a heuristic device that is aimed at identifying underlying networks of relationships between elements that should be analyzed in each individual case. Messages and meanings, for example, cannot be separated from the context in which they are produced and consumed, a thought that was further explored by Stuart Hall in his influential article “Encoding/Decoding.”15 Hall, however, foregrounds the sociopolitical dimensions of communication because of his concern with power relations in society, while Jakobson’s interest stems from a particular concern with textual structures. Jakobson’s model furthermore does not distinguish between fiction and nonfiction film, which share the same code as well as at least some elements of both production process and textual organization. Differences between the two are a matter of degree, Jakobson’s model stipulates, as they are determined by how all functions of the communication process including individual readings operate together. Indeed, fiction and nonfiction may be perceived as the two extremes of one continuum, which may be approached but never met. Even the purest form of fiction, with an invented plot that revolves around characters that are played by actors and takes place in a time and space that faintly resembles our own is to a certain extent a record of events that took place in front of a camera, precisely as in what counts as documentary. Conversely, a strictly observational documentary or experimental film such as Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970), which consists entirely of the juxtapositions of a closer and a wider shot of the same hallway, presents a discourse, a structuring device that is conventionally associated with fiction.

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Silver City Silver City is a film about Peter (Piotr) and Agnieszka, who both live in Aberdeen, Scotland, and work as do so many Polish immigrants in the service industry. Peter, the main character, manages the low-end hotel where Agnieszka works as a chambermaid. In the film, we see how Peter engages with Scotsmen as well as Poles through his music (he plays the harmonica), his command of the English language, and his sense of humor. We also see how Agnieszka, who does not speak English, secures a flat with Peter’s help and manages to bring her eight-year-old son over from Poland. The film explores what the characters hoped to gain by moving to the United Kingdom but also investigates whether there is a price to pay by addressing issues such as missing family and friends at home and discrimination in the destination country. The film’s language is English, and Polish with English subtitles. Applied to Silver City, Jakobson’s model produces the following analysis.16 The film’s textual structure is best qualified as a typical documentary in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It has a narrative that revolves around the exposition of character, and works toward a climax that, as the convention prescribes, takes place when four-fifths of the film’s duration has elapsed. Like many social documentaries, Silver City is a hybrid in terms of style: some scenes are purely observational, but there are interviews as well. The editing is conformist: spatial integrity is maintained throughout the documentary, and in any other aspect too, the selection and suturing process was aimed at offering viewers a smooth experience of reality. The next element to be described is the sender of the message, in particular the sender’s aims. I chose the subject matter because, assuming it is possible to fully access, comprehend, and convey one’s intentions, immigration from Eastern Europe was a hot topic at the time of production. Until 2007, when production began, press coverage had focused primarily on the implications for the British and not on those for the 1 million migrants who lived in the same country. It was my intention to show Polish immigration from the migrant’s perspective. In my opinion, documentary films should add to the information that is already available to audiences; that is, offer alternative points of view. Although I recognize that my personal opinions regarding the historical world consciously and subconsciously inform my decisions as a director, I consider them of minor importance. I have a personal outlook on immigration—it is my view, for instance, that the chance to build a future elsewhere has benefits for the individual, the country of origin, and the country of destination but also comes at a cost—yet, for me as a filmmaker, the referential

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Figure 5.1. Screenshot from Silver City (dir. Govaert, 2009): Peter

Figure 5.2. Screenshot from Silver City (dir. Govaert, 2009): mother and son

function in documentary communication is dominant. Another consideration concerned the intended audience, the young men and women studying at the University of Aberdeen who would participate in the focus groups. In order to achieve my research goals, Silver City had to be able to appeal to an audience. By selecting as the protagonist a peer who was living in the same city, I was hoping to be able to catch the attention of the study participants and hold it for the duration of the film.

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Figure 5.3. Screenshot from Silver City (dir. Govaert, 2009): Peter and Agnieszka

A description such as this centers on the referential, the expressive, the metacinematic, and the conative functions of documentary communication (the latter being the function that corresponds with the receiver) and is indicative of how intricately entwined these functions are. It is impossible to describe one element of the communication process without broaching any of the other elements. The same applies to a description of process. Because I wanted to be able to represent the Polish experience, or at least the experience of several Polish immigrants, I listened carefully to Peter’s views. He was particularly keen to be presented as an individual with personal strengths, hopes, and desires and to avoid the stereotypical representation of the Polish as a hardworking and hard-drinking people, which is how he thought the Polish were usually portrayed in the British media. I also listened to Justyna Topczewska, a Polish student who assisted me with the sound recording. With her knowledge of the language and cultural values, she provided a separate form of access to the Polish community that was unrelated to appearance in the film. An example of her influence is the inclusion of Peter’s answer to the question whether the job opportunity in Aberdeen was worth being away from his girlfriend, who was finishing her studies in Poland. Peter said he missed her but “if you want something in your future life, you have to put some work in.” This statement struck Justyna as “very Polish,” which is why I decided to include it in the film. Justyna not only served as an interpreter during the filming process; she also translated the quotes during postproduction.

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She gave me feedback on the rough cut of the film, which was valuable as a reality check (“Is this what happened?”) and also as an indication of how the target audience might respond; in terms of age and experience, she was closer to the intended audience than I was. From the previous description, it follows that the author cannot be identified as the site of meaning production, if only because film production is preeminently a work of collaboration between participants in front of and behind the camera. Encodings, furthermore, need not coincide with decodings (the terms are borrowed from Hall17)—that is, the former may be understood as the production of meaning potential and the latter as actualized meaning. Despite my specific intention to present a wistful tale that would not ignore negative aspects of immigration, many viewers perceived the film as a success story. A few responses from viewers of various backgrounds are given here: People really aren’t like [Peter]. He was a real good advert. (C4, male, Scottish, 1st year Computer Science, age 15–19) I believe this guy made himself a hero because he was successful; he was OK. (C12, male, Polish, 3rd year Psychology, age 20–24) It’s very much painting a happy picture; they live happily ever after, ooh they work hard and they get a great life, American dream or Scottish dream, whatever [laughter]. (A14, male, German, 1st year Law and Spanish, age 20–24)

The question of why these viewers experienced Silver City as a heroic story of an immigrant’s success has to remain unanswered. One explanation may be that I have simply failed to achieve my aims, although this would be contradicted by the interpretation of at least one participant: “She wanted to show Peter as a normal human being, and not . . . oh, he’s only a Polish worker, but also he’s a human being with feelings and thoughts of his own” (C8, male, Polish, 1st year English and German, age 15–19). Perhaps the problematization of Polish immigration in the media at the time had created a context in which Peter’s charisma and lust for life caught viewers who were expecting a victim’s tale by surprise. Variables like these may interfere to some extent simultaneously, as Jakobson’s model would predict. In any case, these responses underline that readers engage with a text in strictly individual fashion; that is, they will appropriate certain elements of the meaning potential that is made available to them while ignoring others based on their personal preferences, (media) experiences, and social context.

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The National Identity of Silver City For many viewers, the filmmaker’s nationality was a significant factor in the interpretation of Silver City. Consider, for instance, the following excerpt from a conversation that followed the screening of a version that did not reveal my country of origin: I’d like to know if maybe it was a Polish person who went to Polish people and so on or whether it was a Scottish person who went to Polish man and so on . . . How would it have changed your interpretation of the story if you had known more about the background of the filmmaker? Because if it’s a Polish person making it they may just want to show it in a more positive light, because they want to present the people in a good light. If it’s a Scottish person making it or a British person, they want to show that all immigrants coming here aren’t bad people taking our jobs. They want to show it in a more representative way of the way immigrants live here. If it’s a Polish person, maybe I’m generalizing, it’s more relative or positive than it would be. If you know it’s a Scottish or British person, then it’s quite good that it’s a positive film they’ve made. (C4, male, Scottish, 1st year Computer Science, age 15–19)

As already pointed out, the interpretation process consists of the construction and application of a strictly individual frame of reference, which helps viewers to derive meaning that is useful to them at the time of consumption. Consciously, or subconsciously, they thereby draw on the functions of the communication process. For many viewers, the referential function is dominant in the interpretation of documentary film, rendering “referential integrity” an important criterion in the evaluation of factual content.18 In order to assess the authenticity of Silver City, some of these viewers, including C4, used reconstructions of authorial intent. The general assumption thereby was that a Polish filmmaker would project an image of the Polish that is more favorable than reality would warrant, while a non-Polish filmmaker would give a more representative view: A non-British participant voiced a similar view as C4, if less articulately: Would you, and this is a question to all of you, would your interpretation of how well reality is represented in this film—in whatever direction—if you knew more about the filmmaker? I think it would change what you knew. The only thing I can think maybe if I found out that he was Polish or had some really deep

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investment with trying to get word out about this, I would maybe consider it a more subjective look, if I knew that. (E3, female, American, 2nd year Psychology, age 15–19)

These two speakers did not know the filmmaker’s national identity, but several participants who were informed of the filmmaker’s nationality through the film confirmed that it was important information. Some of them did not consider knowledge of the actual nationality of the filmmaker to be pertinent; just knowing that the filmmaker was an outsider rather than an insider was enough information. In particular, non-British participants made comments along these lines: Well, it didn’t bother so much exactly what country, but I noticed she was not from the UK and neither from Poland. So . . . maybe [the film gave] a bit [of an] outside view. (B10, female, Norwegian, 3rd year Biotechnology, age 20–24) You know, she is also a foreigner in this country. So it is a bit closer to us, who are foreign, that someone from another country did it and not a Polish person or a Scottish person, but [another] foreigner. It’s kind of cool to see how other people in other countries see the issue of immigration here in the UK. (C8, male, Polish, 1st year English and German, age 15–19)

Knowledge about the filmmaker’s national identity allowed these viewers to understand the position from which the sender was speaking, either to understand it as a different voice in the debate about Polish immigration or to identify with the perspective. For some, a general indication of the filmmaker’s otherness was enough; but for others, disclosure of the fact that I am from the Netherlands did not provide enough information. Several viewers, Polish as well as British, who also saw the version that mentioned my nationality but provided no information about my motivation to make the film, were disappointed in this respect: She could say why she is making that film, that particular subject, why she is interested in Polish people in Aberdeen, that would be interesting, I think high of the Netherlands, what they think of Polish people. But why, what’s the reason? That would be interesting. (B12, female, Polish, 2nd year Human Embryology, age 20–24) Maybe if she had followed through the point she was making when she told the audience that she was from the Netherlands, like if she had

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a particular interest in Poland or Polish communities or some kind of context for the information rather than to say I am from the Netherlands and then leaving it at that. (D12, female, English, 3rd year Biology, age 20–24)

Unlike the previous speakers, these participants separated nationality and motivation for making the film. Another viewer, by contrast, who also learned from the film that the filmmaker was Dutch held the opinion that biographical characteristics of the filmmaker such as nationality are not indicative of one’s perception at all: “I don’t think it so much depends on background or gender or religion. I think it has more to do where the producer’s influences lie” (D10, male, British, 2nd year Music, age 20–24). To sustain his argument, he referred to a fiction film—Crash, which addresses race relations in Los Angeles.19 In one of the scenes, a black movie director accepts advice from a white supervisor to do another take of a scene because the black character did not sound black enough: “It’s just how directors can totally distance themselves from their background, just try and go with what their influences are. As you said, I didn’t really know where [the filmmaker] is from; it’s just where your connections were and whom you’ve been talking to.” In fact, not all viewers who consider the referential function to be dominant felt they needed to know more about the filmmaker’s background. One viewer said that knowledge about the filmmaker’s nationality might be of interest but not in this particular case because “the movie is objective enough not to allow us to guess.” He continued: I’m not able to say at this moment if it was made by [a] Scottish person, Polish person, or Scottish nationalist or whoever. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it’s a good thing because it shows that the movie is in a sense objective. (E4, male, Polish, 1st year Law and Management, age 15–19)

For this Polish viewer, the assessment of the film as authentic rendered knowledge about the filmmaker’s nationality superfluous. Most Polish participants in the study who did not know the filmmaker’s country of origin, however, were not as easily convinced about the referential integrity of the film. They appeared to be oversensitive to possible misrepresentation and were keen to point out that the Polish experience in Aberdeen was more encompassing than Silver City appeared to convey. One Polish viewer was particularly suspicious of what was presented to the audience:

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I might be wrong but I don’t know anyone who would come to the country with such a good English, without any accommodation and work arranged before. I don’t know any person, so some things for me are true and some are not . . . Because it is different when you see such a situation from the perspective of Polish person like me. I was working in [a] hotel as well; I was [a] cleaner, kitchen porter, then receptionist, and I know something about this. I know feelings. I understand their language. And it’s hard to explain, but for me they show Poland from [a] very bad side. It’s not us. (D2, female, Polish, 2nd year French and Hispanic Studies, age 20–24)

Consequently, this viewer was keen to have the filmmaker’s nationality confirmed—she was convinced that she or he was English or British. All viewers who saw a version that did not reveal the filmmaker’s background were curious to find out, but she enquired three times about the filmmaker’s national identity: once in an e-mail before the screening took place, again when she arrived for the screening, and a third time during the focus group discussion (viewers were not informed until after the session). Polish participants who saw one of the two versions that did reveal the filmmaker’s national identity accepted the film’s authenticity more readily than Polish viewers who did not know the filmmaker’s country of origin. They were less suspicious of the filmmaker’s intentions and accepted the film as authentic. As one of them joked, “That movie showed let’s say a typical Polish person who emigrated; they usually wear those T-shirts and some necklaces, shiny [laughter]” (E6, male, Polish, 2nd year Neuroscience and Psychology, age 20–24). One of the British nationals who did not know the filmmaker’s country of origin either had a completely different viewing experience. Like the anxious Polish viewer, he questioned the film’s authenticity too, but on different grounds: “There was a very pro-Polish slant to it . . . It is very positive about Polish immigration. It is trying to tell about the challenges and stuff and the struggle, but ultimately it is not a bad thing, and that’s [the filmmaker’s] message” (B2, male, British, 2nd year History and Film Studies, 15–19). Another Scottish viewer who saw a version that relayed not only my national identity but my motivation to make the film as well saw a connection between nationality and bias too: It’s very subjective on an immigrant’s experience coming to a country. Maybe if it’s made by a Scottish filmmaker, there would be a lot more from the side of how the whole nation, like the macho country, Scots, look to immigrants coming in, instead of seeing it from the immigrants’

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view, maybe see it from the other side. (B8, male, Scottish, 4th year Film and Philosophy, age 20–24)

The decoder’s nationality, in other words, appeared to be one of the factors that interfered with the assessment of the film’s claim to the real as well. Not all viewers, however, appropriated the information about the filmmaker’s nationality as such. A nonnative speaker of the English language employed the information to establish the scope of the issue at hand: “It can make me more able to understand. In this case the thing is that the filmmaker came from the Netherlands. It can show us that, how do I say, not only a small group of people are concerned with [the issue] but also the moviemaker is also concerned” (B6, male, Hong Kong, 3rd year Biochemistry, age 20–24). For this viewer, the filmmaker’s nationality indicated that Polish immigration to the United Kingdom is an important current issue because a non-Polish/non-Scottish person had taken an interest. He also appeared to interpret the information about the filmmaker’s nationality as an indication of the little interest that the British take in the Polish experience: “Because for example, if I know the filmmaker is Scottish or English, my interpretation would be totally different. Because if this movie is not taken by a foreigner, but taken by local people here, then I will interpret that some people in England are really concerned with this problem and the message given by the movie would be totally different to me.” Not all viewers, however, thought that the primary function of documentary is to give a faithful representation of the world as we know it. For some, a different function of the communication process is dominant. The following participant, who saw a version of Silver City that did not address the filmmaker’s national identity, belongs to this category of viewers: Would you have liked to know more about the filmmaker, their nationality, their point of view? No. It’s not significant. (H4, male, Indonesian, PG Law, age 25–34)

This viewer appreciated Silver City as an intimate and efficiently told story that seemed to address the issues involved. The poetic function, in other words, was more dominant for H4 than the referential function, rendering biographical information about the filmmaker insignificant. Another viewer arrived at the same conclusion, but from a different angle: “If I knew the filmmaker and I knew he was Polish, it probably would not change my opinion about the movie” (C3, male, Nigerian, PG Economics, age 25–34). According to C3, it is the viewer, not the filmmaker, who ultimately determines the meaning of the film, placing major

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importance on the conative function of documentary communication. The filmmaker’s nationality or intentions are secondary. Another viewer appropriated the information about the filmmaker’s nationality as an extension of the procedural function of communication. He saw mainly practical advantages to enlisting a non-Polish director: Because I think, the person who was from Poland . . . already knows aspects of the Polish person, habits of the Polish person . . . So it was the right thing to have a person who was not from Poland because being from the Netherlands, she was much more curious about Polish habits, and the social life and stuff. So I think it was a good move of having a person from the Netherlands. (C10, male, Indian, master’s in Pharmacy, 25–34)

Other viewers saw strategic advantages to the involvement of a Dutch director. They interpreted the conveyance of the filmmaker’s national identity as a means to affect the viewer’s interpretation, a reference to the conative function of documentary communication: Maybe if they’d watch the film and perhaps assume that the person making the film was Polish, then it might perhaps have biased the viewer towards a certain viewpoint, whereas when they found out that the person making it was actually from the Netherlands, they might have thought, well, OK, maybe this isn’t necessarily from the point of view of a Polish person wanting to tell the story of Polish people moving to Aberdeen; maybe it is somebody who is impartial and perhaps has at least geographically nothing to do with the country but is just interested in the subject. (D12, female, English, 3rd year Biology, age 20–24) If the film would be made by a Polish person or a Polish student it would be like, oh, another Polish people making a film about Polish workers here in the UK. It wouldn’t have the same effect as it is because of Charlotte, who is that. So it’s good that she made it and not another Polish person. (C8, male, Polish, 1st year English and German, age 15–19)

The data indicate that national identity was an important factor in the interpretation of Silver City for most of the viewers for whom the referential and the expressive functions of documentary communication were more dominant than other functions. As the film’s topic appealed to their personal national identity, this was specifically the case for viewers of Scottish or Polish nationality. Scottish and Polish viewers who did not know the filmmaker’s national identity were generally more concerned about the film’s possible bias than Polish and Scottish viewers who did

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know the filmmaker’s national identity. The latter accepted the film’s authenticity more readily. Not only was the nationality of the viewer a factor in the assessment of the film’s authenticity; the (perceived) nationality of the filmmaker was a factor too. Viewers who included notions of the filmmaker’s nationality in their interpretive frames often operated on the assumption that the filmmaker’s nationality is an indication of aims. Unfortunately, this is not the place to discuss the problems associated with this strategy, which assumes that it is possible to access the filmmaker’s aims via the text. Yet, the preceding arguably offers a glimpse into the workings of what William Wimsatt termed the intentional fallacy.20 Indeed, Silver City may be qualified as an us-them narrative, which systematically ignores the position of the destination country’s native population. The absence of the Scottish viewpoint, however, is more indicative of the filmmaker’s poetics and the media context in which the film was to function than the filmmaker’s national identity. Some viewers employed knowledge about the filmmaker’s nationality not to assess the film’s authenticity but to draw conclusions with respect to other aspects of the communication process. Other viewers, in particular those who place major significance in the poetic or the conative function of documentary communication, did not include notions of nationality in their interpretive frames. These findings illustrate that reception is an intricate process, which involves the interconnection of many factors, such as social context and genre expectations. A film’s national identity is therefore best described as a particular interaction between the six elements of communication, including reception. Media consumption, it appears, is a factor of importance in the production of national-cultural meaning, for which reason it deserves further probing in research settings that are specifically geared toward the problematic of trans/nationality in film.

Notes 1. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000), 2–3. 2. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 36–46; Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993); Stephen Crofts, “Concepts of National Cinema,” in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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3. Noël Carroll and Sally Banes, “Cinematic Nation-Building: Eisenstein’s The Old and the New,” in Hjort and MacKenzie, Cinema and Nation, 121– 38; Duncan Petrie, “The New Scottish Cinema,” in Hjort and MacKenzie, Cinema and Nation, 153–69. 4. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, eds., Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). 5. Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination,” in Hjort and MacKenzie, Cinema and Nation, 68–69. 6. Charlotte Govaert, “Cueing the Viewer: How Reflexive Elements in Documentary Film Engage Audiences in Issues of Representation” (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 2011). 7. For a full description of the versions and how they relate to each other, see ibid. 8. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 62–93. 9. Linda Waugh, “The Poetic Function and the Nature of Language,” in Roman Jakobson, Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 145. 10. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 66. 11. Waugh, “Poetic Function,” 144. 12. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 137. 13. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2006), 217. 14. Jakobson describes this signification process as follows: “We can refer to someone as ‘hunchback,’ ‘big-nose’ or ‘big-nosed hunchback.’ The object of the conversation remains the same but the sign changes. Film functions in comparable ways. We can shoot the person from behind, which will show his hump, we can shoot him en face, which will show his nose or we can shoot him in profile so both will be seen. The resulting shots each communicate something different but the person remains the same. This is how film translates matter into signs.” Roman Jakobson, “Is the Film in Decline?” in Selected Writings, vol. 3 (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), 732–39. 15. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–1979 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 120–38.

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16. This analysis of Silver City must remain provisional; because analyst and filmmaker are one and the same person, a form of tunnel vision cannot be ruled out. 17. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” 18. Annette Hill, Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres (London: Routledge, 2007), 3. 19. Crash (dir. Paul Haggis, 2004). 20. William K. Wimsatt, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 3–19.

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Part Two

Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films

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Chapter Six

Postcolonial Heterotopias A Paracinematic Reading of Marek Piestrak’s Estonian Coproductions Eva Näripea Although Polish film culture in general was held in high esteem in Soviet Estonia, and many Estonian directors admired the works and successes of their Polish colleagues with a tinge of jealousy, the tangible cinematic link between the two countries, both belonging to the Soviet sphere of influence, was limited. The only Polish-Estonian coproductions were those directed by Marek Piestrak, who made three films in collaboration with Estonian filmmakers: a science fiction film, The Test of Pilot Pirx (Test pilota Pirxa / Navigaator Pirx, 1978);1 a fantasy adventure, Curse of Snakes Valley (Klątwa Doliny Węży / Madude oru needus, 1988);2 and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a horror/detective film, The Tear of the Prince of Darkness (Łza księcia ciemności / Saatana pisar, 1992).3 The film “establishments” of both countries, mainly oriented in a highly modernist manner toward auteur cinema, have rather unsurprisingly rejected these and other works by Piestrak, the true enfant terrible of Polish cinema, or the “Ed Wood of Eastern Europe,” preferring to exclude him from the pantheons of their respective national cinemas. The documentation kept in the Estonian State Archives testifies clearly to the fact that the higher ranks of Estonian filmmakers (directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers) regarded the first coproduction (and quite likely also the following collaborations) as a worthless and embarrassing project imposed upon them by the central Russian authorities.4 Thus only the “secondary” specialists (as well as some local actors and extras) were involved in the actual coproduction process, and quite likely even they considered it hackwork.5 The elitist stance of the Polish side is witnessed by the fact that as recently as 2002 Curse of Snakes Valley was voted by the Polish film critics one of the ten worst Polish films of all time—the ultimate expression of an attitude that was also reflected in reactions to my talk on The Test

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of Pilot Pirx at the Polish Cinema in an International Context conference in Manchester in 2009.6 This elitism can also be seen on the Estonian side in the responses of older Estonian filmmakers to the special issue on Estonian cinema for the online journal KinoKultura (www.kinokultura. com), which included a review of Pirx and an interview with Piestrak.7 Meanwhile, the audience reaction has been diametrically different: upon its release, Pirx was seen by millions of people across the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc and was sold to more than twenty countries and continues to be broadcast regularly on Polish and Estonian television, both by public channels (in Estonia) and commercial ones (in Poland); while Curse of Snakes Valley attracted more than 32 million viewers in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Pirx was awarded the Golden Asteroid, the grand prize at the 27th International Science Fiction Film Festival in Trieste (Italy) in 1979, beating Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which came in second, winning the Silver Asteroid. The film also received favorable reviews in both Variety and the Italian press. Somewhat ironically, RUSCICO (Russian Cinema Council), a commercial association dedicated to restoring and distributing globally the best Soviet and Russian films on DVD, has chosen to include all of Piestrak’s Tallinnfilm coproductions in its series “Best Films of Tallinnfilm Studio,” even if only in an unsubtitled version aimed at the Russian domestic market. Finally, in 2008, the thirtieth anniversary of Pirx was celebrated in Estonia with a special screening at the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival, followed by an open Q&A session with its director. This continued interest in Piestrak’s oeuvre, recently perhaps more “subcultural” than mainstream, gives an opportunity to consider his films as cult productions or examples of “paracinema.” According to Jeffrey Sconce, “Paracinema is . . . less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counteraesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus. In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic ‘trash,’ whether such films have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture.”8 It is important to emphasize that most paracinema is not made deliberately as such, and it often “deviate[s] from Hollywood classicism not necessarily by artistic intentionality, but by the effects of material poverty and technical ineptitude.”9 As already noted, in addition to films themselves, Sconce’s article grants ample attention to the way these films are observed, thus providing useful methodological guidelines. Although I do not consider myself part of a paracinematic audience proper (I do not read fanzines and my interest in, and knowledge of, “bad cinema” is much more limited than those of true “paracinephilès”), I will use the paracinematic

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reading strategy in what follows, in the sense that “by concentrating on a film’s formal bizarreness and stylistic eccentricity, the paracinematic audience, much like the viewer attuned to the innovations of Godard or capable of attending to the patterns of parametric narration described by Bordwell, foregrounds structures of cinematic discourse and artifice so that the material identity of the film ceases to be a structure made invisible in the service of the diegesis, but becomes instead the primary focus of textual attention.”10 The primary focus of my reading will be the representation of space in Pirx and Curse of Snakes Valley. I believe that foregrounding the spatial discourse of these two films (which in many respects function as the alter egos of each other—the reverse sides of the same coin) allows regarding these popular and low-brow, at times even trivial, productions as articulating broader trans- or postnational and cross-Soviet social, political, and cultural mores and values, desires and dreads. After all, as Sconce concludes, the “recognition of a narrative’s artifice . . . is the first step in examining a field of structures within the culture as a whole, a passageway into engaging a larger field of contextual issues surrounding the film as a socially and historically specific document.”11 In my investigation of Piestrak’s “spatial universe,” I will mostly rely on Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias, make some use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, and draw to an extent on the framework of postcolonial thought.

Socialist Science Fiction and Postmodern Heterotopias In a broader context, these films, but especially Pirx, coincided with a burgeoning generic trend that saw a true explosion of interest in science fiction cinema in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. This, in turn, was undoubtedly affected by “a sudden and radical shift in generic attitude and a popular renaissance of the SF film” in Hollywood, around and after the 1977 release of George Lucas’s Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.12 Science fiction films had occasionally been made throughout the Soviet bloc since the late 1950s, some of them, notably, as coproductions, and some gaining rather wide popularity and professional significance even beyond the socialist sphere.13 It was only in the late 1970s, however, that the genre overcame, to an extent, its reputation as one of the “seven deadly sins” of Soviet cinema;14 during this decade, the Soviet film industry, alongside other film industries of the socialist sphere, took a firm course toward the “politics of mass entertainment” through “an officially sponsored campaign for the production of more entertainment-oriented films.”15

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Although, in narrative terms, they are rather unsurprising, perhaps even bordering on banal examples of (postmodern) science fiction, Piestrak’s The Test of Pilot Pirx and Curse of Snakes Valley form a fascinating cinematic diptych of socialist science fiction in several respects, the most notable of which, in my opinion, are connected with the interrelated issues of spatial representations, trans- or postnational cultural identities, and colonial discourse. Pirx is an adaptation of the short story “Trial” (“Rozprawa,” 1967) from Stanisław Lem’s so-called Pirx cycle, Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie), which is set somewhere in the twentyfirst and twenty-second centuries, in a futuristic Western Hemisphere, unlike the utopian communist world-to-come that provides the setting of some of his other novels.16 In this future, mankind has already thoroughly traversed much of the solar system, has a number of colonies on the Moon and Mars, and has even begun to explore further parts of the galaxy. The plot revolves around a secret and nearly fatal experiment, in the course of which robots are tested as potential replacements of the human crew on intergalactic expeditions. During the “test mission,” on the spaceship quite tellingly called Goliath, for which Pirx is hired as the commanding officer, it is revealed that the seemingly perfect robots are flawed and ultimately weak precisely because of their utter rationality and total lack of emotion. The film, like Lem’s story, is set in a world that includes only some very general geographical references: for example, the English language is used on the signs; the names of the companies (United Atomic Laboratories, Cybertronic, Inteltron, and Nortronics) indicate an Anglo-American origin, as does an aircraft bearing the logo of PAN-AM, and a billboard advertising Delta Airlines. Moreover, the architectural attributes—including an unmistakably American gridded cityscape with skyscrapers, which was filmed in Chicago; a futuristic interior of an airport filmed at Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris; an eclectic historicist palace (filmed in Moszna, Upper Silesia, Poland); a Mediterranean villa; several high-rise curtainwalled slabs of International style; and numerous modern interiors— create an image of a generic West rather than of a particular locality. In this universe the historical buildings suggest a long lineage and thus an advanced cultural consciousness, while the modern structures exemplify the technologically sophisticated and cosmopolitan present and future. Interestingly enough, and in accordance with many other science fiction films, this is a projection of “an international unity,” a world without the Iron Curtain, or for that matter, without any clearly discernible national boundaries, although not without lines of conflict.17

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Figure 6.1. Screenshot from The Test of Pilot Pirx (dir. Piestrak, 1979)

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While Pirx projects an all-encompassing Western, Anglo-American universe, Curse of Snakes Valley, in contrast, is a “legendary adventure film” set in the French-speaking part of the world:18 both in France and in the former French colonies in the Eastern Hemisphere, or more precisely, French Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). The film was shot to a large extent on location in Paris and Vietnam. This time, the temporal structure is explicitly contemporary (stretching via a flashback from the mid-twentieth century to the last quarter of the century), and the spatial skeleton of the diegetic world includes some relatively easily identified locations: the French capital is introduced by means of the unmistakable Eiffel Tower, in correspondence with the long touristic tradition of establishing shots, supported by images of Parisian cafés and streetscapes, punctuated by the famous “spidery ferrovitreous” art nouveau entrance structures of the Paris Métro stations.19 In relation to this, Charles de Gaulle Airport assumes a more concrete identity as a particular locale, in contrast with its function in Pirx to denote a technologically advanced future civilization. As opposed to the relatively strong sense of “reality” in Paris, the Orient is still represented as an abstraction, using visual strategies in a way comparable to Pirx: the title of the opening shot places the following episode somewhat vaguely in “Indochina, 1954,” as a consequence posing, in a narratively significant move, the exact location of the Snakes Valley as an enigma. Instead of a futuristic, urban(ized), high-tech Western world, then, Curse of Snakes Valley presents, on the one hand, the French-speaking heart of Europe as the old and dignified cultural and intellectual hub of Western civilization and, on the other hand, the colonized Orient as its mysterious, dangerous, and anachronistic Other. The film focuses on an amphora, which conceals a substance of extraterrestrial origin, and which has been preserved for centuries as a relic in a temple in the Snakes Valley. According to a local monk, it was brought to the Earth by aliens and contains “pure evil,” which, if set free, would destroy the entire world. Despite the warning, one of the Western protagonists, a retired French soldier called Bernard Traven, who first discovered the temple and its riches in 1954, steals the amphora with the coerced help of a Polish scholar of Oriental culture, Jan Tarnas, the only person in the Western Hemisphere who can speak the local language. The amphora is brought to Paris and dissected in a secret laboratory where the emanating liquid turns one of the scientists into a monstrous, otherworldly creature, suggesting a primal allegory of science fiction—that aliens are, in fact, us—the darker side of human nature. The beast is immediately exterminated and the amphora taken away from the city.

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Before it reaches its destination, however, the aircraft carrying it literally disappears into “thin air.” In terms of space, whereas Pirx is visually more or less uniform, yet not without a narrative and ideological conflict, Curse of Snakes Valley is largely bipolarized between its two distinct locations. Nevertheless, both Pirx and Curse of Snakes Valley can be conceptualized as heterotopias, much like a number of other Western and Eastern science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, by which time the Manichean utopian/ dystopian formula prevalent in the “modernist” era had been replaced by a more hybridized, fragmented, and blurred postmodern cultural logic of late capitalism or socialism.20 Michel Foucault, who introduced the subsequently influential notion of heterotopias in a lecture in 1967, designates them as “other spaces” or “real places . . . which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”21 He defines heterotopias in opposition to utopias, “sites with no real place,” and by way of six principles.22 Under the third principle, Foucault describes cinema, alongside theater and Oriental gardens, as an example of heterotopia’s essential ability to bring together “several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible,” and also, as Giuliana Bruno has noted, “segments of . . . diverse temporal histories.”23 Importantly, Bruno draws additional parallels with Foucault’s second principle, under which he locates the heterotopia of the cemetery: according to Bruno, both “film and the cemetery are sites without a geography, or rather without a fixed, univocal, geometric notion of geography. They inhabit multiple points in time and collapse multiple places into a single space.”24 Although the respective diegetic universes of Pirx and Curse of Snakes Valley might, perhaps, seem smooth on the surface and unproblematically mono- or bistructural at first glance, they are revealed as spatiotemporally multilayered, as well as scarred by discordant ideological currents, if one digs deeper into their heterotopian substrata. Their heterotopias are defined by an accumulation of “several, incompatible sites,” in terms of first, how the particular spatial settings were created, and second, what is implied on the connotative level, both in relation to the fictional and the “real” world. In Pirx a (somewhat indeterminate) distant future, ahead of the present by at least several decades, is constructed to a large extent out of actually existing locations, buildings, and artifacts, much like Jean-Luc Godard did in Alphaville (1965). This, if nothing else, provides

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an occasion to discuss the spaces in Pirx as “other spaces,” as real sites “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”: the cityscape of Chicago, although recognizable to a knowing eye, is not presented narratively as such, nor is the palace of Moszna or the other locations in the film. They acquire significance and “locality” only in relation to the diegetic network of spaces and places. Additionally, it is important to emphasize that in order to achieve the image of futuristic, postnational, Anglo-American civilization, Piestrak stitches together, as pointed out by Ewa Mazierska, “elements from different settings and cultural traditions,” from both the socialist East and the capitalist West.25 At the same time it downplays, on the level of the presented environments, the fundamental split between the two competitive “world orders,” the “Second World” of the Soviet sphere and the “First World” of the Western countries, which were confronting each other via political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and the economic competition of the Cold War. Curse of Snakes Valley, contrary to Pirx, presents some unambiguously defined real geographical sites—in the case of Paris especially—at a more or less determined point of time, the mid-1980s. Still, the city is heterotopian in the sense that it seems to function as shorthand for a generalized “Western culture” that, notably, is not imagined as mononational. The film’s Polish scholar of Oriental studies, Jan Tarnas, conducts research at the Sorbonne with a scholarship from the Polish government; he is first introduced sitting in a café called L’Odessa; his image on the cover of Paris Week magazine, as well as the title of the feature article, informs the viewers of his “sensational” international fame. Furthermore, the Parisian streets are filled with people from various ethnic backgrounds. Still, to a large extent, the full heterotopic capacity of the film stems from the Eastern part of its spatial equation, where different levels of time and space get strangely collapsed into one another. The secret Snakes Valley, located in an isolated, almost impossible-to-reach spot somewhere in Indochina, is the place where mysterious old wisdoms (held by the local monks) and even more enigmatic future possibilities or threats are stored, enclosed in the aforementioned amphora and guarded by several obstacles, including the cryptic “Khumans,” cosmic powers that appear in the form of snakes. This is the arena where the modern and rational West, the progress-led, technologically advanced offspring of the Enlightenment, struggles with the tradition-bound, seemingly irrational, and exotic East, which is, on this occasion, closely related to an even bigger unknown, in the form of an unidentified and perplexing alien power. In this transcivilizational heterotopia, the Western colonizers are forced to face their own vulnerability, the incapability of both controlling the presumed “lesser” nations

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and conquering the yet unmapped territories. Although the Earth is not destroyed just yet, the disappearance of the aircraft carrying the contents of the mysterious amphora is effected by “higher powers,” leaving a shadow of danger lingering over the planet. Thus, in both films the spatiotemporal bricolage stretches over long periods of time and vast expansions of space—Eastern and Western, earthbound and cosmic, physical and psychological. In addition to the heterotopias generated by the spatially and temporally multilayered on-screen cinescapes and constructed plots, these films can be regarded as heterotopian in the sense that their conceived messages, as well as their general atmospheres, are neither utopian nor dystopian. Foucault draws attention to the fact that, while “utopias afford consolation” by projecting a “fantastic, untroubled region” and by “open[ing] up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy,” “heterotopias are disturbing” because they “desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source.”26 In other words, while utopias (but also dystopias) are straightforward, forming a distinct and homogeneous pole of dialectic oppositions, such as optimistic/pessimistic or technophilic/technophobic, heterotopias are by nature heterogeneous hybrids, dissonant and incoherent, engaging conflicting ideas and ambiguous stances.27 In connection to this, Umberto Eco’s well-known definition of cult cinema becomes relevant: “To become cult, a movie should not display a central idea but many. It should not exhibit a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on in and because of its glorious incoherence.”28 In Pirx, for example, the connotative attributes of different architectural styles have not been deployed with much consistency; in a sense, both the negative and the positive characters are connected with two contrasting types of built environments—historicist and modernist. However, in the case of the villains, the connotations are on both occasions totalitarian, while in the case of the positive protagonists they are unmistakably humanist. In the film’s narrative framework, then, it seems that neither historicist nor modernist architectural style is uniformly connected with good or evil, thus downplaying, to an extent, the central conflict of the film and reinforcing the impression of a uniform, borderless world. In Curse of Snakes Valley the world is rather clearly polarized (perhaps as a reflection of the changed political situation in the socialist bloc), yet it still seems that almost none of the characters or environments are presented as perfectly good or absolutely evil; rather, they are “impure,” essentially dissonant, in one sense or another. For example, there is Christine Jaubert, a French journalist

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who gets involved in the story when mysterious snakes, appearing from the air-conditioning system, strangle to death a technician at a Parisian university, at first gives the impression of being a strong, empowered, and resourceful woman, but she is soon revealed to be hysterical and weak, reacting to every situation of danger with neurotic shrieks and paralytic petrification. In the final twist of the plot she is portrayed as a true femme fatale, who now goes under the name of Iwonne and turns out to be working for the secret agency that conducted the unfortunate probing of the amphora. This time, her mission is to convince the intoxicated Tarnas that the entire case has, in fact, been a dream, a hallucination brought about by a severe illness, in combination with the mythical contents of his daily research work. Again, even though appearing as a strong woman, she takes her orders from men. Also, while it is true that Tarnas and Traven can be considered, respectively, as the positive and negative agents of the film’s central conflict, their multifaceted (cultural) identities still make it possible to frame them as “heterotopian,” rather than “utopian” or “dystopian” characters. Similarly, Paris, as the heart of Western civilization, is contested by secret plans and alien presences (snakes, aliens), while the Orient, although savage and impenetrable, is a rich repository of ancient material wealth and moral virtues (as represented by the monks). Finally, on a more general level, both films leave the audiences with an uncomfortably uncanny feeling, which is, on the one hand, far from a utopian one, even though the Western architecture in Pirx might be read as an emblem of a technically evolved welfare society of the future. On the other hand, neither is the effect entirely dystopian, even though in Curse of Snakes Valley the Orient and the extraterrestrial secrets it hides are undoubtedly posited as dangerous, instilling the viewer with a certain sense of trepidation. Piestrak’s attitude, then, seems to be fatalistic, rather than optimistic or pessimistic. Piestrak’s creation of heterotopia also extends to the connotative level of the narratives, especially in Pirx, where the ambiguity of the depicted built (and natural) environments also includes broader ideological issues. A set of fundamental conflicts arises from the tensions between meaning and connotation of the plot, on the one hand, and the constructed diegetic world, on the other. There is a whole array of moments that can be read as counterideological in terms of Soviet policies. For example, there is the unmistakably positive depiction of Western architecture, which in Soviet cinema would have been a representational taboo in any other framework than that of science fiction (which offered a certain freedom as a genre of the fantastic). The awe-inspiring Western built environments in this film, images of sleek and chic modernist interiors

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and exteriors, very likely threw into relief, for contemporary Soviet audiences, the inadequacy of the Soviet-style interpretations of modernist architecture. As such, they provided a covert critique of immediate architectural realities—the Soviet bloc blocks—and, by extension, of the sociopolitical circumstances that gave rise to them. While the film demonstrates an undisguised admiration of these beautiful buildings, caressing their smooth surfaces with fluid camera movements and flashy angles, it neglects to question even slightly the fact that the International style in architecture was a direct expression of technophile aspirations and had been widely used in sci-fi films as a generic staple signifying negatively technologically advanced societies, functioning often as a connotation of threat to the safe “homeliness” of more “natural” existence that, on the contrary, was frequently represented by vernacular built environments. Blissfully ignorant of the contradiction created by the positive undertones attached uncritically to modernist architecture, Pirx’s final, completely antitechnological image, of rocky mountains covered with white virginal snow, functions as a metaphor for the purity of human society, seemingly uncorrupted by the presence of robots, as well as an emblem of Pirx’s virtuous personality. From an ideological perspective, the antitechnological rhetoric, stemming from the failure of the robot to benefit humankind the way it was designed to, might perhaps be also read as anti-Soviet rhetoric, given that the advancement of communist society was, in the official pronouncements of the Soviet authorities, firmly connected with advancements in technology, especially space technology (i.e., the Space Race). Furthermore, the borderless, unified, maybe even monocultural (and definitely monoracial) world of Pirx, also evoked by the monochrome stylization of the film’s visuals, can be seen as a metaphor of the unifying tendencies of Soviet national and cultural politics, which strove to amalgamate the diversity of its constituent ethnicities into a uniform RussoSoviet blend. The critique of this “defacing” impulse becomes literal in the shape of the faceless, presumably robotic “hit men” of the UAL, who can be interpreted as the faceless powers (of communism) forcing people into doing what they do not want to do or preventing them from acting according to their own will. At the same time, however, it is not entirely impossible that the obvious enthusiasm of the Soviet cinema authorities toward producing Pirx had something to do with the fact that the institutions involved in the film’s experiment are ultimately able to contain and prevent the possible disaster connected to the serial production of these android robots, not unlike the way the Soviet government was able to contain and extinguish the turmoil in Prague ten years earlier.

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Postcolonial Critiques The issue of real-life ideologies prompts us to draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s well-known notion of the chronotope, which he first developed as a literary category designating “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” where “space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”29 In Robert Stam’s words, “The chronotope mediates between two orders of experience and discourse: the historical and the artistic, providing fictional environments where historically specific constellations of power are made visible.”30 On closer inspection, the chronotopes of Pirx and Curse of Snakes Valley seem to have a number of links with surrounding (political) realities, some of which have already been discussed above. These ideological dissonances bring us to the very nexus of this discussion, which lies in the crucial fact that we are talking about films that were made by a Polish director, in cooperation with an Estonian production company, with a cast of film stars and lesser-known actors from several countries of the global network of the Soviet sphere, filmed in various places around the world, and, most importantly, under the ideological conditions determined to a large extent by Soviet authorities and policies. Under these circumstances it is important to emphasize that on the narrative and visual level, the relations of these films with the respective nations—their cultures, histories, and traditions—are apparently almost nonexistent (in the case of Estonia), or minimal (in the case of Poland); although in Curse of Snakes Valley the protagonist is Polish, no part of the narrative is set in Poland. First of all, this probably explains to a degree the exclusion of Piestrak’s films from the “official” narratives of film history both in Estonia and in Poland. At the same time, this deployment of “postnational” strategies of representation by Piestrak is most likely also the main cause of the immense success of his films among the “transnational” audiences. Yet, the heterotopian chronotopes and post- or transnational narratives of these films contain a connotative level that can be described as “local” and perhaps even “national”—namely, the clearly discernible, if not explicit, critique of Soviet colonialism31 (despite which, somewhat paradoxically, the films still managed to present themselves as politically correct according to Soviet tenets). Thus, the chronotopes of these films involve “other spaces” as well in the sense that they provide a subversive voice to otherwise silenced discourses, in a way that empowers the colonized subjects. In fact, the popular genre of science fiction was a perfect channel for expressing the anxiety of the subjects of colonialism, as it

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Figure 6.2. Screenshot from Curse of Snakes Valley (dir. Piestrak, 1988)

has been commonly acknowledged that “few things reveal so sharply as science fiction the wishes, hopes, fears, inner stresses and tensions of an era, or define its limitations with such exactness.”32 Indeed, the eerie atmosphere of these films can be read as signaling the general frame of mind prevalent at the time in the colonial situation of the societies of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. More precisely, the somewhat uncritical admiration of the Western material world in Pirx, as shown above, throws into relief the nostalgia of the subjugated nations toward their hampered connections with what was, throughout the Soviet period, generally perceived as the “true” ground of their culture and identity—the Europe beyond the Iron Curtain. While in Pirx the critique of the Soviet regime is rather subtle and indirect, in Curse of Snakes Valley, perhaps due to the changed political climate, Piestrak imagines a more clearly polarized world, in which the capitalist colonizers of the Orient are portrayed as losers, in a reversal of actual colonial power relations. The French soldier, though in possession of advanced Western technologies, even if his helicopter, the symbol of these technologies, is shown as broken down in the very beginning of the film, comes across as a ruthless and egocentric opportunist, who in the end pays for his sins with his life. Furthermore, the secret scientific agency based in Paris that tampers with the amphora loses a number of its employees and ultimately also the amphora—and with it, symbolically, the ability to rule the world, at least for the time being. By contrast, the

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Orient, for which the Snakes Valley functions as an abbreviation, though deprived of the amphora, remains more or less intact and untouched by the Western attempts at conquest. In this equation, Russia/the Soviet Union is present both in the Western world (in Paris in the form the Café L’Odessa, referring on an intertextual level to the Ukrainian port town, which has been firmly established in film history by Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin [Bronenosets Potyomkin, 1925]) and in the colonial East. In the East, its presence is signaled, first, on the denotative, narrative level as the Russian friend of Tarnas, Andrei Buturlin (played by the Russian actor Sergei Desnitskii, the “Pirx” of Pirx), who lives in Vietnam, hosts the small “Western expedition” in his modest house, and provides them with a Russian invention, a kind of smoke bomb designed to paralyze snakes, which eventually saves the lives of Tarnas, Traven, and Christine and permits them to enter the underground temple of the Snakes Valley. Second, the Russian presence is referred to on the connotative level, as during that time the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, ravaged by the Vietnam War and its repercussions, relied heavily on Soviet economic and military aid. Thus, the confrontation could be easily read as one between the capitalist West and the socialist Soviet sphere. However, it could also be interpreted as an allegory of Soviet colonialism, in which the failure of the Western colonizers refers to the ultimate bankruptcy of the Soviet project, which was moving toward its inevitable collapse as the film was made. For example, in contrast to Pirx, the “dominant ideological establishment” in Curse of Snakes Valley is revealed as in a severe state of decline, unable to control and contain the enemy. Poland, embodied symbolically in the figure of Jan Tarnas, is portrayed as a liminal phenomenon, oscillating and also mediating between the East and the West. It is precisely in this in-between zone where the complex set of colonial relationships pushes to the surface of the film, cracking the neat surface of unambiguously bipolar oppositions and banal narrative patterns. The character of Tarnas, then, refers to a set of problems not explicitly tackled in the narrative, opening up an avenue of connotations, which leads to the field of real-life political and cultural struggles. In short, Piestrak’s films form a part of a postcolonial discourse, in which, according to Homi Bhabha, the colonizer and the colonized are engaged in a hybrid relationship of mutual dependency and domination, and whose subjects are both split, albeit with different consequences and significance. As proposed by Bhabha, the colonized is not merely a mute victim, but rather exercises a certain amount of power over the colonizer.33 From that perspective, Piestrak’s films, and especially Curse of Snakes Valley, could be read as postcolonial critiques,

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which involve intricate negotiations between the colonized and the colonizer, simultaneously adapting to the rules set by the colonizer, and yet still undermining colonial dominion by means of subtle inversions and strategic shifts of signification. That said, it should also be emphasized that both of Piestrak’s films are exponents of cult cinema as defined by Eco, and thus incoherent and dissonant. In the discussion above, I described how in Pirx the director was blissfully unaware of the conceptual conflicts of the represented spaces and their intertextual networks of references. In Curse of Snakes Valley the discrepancies of the film’s messages become especially clear when one considers the way the Vietnamese are represented. They are seen in a typically Orientalizing manner, reduced to stereotypes; then again, so are their Western colonizers. Moreover, this Orientalization might also be read as an inverted critique of the official Soviet ideology of communist equality, which on the level of pictorial representations notoriously tended to operate with exoticizing national stereotypes and as such stood in stark contrast with actual totalitarian and colonial policies. All in all, however, these discordant aspects are the very source of appeal of Piestrak’s oeuvre, enriching rather than impoverishing it. In conclusion, I would like to return to an idea suggested by Jeffrey Sconce. Although it might appear too ambitious a statement, Piestrak’s films indeed seem to confirm Sconce’s proposal that “perhaps paracinema has the potential, at long last, to answer Brecht’s famous call for an anti-illusionist aesthetic by presenting a cinema so histrionic, anachronistic and excessive that it compels even the most casual viewer to engage it ironically, producing a relatively detached textual space in which to consider, if only superficially, the cultural, historical and aesthetic politics that shape cinematic representation.”34 By speaking of colonialism in the disguise of the capitalist West and the Orientalist East, Piestrak’s films reveal a complex set of colonial relationships, which deserve to be scrutinized in much more detail than the limits of this paper have enabled. It is exactly in this sense that Piestrak’s popular films can be seen as politically significant: even if unable to change the situation, they provided a potentially subversive reading of it by showing it in a peculiar carnivalesque mirror. It is precisely their “glorious incoherence,” the fissures of their narrative and visual execution, the dissonances between the denotative and connotative levels that create space for voices silenced in the colonial situation. Thus, the very reasons these films have been considered worthless provide, in fact, the strongest ground for reassessing their relevance, both as “national” and “transnational” productions.

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Notes 1. Produced by PRF “Zespoły Filmowe” and Tallinnfilm. 2. Produced by Zespół Filmowy “Oko” and Tallinnfilm. 3. Produced by Zespół Filmowy “Oko,” Tallinnfilm, and Eskomfilm. 4. It is indeed true that the initiative of collaboration came from above, as Piestrak used the typical institutional channels in his search for partners, rather than direct relations with fellow filmmakers. 5. In The Test of Pilot Pirx, the Estonian crew included art directors Aleksander Peek and Priit Vaher, costume designer Helve Halla, first assistant director Airi Kasera, and producer Karl Levoll. In addition, the original score was written by Arvo Pärt, probably the most famous contemporary Estonian composer, for whom this was his last original score to write. See Tiit Tuumalu, “‘Navigaator Pirx’—30 aastat hiljem,” Postimees, March 22, 2008, http://blog.postimees.ee/300308/esileht/ak/319037.php?navigaator-pirx30-aastat-hiljem. Subsequently, Pärt’s preexisting compositions have been used by such world-renowned directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Michael Moore, Gus Van Sant, Tom Tykwer, and François Ozon; see Kaire Maimets-Volt, Mediating the “Idea of One”: Arvo Pärt’s Pre-existing Music in Film (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, 2008). 6. Polish film historian Krzysztof Loska has termed The Test of Pilot Pirx “an unfortunate adaptation of Lem’s” work; he dedicated only two paragraphs of his article to an analysis of the film’s plot. Loska, “Lem on Film,” in The Art and Science of Stanisław Lem, ed. Peter Swirski (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2006), 160. 7. Eva Näripea, “Transnational Spaces of Science Fiction: An EstonianPolish Co-production The Test of Pilot Pirx (Test pilota Pirxa / Navigaator Pirx, 1978),” in “Estonian Cinema,” special issue, KinoKultura 10 (March 2010), http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/10/estonian.shtml; Ewa Mazierska, “My Great Estonian Adventure: An Interview with Marek Piestrak,” in “Estonian Cinema,” special issue, KinoKultura 10 (March 2010), http:// www.kinokultura.com/specials/10/pirx-interview.shtml. 8. Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 535. 9. Ibid., 546. 10. Ibid., 547. 11. Ibid., 552–53. 12. Vivian Sobchack, “Post-futurism,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 221; originally published in Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, 2nd ed. (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

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13. The authors of the book Miracles on the Screen, for instance, claim that the Soviet “space opera” The Planet of Storms (Planeta bur, 1961) belongs to the curriculum of many American film schools because of its stunning Venusian sets and outstanding cinematography. Evgenii Kharitonov and Andreii Shcherbak-Zhukov, Na ekrane—chudo (Moscow: NII Kinoiskusstvo, 2003), 192. Also, the Czechoslovakian film by Jindřich Polák, Icarus XB 1 (Ikarie XB 1, 1963)—bought and rereleased in an altered, English-dubbed version in the United States (under the title Voyage to the End of the Universe) by American International Pictures—was among a number of Eastern European and Soviet science fiction films that reached the American market; in addition, the East German–Polish coproduction Der schweigende Stern (Milcząca Gwiazda in Polish; dir. Kurt Maetzig) from 1960 was released in the United States as First Spaceship on Venus, a shortened and Englishdubbed version of the original, by Crown International Pictures. Stefan Soldovieri, “Socialists in Outer Space: East German Film’s Venusian Adventure,” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 382–98. Similarly, Sky Calls (Nebo klyche, 1959), the Ukrainian film by Mikhail Kariukov and Oleksandr Kozyr, was bought in 1962 by “King of the B-movie” Roger Corman and distributed in the US market under the title Battle beyond the Sun (adapted for American audiences by then UCLA film school student Francis Ford Coppola). Oleksiy Radynski, “The Corman Effect: A Give-and-Take between Soviet and American Cold-War Science Fiction Film,” in “Ukrainian Cinema,” special issue, KinoKultura 9 (December 2009), http://www.kinokultura. com/specials/9/radynski-corman.shtml. In fact, the relationship of mutual enrichment and influence between “Eastern” and “Western” science fiction cinema is a complex and severely underresearched topic that deserves much greater academic attention. 14. Joshua First, “From Spectator to ‘Differentiated’ Consumer,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 9 (2008): 318. 15. Georges Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the Soviet Film Industry (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 57. See also Val Golovskoy, “Art and Propaganda in the Soviet Union, 1980–5,” in The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed. Anna Lawton (London: Routledge, 1992), 264. A somewhat similar “boom” of science fiction films can also be detected in East German cinema (see Sonja Fritzsche, “East Germany’s ‘Werkstatt Zukunft’: Futurology and the Science Fiction Films of ‘defa-futurum,’” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 [2006]: 367–86) and Polish cinema (see Ewa Mazierska, “Polish Cinematic Dystopias: Metaphors of Life under Communism—and Beyond,” Kinema [Fall 2004], http://www.kinema.uwaterloo. ca/article.php?id=77&feature [accessed July 19, 2013]); in Czechoslovakia, the “normalization period” also favored mass entertainment (see Petra Hanáková, “‘The Films We Are Ashamed of’: Czech Crazy Comedy of the

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132 Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films 1970s and 1980s,” in Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc, ed. Eva Näripea and Andreas Trossek [Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts; Tartu: Estonian Literary Museum, 2008], 109–21). 16. This cycle was also adapted as a short TV series in Hungary in 1972, under the title Adventures of Pirx (Pirx kalandjai), by the producer András Rajnai. 17. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 45; originally published in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage Press, 1994). 18. Tuumalu, “‘Navigaator Pirx.’” 19. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 70. 20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); Epp Annus, “Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Socialism,” in Hybrid Spaces: Theory, Culture, Economy, ed. Johannes Angermüller, Katharina Bunzmann, and Christina Rauch (New York: Transaction; Münster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 25–36. 21. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 24. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 25; Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 147. 24. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 147. 25. Ewa Mazierska, “International Co-productions as Productions of Heterotopias,” in A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas, ed. Anikó Imre (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 497. 26. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), xix; emphasis in original. 27. See also “Themes in SF and Fantasy,” Film Communication Media, accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.adamranson.plus.com/SFThemes.pdf. 28. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” SubStance 14, no. 2 (1985): 4. 29. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 30. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 11. 31. On Soviet colonialism and its complicated relationship to the Western discourse of postcolonialism, see, for example, Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr, and Edward Allworth, Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),

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3–9; David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in PostSoviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28; Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Epp Annus, “The Problem of Soviet Colonialism in the Baltics,” Journal of Baltic Studies 43, no. 1 (March 2012): 21–45. 32. H. L. Gold, quoted in Annette Kuhn, ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1990), 15. 33. See Epp Annus and Piret Peiker, “Homi K. Bhabha,” in 20. sajandi mõttevoolud, ed. Epp Annus (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2009), 921. 34. Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy,” 553.

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Chapter Seven

Poland-Russia Coproductions, Collaborations, Exchanges Izabela Kalinowska In the period following the collapse of communism, when government sources for funding native film production throughout Eastern Europe shrank to very low levels, filmmakers throughout the region turned to international coproductions as the most viable option for securing their craft’s continued existence. In Poland some of the most established and promising film directors, such as Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, and Krzysztof Kieślowski, found their producers in Western Europe. In the case of the latter two, the conditions of foreign coproductions impacted their works so significantly that the collaborations may be said to have amounted to fundamental turning points in their respective careers. At the same time, Russian film directors were increasingly relying on Western, primarily French, production companies for the funding of their projects. The political and, more importantly, cultural connections that had existed between Poland and the Soviet Union prior to 1989 ceased to provide any sort of link between the two national cinemas in the postcommunist era. On the level of representation, stereotypical portrayals of Russians in Polish cinema, and vice versa, that harked back to the pre– World War  II period started to gradually dominate Polish and Russian screens. Since the collapse of communism in Poland, Polish film directors have been successfully casting Russian actors at a rate that may actually have exceeded their presence in Polish films of the communist era.1 But only one film, Krzysztof Zanussi’s Persona Non Grata (2005), has presented an example of a Polish-Russian coproduction that went beyond casting and approximated the type of collaboration that occasionally brought Polish and Soviet filmmakers together in the previous era. Dina Iordanova correctly points out that a system of distribution of films produced within the Eastern bloc was in place before 1989: “Works of higher artistic quality, particularly from across the region, were exhibited in a system of art house theaters. A well-developed system of

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cinematic barters between the Eastern Bloc countries included not only theatrical distribution, but also a range of special events. The export of films was part of a wider promotional effort, including national film weeks abroad run by dedicated organizations.”2 However, Iordanova’s claim that artistic migration and collaboration among the various national film industries within the Soviet sphere were a common occurrence cannot be fully substantiated when looking at the Polish and Soviet film industries.3 Relative to the steady output of both film industries, the percentage of films that were coproduced was very small.4 The few communist-era coproductions that came to fruition include, for example, A Legend (Legenda, 1970), directed by Sylwester Chęciński and coproduced by Mosfilm and the Film Unit Kraj; Remember Your Name (Zapamiętaj imię swoje, 1974), directed by Sergei Kolosov and produced by the Film Studio Iluzjon and Mosfilm; To Save a City (Ocalić miasto, 1976), directed by Jan Łomnicki and coproduced by Mosfilm and the Polish film unit Kadr; and Juliusz Machulski’s comedy Déjà vu (1989), coproduced by the Polish film unit Zebra and the Odessa Film Studio. Anne Jäckel has pointed out that “co-production is a much abused term: it may refer to any form of co-financing (a pre-sale to a television channel, theatrical distribution or foreign territory) or creative and financial collaboration between various producers (including broadcasters).”5 In each of the aforementioned films, Polish-Soviet coproduction involved shared funding and both sides’ involvement in various aspects of the film’s production. More important, all four films had Polish-Russian content, and it is safe to assume that the requirements of telling a Russian-Polish story provided the impetus for the coproduction. Krzysztof Zanussi’s Persona Non Grata meets all of the same criteria; that is, the making of the film involved shared funding, a mixed Polish-Russian cast and crew, and— last but not least—a narrative that incorporates Polish and Russian elements. Thus, in both cases—the Polish-Soviet films of the postwar period and Zanussi’s postcommunist Polish-Russian production—coproduction implied a high degree of collaboration. As Andrew Higson has consistently argued, national cinema is a complex and multifaceted concept. Some of the aspects to be considered when defining the concept of national cinema include the economics of film production, institutional specificity, stylistic characteristics, and audience reception. In my consideration of coproduced films, I will focus on two of the possible approaches singled out by Higson: production and textual analysis. First, according to Higson, one can define “national cinema in economic terms, establishing a conceptual correspondence between the

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terms ‘national cinema’ and ‘the domestic film industry,’ and therefore being concerned with such questions as: where are these films made, and by whom? Who owns and controls the industrial infrastructures, the production companies, the distributors and the exhibition circuits?”6 While a Polish film is one produced within the domestic film industry in Poland and a Soviet or Russian film within the Soviet or Russian film industry, respectively, it is obvious that the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe provides a crucial caesura that needs to be considered when defining these national cinemas and their mutual relationship. State ownership of film production and distribution and the resulting primacy of ideological requirements imposed on film production by the state were common to both Poland and the Soviet Union. These unifying elements ceased to play a prominent role in film production in the period following 1990. While both in postcommunist Poland and in Russia government support of native film production has been essential for filmmakers of several generations, including the most established authors such as Krzysztof Zanussi and Nikita Mikhalkov, film production has now been freed from overt government involvement and has ceased to function as a strictly controlled, government institution. Second, in his discussion of possible approaches to national cinema, Higson includes an approach that focuses on textual elements.7 The key questions of a text-based perspective are the following: “What are these films about? Do they share a common style or world-view? What sort of projections of the national character do they offer? To what extent are they engaged in ‘exploring, questioning and constructing a notion of nationhood in the films themselves and in the consciousness of the viewer’”?8 Such textual indicators that may help delineate the contours of a national cinema are of primary concern to me. I assume that film texts serve to articulate messages that are relevant for a national community in that they both reflect the preexisting values of that community and, at the same time, are working to shape a cultural identity. Consequently, national cinemas give us insight into the ways in which people represent themselves and others. It is important to bear in mind that, in spite of the institutional and ideological elements that unified Polish and Soviet cinemas, each functioned within a specific historical and cultural context and maintained a high degree of national autonomy. The collapse of communism unfettered nationalist tendencies in both cultures, and as a consequence the narration of the nation has become significantly more accentuated in postcommunist cinemas. While coproductions are likely to enhance the films’ conditions of production by granting filmmakers access to greater resources, opportunities to use foreign locations,

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Figure 7.1. Screenshot from Persona Non Grata (dir. Zanussi, 2005)

and—eventually—access to a larger audience, they may complicate the articulation of the film’s cultural goals.9 Thus, international coproduction may present a challenge to the notion of national cinema, and thereby open up a mode of transnational communication. In what follows, I take a closer look at two films that were made as Polish-Soviet/Russian coproductions, one produced before the fall of communism and the other after. In each case, the nationality of the coproduced film’s director tilts the entire production to one side or the other. The Polish side dominates in Persona Non Grata, while Remember Your Name is closer to being a Soviet film. I am interested, primarily, in the narrative and representational strategies that these two films employ. As I have already pointed out, both films have mixed casts, and Poles and Russians participated in various aspects of the films’ production. Remember Your Name was made at a time when Soviet dominance over East-Central Europe was unquestionable, periodic outbursts of social protests directed against local Communist Party dominance notwithstanding. In contrast, Zanussi made his Persona Non Grata as the Polish People’s Republic was quickly becoming a distant memory. A closer analysis of communist-era coproductions reveals the constituent elements of the construct that was the official Polish-Soviet friendship. A comparison of films made before the collapse of communism with the post-1989 Persona Non Grata allows one to answer the question of whether—freed from the burdens of official ideology—Polish and Russian filmmakers who collaborated on the latter project were

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able to enter into a meaningful dialog with each other’s cultures. Was the paradigm that had been established in communist-era Polish-Soviet coproductions rejected altogether, questioned, or reversed in the period that followed? As demonstrated by Elżbieta Ostrowska and Adam Wyżyński, and contrary to what one might expect given the circumstances of Soviet political domination over Poland, not that many Soviet/Russian characters appeared in Polish films made after 1945 in the People’s Republic of Poland. Russians were cast, most often, in “films that tackle the subject of World War II, and they (the Russians) always represent unwavering heroism that is worthy of highest respect.”10 The authors correctly identify the reasons behind this paucity of Soviet themes and protagonists in Polish films of that era. They point out that a subdued Soviet presence in the film world of postwar Poland was meant to deemphasize the determining character of Soviet intervention in Poland after the war. Introducing Russian characters to the imagined world of communist Poland would mean bringing attention to the involuntary character of Poland’s transformation into a communist country. According to Ostrowska and Wyżyński, “socialist realist films persistently created the illusion of a social revolution as an upward movement that may have—at the most—been inspired by ideas flowing from the East.”11 Moreover, the authors point out, citing Krzysztof Zanussi, that written permission from the Soviet Embassy was required every time a Russian character appeared in a Polish film, which further complicated matters. In the atmosphere of greater openness after 1956, Polish filmmakers were still not able to deal with the real circumstances of the Soviet takeover of power in Poland, and therefore they avoided the subject altogether.12 Ostrowska and Wyżyński conclude that the 1970s did not contribute anything new to the way Russians were represented in Polish cinema. Russian characters, according to them, appeared sporadically, and most often in the context of monumental war films.13 Yet, it is in the course of that decade that the largest number of Polish-Soviet coproductions was made. Upon closer scrutiny, the Seventies appear to have produced a noticeable and slightly more diverse yield of Polish-Soviet cinematic interactions than any decade before or since. One may assume that coproductions allowed for a greater mutual involvement in various aspects of the films’ making. The result was a greater visibility of Russians on Polish screens and vice versa. Why did Polish-Soviet collaboration pick up at this particular time? The 1970s were sufficiently removed from the World War  II years and the Soviet-led communist takeover of power that followed the war. A generation of homegrown communist leaders had been

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firmly in place for some time now. While not quite as politically subdued as the 1960s, the first part of the 1970s coincided with an increased sense of complacency among the general population. Consequently, the atmosphere was more conducive to joint projects, and it was safer for the presence of Soviet actors to increase without arousing anti-Soviet resentment among Polish viewers. It may also be worth pointing out that following Edward Gierek’s accession to the post of the Polish Communist Party’s first secretary in 1970, Poland appeared to embrace greater openness. Perhaps the presence of Soviet accents in Polish cinema was meant to counterbalance the “Westernizing” tendencies that became apparent in Polish public life and popular culture in the first half of the 1970s. This situation would change in many respects in the second part of the decade, which witnessed a wave of antigovernment strikes and a general worsening of the economic and political situation. It is important to note that World War II and the ensuing war-induced trauma present common elements of most, if not all, of the films coproduced during this period. A Legend tells the story of two teenage boys, a Pole and a Russian, who had been orphaned by the war and are sheltered by a Polish peasant girl. In To Save a City the film’s action is set in 1944, in Kraków. Its story presents the Soviets as the benefactors of wartime Poland, and saviors of Kraków in particular. Thanks to the selfless heroism of a group of three Soviet paratroopers and, ultimately, the Soviet marshal Konev’s decision to take the city without the help of heavy artillery or the air force, Poland’s “old capital” was saved. Contrary to these two films, the plot of Remember Your Name initially locates the film’s action in the contemporary Soviet Union and later in Poland, and it moves away from the fields of battle.14 In comparison with To Save a City, which smoothly articulates the message of Soviet-Polish friendship, fissures open up in the way that the Kolosov film tackles the same challenge. An unconventional Polish-Soviet love triangle emerges at the center of the story. It includes a Russian woman who has been separated from her young son during the war, while both she and the child were inmates in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the son’s new, adoptive Polish mother. The film begins with Zinaida Vorobeva, the main protagonist, living the life of a single, professionally active woman. Soon, however, the news she receives from Poland triggers a series of flashbacks that span her life from the moment her son is born, just on the eve of the war’s outbreak, through her wartime ordeal that includes her Auschwitz experiences, to the dubious relief that comes with liberation—with her husband a casualty of the war, and her son now missing. The dilemmas and potential tensions along the Soviet–Polish line that could arise from the

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situation in which two mothers—one Polish, the other Russian—compete for the affection of their son are annulled by a shift of narrative focus to the horrors of the war. According to his own testimony, while visiting Poland to promote one of his films, Sergei Kolosov came across a newspaper story about a Russian woman who had just been reunited with her son.15 Zinaida Murav’eva had found the boy, now a grown man, in Poland, many years after the war. A Polish woman, a teacher who took care of the boy at an orphanage, had adopted him. He grew up in Poland without being aware of his true name and nationality. Kolosov’s subsequent explorations of this and similar stories of children who were separated from their mothers during the war resulted in encounters with other people who were similarly affected. He was particularly impressed by a woman who was herself a war hero and, following the successful search for her two daughters, became an activist after the war for the cause of other children separated from their parents.16 Although Kolosov claims that the figure of the activist-mother provided inspiration for one of the film’s supporting characters (Nina, the main protagonist’s best friend), it is the main protagonist herself who encompasses the characteristics of both a suffering mother, who has been separated from her child, and a socially engaged activist, a mother figure to the entire community. We first meet Vorobeva (Ludmila Kasatkina) when she is surrounded by her coworkers, who obviously hold her in high esteem and seek her advice, not only in professional but also in private matters. Her wise and caring attitude extends to the realm outside work as well, where we see her caring for a neighbor’s daughter. The image of a confident and composed woman who is a model Soviet citizen starts to falter when Vorobeva gets a message from Poland. Unable to face the emotional burden of establishing direct contact with her long-lost son, she frantically seeks support from a friend. The flood of emotions that overpowers her brings forth the flashbacks that acquaint the viewer with Vorobeva’s wartime experiences. Kolosov chose a somewhat anachronistic way of representing the reality of the concentration camp in his picture. His Auschwitz is not too far removed from Wanda Jakubowska’s representation of the same place in The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948). He appears to opt for a similar type of “pathetic realism” that favors didacticism over any type of a modernist unsettling of the represented world. The camp’s German overseers are exaggerated to the point of becoming one-dimensional caricatures, and the female inmates are all united in their suffering and by the support they lend to each other, independent of nationality. At the same time,

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the somewhat stagey, theatrical manner of the actresses’ performances paradoxically tones down the horrors of their concentration camp experience. As was the case with Jakubowska’s film, such simple schematism of representing the reality of Auschwitz is reminiscent of socialist realism. Kolosov himself was very specific in defining his film’s ideological bent and its didactic goal: “We wanted to make sure that after seeing our film people would hate fascism, war, barbarism, with renewed force.”17 How does the film’s contemporary frame, and the Polish component of the story specifically, fit into this simple ideological design? The film’s title, formulated as a command, Remember Your Name, echoes Zinaida Vorobeva’s parting words directed to her son: “Remember, your name is Gena Vorobev; your homeland is the Soviet Union.” Such a clear assertion of identity and a call to remain loyal to the Soviet community are consistent with the film’s ideological goals as described above. Kolosov does not intend to raise questions concerning identity. Rather, he wants to provide answers. Yet, his Gena Vorobev has become Eugeniusz Truszczyński; a Russian has been transformed into a Pole. Therefore, answering the straightforward summons to remain loyal to the Soviet Union becomes a bit complicated. Bringing Poland into the picture makes a simple resolution impossible. This difficulty arises from the fact that Gena Vorobev has been cared for, and in the process has also assumed a new identity thanks to a woman who is not an ideological enemy, but who comes from a country that belongs to the Soviet bloc. Since, in this situation, providing a simple and, at the same time, ideologically correct answer to the dilemmas of personal loyalty is not that easy, Remember Your Name becomes marred by silences and contradictions that undermine the socialist realist paradigm. The Russian mother and her long-lost, Polonized son first come in contact after Zinaida goes to a post office to respond to a call placed from Gdańsk. Thus, the phone conversation takes place at the son’s request. Moreover, the exchange itself suggests that Gena is very interested in finding out about his biological mother. Through the mediation of a Russian-speaking friend, he wants to find out about her well-being, while she focuses her questions on ascertaining his identity. Soon after, though, when the film’s narrative switches to Poland and moves back in time, the son appears to be reluctant even to consider responding to messages that reach him regarding his Russian mother’s search for her child. It is the Polish mother who encourages him to be more responsive to Zinaida’s pleas. The phone conversation between Gena and his Russian mother provides a turning point for the narrative, as the chronologically ordered

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flashbacks that follow this scene belong to the son. We see him transform from a scrawny, scared little boy into a handsome and confident young man, about to become a captain of a large vessel. When Kolosov brings the son’s flashback close to its starting point—that is, the conclusion of the telephone conversation—Eugeniusz/Gena appears to be very reluctant to get in touch with the Russian woman. He confides to his Polish mother that he wishes she, Halina Truszczyńska, had maintained that she was his only mother. He states that he has no desire to see the woman living in the Soviet Union who claims to be his mother. However, soon the plot takes a sudden turn and we see Gena getting off a train in Leningrad, and exchanging warm greetings with his mother and a group of her female friends. This change of mind is so sudden and clear-cut that it is not credible. Moreover, it represents the pattern of playing down the characters’ personal dilemmas at the cost of placing emphasis on the overarching ideological message of Polish-Soviet friendship and wartime suffering. A lack of consistency in Gena’s behavior becomes apparent when the ease with which he switches his position on being Zinaida’s grown son is juxtaposed with the hesitation and pain he experiences, during an earlier flashback, when trying to decide whether to visit Auschwitz. Narrative inconsistencies at the intersection of the Polish and Soviet portions of the plot point in turn to a superficial and fragmentary representation of all the Polish characters. Remember Your Name directs most characters’ affect to memories of the war. In the film’s contemporary frame, Zinaida is the only character who is allowed to become very emotional. The emotions, whether positive or negative, of the Polish characters are kept in check. Kolosov’s restraint in representing the Polish characters’ inner struggles suggests that the film may be concealing more about RussianPolish relations than it reveals. The trauma of war-related experiences links all of the protagonists’ life stories. One of the few things we know about the Polish mother, Halina Truszczyńska, is that she, too, was a prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp during the war. It must be pointed out, though, that the element of shared war-related experiences does not bring the two mothers closer together. They never meet, and the only sign of their mutual, amicable acknowledgment is an exchange of gifts that Gena mediates. The Polish woman remains somewhat distant and elusive. She encourages Gena to connect to his biological mother, calmly giving up the position that she has until now occupied in his life. She gives little indication of any anxious feelings at the prospect of Gena’s reunion with Zinaida. Her reserved posture and meek behavior, along with a resigned willingness to give up

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her son for the sake of the Russian mother, could be interpreted as a figure that speaks of Poland’s subservient status vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Another interesting case of the Poles’ silencing crops up in the somewhat peculiar phone conversation mentioned previously. The mother’s aural reunion with her son—by its nature, a very private matter—becomes transposed into the very public space of a phone booth at a post office. On both sides of the phone line, agents other than the mother and her son are activated, and instead of just two voices we can hear a whole chorus that lends support to the two, but also articulates issues that go beyond the immediate concerns of Zinaida and Eugeniusz/ Gena. Amidst their search for words, another voice becomes audible on the Polish end of the line. “This is Andrzej, Andrei, I lived in the Soviet Union until 1956. I am a friend of Eugeniusz. He does not speak much Russian, and this is why I . . .” The speaker offers to interpret for the mother and son. His own story is quickly overshadowed by the conversation he facilitates. This is the viewer’s only encounter with Andrzej, but the episode is quite revealing of the method that the film adopts to represent Polish-Soviet relations. Andrzej, too, must have suffered during the war, if for no other reason than his long exile from Poland. Either he was among the many Poles who were forcibly deported to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war or his home remains in the territories that formerly belonged to Poland but were incorporated into the Soviet Union after the war. In any case, the story of a Pole who was only allowed to return to Poland from the Soviet Union in 1956 would not be a happy one. Obviously, the subject of the Poles’ victimization by the Soviets must be avoided because it does not fit into the officially sanctioned version of Polish-Soviet relations. We can only speculate that Andrzej’s lines were smuggled into the script by one of its Polish coauthors (Ernest Bryll and Janusz Krasiński were credited for the screenplay along with Kolosov) as a subversive gesture, perhaps to hint at a broader scope of the shared Polish-Soviet history. This slippage might also explain why Polish characters are presented with such restraint in Remember Your Name, and why—in the end— Eugeniusz/Gena goes back to Poland, and to his previous life, after only a brief sojourn in Leningrad. The two realms, Poland and the Soviet Union, must remain separate to make sure that mutual resentments do not come to the surface. Such separation in the present ensures that the shared history of the two nations’ past suffering under Nazi occupation remains in the foreground, as dictated by the requirements of the dominant ideology. When watching Remember Your Name today, one wonders what a remake of this picture—free from the straightjacket of communist

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ideology—might be like. Would this very compelling story of wartime suffering and separation and of the postwar Polish-Russian familial reunion be marred by the “ugly feelings” of maternal envy and mutual resentment? Freed from the burden of obligatory declarations of PolishSoviet friendship, could a filmmaker rise above all national stereotypes and just focus on the human story? Could a film based on Vorobeva’s life experiences point a way to a national reconciliation between Russians and Poles, or would it necessarily slip into national paranoia? Any answer to these questions remains hypothetical, but a closer look at Krzysztof Zanussi’s Persona Non Grata presents an opportunity to trace the trajectory both of Polish-Russian coproductions and of the way in which Poles and Russians have represented each other, beyond the temporal caesura of communism, and into the post-Soviet period. Krzysztof Zanussi, whose work is well known and respected in Russia (his Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease won the Grand Prix at the 2000 Moscow Film Festival), and who has demonstrated noticeable sensitivity to the issues of Polish-Russian relations, was very well positioned to open the space of his film to a constructive dialog between the two cultures.18 In a commentary appended to the DVD release of Persona Non Grata, Krzysztof Zanussi intimates that he wrote the script with the prominent Russian actor and filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov in mind.19 In another commentary included in the same bonus material, Iwona Ziułkowska, one of the film’s Polish producers, further explains: “One of the first people who developed an interest in the script was Nikita Mikhalkov, who accepted the role soon after having read the script. Krzysztof Zanussi had written this role especially for him. At that point we started believing that the film would be made.” Ziułkowska adds that when financing for the film became an issue, Mikhalkov offered the assistance of his production company.20 Thus, it was critical for Zanussi’s project that Nikita Mikhalkov, who can boast both a very charismatic screen presence as an actor and a prominent position within the Russian film industry as a film director and producer, decided to participate in the filming of Persona Non Grata. Mikhalkov himself speaks about a challenging split between his role as actor and producer.21 He minimizes his input as a producer by saying that, in the case of the Zanussi project, his role was limited to securing good working conditions. At the same time Mikhalkov’s comments suggest that his contribution to creating the role he played in Persona Non Grata was in fact quite significant. When commenting on his experience of working with Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, the lead actor in Persona Non Grata, Mikhalkov intimates: “I improvise with him, he does not always know the lines that he hears from me, but when he catches

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the sense of what I am saying, I can see how he holds on to it, and how he reacts in a new way. This is how a talented person reacts.”22 Just as was the case in Remember Your Name, Zanussi’s film revolves around a Polish-Russian triangle, although the true nature of the relationship is never revealed. All three people involved are introduced visually in the credits (photographs of a middle-aged woman holding a camera with a telephoto lens) and the opening sequences (Zbigniew Zapasiewicz’s character, Wiktor, mourning over the body of his wife; and Nikita Mikhalkov as Oleg, a Russian government official, making arrangements to travel to the funeral). We later find out that the three became friends back in the 1970s or 1980s (no exact time frame is provided, but the mention of Solidarity extends the period of their original acquaintance into the 1980s), when Oleg was in Poland as a Soviet diplomat. Both Wiktor, a Pole, originally a promising musicologist, and his now deceased wife had been involved with the political opposition. In spite of the official character of his post in Poland, Oleg befriended the couple and was known to be sympathetic to the Poles’ oppositional struggle. In the following sequence, the two men meet, but only after the funeral. Wiktor informs Oleg about the circumstances of his wife’s sudden death. The dynamic of the two men’s encounter reveals a lot about their personalities and foreshadows their future interactions. Wiktor opens the dialog by saying that he was beginning to doubt whether the Russian was going to come at all, revealing himself to be pessimistic, petty, and ungrateful, as the Russian obviously made an effort, as the opening sequence reveals, to show his support by making the trip. The Pole regrets that the two will not have the time for a soulful conversation over a couple of bottles of vodka. He would appreciate a chance to ask some questions. The one that bothers him most is whether Oleg, his longtime Russian friend, had an affair with his wife, Helena. A peculiar logic emerges from the Pole’s following utterances. When the Russian asks if the Pole would like to hear his confession, Wiktor unexpectedly pushes the conversation into another register by saying that the Soviet KGB and the Polish secret police also required that people confess. Since Wiktor refers to secret police interrogations only after he begins to question Oleg about the past, one may surmise that a certain turning of the tables is occurring. The person who may once have been subjected to questioning by the police now positions himself as an interrogator. Reprimanded by the Russian for only wanting to protest and always being unhappy, Wiktor admits that even though he once believed that the world could change for the better, he is not content with the way things have turned out.

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While Wiktor’s initial lament over not being able to talk to his wife anymore is fully understandable, his preoccupation with whether she had had an affair with Oleg reveals a character flaw and, at the same time, adds a new dimension to a narrative that centers on individual loss. Persona Non Grata focuses on the emotional tribulations of a mourner who fails to detach himself from the lost object of affection, but the introduction of the Russian character opens the narrative’s scope to issues that have to do with communal and not just individual identity. The abrupt shift in Wiktor’s conversation with Oleg, from personal matters to politics, speaks of the powerful draw that the long history of Polish-Russian prejudice may have on the representation not only of the two nations’ mutual relations but also of personal relationships that involve Poles and Russians. One could even go further and say that Helena’s suspected love affair with Oleg provides a pretext for introducing the Russian into the story and addressing broader issues that have to do with Polish and Russian identities. In this sense, Zanussi’s film does not diverge from the general pattern established by Polish-Soviet coproductions, where Polish and Russian protagonists represent forces larger than themselves. However, the tone of the exchange between the two men and Oleg’s ambiguous role in Helena’s life suggest that it is not a story of PolishRussian friendship that Zanussi wants to tell. Despite the ostentatious demonstrations of cordiality between Wiktor and Oleg, Persona Non Grata is more about mutual Polish-Russian resentments than friendship. Zanussi reverses the pattern established by Polish-Soviet coproductions of the communist era. At the same time, instead of just rehashing previously suppressed prejudices, the director appears to make an attempt to facilitate a Polish-Russian dialog. The fact that Oleg, the Russian character, is jovial and friendly, while Wiktor, the Pole, is disgruntled and surly, and that both men articulate their opinions quite freely suggests that this Polish-Russian encounter may be freer of the types of constraints imposed on cross-national communications in the previous era. Ultimately, however, Zanussi’s film fails to approximate a genuine dialog between the two cultures and instead participates in the discourse about Russians as Poland’s Others. As Tomasz Kłys has observed, rather than create meaning through the power of images, Zanussi’s films generally communicate through intellectual discourse, realized as “dialogs, in which the protagonists’ views clash.”23 A longer exchange between Oleg and Wiktor that takes place close to the film’s crescendo confirms this view and provides further insight into the Polish-Russian dynamic in Persona Non Grata. After Oleg arrives at the Polish Embassy in Montevideo, Uruguay, in order

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to pay an unofficial visit to Wiktor, who occupies the post of Poland’s ambassador there, the Pole effectively challenges the Russian to a verbal duel. The visit allows both men to reminisce, but Wiktor begins posing questions that are openly confrontational. Interestingly, the questions he chooses to ask do not initially have anything to do with Oleg’s relationship with Helena. First, the Pole inquires whether Oleg was a Soviet spy while in Poland at the beginning of the 1980s, and not just a Soviet official who was sympathetic toward the independent trade union Solidarity. Oleg maintains diplomatic restraint by saying that he will not respond to Wiktor’s questioning. The Pole quotes the Scriptures (“Let your ‘yes’ be yes and your ‘no’ be no”), trying to assume the moral high ground vis-à-vis his interlocutor in order to elicit an answer. When this strategy fails, the Pole’s personal attack continues with insinuations that Oleg’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity must have been disingenuous. For the Pole, religious identity should remain fixed. He does not understand how someone can substitute one ideology for another. For the Russian, the explication of Wiktor’s puzzlement lies in the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. He claims that Catholics try to grasp everything with their minds, whereas for the Orthodox rational comprehension is least important when interpreting the world. The introduction of the question of religious difference into the exchange proves once more that Zanussi uses his protagonists to touch on questions that go beyond the Wiktor–Helena–Oleg love triangle, and have to do with the essence of Russianness and Polishness. On the one hand, the Poles’ Catholicism is the one invariable element that unites Russian discourse on Poland from the times before the rise of communism and after its collapse. On the other hand, Wiktor’s disparaging comments about Oleg’s ideological transformation can be related to a negative stereotype of Russians that has functioned within Polish culture, according to which Russians are prone to an unquestioning acceptance of dominant ideologies. Thus, both Oleg and Wiktor rely on traditional forms of identification. The dialog between the two draws from the reservoir of national myths and established, stereotypical ways of thinking about the other culture. The Pole’s accusatory questioning produces the expected result: Oleg takes offense at Wiktor’s words. He pulls out a picture he had brought as a present for Wiktor, and he tears it in two parts, putting one part in his trouser pocket, and the other in his jacket, without revealing its subject. Oleg sums up the first round of the Polish-Russian sparring: “As far as the past is concerned, there is no agreement between us. What about the present?” The Pole proceeds to accuse the Russians of trying to undermine a Polish bid to deliver helicopters to Uruguay. He accuses

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the Russian wife of one of the Polish Embassy’s consular officers of being a spy for the Russians. Oleg responds that the Russians require no such assistance, since they are a lot more effective at what they do than the Poles. Accused by Wiktor of giving bribes, Oleg asks what prevents the Poles from doing so. The Pole’s answer sounds very categorical: “principles.” Oleg rebuts the accusation by pointing out that the Poles had previously despised the Russians for adhering to principles, and now that they—the Russians—have become just as unprincipled as everybody else, they are being scorned for that. He points out that Wiktor’s adherence to principles prevents him from taking care not only of his own interests but also those of the government he represents. Indeed, Wiktor’s adherence to principles is soon put to the test. When Oleg excuses himself to use the restroom, the Pole reaches into Oleg’s jacket pocket to take out the photograph, proving his own complete moral bankruptcy. Oleg, who appears to have set up a trap for Wiktor, quickly discovers the transgression. This allows him to have the last word in the Polish-Russian exchange: any Pole always suspects any Russian of being a spy, a crook, and an informant; and at the same time, the same Pole will have no problem with reaching into another man’s pocket. Wiktor can only excuse himself by claiming that he had been provoked. The question that the viewer expected to hear at the beginning of the encounter is only articulated now when Wiktor finally asks Oleg about the affair he suspects he had with his wife. The Russian is evasive. The picture that Wiktor retrieves from his pocket shows Helena embracing Oleg, but the missing part that is added to it in a following sequence shows Wiktor himself seated right next to Helena. By tearing the photograph in two and concealing the husband’s presence in the picture, Oleg ridicules Wiktor’s suspicions concerning his relationship with Helena. When he returns the picture’s missing part, just prior to his departure from Urugway, he seems to be suggesting that Wiktor was never really “out of the picture,” and that no transgression on his part occurred. The Polish-Russian dialog that takes place within the context of Zanussi’s film leads to an open clash of two disparate articulations of national identity. It is an exchange that approximates a Dostoevskylike heteroglossia, which, according to a Bakhtinian interpretation of Dostoevsky, signifies the coexistence of many voices, or discursive perspectives, within one text.24 The difference between Zanussi and Dostoevsky lies in the fact that Dostoevsky never loses control of the various discursive strands that he introduces into his fiction, while Zanussi allows Mikhalkov, in the guise of one of the film’s characters, to kidnap the narrative. Asked by Tadeusz Sobolewski about Russian attitudes

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toward Poland, Krzysztof Zanussi answered by quoting Mikhalkov. Allegedly, during a press conference in Moscow, Mikhalkov intimated that to a Russian, Poland is like a suitcase with a broken handle: it’s a pity to throw it out, but you cannot carry it any longer.25 A similar, postcolonial sentiment, articulated from a nostalgically imperialist position, speaks through the character whom Mikhalkov impersonates in Persona Non Grata. When confronted with Oleg’s imperial nonchalance, the frustrated, petty, and pompous Polish intellectual loses out. Clearly, this Polish-Russian exchange stands at the opposite end of the formulaic expressions of Polish-Soviet friendship represented by, for example, To Save a City and Remember Your Name. The unrealized potential of a Polish-Russian exchange implied by the scene of the telephone conversation in Kolosov’s film is thus fully developed by Zanussi in that both interlocutors, the Pole and the Russian, are free to speak their minds. While Mikhalkov/Oleg triumphs in his discursive duels with Wiktor, Zanussi involves his Polish protagonist in a project that undermines the Russians in another arena. After discovering that Oksana, a young Polish consul’s Russian wife, has been making multiple copies of documents, Wiktor openly accuses her of being a spy for the Russians. Oksana becomes emotional and reveals the truth: she is not spying for the Russians, she explains, but gathering incriminating information that she could use against her own husband. She wants to make sure that he does not abandon her and their children at any point in the future. She claims that her husband would understand such precautions because he studied in Russia and knows the Russians well. Distraught by Wiktor’s threats to reveal her misdemeanor to the Polish security forces, Oksana declares that she is willing to do everything for Wiktor, and proceeds to pull down the straps of her dress. Wiktor looks at her with surprise and indignation. In his commentary Krzysztof Zanussi refers to Oksana as “the Russian woman with a pleasant, and yet strongly Asiatic face” whose presence illustrates a very different way of thinking, for “how can you love and gather incriminating information about the person whom you love?”26 Thus typecast as different, Oksana presents a negative stereotype of Russian femininity. Zanussi uses her to help Wiktor validate both his masculinity, which has been put in question by his wife’s alleged affair with Oleg, and his Polish “principles.” The director allows his protagonist to transform the young Russian woman into an object that promises to fulfill his fantasies. Wiktor’s controlling voyeurism becomes manifest when he watches the young couple from behind a shaded window, as they frolic by the swimming pool. His fascination with the young woman is apparent when he lures Oksana to his quarters and encourages her to put on

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his wife’s clothes. “I would like to see you in her clothing,” encourages the older man when Oksana expresses reluctance. By drawing Oksana and her husband into his life, Wiktor creates another Polish-Russian triangle, one over which he can, for the time being, maintain full control thanks to the empowerment that comes with his professional position. The unceremonious use of familiar forms of address in his communications with the consul and Oksana further underscores his authoritative stance. Thus, throughout Zanussi’s film Russian-Polish relations revolve around issues of power. Wiktor’s interactions with Oleg enable the Pole to air out some of the resentments that result from Poland’s historical subordination to Russia; however, what Zanussi himself identifies as Mikhalkov’s “type of bear’s hug: a mixture of charm and something that terrifies,” allows the film’s Russian protagonist to reassert his own superiority vis-à-vis the Pole.27 The reversal of Russian-Polish power relations that occurs in Wiktor’s relationship with Oksana does not do much to strengthen the Pole’s discursive position. “This is your Eastern way of thinking,” interjects Wiktor after one of Oksana’s comments, emphasizing once more that he views her as markedly different and culturally distant. Zanussi allows his protagonist to fall back on a negative, stereotyped view of Russianness that is additionally posited in terms of gender difference. As the other woman Oksana is desired, yet threatening, and therefore she needs to be controlled. Ultimately, both she and her husband evade Wiktor’s control by moving out of the embassy. Thus, in spite of the director’s apparent openness toward dialog, Polish-Russian reconciliation is not in sight in Persona Non Grata. The films that have been the object of my analysis were coproduced for disparate reasons. The Polish-Soviet films came into existence because their scripts either called for participation of Russian and Polish actors or required extensive shooting on location in both countries. In the case of Persona Non Grata, the financial backing of Sergei Mikhalkov’s production company enabled Krzysztof Zanussi to proceed with the filming. Yet, in both cases, coproduction provided a way of bringing the two cultures into contact in ways that go beyond the conditions of economic cooperation. Unlike Western coproductions, where the factor of the film’s commercial potential or its possible appeal to film festival audiences may have provided the dominant impulse, Polish-Soviet and Polish-Russian coproductions approximate the conditions of a cultural dialog whereby both sides participate in the films’ authorship. Consequently, two disparate articulations of national identity come into contact. In the case of Remember Your Name, the differences are reconciled by the common denominator of a shared ideology that stems,

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in large part, from the experience of wartime struggle against the Nazis and the suffering that was inflicted on the civilian populations of both countries. In Zanussi’s Persona Non Grata, the outcome is very different. Historical experiences of both national groups and the cultural values that their members embrace separate them instead of bringing them closer. While each group is given a voice, through the characters of Wiktor and Oleg, both the Poles and the Russians are caught up in conceptualizing the other in terms of stereotypes, which effectively diminishes the film’s potential for communication on a transnational level.

Notes 1. These castings have included actors who went on to enjoy great popularity with Polish audiences and critics, such as Aleksandr Domogarov, who appeared in Jerzy Hoffman’s adaptation of With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1999), and Svetlana Khodchenkova, who won the best actress award at the Gdynia Film Festival in 2008 for her role in Waldemar Krzystek’s Little Moscow (Mała Moskwa, 2008). Other noteworthy performances of Russian actors include Sergei Garmash in Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń (2007) and Andrei Bilanov in Jan Jakub Kolski’s Afonia and the Bees (Afonia i pszczoły, 2009). 2. Dina Iordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 27. 3. Ibid., 40. 4. The database of Polish cinema, filmpolski.pl, lists only nine titles of films made as Polish-Soviet coproductions during the period between 1945 and 1989. 5. Anne Jäckel, European Film Industries (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 58. 6. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 37. 7. In the text to which I refer, Higson himself favors a focus on “the actual cinematic experience of popular audiences.” Ibid., 37. I do not take this aspect of national cinema into consideration. 8. Ibid. Higson cites Susan Barrowclogh. 9. Jäckel, European Film Industries, 58–66. Jäckel discusses the advantages of international coproductions. She cites Hoskins, who provides a long list of benefits that result from joint film projects. 10. Elżbieta Ostrowska and Adam Wyżynski, “Obrazy Rosjan w kinie polskim,” in Katalog wzajemnych uprzedzen Polaków i Rosjan, ed. Andrzej de Lazari (Warsaw: Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarodowych, 2006), 311.

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152 Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films 11. Ibid., 313. 12. A similar process of blocking off the subject of the communist takeover of power may be observed in other countries’ cinemas, most notably in East German cinema. Ibid., 314. 13. Ibid., 318. 14. I have previously analyzed Kolosov’s Remember Your Name in “Kochanki i matki: Melodramatyczny wymiar przyjaźni polsko-radzieckiej” (Mothers and Lovers: Melodramatic Dimension of Polish-Soviet Friendship), Historyka 41 (2011): 53–63. 15. Sergei Kolosov, “Pomni imia svoe,” Sovetskii film, no. 3 (1975): 38. 16. Ibid., 39. 17. Ibid. 18. Krzysztof Zanussi has participated in civic initiatives meant to bring Poland and Russia closer together, such as the Forum Dialogu Obywatelskiego (Civic Dialog Forum), of which he has been the cochair. 19. Piotr Bujnowicz, Jak powstawał film (How the film was made), a series of interviews and commentaries appended as bonus material to the Vision Film DVD edition of Persona Non Grata. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Tomasz Kłys, “Krzysztofa Zanussiego kino intelektualne,” in Kino polskie w trzynastu sekwencjach, ed. Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska (Kraków: Rabid, 2005), 139. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Heteroglot Novel,” in The Bakhtin Reader, ed. Pam Morris (London: E. Arnold, 1994), 112–20. 25. Tadeusz Sobolewski, “Nieznośny idealista w pióropuszu cnoty,” Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 206 (May 9, 2005): 14. 26. Refleksje reżysera (Director’s musings), an interview with Krzysztof Zanussi appended as bonus material to the Vision Film DVD edition of Persona Non Grata. 27. Ibid.

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Chapter Eight

Train to Hollywood Polish Actresses in Foreign Films Ewa Mazierska Much has been written about Polish directors crossing borders, and several essays in this volume further attest to this phenomenon. A much less explored phenomenon is the presence of Polish actors and actresses in international cinema, the careers of the latter being the topic of this study. Yet, it is a significant aspect of Polish cinema; from Pola Negri to Alicja Bachleda-Curuś, the matter of Polish actresses in large numbers boarding trains to Budapest, Prague, Munich, and of course, Hollywood. Some of them reached their destination and stayed there for good; others returned after making one film, either directly to Łódź or Warsaw, or taking a detour to other cinematic capitals. Each case of success or its lack is unique, as film performance and stardom are highly composite phenomena and there are many factors underlying why somebody is employed in a foreign film and how his or her role is received. However, there are also certain recurrent factors facilitating or hampering actors’ foreign careers, such as, for example, their age, whether they have a family and especially children in their own country, and, in the case of those coming from the socialist bloc, the ease of obtaining a passport and visa or even being able to afford the trip. In this chapter I want to discuss the cases of four Polish actresses who literally and metaphorically crossed the border: Lucyna Winnicka, Krystyna Janda, Katarzyna Figura, and Alicja Bachleda-Curuś. I settled on these four actresses for two principal reasons. First, they represent different generations—the oldest being born in the 1920s, the youngest in the 1980s—and their attempts to win foreign markets took place in different political and cultural circumstances. Establishing how these circumstances facilitated or limited their successes is one of the aims of this essay. Second, despite the transnational character of their careers, in their native country they are regarded as Polish actresses rather than German or American actresses of Polish origin, as is the case of Pola Negri or

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Joanna Pacuła. This is because Polish films represent a significant chapter in their artistic biographies, and for Polish viewers they represent something distinctly Polish. In my investigation I intend to establish whether there is a continuation or a rupture between their roles in Polish and foreign films. I decided to present the careers of actresses alone rather than mix actresses with actors because, as with many authors, I believe that the case of female performers and female stardom is different from that of male actors.1 The difference concerning performance is summarized in Laura Mulvey’s famous statement that in a film woman functions as image, man as the bearer of the look.2 Actresses are expected to be beautiful, and the careers of female stars tend to be shorter than those of their male counterparts. This has a special significance for transnational actresses, because by moving to a different country and ceasing to perform for their domestic audience, they risk losing the latter for good. Christine Gerathy adds that “the category of celebrity is one which works well for female stars,” while male stars are more often constructed as “professionals.”3 Thus we can deduce that the situation of an actress embarking on a career in a foreign country is more difficult for her than for her male counterparts, because her biography is not known to the new audience. However, the analyses of acting and stardom offered by Mulvey, Gerathy, Richard Dyer, and others do not take into account the specificity of acting and stardom in the socialist Eastern Europe. Two features are worth considering in this context. First, the “star system” was weaker in this part of Europe, including in Poland, than in the West.4 Iwona Kurz quotes one of the most popular Polish actresses of the 1960s, Elżbieta Czyżewska, lamenting that in Poland actors and actresses had little chance to develop their successful characters, so that the audience would have a chance to recognize them in subsequent films and build a lasting bond with their favorite actor or actress. Equally, Czyżewska criticized the Polish film industry for not promoting the stars; in her words, there was no “fun” attached to the experience of stardom in Poland.5 Czyżewska’s complaints reflect the fact that under communism auteur cinema had a dominant position within the film industry, at the expense of popular/genre cinema—the natural “habitat” of stars. To put it crudely, in Polish cinema the director was the ultimate star, and he was more concerned with his status as an artist than with the popularity of his films among ordinary viewers. He had no real incentive to be faithful to the actors he cast. Moreover, due to the puritanical nature of socialist culture, the private lives of popular actors and actresses remained, metaphorically speaking, off-screen. Little was written about the spouses and

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children of popular actresses, especially if there was something unusual or scandalous in their lives. There was also an unwritten rule to play down the affluence of stars, as such affluence was at odds with the official ideology of egalitarianism and the leading role of the working class. As Kurz maintains, “Being conspicuous was not looked at favourably in the official life of People’s Poland.”6 In accordance with this approach, an actor/actress was construed as a “professional,” who works as hard as any other person in the country. If he or she became a star, it was due to the persona created on screen. Of course, there were exceptions to this rule: actors and actresses who became legends, such as Zbigniew Cybulski or Kalina Jędrusik. Moreover, the situation was not static. As time passed and state socialism in Poland approached its end, Polish film stars became more like Western stars. After the collapse of communism, popular Polish cinema gained in importance, not least because it has been the main source of income for the Polish film industry at large and stars matter more than ever before. This interest is also reflected in recent academic work on Polish stars, as demonstrated by the work of Iwona Kurz, Elżbieta Ostrowska, Michael Goddard, and myself, making up for the decades of neglect of Polish stardom in academic studies.7 However, even in these new studies the emphasis is put on the roles the actors and actresses played in Polish films and the meanings the stars transmitted to Polish audiences, chiefly because many of the foreign films in which they appeared are less well known.

The 1970s: Lucyna Winnicka Lucyna Winnicka (1928–2013), together with Beata Tyszkiewicz and the previously quoted Elżbieta Czyżewska, was one of the best-known Polish actresses of the 1960s. She owed her high position in the Polish film industry to the roles she played in the films of her director husband, Jerzy Kawalerowicz: Under the Phrygian Star (Pod gwiazdą frygijską, 1954), The Real End of the Great War (Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny, 1957), Night Train (Pociąg, 1959), The Game (Gra, 1969), and most importantly, Mother Joan of Angels (Matka Joanna od Aniołów, 1961). These films spanned three periods in Polish cinema: socialist realism, the Polish school, and the Polish New Wave (the short period in the second half of the 1960s characterized by formal experimentation). Although naturally blonde, Winnicka’s type of beauty can be compared to that of Jeanne Moreau (who was also born in 1928); she had deep, sad eyes and a mouth that appeared to be turned down and that smiled with great

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effort. Also, not unlike Moreau, even if in her early roles Winnicka came across as mature, she knew what other characters were unaware of. Her beauty made her a natural tragic heroine. In Under the Phrygian Star, Winnicka’s Madzia cannot fulfill her romantic desires because, being a devoted communist in capitalist, prewar Poland, she has to sacrifice private happiness for a public cause. In Mother Joan of Angels, Winnicka’s heroine is doomed because she is a nun and thus expected to live a life of chastity. Yet, not only do external circumstances prevent Mother Joan from achieving happiness; happiness also eludes her because she finds tragic life attractive. As she puts it, she prefers to be unhappy and unique rather than content and ordinary. For this reason Mother Joan can be compared to one of Moreau’s greatest roles, in Mademoiselle (1966) by Tony Richardson. Both women crave love, but are unable to accept it; both destroy men who love them; each is a mixture of sanctity and depravity. However, the freedom Mademoiselle enjoys is much greater than that of Mother Joan. This reflects the fact that the first is a teacher and the latter a nun and that the films are set in different times. Their different positions can also be regarded as metaphors for different conditions of women under capitalism and socialism, respectively. After a stream of successful roles, at the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Winnicka’s career started to fade. In interviews given toward the end of this period, she complained that Polish directors did not offer her any interesting roles and, especially, that she had no chance to play in a contemporary repertoire, to which she felt most attuned.8 The decline of her stardom was partly the result of a change in Polish cinema toward greater naturalism, which culminated in the second half of the Seventies in the Cinema of Moral Concern. With this new cinematic direction, a new type of actor and actress entered the Polish screen. They tended to look more ordinary, introduced a more naturalistic style of acting, and were, of course, younger, not least because the cinema of the decade focused on the plight of the younger generation. A seminal example of the new type of acting was offered by Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak in To Kill This Love (Trzeba zabić tę miłość, 1972) by Janusz Morgenstern, an actress who was ordinary but fascinating. In the second half of the 1970s, Krystyna Janda, who was more than twenty years younger than Winnicka, became the most successful actress. Compared with Janda and others of her generation, Winnicka, with her enigmatic beauty and restrained style of acting, appeared to belong to a different epoch. Winnicka’s lack of success in Polish cinema after the 1960s also resulted from the breakup of her marriage to Kawalerowicz. The last film they made jointly was The Game (Gra, 1969), which represents the

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disintegration of a marriage of a middle-aged couple and can be read as a reflection of the marital problems experienced by the director and actress in real life. Winnicka also fell victim to the custom of Polish directors not to employ their colleagues’ wives, perhaps owing to a fear that they will be unable to emulate the skill with which the husbands used their talents. In the case of Winnicka this fear was justified, as demonstrated by her roles in films by other Polish directors—for example, in Knights of the Teutonic Order (Krzyżacy, 1960) by Aleksander Ford, where her role as the Polish queen is merely decorative.9 By Winnicka’s own admission, playing in foreign films was partial compensation for her lack of success in Poland.10 Had she been busier in her native country, she would have refused some of the offers from abroad. Foreign directors’ interest in this actress resulted from the international successes of the films she made with Kawalerowicz, especially Mother Joan of Angels, which received the Jury Special Prize in Cannes in 1961 and brought Winnicka a Crystal Star, an award for best foreign actress given by the French Film Academy. Mother Joan of Angels was also highly acclaimed in other socialist countries, such as Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, where it was regarded as a sign of a new cinema in Eastern Europe. It is worth mentioning that in this film the national characteristics are played down; its story and characters come across as universal. This, to a large extent, explains the wide appeal of the film, including its star. From the late 1960s Winnicka started to appear regularly in foreign films. She played Princess Sofija in Assassination in Sarajevo (Sarajevski atentat, 1968) by Fadil Hadzic, the estranged wife of the main protagonist in 322 (1969) by Dušan Hanák, and two films by István Szabó: Love (Szerelmesfilm, 1970) and 25 Fireman’s Street (Tüzoltó utca 25, 1973). From the interviews Winnicka gave in relation to these films, one can deduce that she was treated in the respective countries as a great star, which flattered her.11 However, her international career also brought shortcomings. Playing in films made by directors of different nationalities and belonging to different national cinemas, such as East German, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak, brought with it a sense of being scattered or unfocused, of moving in all directions, rather than definitely forward. Other problems were the loss of her voice in films, in that her parts were often dubbed, and the inability to communicate effectively with other members of the cast and crew. When discussing her roles in Szabó’s films, for example, the actress said that nobody understood her when she spoke in Polish, and that “even the camera was Hungarian.”12 Consequently, her foreign roles felt less fulfilling than those created for

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her in Polish films. Of course, these complaints testify to Winnicka’s self-perception as a Polish actress through and through, not someone embarking on an international career. Consequently, her approach to her foreign career was passive: she waited for suitable propositions, rather than actively seeking them, such as by attending auditions. In interviews Winnicka does not even mention the possibility of working in Western European films or in Hollywood. We can guess that she did not get proposals of this kind and that if she had, most likely she would have rejected them, in order not to jeopardize her Polish career. Although the model of Winnicka’s career in foreign films can be described as that of a “guest star,” she visited Budapest more regularly for work than any other foreign city. Equally, the most interesting roles she played outside Poland were in the films by István Szabó. Szabó’s interest in Winnicka can be explained by his custom of engaging foreign stars in his films, which was part of his wider strategy to become an international or even pan-European director. Winnicka also perfectly suited the somewhat antirealistic style of his early films and their mood of foreboding and tragedy. These aspects of her presence are foregrounded in 25 Fireman’s Street, in which she plays a middle-aged woman named Maria, a resident of the tenement block on the titular street, which is to be demolished. For the director the approaching destruction of the house is an opportunity to tell the tragic stories of its residents. They range in time from 1920 through World War  II up to the demolition of the building (presumably roughly contemporaneous with the film’s release in 1973) and are presented in a surrealist fashion, bringing to mind the cinema of Fellini and Resnais as well as fellow Eastern Europeans Wojciech Has and Juraj Jakubisko. Maria in this film is an almost spectral presence: she traverses historical epochs and cinematic narratives, as if she was a living palimpsest, embodying important moments from the history of Eastern Europe and its cinema. For example, in this character Polish viewers can identify memories of The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948) by Wanda Jakubowska, Passenger (Pasażerka, 1963) by Andrzej Munk, Lotna (1959) by Andrzej Wajda, and most importantly, Mother Joan of Angels. Winnicka’s foreignness in this role is also advantageous because she oscillates between the positions of an insider and an outsider. Although she is part of the community living in the house on Fireman’s Street, it is suggested that she is Jewish, which we derive from the fact that she has to leave the house suddenly, on the order of the Arrow Cross (the national socialist party, which led the Hungarian government in the last stage of World War II), and later we see her subjected to the humiliation of being stripped,

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Figure 8.1. Screenshot from 25 Fireman’s Street (dir. Szabo, 1973): Lucyna Winnicka

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medically examined, and swimming in a steaming bath—a clear allusion to the death-camp routine. Yet, Maria miraculously survives the war, as well as the death of her husband, although the painful experiences mark her attitude toward life. Her face conveys the sadness and tiredness of having to relive the same events again and again. She does not want to remarry or engage in any cause, knowing that commitment and passion will only bring her disappointment. This attitude renders her a “Mother Joan” transported to a different reality and fifteen or so years older. This association is also evinced through visual means, such as surrounding the already suffering woman by a group of nuns or nurses, who in their white attire and starched cornets look strikingly similar to the nuns from Kawalerowicz’s film. Significantly, 25 Fireman’s Street is the only film in Winnicka’s career that builds on her most famous role. Unfortunately for her career, 25 Fireman’s Street was not a great success with either domestic or international audiences. In Hungary it sold only 121,000 admissions;13 and despite winning the festival in Locarno, it remained practically unknown in the wider European context. The same was true of Winnicka’s other ventures into international cinema. Consequently, although roles in foreign films prolonged her acting career, they did not save it. This does not mean that she ceased being a star. The actress used her popularity as a platform to launch a new career in journalism. Already in the 1960s she had begun publishing interviews with well-known cultural figures in newspapers and magazines. Later she wrote about distant lands, such as India, which she visited many times, and phenomena not well known in the socialist world, such as Buddhism, Indian philosophy, hypnosis, and Eastern medicine. In due course, she received a full-time post with the popular cultural weekly Przekrój and added to her income by writing books. Her first book sold over 100,000 copies. Winnicka thereby showed the way to a stream of younger Polish actresses, such as Grażyna Trela, Krystyna Janda, and Joanna Szczepkowska, who in the years to come also learned to capitalize on their popularity as actresses and become true celebrities.

The 1980s: Krystyna Janda If there were to be a contest for the greatest female star of Polish postwar cinema, Krystyna Janda (b. 1952) would most likely be the winner. She rose to fame early due to her initial role in Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977), in which she played Agnieszka, an investigative journalist who attempts to discover what happened to

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the Stakhanovite worker Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), who was promoted as a model worker in the 1950s, even posing for marble statues, and then disappeared from public view. Janda played Agnieszka again in the 1981 sequel Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza). In this film, she is the imprisoned wife of the son of Mateusz Birkut, Maciek Tomczyk, whom she finds during her search for Birkut. The extraordinary success of Man of Marble and Man of Iron and of Janda in the films, as Elżbieta Ostrowska and myself observe, put this actress in a position heretofore unknown to Polish actors, even its male stars.14 The audience transferred to Janda the features with which Agnieszka was furnished. She “became identified with the character of this rebellious, nonconformist and liberated young woman.”15 As the first Agnieszka, Janda became a role model for the generation of Polish women that grew up after the war and who in the 1970s, during the so-called decade of the propaganda of success, got a taste for the West. How did she do it? The answer is complex, not least because a role in a film is a function of many factors, such as its description in the script, the use of cinematography, and of course, the input of the performer. Those who wrote about Janda emphasize the third element, claiming that Janda created Agnieszka, furnishing her with features of her own personality: her passion and dynamism. Aleksander Jackiewicz, for example, observes that she (Janda as Agnieszka) “walks with big steps and makes wide gestures.”16 However, equally important is her position within the diegesis and the way she is presented by the camera. She is almost continuously in the film, virtually filling the screen; her wide gestures, as observed by Jackiewicz, leave barely enough space for movement by other characters. She is often filmed by a camera situated near the ground, which renders her as a towering figure, dominating other characters, including men in high positions, such as the director of the Nowa Huta steelworks. Janda’s performance in Man of Marble invites comparison with Jane Fonda. Especially worth recollecting in this context is the analysis of Fonda’s acting offered by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin in Letter to Jane (1972). In this documentary the directors, by analyzing a famous photograph of Fonda in Vietnam, attribute to the actress a certain style of acting (in both the narrow and the wider sense of acting, understood as behaving) that conveys superiority—in this case over Vietnamese people. Godard and Gorin’s film was planned as an indictment of Western racism and imperialism, but what is important from my perspective is its tacit recognition of Fonda’s uniqueness. She is shown as the only woman in Hollywood who can look at others from above; such a gaze is normally reserved for men. Equally, her acting is political;

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as suggested by juxtaposing her photo with that of President Nixon. The same can be said about Janda; in Man of Marble she conveyed supremacy and political engagement. While in Man of Marble Janda comes across as a feminist and a patriot, as Agnieszka in Man of Iron she offers a new incarnation of a Polish mother, a figure dominating Polish discourses on femininity from the time Poland lost its statehood at the end of the eighteenth century. As Ostrowska maintains, here “her earlier determination to achieve her own aims has been replaced with silent support for the collective cause in which her husband and his colleagues actively engage. She appears as the incarnation of this simplicity and purity when she bids farewell to her husband at the station: her black mourning clothes return her to the Polish verities for woman.”17 The transformation of Agnieszka could be perceived as either regression or progression thanks to achieving maturity. The second interpretation, however, dominated in Poland at the time. Thanks to these two roles, Janda appealed to different types of audiences, insofar as attitudes toward women’s social roles are concerned: feminist/progressive and conservative. She demonstrated that two seemingly incompatible versions of femininity can be reconciled literally and metaphorically in one body. Most likely this happened because in both incarnations she played somebody who lived for issues greater than private happiness and was expected to be such a person off-screen as well. From the 1980s, in the eyes of a large portion of Polish viewers, she became more than an actress, even more than a star: an epitome of what was best in Polish postwar culture. Although some critics and viewers were disappointed by Janda’s subsequent roles, on the whole she fulfilled her difficult role of a “national treasure” very well, which is a testament to her exceptional talent, personal integrity, and immense energy. Now, over sixty, in a time when even the greatest female stars tend to spend their lives in semiretirement, Janda is busier and more respected than ever, in large part to her ownership of an immensely popular theater in Warsaw, meaningfully named “Polonia.” She is also perceived as “her own woman,” rather than merely the creation of Andrzej Wajda, which was the case at the beginning of her career. Hence, if she is less of a model for women than she was thirty years ago, this is not because the values she embodies became obsolete, but because it appears that one life cannot contain all the successes she achieved. The performance of Janda in Man of Marble (in common with her costar, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), did not go unnoticed abroad. The stars of Wajda’s films were invited by foreign filmmakers, both from the East

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and from the West, to play in their films and television series. Yet, while in the case of Radziwiłowicz this led to a distinctive career in French and Francophone cinema, through major roles in the films of Jacques Rivette and Godard, Janda’s international career turned out to be more geographically dispersed and less satisfactory. She played in Hungarian, French, and German films, but only in Germany, by her own admission, did she become recognizable by the public, and that was thanks not to cinema but to television. The fact that she could act in Western and Eastern films, as well as in Polish, without relocating to a foreign country or encountering political problems can be attributed to the timing of her career; these were different times than those in which Winnicka worked. Meaningfully, Janda’s first non-Polish role was in a film by István Szabó, A Green Bird (Der grüne Vogel, 1980), alongside many nonHungarian actors. Shortly afterward she was also cast in his Oscarwinning Mephisto (1981), as Barbara Bruckner, wife of the main character, German theater actor Hendrik Hofgen, who “sells his soul” to the Nazis. As Barbara, Janda is strikingly attractive, which is accentuated by her careful makeup, hairstyle, and clothes, such as horse-riding gear, that exposed her long legs and narrow waist. In this sense Barbara provides a contrast to her roles in Wajda’s films, in which she is rendered as a woman who has no time to look after herself. However, Szabó does not reduce the actress to being merely food for the eyes, but also gives her the power of the gaze. Barbara comes across as a critical observer; she observes her hyperactive and ambitious husband, the events in the Hamburg theater, as well as the unfolding of German history during the time of the Nazis’ rise to power. She senses approaching tragedy and repeatedly admonishes her husband for being indifferent to the political situation. In this sense, she revisits her role in Man of Marble, where she acted as a conscientious citizen. Yet, Barbara is more static and reserved than Agnieszka, and with the passage of time she withdraws from German reality and eventually emigrates, unlike Agnieszka, who is determined to change her country from within. The film hints that Barbara may be a lesbian, as her friendship with another young woman matters to her at least as much as her marriage to Hendrik. Mephisto proved extremely successful in the international arena, and Janda’s role was well received. However, in common with other excellent actors in this movie, such as Ralf Hoppe and György Cserhalmi, her part is overshadowed by the performance of Klaus Maria Brandauer, who, true to the profession of his character, manages to steal the show. Another of Janda’s foreign films worth remembering is Laputa (1987) by Helma Sanders-Brahms, in which she plays a Polish photographer

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named Małgorzata, who meets her married lover, Paul (Sami Frey), in West Berlin. They spend some time together before she has to return to Warsaw and Paul must return to his wife and daughter in Paris. Paul wants his lover to relocate to Paris, but Małgorzata refuses. West Berlin, on the border between East and West, is symbolic of a boundary she does not wish to cross, knowing that if she finds herself drawn further into the West, she will lose all ties with her country. As a free spirit and a patriot, Małgorzata reminds one of Agnieszka and numerous similar roles of Janda from the 1980s, such as Ewa in Inner State (Stan wewnętrzny, 1989), directed by Krzysztof Tchórzewski. Laputa is also a classic melodrama about people for whom external circumstances forbid permanent happiness or, perhaps, who do not love each other enough to sacrifice everything in their life for love. Despite being directed by a wellknown director, whose earlier Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter, 1980) is regarded as an important film about World War II, Laputa did not reach a wider audience and remains virtually unknown. On the whole, Mephisto and Laputa mark the choices Janda faced as an actress in foreign films: play supporting roles in prestigious productions or main parts in low-budget/obscure films. She never did play a main role in an excellent film or blockbuster, as happened in Poland. Furthermore, although Janda was cast in foreign films largely because of her memorable performance in Wajda’s films, what constituted the uniqueness of her acting was only in small part reflected in these films. When watching them, I see a “pale Agnieszka”: someone who is weaker than her Polish predecessor and cannot properly channel her immense energy. Not surprisingly, early on Janda became aware that playing in foreign films would always be for her a side job to pursue only if her busy “Polish calendar” permitted. For the Polish superstar it was not worth sacrificing her unique place in Polish culture for the dubious advantages of playing in foreign films. This is still the case. According to the actress, her role in Sweet Rush (Tatarak, 2009), in which she paired with Wajda after almost thirty years of working apart, again attracted the attention of foreign filmmakers. She would be happy to resume her international career, but is too busy with her theater to find time for it. And yet, despite her condescending approach to this aspect of her work, I believe that her international career played an important role in Janda’s overall development as an actress and filmmaker. It furnished her acting style with subtlety and helped her develop as a heroine of melodrama. The significance of this aspect of her performance is reflected, for example, in the choice of story for her debut as a film director, the novel

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The Pip (Pestka) by Anka Kowalska. The film, based on this book and also entitled The Pip (1995), can be seen as Laputa ten years on, as it, too, is a story of love between a free, single woman and a married man, who meet in her apartment, which serves as their “Laputa”: an impossible place, in which they can escape from everyday social pressures. Yet, The Pip, like Laputa, occupies only a marginal place in Janda’s career, which suggests that the audience prefers to see Janda as a public rather than a private person—not just as a film star, but a heroine.

The 1990s: Katarzyna Figura While Janda’s special position in Polish cinema and culture at large is attributable to her acting talent and political attitudes, the stardom of Katarzyna Figura (b. 1962) is mostly explained by her physical appearance. As Michael Goddard notes, “Figura is an excessive sign of sensuality, a little too voluptuous and too sexy to correspond to prevailing feminine ideals but instead evokes female movie stars of the 1950s such as Marilyn Monroe, with whom she has often been compared.”18 Maciej Maniewski summarizes Figura’s specificity in even simpler terms: “First there was a body.”19 Figura became a star in the late 1980s, during the transformation of Poland from a communist to a postcommunist state. The fact that such a highly erotic actress became, as Goddard put it, “the ‘figure’ of postcommunist desire” can be attributed to the eroticization of Polish cinema, following the introduction of martial law and accelerated by the collapse of communism.20 As Goddard notes, the eroticization of Polish cinema “is clearly in part a reaction against both communist and Catholic puritanism and censorship as well the image of the ‘Polish Mother’ revered for her devotion and self-sacrifice.”21 It can also be seen as a sign of late-communist and postcommunist misogyny, conveyed by reducing female characters to a handful of stereotypes, such as the dumb blonde, for which Figura appeared to be especially well suited.22 Indeed, Figura’s first successes were in films in which she played exactly this kind of woman. In Piotr Szulkin’s Bible-inspired science-fiction Ga-ga: Glory to Heroes (Ga, ga: Chwała bohaterom, 1985), she was cast as a consolation prize for a Christlike “hero” chosen to be impaled as a punishment for human sins. In Train to Hollywood, or Desire for Hollywood (Pociąg do Hollywood, 1987), by Radosław Piwowarski, she played Mariola Wafelek, nicknamed Merlin, who earns her living serving abusive drunkards in a railway bar, but who, after watching Some Like It Hot (1959) by Billy Wilder, starts to dream about becoming a movie star.

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The gap between Merlin’s desire to live in Hollywood and her daily life can be taken literally or interpreted as a metaphor of the socialist condition, marked by everyday misery and a conviction that happiness is to be found in the West. Mariola/Merlin projects her dreams onto Marilyn Monroe because she does not know that her favorite actress is not only a symbol of success but also an epitome of Western unhappiness behind the happy facade. In this way she represents Polish society under communism, which yearned for Western capitalism in spite of not knowing its full story. In the same year that Figura starred in Train to Hollywood, she also appeared in a film by the renowned Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, Season of Monsters (Szörnyek évadja, 1987). However, this role did not lead to more parts in Eastern European films. To Figura, the only international career worth pursuing was in the West. When communism collapsed, true to Merlin’s dream, she left Poland and spent the first half of the 1990s chasing parts in American and Western European films, signing with acting agencies and attending numerous auditions. To facilitate her progress, she changed her name from Katarzyna to the diminutive Kasia. She did not achieve success, however, and the sense of her failure was exacerbated by the gap between her high expectations, which she naively—or cunningly, as some critics claimed23—conveyed to the Polish audience, and a less satisfying state of things. Her reality consisted of either playing small parts in better films or secondary parts in films regarded as very bad: low-budget, unashamedly commercial productions for immediate consumption, either for TV or for straight-to-video release, usually laced with sex and criminal intrigue. These parts include an episode in the soft-porn series Red Shoe Diaries (1992) and the main role, as a lover of a man found dismembered in a washing machine, in The Washing Machine (Vortice mortale, 1993), an Italian thriller directed by Ruggero Deodato. No doubt she was chosen to play in these movies because of her sex appeal, which was on display by her attire that accentuated her impressive bosom. In 1994, Figura also posed for Playboy, thus confirming her status as the leading Polish sex goddess. Of all her roles in foreign films, Figura is best remembered in her native Poland for two films by Robert Altman, The Player (1992) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994). The importance of the first film lies not so much in her actual presence, but on speculation, widely reported in the Polish media, that the director was keen to cast “our Kasia” in the main female role of June Gudmundsdottir. Most likely, Figura was just one of many non-American actresses who auditioned for this part, which in the end was offered to an actress of much higher international profile, Greta

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Scacchi. According to Figura herself, the reason she lost out to Scacchi was the pressure exerted on the director by the film’s producer; Altman himself was keen to employ her (a common explanation used by disappointed actors).24 Figura’s role in The Player is mute, and as Rafał Syska, the author of a Polish monograph on Altman, reports, the total time we see Figura on screen is less than one minute. However, it is significant that the film documents Figura’s position as one of the numerous foreign actresses trying to make a career in Hollywood. This short appearance, as Syska reports, in 1992 affected the emotions of Figura’s admirers, not least because many believed that The Player marks the beginning of her Hollywood career. After this film Figura was meant to play in Short Cuts, but again the “nasty producers” decided that her episode would make the film too long, and it was deleted from the working script before shooting even started.25 The only “real” role Figura received from Altman was the part of a personal assistant to a famous star in Prêt-à-Porter. Although small, her role is symbolic of Figura’s international position at the time, as she plays somebody waiting for her breakthrough. It is also derivative of her Polish roles, especially Train to Hollywood, as shown in an episode in which she repeats her most memorable scene from Piwowarski’s film: jumping into a fountain looking for a key. Of course, such a scene is also a pastiche of famous episodes with stars of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Marilyn Monroe or Anita Ekberg, in which clinging wet garments were used to reveal better their voluptuous bodies. Judging by this part, it is unlikely that Altman and Hollywood at large saw in Figura much more than a body, and even her body functioned merely as a reminder of earlier, famous “cinematic bodies.” This can also be demonstrated by comparing Figura with the greatest Hollywood stars of the 1990s, such as Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie, who are all taller and slimmer than she, as well as younger and darker-haired. Figura’s presence in Hollywood thus exposed the fact that the Polish model of female beauty lagged behind America’s by many decades. Not surprisingly, the Hollywood chapter of Figura’s career was soon closed, though it lived on owing to malicious jokes that circulated in colorful tabloids and by word of mouth in Poland in the 1990s. Her Hollywood failure is also referred to in the film Trap (Pułapka, 1997) by Adek Drabiński, himself a rather unsuccessful director, both in Poland and in Hollywood. Although the Polish press exposed Figura’s failure in the West, as Maniewski argues, it helped her remain present in the Polish consciousness. This was all the more important as the 1990s mark the explosion of “celebrity culture” in Poland. The importance of Figura’s Hollywood phase also consisted in her bringing her second husband from the United States to Poland, thus

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demonstrating that the train from Hollywood might be as attractive for some people as the train to Hollywood was for others. Following her return to Poland in the mid-1990s, Figura worked hard to regain her old position as the most desired Polish actress. Not only did she achieve success, but the passage of time helped enrich her cinematic image. More often than previously, her characters in this period are well aware that sexual allure can be not only an asset but also a burden. An example is White Soup (Żurek, 2003), directed by Ryszard Brylski, in which she plays a widow looking for the father of a child of her slowwitted daughter. From time to time Figura also has landed small parts in international productions, though they are literally and metaphorically closer to home, such as The Pianist (2002) by Roman Polanski and the series Londyńczycy (The Londoners, 2008). Yet today Figura perceives her Hollywood career as definitely closed, justly assuming that she is too old to compete with the new crop of actresses boarding their train to Hollywood; in Poland, however, despite approaching fifty, she is still sought after. This position was evidenced by her posing for the October 2010 issue of the Polish edition of Playboy, sixteen years after her debut in the magazine. The issue with a naked Figura was even published in larger than normal circulation, as if to confirm the opinion that the actress remains the ultimate “figure of postcommunist desire.”

The 2000s: Alicja Bachleda-Curuś While the three actresses discussed so far began their careers under communism, Alicja Bachleda-Curuś (b. 1983) belongs firmly to the postcommunist period. She is one of the most successful Polish actresses of her generation and especially of those making a career outside Poland, along with Agata Buzek and Karolina Gruszka. Her artistic trajectory and her star persona also read like a palimpsest of the strategies utilized by actresses of earlier decades who attempted to gain recognition abroad. Bachleda-Curuś appears to be better equipped for cosmopolitan life than her predecessors. Coming from a family of artists and diplomats, she was born in Mexico and traveled widely from a young age; because she possessed musical talent, she started her public life at the age of six, winning numerous contests in festivals of children’s songs during her childhood. When she was sixteen, she began her acting career, getting the role of Zosia in Pan Tadeusz (1999), directed by Andrzej Wajda and based on the epic poem by the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz is regarded as a “Polish bible”: it is the single most important

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work conveying Polish identity, and its principal characters, including Zosia, constitute important (stereo)types of Poles. Thus Zosia is an ideal of Polish femininity: fair-haired, blue-eyed, beautiful, virginal, and patriotic. Obviously, Wajda’s choosing of Bachleda-Curuś suggested that he regarded her as fulfilling this ideal, despite the fact that her hair and eyes were much darker than Zosia’s in Mickiewicz’s description. The young actress fulfilled her assignment well: she was praised as a worthy counterpart of her older rival Telimena, played by the charismatic Grażyna Szapołowska (best known as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s favorite actress). Another sign of Bachleda-Curuś’s success in this role was that she went on to receive the part of another Polish virginal patriot in The Gateway of Europe (Wrota Europy, 1999) by Jerzy Wójcik. Wójcik’s film tells the story of a Polish hospital besieged by the Bolshevik army in 1919. The Russians are presented as barbarians, who nevertheless fall under the spell of the proud and beautiful Polish nurses. The nurse who attracts most the leader of the Russians is Zosia, played by Bachleda-Curuś. In this film, as Elżbieta Ostrowska argues, the Polish women represent the centuries-long stereotype of the “proud Polish woman” who rejects the advances of a foreign man, thereby preserving the purity of Polish blood and culture. Such a “proud woman” serves as a metaphor for Poland itself—ravished by its vicious and powerful neighbor, yet able to triumph over it morally.26 The two roles of Bachleda-Curuś suggest that she was on the way to occupying the position Janda gained twenty or so years earlier— namely, that of a symbol of Polish femininity. At the same time, there were significant differences between the texts and contexts of Janda’s and Bachleda-Curuś’s appearances. While Janda played in contemporary films, Bachleda-Curuś was cast in historical films, and her roles evoked an old-fashioned ideal of womanhood. Janda’s films appeared when Polish cinema was still a strong national institution; BachledaCuruś attained stardom during the period of cultural fragmentation, when cinema was perceived mostly as entertainment and viewers had plenty of models to choose from. Bachleda-Curuś’s off-screen persona was not identified with a particular character she played. If anything, critics pointed to a certain “blankness” or “moderation” in her acting, which they attributed to the lack of a distinct personality. Although this “moderation” could be regarded as a shortcoming, making her roles less memorable than Janda’s and less connected with national cinema, it could be viewed an asset too, suggesting her ability to adjust to different genres and cinemas, as indeed she did. By all accounts, BachledaCuruś’s position within Polish cinema, though still impressive, taking

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into account her young age, was less attractive to her than that reached by Janda in her early career. In these circumstances it is only natural that an international career appeared to Bachleda-Curuś more attractive than it had to Janda twenty or so years before. Bachleda-Curuś’s “train to Hollywood” passed through Germany. In the early 2000s she acted in several films made by German directors, including in Summer Storm (2004) by Marco Kreuzpaintner, a young director who, like her, wanted to test his abilities in Hollywood. It is also thanks to Kreuzpaintner that Bachleda-Curuś received her first role in a Hollywood production, in a film entitled Trade (2007). In it, she plays Weronika, a young Polish woman who, lured by the promise of a modeling and acting career in America, goes to Mexico, where she is raped, ends up as a sex slave to a Russian mafia boss, and is smuggled to the United States, where she escapes her predicament. For a person who knows Bachleda-Curuś’s biography, this role is full of intertextual baggage. Weronika bears a similarity to Zosia in The Gateway of Europe, in which Bachleda-Curuś also represented a noble woman, threatened by Russians, who does not lose her dignity even in adverse circumstances. She is also similar to Bachleda-Curuś herself, who had a connection with Mexico because of being born there and also reached Los Angeles indirectly, via Germany. In Trade the Polish actress got a role that was originally written for a much better-known actress from Eastern Europe, Milla Jovovich, while Kreuzpaintner took the seat of a more experienced German director, Roland Emmerich. We can thus observe a somewhat reversed situation compared to that of Katarzyna Figura, who was meant to play in a film by Altman, but lost out in competition with the more experienced Greta Scacchi. The approach of Bachleda-Curuś to her Hollywood career can also be seen as a reverse of that of Figura. While Figura inflated her fans’ expectations, talking about the roles she was about to get, which in due course eluded her, Bachleda-Curuś, in a way suggesting maturity, played down such expectations, claiming that she just wanted to see how life in Hollywood looks, gain experience, and test herself.27 As a result, her successes seem much greater than they might, had she been as cocky as Figura. Among her successes as a budding star we should list not only subsequent films such as Ondine (2009) by Neil Jordan and being represented by the same agency as Robert De Niro, but also her relationship with the popular actor Colin Farrell, with whom she has a son. Although at this moment it is difficult to say how her career will develop, it appears that she boarded her train to Hollywood at the right moment and sat in the correct compartment.

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The Twisted Road to Hollywood The stories of these four actresses present different paths through which Polish actresses reached foreign audiences. The older pair, Winnicka and Janda, owe their parts in foreign productions to their successes in Polish cinema. The younger two, Figura and Bachleda-Curuś, owe their success predominantly to themselves. Winnicka and Janda waited for roles; Figura and Bachleda-Curuś actively sought them, attending auditions and joining acting agencies. Their different trajectories also demonstrate the relative attractiveness of international stardom: its desirability largely depends on the position of the actress in Polish cinema. For Janda, in particular, who in Poland transcended the boundaries of stardom, international success appeared less attractive than maintaining her position as a “national treasure.” The trajectories of Winnicka, Janda, Figura, and Bachleda-Curuś also demonstrate the growing allure of acting in foreign films and point to Hollywood as the ultimate destination of a new generation of Polish actresses. Nevertheless, the road to Hollywood remains for a Polish actress rather twisted, with a stop in Hungary or Germany helpful in reaching this vaunted destination.

Notes 1. Treatments of the differences between actors and actresses include the following: André Bazin, “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 2:158–62; Richard Dyer, Stars, rev. ed. (London: BFI, 1998); Christine Gerathy, “Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performance,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 183–201; and Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 746–57. 2. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 750. 3. Gerathy, “Re-examining Stardom,” 196. 4. Anita Skwara, “Film Stars Do Not Shine in the Sky over Poland: The Absence of Popular Cinema in Poland,” in Popular European Cinema, ed. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1992), 220–31; Iwona Kurz, Twarze w tłumie: Wizerunki bohaterów wyobraźni zbiorowej w kulturze polskiej lat 1955–1969 (Izabelin, Pol.: Świat Literacki, 2005); see also Stefan Soldovieri, “The Politics of the Popular: Trace of Stones (1969/89) and the Discourse on Stardom in the GDR Cinema,” in Light

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172 Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 220–36. 5. Kurz, Twarze w tłumie, 128–29. 6. Ibid., 129. 7. Ibid.; Elżbieta Ostrowska, “Krystyna Janda: The Contradictions of Polish Stardom,” in Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 37–64; Michael Goddard, “‘Figura’ postkomunistycznego pożądania? Role Katarzyny Figury, albo: Jak polskie kino stawało się ‘popularne’?” in Kino polskie: Reinterpretacje, ed. Konrad Klejsa and Ewelina NurczyńskaFidelska (Kraków: Rabid, 2008), 275–86; Ewa Mazierska, “Agnieszka and Other Solidarity Heroines of Polish Cinema,” Kinema, no. 17 (2002): 17–36. 8. Alicja Korubczyńska, “Interesują mnie role kobiet współczesnych— mówi Lucyna Winnicka,” Dziennik Ludowy 30, no. 11 (1974): 12. 9. Maciej Maniewski, “Lucyna Winnicka,” Film, no. 17 (1989): 14–15. 10. Korubczyńska, “Interesują mnie role kobiet współczesnych,” 12; Maniewski, “Lucyna Winnicka,” 14. 11. Sdr., “Lucyna Winnicka: Mieszkanka ulicy Tuzolto,” Kurier Polski 24, no. 4 (1973): 14. 12. Korubczyńska, “Interesują mnie role kobiet współczesnych,” 12. 13. John Cunningham, István Szabó: Visions of Europe (London: Wallflower Press, forthcoming in 2013). 14. Mazierska, “Agnieszka and Other Solidarity Heroines”; Ostrowska, “Krystyna Janda.” 15. Ostrowska, “Krystyna Janda,” 37. 16. Aleksander Jackiewicz, Gwiazdozbiór (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Radia i Telewizji, 1983), 243. 17. Ostrowska, “Krystyna Janda,” 45. 18. Goddard, “‘Figura’ postkomunistycznego pożądania?” 278. 19. Maciej Maniewski, “Katarzyna i Kasia: O aktorstwie Katarzyny Figury,” Kino, no. 12 (2003): 20. 20. Goddard, “‘Figura’ postkomunistycznego pożądania?” 278; Ewa Mazierska, Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: “Black Peters” and “Men of Marble” (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 131–76; Izabela Kalinowska, “Seks, polityka i koniec PRL-u: O cielesności w polskim kinie lat osiemdziesiątych,” in Ciało i seksualność w kinie polskim, ed. Sebastian Jagielski and Agnieszka Morstin-Popławska (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2009), 63–78. 21. Goddard, “‘Figura’ postkomunistycznego pożądania?” 279. 22. Ewa Mazierska, “Witches, Bitches and Other Victims of the Crisis of Masculinity: Women in Polish Postcommunist Cinema,” in Women in Polish Cinema, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Elżbieta Ostrowska (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 110–30.

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23. Maniewski, “Katarzyna i Kasia,” 20. 24. Rafał Syska, Zachować dystans: Filmowy świat Roberta Altmana (Kraków: Rabid, 2008), 281. 25. Ibid., 281, 336. 26. Elżbieta Ostrowska, “Polka—dumny przedmiot pożądania,” in Jagielski and Morstin-Popławska, Ciało i seksualność w kinie polskim, 146–51. 27. Anna Bimer, “Przystanek Hollywood,” Gala, June 11–17 (1997): 52–54.

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Chapter Nine

Polish Performance in French Space Jerzy Radziwiłowicz as a Transnational Actor Alison Smith Jerzy Radziwiłowicz first came to French cinema in 1981, to star as an expatriate Polish film director in Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion (1982). He was thirty-one and thought of himself mainly as a stage actor, having been a regular member of the company at the Stary Theatre in Kraków, where he first encountered Andrzej Wajda. It was, of course, Wajda’s film Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), made in 1977, that brought Radziwiłowicz international fame, as well as changing his self-image as an actor, revealing, as he told Cahiers du cinéma, “a part of myself that I didn’t want to know: a timid and sensitive person.”1 The debate that Man of Marble elicited in the still-politicized France of the late 1970s was fervent and prolonged. It filled a large portion of three issues of Cahiers, culminating in an extensive tribute by Godard in May 1979. In this quintessentially Godardian image-essay we can discern a fascination for the young actor, which makes it unsurprising that the director soon contacted him for discussion of a project. Radziwiłowicz received the invitation with some trepidation: “I’ve seen some of his films; his way of thinking is so different from other things I’ve done”2—trepidation that proved warranted by the notoriously difficult relations between director and actors in Passion (1982). The somewhat agonizing shoot nonetheless established Radziwiłowicz as a potential resource for the more demanding sectors of French cinema, and the mutual respect that grew between him and Michel Piccoli— the doyen of the actors on the set of Passion, as well as apparently the principal line of communication between Godard and the cast—would determine his casting in Piccoli’s film The Black Beach (La plage noire, 2001) some twenty years later. In almost the same year, Radziwiłowicz made his Francophone debut in Belgium as one of the main characters of a socially engaged, stylistically ambitious, and militantly local Belgian film, Le grand paysage

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d’Alexis Droeven (1981). This film, which appeared before Passion, won great praise on the festival circuit, including a special mention at Berlin in 1981 for its cinematography. Stuart Byron, reviewing the Berlinale for the Village Voice, called Alexis Droeven a masterpiece and described Radziwiłowicz’s appearance in it as “ruggedly poetic”;3 but it never found a commercial distributor. Alexis Droeven is an intriguing Western debut for the young Pole, since it, for the first and only time, gave him very definite roots in a clearly identified Western place (he plays the son of a Belgian peasant), but it made little impact, while Passion, despite its difficulties, was received with enormous critical interest. No doubt it might have facilitated a definitive move to French work, but this is not what Radziwiłowicz was seeking: like his character in Passion, he was eager to return to Poland at that tumultuous time. In fact, although the late 1980s witnessed an increasing number of international projects in his filmography, frequently with a French link, it was not until the late 1990s that his career could be said to have developed a decisive, consistent French component. Over the last dozen or so years, however, French projects have constituted a small majority of his filmic output. This chapter will explore the characteristics of Radziwiłowicz’s performances in French cinema, seeking to trace the way in which particular characteristics of his physical presence and performance style have been singled out and accentuated in the hands of the various directors he has worked with, creating in the process a distinctive and complex persona. The question that concerns me most keenly is the extent to which his performances have abandoned the national identification with Poland and with politics that marked his screen presence in Passion so strongly, and that served for a long time to define him for film reviewers who regularly followed his name with an explanatory “Man of Marble” or “Man of Iron.” It is my contention that in his later French films, the figure that has been developed, largely as a result of selective emphasis on certain performance traits, is one who is not easily locatable; he retains, and indeed cultivates, a sense of “otherness” or foreignness even while being apparently very strongly associated with the surroundings in which he is immediately, physically placed. This combination of foreignness with close affinity to, even symbiosis with, place creates an unease both in and around his characters. Although this “evolution” has not been entirely straightforward or linear, it has created a distinctive figure of the unplaceable “outside insider.” Rather than a simple crossing of the border between Poland and France, Radziwiłowicz’s incorporation into French film has involved something resembling the incarnation of an ambiguous place of origin in the actor’s body, gestures, voice, and gaze.

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The Gaze For both Jean-Jacques Andrien, director of Alexis Droeven, and Jean-Luc Godard, the most startling feature of the young actor of Man of Marble was his gaze. For Andrien: “The film [Alexis Droeven] is built around Jean-Pierre’s gaze (he ‘gazes’ at the present and the past / the substance of his performance is there, in the gaze he directs at his father’s life as much as at the ‘landscape’ of the present).”4 He contrasts this with his other stars, Nicole Garcia and Maurice Garrel, chosen for her “parole” (word) and his “geste” (action), respectively. As for Godard, we have already mentioned his first engagement with Radziwiłowicz, the seventeen-page “visual essay” dedicated to Man of Marble published in Cahiers du cinéma in May 1979. This article consisted of a montage of stills of Radziwiłowicz and his costar Krystyna Janda, along with images from Eisenstein’s October (1928), photographs from the October Revolution, and extracts from the previous issue’s debates on Wajda’s film. Godard arranges these images, punctuated by brief captions printed in capital letters, in order to create a dialogue between the present and the past of cinematic communism. Radziwiłowicz’s gaze is accorded an organizing function: a still of his face, inscrutable, eyes slightly narrowed, appears repeatedly, accompanied by the word “voir,” while other images are arranged on the page in order to make them the apparent object of his seeing. In this “imagecriticism,” Radziwiłowicz thus becomes the visual incarnation, and the subject, of the verb “to see,” his unreadable, but critical, gaze commanding our reception of what follows. Passion engages a subtle play with Radziwiłowicz as gazer. He plays a film director, perhaps a substitute-Godard, and, what is more, a director obsessed with light—a gaze incarnate, as it were. And yet Godard often deliberately hides his eyes behind thick glasses and obscuring shadows, or places him in deep shadow or even off-screen. Although a potential gazer, he is often a hidden one. Godard introduces him to the film behind the wheel of a car as he drives into the low winter sun. In the first shot of this scene, which lasts several seconds, he is the invisible, seeing subject, as the camera, apparently placed in the driver’s seat, records the passing landscape and then the young woman (Isabelle Huppert) who is talking to him through the nearside window, framed against the drenching light. His unmistakably deep and rather harsh voice, with a slight but audible accent in French and one aside in Polish, is the only trace of his presence within the filmic space. When the camera switches to a countershot, looking through the windscreenwith the sun behind it (fig. 9.1), we see a face

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sharply divided horizontally by the shadow of the car’s sun blind: the mouth is in sunlight and clearly visible, allowing the position of the head to be obvious, but the eyes are in deep shadow. The spectacles perform a double function: their bulky outline defines the direction of Jerzy’s gaze, which by the position of his head we may guess to be intensely concentrated, but the thick lenses, reflecting the glare of the sun, further screen the eyes themselves from view. He is silent now; even when his voice is briefly heard, the absence of lip movement assures us that he has made no diegetic sound. His mouth is expressionless except for a brief wince as he extracts a pen. Radziwiłowicz’s performance consists in brief turns of the head, the placing of a hand thoughtfully in front of his mouth, and finally the production of a notebook in which he writes while still gazing forward, keeping his eyes covered by the shadow of the blind. Almost the only alteration in his attitude throughout the sequence, which lasts nearly a minute, concerns the direction of his gaze, the position of the eyes that we never see. The scene then changes to the forecourt of a garage, where a second car has pulled up, across the front of the shot, in a space of shadow. Over the roof of this car we see Jerzy and Isabelle arrive on foot, in longshot, in sunlight and brightly lit but too far-off to make out their features. Responding to an angry summons from the driver, Jerzy comes forward, toward the car and, at the same time, into the shadow, before squatting down to speak to the driver through his window, effectively hidden from view. Camera and soundtrack then apparently lose interest in Jerzy, transferring us to Isabelle, who has walked past the first car and is now in conversation with an elegant woman sitting behind yet another wheel; the last words we hear Jerzy’s voice saying are “Je vois plus rien” (I can’t see any more). After a long digression, the camera returns to a close-up of his face at the end of the scene; it is still in shadow, still sharply divided this time by a window frame, and yet his gaze, still both near invisible and intensely directed, is linked by an eyeline match with all that has gone before, as if, once again, his eyes commanded ours. Jerzy’s is thus an ambiguous gaze, visible and invisible, all-seeing while seeing nothing, a substitute for the filmmaker, obsessed with light, but veiled by shadow. Very occasionally, however, his eyes appear unscreened, and provocatively, even aggressively, brought to our attention; for example in the (in)famous scene by the pool, where Jerzy the director forces an idle extra to “do the star” and the camera slowly rises from a view of her spread-eagled body—taken from behind her head, and revealing little— to encounter his long, intense, disturbing stare at what, to this director obsessed with reproducing classic paintings, might well be “l’origine du

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Figure 9.1. Screenshot from Passion (dir. Godard, 1982): Jerzy Radziwiłowicz

monde” (the origin of the world). After an interminable thirty seconds, he actually removes his glasses, before turning away and releasing the tension in which actress, camera, and audience had alike been held. The artist’s gaze, when so persistent and so intrusive, approaches aggression, a kind of attempted rape by eye, even if he turns away at what seems to be the last minute. Here Godard’s own apparent disquiet with the implications of the directorial function—already a concern in his previous film, Slow Motion (Sauve qui peut (la vie), 1980)—are made vividly visual through his wry use of the disquiet produced by Jerzy’s silent stare. Even apart from the directions he gives, the mere fact that the director looks makes others uneasy. The uneasiness that Radziwiłowicz can produce with a mere fixed look was to become one of the most constant features of his roles in French cinema. In later films it has been regularly and expressively made use of. His surprisingly blue eyes have a certain harshness, which can be both intense and steely; and his inexpressive and rather heavy features, along with his general massiveness (to which I shall return), can also render his gaze quite radically unreadable. This silent, intense look can therefore

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supplement, or even substitute for, speech with a suggestion of a process of reflection that words spoken cannot or will not be permitted fully to reveal. Radziwiłowicz’s gaze transmits an excess of interpretation of whatever is in front of it, which will not be expressed either to the audience or to its object. Directed at the camera, such a look may directly engage the audience, challenging us to understand his interpretation of an inextricable situation. The weary ex-revolutionary in Michel Piccoli’s The Black Beach occasionally directs at the camera a blank blue gaze that speaks of an impasse. But when directed at an object, and most especially at a woman, a frequent occurrence in Radziwiłowicz’s French films, the same gaze is ambiguously powerful. From Passion onward, in fact, his character has with remarkable, perhaps somewhat surprising, consistency been typed as a seducer. In Passion he is a subject/object of furious desire for no fewer than three women, all of whom want to leave for Poland with him. In Yves Angelo’s An Air So Pure (Un air si pur, 1997), a very black comedy set during World War I, he portrays a lonely farmer living in the neighborhood of a fashionable sanatorium, to whose residents he offers milk and apparent hospitality. In an early sequence, he engages in conversation with a young woman who has come to the farm in the company of a consumptive count. For a long while, Angelo’s very mobile camera follows the young woman as she explores the farm’s surroundings, and when it frames Radziwiłowicz it is from behind, avoiding any encounter with his gaze. The first brief direct glance that he gives the camera, and by dint of an eyeline match also the girl, shows him uncharacteristically and apparently frankly smiling, as he tells her casually how his fiancée left him for another man. There is little menace here, but the low camera angle from which he is shot gives him a dominance in the conversation that compels concentration on his face. In the reverse shot, her smile fades, encouraging us to feel the discomfort involved in being the object of a gaze that we have so far only glimpsed. That disquiet is amply consolidated in the following shot, which remains much longer on his face: at first he looks away, out of the frame toward the new house he has built and is describing—but then his eyes return to meet ours/hers directly, his smile now much less frank and more knowing: “. . . with a lovely bedroom. A man like me needs a woman.”5 A few shots later, he is once again caught gazing into the camera, and this time his sidelong look, directed at his visitors in intimate conversation, needs no words to interpret it. The concentration of the gaze here communicates to the audience a combination of desire and potential action, which creates a suspense all the more effective for being accompanied by minimal words. When he eventually resorts to blackmail and murder in order

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to win the girl, this comes as a confirmation of the potential menace we read in his look, rather than as a surprise. Rivette makes use of his unlikely seductive power in Secret défense (1998), in which his shady businessman Walser fascinates suspicious girls with phenomenal ease, and establishes a profoundly uneasy power relationship with Sandrine Bonnaire’s chilly Sylvie. In the scenes between Walser and Sylvie, action and word express only distrust and dependency on her part, wariness on his, but the crossing looks (of both) divert and cast doubt on what they say and do, charging every word and action with desire. Rivette’s use of the gaze is complex, however. Secret Defense is a film that makes very little use of close-ups, and the characters almost never look directly at the camera or the audience. Besides, Rivette, like Godard—although less drastically—has chosen to hide or defuse Radziwiłowicz’s gaze, sometimes covering his eyes with a heavy fringe. It is thus through posture as much as through direct experience that we understand the intensity of his concentration on his costars and the power that he thus attains over them while keeping an apparently wary distance. This brings us to the second characteristic feature of Jerzy Radziwiłowicz’s French screen performances.

The Body As much as on his intense gaze, Radziwiłowicz’s stage and screen persona is built on a strong physical presence—he is a massive actor, whose body (and even whose face) impart a sense of weight and physicality. If this was to some extent true even at the time of Passion, by the mid-1990s, with the onset of middle age, it had become an integral part of his performance, one that as a theater actor by training and temperament (that is, someone whose approach to his profession is based on the assumption of physical presence), he is technically particularly well prepared to exploit. In this he has something in common with Gérard Depardieu, and the parallel has not been lost on some reviewers, especially when, in 1988, he replaced Depardieu as Sjatov in Andrzej Wajda’s The Possessed (Les Possédés, 1988) and garnered critical praise for his performance in a film that was generally poorly received.6 In Secret Defense he wryly draws attention to his body on his first appearance on screen, telling Sylvie/Sandrine Bonnaire that he’s “filled out a bit” (un peu épaissi); and so a French audience might have thought, comparing him with the slim young man striding around the set of Passion, even though Godard, too, at times, plays on the ways in which his protagonist defies, or submits to,

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the gravity that increasingly pulls him down as he becomes wearier and more disenchanted with the progress of his film. It is perhaps in his work for Rivette that Radziwiłowicz’s physicality is used most tellingly. Rivette is notoriously not a carnal director, but he has always been a choreographic one: his concern with movement has led him to a cinema approaching, and at times attaining, the condition of dance. His characterizations are drawn from interaction between characters in generous space rather than from actors performing with individual expressiveness for the camera. In considering the use that Rivette, along with Godard, and indeed Michel Piccoli, in the single film in which he directed the Polish actor, makes of Radziwiłowicz’s body, I have found considerable inspiration in a short but rich article by Stéphane Bouquet, “Pour une chorécinégraphie” (For a choreocinography), published in Cahiers du cinéma, coincidentally in the same issue in which Secret Defense was rather unenthusiastically reviewed.7 Bouquet’s point of departure is a recently published book on contemporary dance that put forward a theory of choreography of the body based on Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis.8 According to Laban, and Laurence Louppe, the significance of movement can be codified according to four basic principles: space, time, mass and its displacement, and dynamic tensile forces. The advantage of this analysis for cinema studies, according to Bouquet, is its concentration on the actor’s/dancer’s body in and of itself, rather than its position in the frame or its insertion in the play of montage. Louppe’s choreographic approach to human movement allows performance to be repositioned as a dynamic force acting on the rhythm of a film, rather than a mere means of individual expression. Bouquet’s article rather disappointingly makes no mention of Rivette, but he does apply himself to Godard’s 1980s cinema, and the terms in which he does so have considerable relevance to Radziwiłowicz’s performances, even beyond the direct connection with Passion. In Godard’s later films, Bouquet observes, Laban’s third principle becomes the dominant choreographic force: there is a move from weightlessness to gravity: “Before, the Godardian body is a light body, spared the cares of gravity because of its great freedom . . . Afterwards comes mass, and mass in its heaviest manifestation. And then we see bodies falling, more often than seems natural.”9 Falling, he observes, is not a merely negative dynamic: it implies abandonment, but also acceptance: “For Godard a body on the ground is a body which has escaped or is trying to escape the fight. The ground is where the body leaves all its tension behind and finds fulfillment.”10 In this he follows Louppe’s lead, quoting her assessment of the role of the

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ground in choreography: “A fall . . . finds its completion in the use of the ground . . . the ground to lean on, to make love to, to recoil from: one can be destroyed on the ground, all tensile muscles relaxed, pure mass, leaving the supporting surface to take control, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, of all the weighty matter that one has abandoned to it.”11 The references to “fulfillment” and to the ground as something “to make love to” indicate that submission to gravity and to physical mass may signify something more than a loss of the “liberty” and “lightness” associated with weightlessness, although a dynamic of conflict and putative defeat seems perhaps better adapted to Jerzy’s unwilling subjection to gravity in Passion. Triumphantly defiant when borne by a crane around the set (just prior to wrestling with an angel!), his increasingly weary struggles to finance his film and retain its integrity end when he slumps to the ground, felled by a misaimed knife blow. Although the damage is not serious, the fall marks the end of Jerzy’s resistance: from here on we will only see him seated at a table, leaning heavily on his elbow, considering his imminent return to Poland, and finally ensconced once more in the driver’s seat of his car. Whether subjection to gravity brings the relief, even the pleasure, that Bouquet and Louppe tentatively ascribe to it is far from certain. Jerzy in his fallen state does find fulfillment by making love to Isabelle, but their coupling is disembodied and dissociated from the earth, the camera rising up again along the elegant baroque forms of the diegetic film’s greatest angelic set piece (which there is little evidence now will ever be filmed in reality). Gravity is defied once more, but by the power of the imagination—Jerzy’s body is nowhere to be seen. Bouquet’s description of the changed dynamic of Godard’s work becomes fascinatingly apposite, however, when applied to the two films Jacques Rivette was to make with Radziwiłowicz in the early 2000s and, indeed, to the subsequent Don’t Touch the Axe (Ne touchez pas la hache, 2007), in which Radziwiłowicz is succeeded by Guillaume Depardieu. Not that Rivette had never before used actors of imposing physique, or even exploited their weight in choreographic fashion: Michael Lonsdale, in Out 1 (1971), is already a force of gravity. But Lonsdale was just one of many figures drawn into constant mobile interaction, and his tendency toward immobility responds to and conflicts with others’ movement. In Secret Defense, Radziwiłowicz’s bulk occupies the screen, commanding the space he enters; consoling, menacing, and central, he frequently appears framed in doorways that he fills entirely, blocking all exits to other characters (see fig. 9.2). It is not merely the frame-space that he dominates, but frequently the camera movement too: in his first appearances, standing in the center of his well-appointed office, his massiveness

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Figure 9.2. Screenshot from Secret Defense (dir. Rivette, 1998): Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Sandrine Bonnaire

and confidence ensure that he can dominate Sylvie easily. The bright light that comes through the windows makes of him a dark figure, and he draws the camera along with him as he moves around the room. Mass in motion is also a force of attraction, not merely subjected to gravitational pull but exerting one of its own. Thus, perhaps, Walser’s apparently irresistible seductive power becomes explicable. Nonetheless, eventually, the massive body becomes a signifier of vulnerability—surrender to the support of the earth, abandonment of will—and in the last shots of Secret Defense, as Radziwiłowicz uses all his weight to sit down on the stairs with Sylvie’s body in his arms, his massiveness accentuates the sense of defeat and helplessness of a man trapped in a cycle he cannot control. Michel Piccoli makes similar use of Radziwiłowicz’s ability to surrender to gravity to highlight his increasing sense of impotence in The Black Beach, frequently contrasting it with energetic and optimistic activity, usually filmed in long-shot. One memorable scene from this film begins with a mid-shot of Radziwiłowicz’s weary activist A and his daughter buried up to their necks in the sand of the titular beach, not merely on but in the ground after the manner of Beckett’s Happy Days—their bodies invisible, but their faces relaxed and smiling.12 When A extricates himself from the sand, he proves to be wearing a full-body wetsuit, which narrows and contains his form and contrasts with the crumpled jacket and trousers he has worn in previous shots. As he begins to run along the edge of the sea, with the camera tracking him in long-shot, he is exuberant and energetic,

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jumping and dancing in front of his daughter, apparently defiant both of his body mass and of gravity. But the leaping movement soon slackens, he collapses on the ground, and the camera moves in to frame his head and torso abandoned to the earth and the base of the frame, while his alarmed daughter prods at him helplessly. There is little clue to help us, or indeed her, to distinguish whether his collapse is playful or real. In this progress from frantic action to helpless resignation Radziwiłowicz, reinvented by his wetsuit as a black shadow, incarnates the narrative process of The Black Beach as a whole—“dancing,” as it were, his condition as a doomed activist. In The Story of Marie and Julien (L’Histoire de Marie et Julien, 2003), Rivette concentrates much of his film, the most earthily physical of his career, in the combination of menace and vulnerability expressed in Radziwiłowicz’s massive male body. In his interactions with Marie (Emmanuelle Béart), Julien may seem to be a solid and stable figure, the confident center of each of his cluttered rooms. He is broad and deepchested—a form further emphasized by frequent framing in plan américain—while her slightness is emphasized by envelopment in jumpers and dressing gowns several sizes too big for her. He moves slowly and deliberately, his actions measured according to their practical effect: mending the clocks in his workshop, answering the telephone, preparing breakfast; while her presence in the house is one of constant mobility interspersed with moments of withdrawal when she curls into corners of the furniture. Surrounded by two small, prowling, active creatures, since Marie’s occupation of the house is not unlike that of the cat Nevermore, Julien’s stillness becomes an anchor for the film, and Jean-Marc Lalanne, in his Cahiers review, describes him as “a man, a real one: mature, massive, stable, a bit gruff . . . a reassuring companion-figure, with no narcissism, a pure protective force.”13 Lalanne, however, resolutely brushes aside the more melodramatic and mysterious aspects of the story—he even proposes replacing Rivette’s description of the original screenplay, “Scenes of Parallel Life,” with the domestic “Scenes of Conjugal Life”—and Julien’s massiveness and taciturnity are not necessarily so positively coded for his interlocutor. For example, in his confrontations with Madame X, whom he is blackmailing for no apparent reason, his physical immovability accentuates her helplessness in front of his changes of tack, which are as irrational to us as they are to her. He will have ten times what he first asked for, he will not explain or negotiate, he cannot be moved; and whether he moves away, turning a broad back to Madame X and the camera, or sits squarely down on the porch steps of his domain blocking all further access or

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Figure 9.3. Screenshot from Story of Marie and Julien (dir. Rivette, 2003): Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Emmanuelle Béart

interaction between them, he becomes a single obstructive, unexpressive mass against which all but the most irresistible force breaks in vain. Symptomatic of this physical ambivalence in Marie and Julien are the actor’s hands, which we might remember were a central focus of Radziwiłowicz’s performance in Man of Marble. Even then they were ambivalent—a worker’s hands irremediably damaged. It is not that Rivette’s camera insists on them; indeed, he films the movements of Béart and Radziwiłowicz according to the tendency that Bouquet had located in contemporary dance in his 1998 article, concentrating on their bodies as a whole, guided by the “centres of energy”—the torso, spine, and pelvis— rather than on the expressive extremities. But the actors’ bodies in Marie and Julien are also defined through words. We are told of, rather than shown, the incongruous physicality of Julien’s hands: massive, apparently clumsy, “butcher’s hands,” he tells Marie (see fig. 9.3), while at the same time we see them, from a distance, performing the most delicate operations on the mysterious machinery of the clocks he repairs. Little has changed in the image and its organization, but our perception of Julien as a stable and comforting figure at ease with his objects has been disturbed, his reassuring proportions now slightly out of kilter, capable of error or even of violence. Those “butcher’s hands” later become a central feature of Marie’s sexual fantasy, once again borne to us entirely by words: we see the man’s solid body and hear its significance condensed into the violent/tender actions she imagines, or choreographs, into his unseen hands. The three sequences

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where Radziwiłowicz and Béart are in bed together are probably the most intimate and carnal that Rivette ever filmed, and yet, strictly, their physicality is largely an illusion. Filmed against the light, or in extreme close-ups that reveal little, it is through what they say that their bodies operate; carnality transmitted directly from their imagination to ours without passing through the actors’ bodies. And yet our consciousness of their physical presence is essential. In his subsequent film, Don’t Touch the Axe, Rivette once again centers his imaginary world on a male protagonist whose movement is characterized by mass and a certain awkwardness, and who can be made to embody both vulnerability and menace. Guillaume Depardieu becomes a direct successor to Radziwiłowicz, who might be said to be the initiator and symbol of the incarnation of Rivette’s previously aerial world. As Antoine de Baecque described his appearance in Secret Defense, Rivette’s Radziwiłowicz is “like a fascinating ghost returned from the void, a ghost embodied, with astonishing individuality, by words, accent, gestures and physical mass.”14

The Voice The voice, then, is part of the incarnation; not only as “words,” which after all are regularly attributed to ghosts without necessarily giving them body, but more importantly as “accent.” Radziwiłowicz’s characteristically deep voice, with its slight Polish accent, is as much a part of his physical being as his gaze or his broad chest and trunk; and it is the voice that provides the most obvious physical sign of the actor’s Polishness or, at least, his foreignness. The significance of the accent in Radziwiłowicz’s performance is the final aspect of the actor to be considered here, and we will observe that, despite its apparent specificity, it is perhaps the most polyvalent and mysterious characteristic of all. In Passion, where voice, accent, tone, and synchrony play a vital part in Godard’s sophisticated inquiries into communication, the director Jerzy, like the performer who incarnates him, is unequivocally Polish. He even speaks Polish on one or two occasions, although rarely to other Poles; the language usually serves either to mask his meaning from his interlocutors, perhaps including Godard (“Radziwiłowicz speaks French but, he can’t help himself, he gets angry in Polish”),15 or to accentuate his identification with the complex knot of meaning that Godard invests in the name, and the idea, of “Poland” in 1981. I would argue that Poland is most of all a vital absence in Passion: an “other place” that serves as a

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point of departure for many of the protagonists in their efforts to make sense of their here and now, and which attaches to the figure of Jerzy like an extra dimension of existence, a parallel life inaccessible to others. His Polishness becomes the obvious, visible, and audible sign of the inevitable mystery that will always make another person inaccessible; communication across that abyss is almost always unsatisfactory in Godard’s films, but with Jerzy, and the absent presence of Poland, the difficulty becomes fascinating. For Isabelle, as for the production manager who tries to engage Jerzy in conversation, Poland is the place where politics are happening—as indeed was really the case during the making of Passion, when Radziwiłowicz’s real desire to be present and engaged at home contributed to the notorious tensions on the set. Whether this “politics-elsewhere” is interpreted as fearful (by the production manager), hopeful (by Isabelle), or simply as a responsibility (by Jerzy himself), it becomes a sign of something that, by the end of the Seventies, post-1968 cinema in France and Switzerland was becoming painfully aware of having lost. It is desired, and unknown. And so Poland is a place “out there” that has become a substitute for impossible action here; those who know, or even perhaps care, very little about the place still want to talk about the action, and Jerzy spends much time evading the discussion, not speaking, only insisting to his Polish friend, who has decided to leave for the US, that he will not turn his back on whatever it is that his Polishness has left in him. At the same time, for all the three women with whom Jerzy becomes involved, Poland is more directly the foreign land to which he alone can take them, away from the stress and dissatisfaction of their present lives and toward a possibility of new life and new love—an ideal Elsewhere to which he has the key. However, at the end of the film it seems far from certain that Jerzy, unlike Radziwiłowicz himself, has any intention of going anywhere. Hanna and Isabelle have certainly set off hopefully toward an uncertain destination, perhaps no farther than the airport; they believe they are following Jerzy, but the following sequence reveals that he remains behind them, pausing in the Swiss snow to pick up Manuela. If he is indeed heading to Poland, it seems more to keep in the wake of his departing women than as a response to the place itself; and one may even be permitted to doubt the destination. Paradoxically, although it is important to the film that Jerzy be Polish, the Poland of Passion is more the “nowhere” referred to in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi than the concrete historical land of Man of Marble. Given Radziwiłowicz’s profile in the late 1970s, and his undeniably audible accent at this stage, it is almost more intriguing that his first Francophone role not only did not cast him as a Pole, but immersed him

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completely in a local Belgian context. In the casting in Alexis Droeven his origins were absolutely not a consideration, nor do any of the (fairly rare) reviews of the film ever mention them. This is all the more intriguing because it is a unique case. Not that Radziwiłowicz has been condemned to Polish roles; in fact, he has only “officially” played one other Pole, a guilt-ridden state torturer in Jean Lvoff’s Man of the Crowds (L’Homme des foules, 2001), a film that was not well received either by critics or by the public. However, in The Black Beach, not only Radziwiłowicz’s role but the whole film “became” Polish literally, it seems, as a result of the choice of lead actor, and this despite the latter’s consistent denials that story or character had any relevance to Poland. Piccoli and Radziwiłowicz knew and appreciated each other from the time of Passion, and when Piccoli sent his erstwhile colleague his script, which was drawn from a novel by François Maspéro set in an unidentified South American country, it elicited the actor’s interest immediately. The political connotations of the role evidently were no discouragement, but the center of interest, for Radziwiłowicz, was the human consequences of political engagement and not the politics themselves, certainly not the situation sketched out by the screenplay. He told Le Figaro that “the political reality of the film has nothing to do with that in Poland and what the character represents is made clear by the story itself” and even insisted that “as in the book, the country is not identified. That clearly means that the story could be taking place anywhere.”16 Certainly nothing in Maspéro’s novel predestined a connection. And yet, problematically for the actor’s own interpretation, Piccoli’s production choices all tended in the same direction—a relocation of Maspéro’s unnamed South American state within the borders of Poland. Piccoli himself offered an astonishingly ingenuous explanation: “I surrounded [Radziwiłowicz] with Polish actors so that the accents wouldn’t conflict,”17 thus charging Radziwiłowicz’s voice with the responsibility for determining the nationality not only of his own character but of a whole project! This is hardly a convincing argument, especially given that after Alexis Droeven at least two other films, An Air So Pure (Un air si pur, 1997) and Secret Defense, had also proved that Radziwiłowicz’s accent, if still perceptible, was at least not strongly typed, while his costar in The Black Beach, Ignacy Gogolewski, has an accent so heavy as to be opaque at times. And yet the decision plunged the project into the milieu of Polish cinema; locations were also identified in Poland, both in Warsaw and on the coast, and Polish TV was persuaded to offer some financial support. As the Libération reviewer “P.A.” observed, it is practically impossible to detach the film from its Polish setting even for a spectator aware of the

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original Maspéro novel;18 and, for “P.A.,” the overwhelmingly responsible factor was not Gogolewski’s accent or the Warsaw locations but Radziwiłowicz, by his mere presence. However avoidable that association might in fact have been, it does seem that, despite the denials of the director and the strenuous denials of the star, Radziwiłowicz’s engagement pushed The Black Beach irrevocably in the direction of Poland. Radziwiłowicz was not alone in finding the connection imperfect: Gérard Lefort, also in Libération, found himself confused by the varying national signals reaching him;19 and despite considerable praise for the actors, a vague dissatisfaction accompanied other critical assessments. “However vibrant the actors,” complained the reviewer in Le Monde Aden, “we were rapidly lost on this beach whose beauty fails to move us.”20 The relocating of Maspéro according to the absolute dictates of Radziwiłowicz’s nationality may have left a film all the more displaced for being overloaded with not entirely coherent visual and aural identifiers. In the films Radziwiłowicz made with Rivette, and also to some extent An Air So Pure, the case is rather different. Neither Yves Angelo’s farmer, nor Walser (Secret Defense), nor Julien is explicitly anything but French. Certainly, none of them has any sign of Poland about them; and if their voices are accented, the question of their origins is never raised. What they have in common, though, is strangeness. In Angelo’s film the farmer is in fact the only character who is not an “outsider” in whatever place this is filmed, but that is not to say that, as in Alexis Droeven, he is rooted in a local milieu, for An Air So Pure sees the land through the eyes of the outsiders. The camera, like most of the characters, has come to this unnamed mountain area, which may be Swiss judging by its appearance and liminal status. It is a place through which people come and go, toward Poland, toward Italy, toward France, even during a period of war, but it is never named. In reality the film was shot in both France and Poland. All we know is that it is “outside”—outside hostilities, outside the great powers, outside the societies from which its visitors have come. In the film at least, only Radziwiłowicz is a native of this place. A man of the earth, he is indeed not merely a native but rooted in his land, but here it is the visitors from surrounding, more identified, territories who are potentially the audience’s compatriots. The dweller in this place, with his accented performance, is a Stranger, and through him the beautiful landscape with its pure air and fresh produce becomes treacherous, as he waits, with his disconcertingly calculating gaze, to trap and take possession of the passing admirer. And what of the Rivettian roles? Rivette himself gave the game away, commenting on the French DVD of Story of Marie and Julien about

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his choice of actor: “Perhaps precisely because it was already a foreign actor . . . who spoke good French but wasn’t . . . It’s like that, I’ve just never imagined Julien looking like a French actor.”21 Even though there seems no narrative reason for Julien to be anything but French, and there is no hint given of any other nationality, it was for some reason important to the director that he should not be. One might suspect something similar regarding Walser, the international businessman whose slightly Germanic name perhaps also reflects his command over the film’s circling movements. Walser, a maître-danseur while Julien is a maître-chanteur, is certainly heard speaking German, briefly but fluently, on the phone; however, those few words are not enough for the spectator to stamp his passport. As with so much else about this character, his origins are mysterious; but it is, at least, vital to understand that he came from outside the involuted family, to become the mother’s lover, the father’s murderer, perhaps the daughter’s avenger, the house’s owner, and finally its prisoner. Julien’s foreignness is more difficult to explain, and indeed to detect, even though we have the director’s word for its importance. He seems ineradicably rooted in his house and his somewhat old-fashioned craft, an earthy and indeed reassuring contact with the everyday world for a wandering ghost like Marie. And yet his house, like many of Rivette’s houses, despite its bright and welcoming kitchen and its friendly cat, is something of a “world apart.” Surrounded by greenery in the midst of the city, and full of peculiar, and at first glance mysterious, machines, it constitutes a private world outside the buzz of literary Paris, of which Marie was once an integral part, a world of which Julien is the sole (human) native. He is only ever fully at ease when at home in it. Its peculiar properties lure Marie ever further into its depths, she becomes involved in Julien’s incomprehensible plots, and she ends the film either as Julien’s partner or as his now-familiar spirit, unlikely, perhaps unable, to depart. Radziwiłowicz, once again, is the only insider in a world outside the norm, the dweller in a subtly uncanny space—and, in Marie and Julien, Rivette installs his camera inside this outside, to film from the not-quitelocatable place in which Julien is the brooding genius. If there is one abiding characteristic of Jerzy Radziwiłowicz’s roles in France, it is a sense of uncertainty and ambivalence: Is he strong or weak, menacing or consoling? Is his gaze benevolent or malevolent? Is he here or elsewhere? Not by chance the word “troublant” (disturbing) recurs frequently in French reviewers’ assessments of his performances.22 In this context, Lalanne’s description of Julien as “reassuring” seems all the more surprising, especially given Julien’s indulgence in blackmail and Marie’s fantastic vision of him—frankly, such reassurance seems far from reassuring! Despite,

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or because of, his massive presence, Radziwiłowicz defies all attempts to pin him down; there will always be some physical resource that he can marshal to block the audience’s attempts to interpret him. These resources, which include physical resistance and the ability to act with minimal movement, a penetrating gaze, and a still detectable but increasingly unlocatable accent, combine to create a unique performing presence on the French screen. He has, not without some difficulty, moved beyond identification with the “political dissident” image that made him known, and even beyond association with a specific nation, but he remains unassimilated and perhaps inassimilable, an eternal native of a place outside.

Notes 1. “Une partie de moi-même que je ne voulais pas connaître: un type timide et délicat.” “Interview,” Le Journal des Cahiers 17 (1981), supplement to Cahiers du cinéma 328 (October 1981): III. 2. “J’ai vu des films de lui, sa manière de penser est si différente des autres choses que j’ai faites.” Ibid. 3. Stuart Byron, “The Endless Land of Alexis Droeven,” Village Voice, March 18–21, 1981, 50. 4. “Ce film [Le Grand Paysage] est construit sur . . . le regard de Jean Pierre (il ‘regarde’ présent et passé / l’essentiel de son jeu est là, dans ce regard qu’il porte sur la vie de son père autant que sur le ‘paysage’ du présent).” Jean-Jacques Andrien, personal communication with author, October 18, 2009. 5. “Avec une belle chambre. Faut une femme à un homme comme moi.” An Air So Pure (Un air si pur; dir. Yves Angelo, 1997). 6. Of Radziwiłowicz, Robert Chazal, for example, wrote, “Ce n’est pas pour rien qu’on l’a surnommé le Depardieu polonais” (It’s not for nothing that he’s been called the Polish Depardieu), and observed that he is “le plus vraisemblable et le meilleur” (the most credible and the best) among the stellar cast Wajda assembled. Robert Chazal, review of Les Possédés, FranceSoir, February 24, 1988 (BIFI archive, n.p.). 7. Stéphane Bouquet, “Pour une chorécinographie,” Cahiers du cinéma 522 (March 1998): 64–65. 8. Laurence Louppe, Poétique de la danse contemporaine (Brussels: Contredanse, 1998). 9. “Avant, le corps godardien est un corps léger, délivré des soucis de la gravitation parce que très libre Après vient le poids, et le poids dans sa manifestation la plus lourde. Il arrive alors, plus souvent qu’à son tour, que les corps tombent.” Bouquet, “Pour une chorécinographie,” 65.

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192 Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films 10. “Chez Godard un corps au sol est un corps qui a échappé ou cherche à échapper au conflit. Le sol est le lieu où le corps s’extrait de toutes les tensions et trouve l’accomplissement.” Ibid. 11. “La chute . . . trouve son aboutissement dans l’usage du sol . . . sol appui, sol partenaire amoureux, sol repoussoir: on peut être au sol abîmé, lâchant tous les tenseurs, poids absolu, laissant la surface d’appui prendre en charge qualitativement comme quantitativement toute la matière pondérale qu’on lui abandonne.” Laurence Louppe, quoted in ibid. 12. The main character, like his country, is left unnamed in The Black Beach. 13. “Un homme, un vrai: mûr, massif, constant, un peu ours. Une figure rassurante de compagnon, un homme sans narcissisme, une pure instance protectrice.” Jean-Marc Lalanne, “Un couple,” Cahiers du cinéma 584 (November 2003): 14. 14. “Comme un fantôme fascinant revenu du néant, un fantôme auquel les mots, l’accent, les gestes, l’embonpoint donnent corps, avec une singularité étonnante.” Antoine de Baecque, “Un système vide,” Cahiers du cinéma 522 (March 1998): 71. 15. “Radziwiłowicz parle en français mais, c’est plus fort que lui, s’énerve en polonais.” Serge Toubiana, “Lumières de la Passion,” Cahiers du cinéma 325 (May 1982): 18. 16. “La réalité politique du film n’a rien à voir avec celle de la Pologne et ce que représente le personnage est raconté par l’histoire elle-même . . . comme dans le livre, le pays n’est pas situé. Cela veut bien dire que cette histoire peut se dérouler n’importe où.” Dominique Borde, “Jerzy Radziwiłowicz, l’homme des lointains,” Le Figaro, December 12, 2001 (BIFI archive, n.p.). 17. “J’ . . . ai entouré [Radziwiłowicz] d’acteurs polonais pour qu’il n’y ait pas de décalage d’accents.” Ibid. 18. “P.A.,” “Review of La Plage noire,” Libération, December 13, 2001 (BIFI archive, n.p.). 19. Gérard Lefort, “Review of La Plage noire,” Libération, May 14, 2001 (BIFI archive, n.p.). 20. “Les acteurs ont beau vibrer, on est vite perdu sur cette plage dont la beauté n’émeut guère.” Review of La Plage noire, Le Monde Aden, 1, December 12, 2001 (BIFI archive, no pagination). 21. “Peut-être parce que justement c’était déjà un comédien étranger . . . parlant bien le français mais pas . . . C’est comme ça, j’ai jamais vu Julien avec la tête d’un comédien français.” Jacques Rivette, interview by Héléne Frappat, Histoire de Marie et Julien DVD (ArteVideo, 2004). 22. Examples of reviewers’ comments on Radziwiłowicz include “A.C.”: “Il sait donner à son personage une étrange presence, entre épaisseur et troublante absence” [He knows how to give his character a strange presence, somewhere between density and disturbing absence] (on L’Homme des

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foules: in Les Echos, April 23, 2001, 1); Jacques Morice: “Le seul vraiment troublant, parce qu’insaisissable, décalé et ludique” [the only one who is really disturbing, because he’s impossible to pin down, detached and playful] (on Secret défense: “Si long, si lent,” Télérama, March 21, 1998, 23); and Jean-Pierre Dufreigne, less impressed but sensing the same requirement: “Pas assez bon pour paraître inquiétant” [Not good enough to appear disturbing] (“Le Bonjour d’Alfred,” L’Express, March 19, 1998).

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Chapter Ten

Polish Actor-Directors Playing Russians Skolimowski and Stuhr Lars Kristensen The principle question of this chapter is: What messages are conveyed when Polish actors play Russian characters? The context of my ananlysis is the strained relationship between Poland and Russia that resulted from a centuries-long colonial relationship between these two countries, and was represented during the postwar period of People’s Poland in official discourses as friendship. While the partitions period was arguably quite different from what is usually understood as colonialism, the postwar period is seen as semicolonial, as the Soviet Union dominated Poland by both political and military power.1 I will discuss Polish actors playing Russian characters via two case studies: Jerzy Skolimowski in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007) and Jerzy Stuhr in Roman Kachanov’s Ar’e (2008). These films provide an interesting comparison, because the former, an American/ Canadian production, offers an “external” perception of Russians and Russianness, while the latter is a Russian film. Furthermore, the two actors playing Russians are also very different. Skolimowski is predominantly known as a film director, although he also played roles in his own films.2 Stuhr was first an actor, who moved to directing in his middle age, largely influenced by his mentor, Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Transnational Actors and Actresses While transnational directors have been given considerable space in academic writings, little attention has been granted to actors’ cross-cultural journeys, and practically nothing to Eastern European actors playing in foreign films. Therefore, to seek conceptual tools to discuss the cases of Skolimowski and Stuhr, I turn to the recent studies concerning actresses

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from Southeast Asia playing in foreign films. In particular, Dale Hudson describes how Maggie Cheung’s performance in Olivier Assayas’s film Irma Vep is a case of nonacting; the actress is employed “not to act so as much as to be herself.”3 Furthermore, Hudson observes that Maggie Cheung “is marked as Chinese in ways that [Julia] Roberts, comparably, is not marked as American.”4 Where Roberts can be “just a girl” in, for example, Notting Hill (1999), Maggie Cheung is marked as Chinese, despite her Hong Kong national identity and fluency in English. Of course, Hudson’s assessment is made from a particular position—that of a Western spectator looking at an Asian actress. For Hong Kong audiences Maggie Cheung most likely offers a different set of associations. The issue of what an actor signifies for different categories of viewers is thrown into sharp relief by the case of actors/actresses playing characters who belong to a different, yet similar nationality than their own. One such case is the American production of Memories of a Geisha (2005), in which three Chinese actresses play Japanese geishas. Song Hwee Lim sees this ethnic (mis)casting strategy as “a marketing ploy that deliberately plays/preys on the predictable nationalistic outcry stirred up in both countries.”5 I adhere to Lim’s approach of going beyond misrepresentation and miscasting. Such choices have to do with cultural strategies rather than political incorrectness, as Hollywood has a long tradition of racist casting—for example, Korean American actor Philip Ahn was the Hollywood face of Asia cast in multiple national roles. Such masquerading identities can cause offense to groups that identify with a nationalistic purity, but they also can bring pleasure to those who recognize such identities at all. In the case of Philip Ahn, Hye Seung Chung argues, “we should not downplay the significance of the empowering pleasure (however qualified it may be) that the in-group spectator derives from the recognition of masquerade.”6 Therefore, contemporary Asian American actors, such as Russell Wong, are faced with the same duality of fear and fantasy of miscegenation. Wong’s role as Kai in Romeo Must Die (2000), for example, “is like other Hollywood mixed-race characters who are deceitful and dangerous in their drive to achieve the privileges of whiteness, a pattern the D. W. Giffith’s Birth of a Nation established in 1915.”7 Lim recognizes, however, that a practice of casting an actor as a character belonging to a different ethnicity or nationality than that of an actor raises issues of ethnic belonging, the global economy, and cross-cultural flows of stardom. Performing somebody of a different nationality remains in a space of in-betweenness, where the performance is accentuated, or problematized, through ethnic (mis)casting.8 The idea behind such a casting strategy is to “pass oneself off”—namely, to be acceptable

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as someone of a different nationality or ethnicity, but without doing a complete ethnic or national makeover. Actors play fictional characters and as such are always “playing someone else,” but in closing this gap between real person and fictional character, acting techniques enable the actor to “be” the character to such a degree there is virtually no distinction between actor and character—say, between Robert de Niro and Jack La Motta in Raging Bull (1980). Such performances are valued for their truthful representation of the character, but this aspect gets undermined by cross-cultural acting that disregards national and ethnic identities. I will call this type of acting “passing with a difference.” Situating the performances of Skolimowski and Stuhr within this framework, I will argue that the marking and unmarking of national differences is taking place at two levels, referring first to their nationality as Poles, and second to their Eastern Europeanness. Moreover, Skolimowski and Stuhr bring to their characters also their individual qualities and acting skills, which I will label their “cinematic capital.” I shall now discuss this concept in the context of Eastern European filmmakers.

Cinematic Capital Stars and the star system have mainly been of interest to scholars of Hollywood and more recently Western European cinemas, as demonstrated respectively by Richard Dyer’s seminal books, Stars and Heavenly Bodies, and Ginette Vincendeau’s study of stars in French cinema.9 Hence, these studies are of limited use for this research. That said, with respect to Gérard Depardieu, for example, Vincendeau points to a “perceived closeness of Depardieu the actor to Depardieu the man,” which adds authenticity to his performance.10 In assessing the role of the star actor or actress, social class and off-screen biography, as well as their training and theater foundation, are drawn out to analyze individual actors’ performances. I want to add here the casting strategies of individual films that take into account the off- and on-screen persona of actors’ films, what I call “cinematic capital.” The term cinematic capital is derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital; it can be regarded as a specific form of cultural capital.11 If Bourdieu’s cultural capital consists of formal education, social status, and acquired knowledge, then the cinematic capital of Skolimowski and Stuhr would include formal training, status in the film industry, and previous acting experience.12 All these factors affect casting decisions for film production, but in the case of transnational production, the third element is of special

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importance: the experience an actor carries from film to film. In the remaining part of my analysis I will discuss what constitutes the specific cinematic capital of Skolimowski and Stuhr that made them attractive as actors to Cronenberg and Kachanov, respectively.

Skolimowski’s Russianness Jerzy Skolimowski is associated with the Polish New Wave of the 1960s, to which he contributed by directing four films and playing in three of them. Further indication of Skolimowski’s closeness to the Polish New Wave is through his forced migration from Poland and through Roman Polanski, with whom he collaborated on Knife in the Water (Nóż w wodzie, 1962). Another well-known fact is that before moving to filmmaking, he was a semiprofessional boxer. This experience strengthened his connection with discontented youths and the reputation as a nonconformist filmmaker and man that he enjoyed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He was perceived as a tormented artist, whose wild-card attitudes made his life difficult. The first appearance that Skolimowski made as an actor in a film made outside Poland and not directed by him was in Volker Schlöndorff’s Circle of Deceit (Die Fälschung, 1981). The precise reasons why Schlöndorff offered the role to Skolimowski are unknown, but undoubtedly a factor was Schlöndorff’s close links to Poland and the Polish film industry, as evidenced by his frequent use of Polish actors in his films and even his shooting of films in Poland. For example, Schlöndorff’s most famous film, The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel, 1979), was set in Gdańsk.13 In Circle of Deceit, Skolimowski plays alongside Bruno Ganz as Hoffman, a photographer who works for Ganz’s character, Georg Laschen, who is a well-known investigative journalist. Laschen is fleeing marital problems at home in Germany by taking a trip to Lebanon as a reporter for a German newspaper. In contrast to Laschen, we never get to know where Hoffman comes from. He joins up with Laschen once the narrative shifts to Beirut, but his nationality is never fully explained. An important characteristic of Hoffman is macho masculinity, which women in the film find attractive. This links Hoffman to the characters played by Skolimowski in his Polish films and, on a director-to-director level, to Hands Up! (Ręce do góry, 1981), in which Skolimowski uses clips from Circle of Deceit. Hoffman’s command of English suggests a British identity, which would also concur with Skolimowski’s residence at the time, as he lived in

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London during the shooting of Circle of Deceit. More significantly, however, his name suggests that he is Jewish, although this claim is also contested during the narrative. The questioning of national identity happens when Hoffman is cornered by Palestinian soldiers and protests wildly at the accusation of being an Israeli spy. He even suggests that he will take his pants off to prove that he is not circumcised. This action does not happen, though, and ultimately we cannot pin down Hoffman’s allegiances either to a specific country or to an ethnic group. As a result, his identity remains ambiguous, with traces of various identities inscribed in his voice and body. Within the narrative, Skolimowski’s character functions as a mirror to Laschen, the main protagonist, who is finding it more and more difficult to operate in the political morass of Beirut. Hoffman is described in the film as a person who is daring and who uses unorthodox ways of getting his pictures. Although this does not mean that Skolimowski plays himself, it nonetheless concurs with Skolimowski’s image as a nonconformist filmmaker.14 In turn, Schlöndorff featured in Skolimowski’s prologue to Hands Up! These guest appearances in each other’s films suggest a transfer of cinematic capital. By referring to Schlöndorff and Circle of Deceit, Skolimowski underscores their association, which goes beyond an individual film, but pertains to a shared cultural background—namely, coming from Central Europe as well as sharing an approach to filmmaking. In the prologue to Hands Up!, Skolimowski also points to his role in Circle of Deceit and his entire acting career as a means to survive economically. He tells in the voice-over: “I was scraping a living the best I could.”15 Consequently, he conveys an idea that there might be an emotional distance between his roles in the films of other directors and his true beliefs. One can see this distance in Circle of Deceit and Skolimowski’s subsequent films, in which he barely conceals the fact he is not a professional actor. Skolimowski’s next role in another director’s film was as Colonel Chaikov in Taylor Hackford’s White Nights (1985), which would become paradigmatic for the roles Skolimowski would receive from then onward. In particular, it bears close resemblance to the character Stepan in Eastern Promises. Chaikov is the mean KGB officer that is assigned to get the Russian ballet dancer, Nikolai (Kolya) Rodchenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), who defected to the West, to dance again at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Chaikov places Kolya with an African American tap dancer (Gregory Hines), who “defected” from the United States to the USSR. Skolimowski’s role is that of the intermediary; deep down Chaikov is hostile to both of them and to what they represent. For Chaikov there

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is only one focus of allegiance, which is, of course, Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire”: the Soviet Union.16 At the same time he has to build a working relationship with them, so that Kolya will perform in the Soviet Union. Chaikov fails in this, however. The Polish director was employed in this role on account of his Slavic looks and proficiency in Russian. However, for those who are familiar with Skolimowski’s filmmaking career, he comes across as a “Russian with a difference.” This was recognized, for example, by the New York Times reviewer who wrote that Skolimowski “is so reasonable as the KGB fellow that you believe him.”17 Although the review is positive, it points to its author’s awareness of Skolimowski’s difference—not being a “true Russian,” but a Pole playing a Russian very well. For a “gentile” (i.e., non-Slavic) group of spectators, Skolimowski’s performance may well pass off as an authentic Soviet KGB officer, but a better-informed group of viewers will note that his character is a KGB officer “with a difference.” He speaks the Russian language with an accent, and at one point we see Chaikov shadowboxing in front of a mirror, which is a marker of Skolimowski’s persona both on and off the screen. While Hines and Baryshnikov dance together in the studio, performing both the symbiosis and the difference of the two dancing bodies, Skolimowski is fully dressed in a track suit. Chaikov’s body is hidden from us, as it would confuse the spectacle of white Russian body and black American body. These references are only detectable, though, by those who know Skolimowski the filmmaker. The strategy behind casting Skolimowski was not different from that of employing other actors in the roles of Russians in White Nights; they were chosen on account of having “new faces” and looking somewhat foreign, meaning not American, like Isabella Rosellini, who plays the Russian girlfriend of the American dancer. The role in White Nights led to Skolimowski’s being employment in other roles of a similar type— namely, as a “nonnative” and often someone with an unidentifiable nationality. In Big Shots (1987), he plays a trenchcoat thug without a clear nationality attached, neither Polish nor Russian. He is the inventor of a translation machine in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996), a wedding minister in Mika Kaurismäki’s L.A. without a Map (1998), and finally a Russian agricultural professor in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls (2000). In some of these roles his character introduces comedy into the film. This is facilitated by the previously mentioned distance between Skolimowski and his character, which adds absurdity to the situations in which he appears on screen. Often his roles evoke his persona as a Polish director. On such occasions, Skolimowski can be regarded as substituting

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for, or gesturing toward, the directors of the films in which he appears: Burton, Kaurismäki, and Schnabel. While mainstream production, such as the aforementioned Big Shots, typically does not witness such intertextuality, indies and art house films thrive on the adoption of cinematic capital. This is most clearly seen in the case of Julian Schnabel, who is also a painter and shares affinities and concerns with Skolimowski, such as freedom of expression and an adversarial position toward the totalitarian state, whether it is communist Poland or communist Cuba. This is what Schnabel underlines in commenting on the “celebrity” filmmakers, from Hector Babenco to Sean Penn, who were employed in Before Night Falls: “Everybody [who played in this film],” says Schnabel, “has been involved in some kind of fight for freedom.”18 Thus, it makes sense to ask Skolimowski to star as a Russian agricultural professor, teaching the young Cuban gay poet Reinaldo Arenas the wonders of communist farming. This paradigm, however, as I will argue, is abandoned in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. Despite being modeled on Colonel Chaikov in White Nights, Skolimowski’s character in Eastern Promises lacks the explicit closeness to Skolimowski the filmmaker. In Cronenberg’s film, Skolimowski is somewhat disconnected from his cinematic capital.

Eastern Promises In an interview with Jordan Riefe on the now defunct UGO Entertainment website, David Cronenberg highlighted the importance of casting: Casting is a huge part of being a good director, and it’s not very well known. Most people think of cameras and angles and stuff when they think of directors. But really the casting is so important. You can doom yourself to mediocrity by casting the wrong people, and yet there’s no guideline. There’s no rulebook that tells you how to cast a movie. It’s all instinct and intuition and sort of education.19

When making casting decisions, directors have to balance the requirements for the “authenticity” of the characters and the ability of an actor to generate publicity for the film, even to impart star quality to the film. “Authenticity” does not necessarily require employing Russian actors for the roles of Russian characters, but only actors who convey Russianness for the film’s target audience. Thus, Cronenberg’s “ethnic miscasting” of a Pole, a Frenchman, a German American, and a half Dane as his leading

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Russians functions on a similar level as the casting of Chinese actresses in the roles of Japanese geishas. According to Cronenberg, casting in Eastern Promises was about “looking for faces that are not going to be overtly familiar. It’s kind of interesting to do that, to find faces, especially from North America, that people would not know, that they hadn’t seen these people before. It helps to make them be real as characters, if they’re not really stars who have their own star personality.”20 Elsewhere, Cronenberg states that he “would love to have had more Russians and Eastern Europeans in those roles, but it’s very hard to find Russian actors who speak English well enough to act in English.”21 In other words, Cronenberg selects actors who do not sport universal Julia Roberts–like characteristics, but who would pass as Russians, even if with a difference. This is a difference that the vast majority of the audience would accept. It is in the context of such a casting strategy that Skolimowski appealed to Cronenberg as a potential actor for playing the anxious, racist, and hypochondriac Uncle Stepan. “Out of the blue,” says Cronenberg, “I somehow thought of Jerzy. I didn’t know if he was still alive, still acting. He hadn’t made a movie in a long time. Sure enough he was still alive, and he knew my director of photography, Peter [Suschitzky].”22 The reference to Suschitzky is important from my perspective, because it points to the fact that Skolimowski’s career as a British director who made such films as The Shout (1978), Moonlighting (1982), and Success Is the Best Revenge (1984) put him in contact with people who proved useful in his subsequent career as an actor. In a wider sense, it demonstrates that being part of a filmmaking community that reaches beyond cultural and national borders is an important part of an actor’s cinematic capital. However, it is still Skolimowski’s Colonel Chaikov that is cited as making an imprint on Cronenberg’s mind: “I remember, in the ’60’s and ’70’s, he was a director. I really admired him and I was watching a lot of his movies. He had acted in some of his own movies and had been in a movie called White Nights that Taylor Hackford directed, where he played a KGB agent and I thought he was convincing in that.”23 Ironically, Skolimowski’s abilities with the English language, rather than his Russian skills, are what make him perfect for the role in Eastern Promises. The Russianness of Russian characters in Eastern Promises is conveyed by using ungrammatical English and speaking English with an accent. In Eastern Promises, the Russian diaspora in London is defined by its use of this second-class English, racism toward people of color, and homophobia. Stepan conforms to this image. He is an ex-KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union to the West during the Cold War. The reasons for his defection are not spelled out in the film, but we might guess that he

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Figure 10.1. Screenshot from Eastern Promises (dir. Cronenberg, 2007): Jerzy Skolimoski

did so in search of a better life or because he is Jewish. Again, it appears that Skolimowski does not identify fully with this character, or even that he is more distanced from him than from other Russians he has played in his career. His performance verges on camp, as if he would like to make the viewers aware that he is not Russian but is only playing at being Russian, and this position is somewhat ambiguous for a Pole. As if reprising the KGB officer of White Nights for what are now postcommunist audiences (a now former dissident playing a now former KGB officer!), Skolimowski’s performance in Eastern Promises severs the link between on-screen actor and off-screen persona. There is no reference to Skolimowski’s boxing as in White Nights or his fight for freedom as in Before Night Falls. As an actor in Eastern Promises, Skolimowski participates in the perpetuation of the Western stereotype of Russians as backward, homophobic, and racist. For example, Stepan remarks about his niece’s former black boyfriend: “It is not natural to mix races.” The question arises whether, due to being a Pole, his presence in the film offers an additional meaning to the viewers familiar with his career. I would offer two competing interpretations. According to one, he projects an image of not only Russians but all Eastern Europeans or ex-communists as backward, homophobic, and racist. Such a reading is supported by the fact that some of Skolimowski’s own work, especially The Lightship (1985), contains homophobic undertones.24 In the second reading,

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Skolimowski’s unflattering portrayal of Russians can be regarded as a kind of subtle revenge of a colonized Pole, who felt superior over his Eastern neighbor yet could not openly reveal his sense of superiority toward his Russian colonizer and neighbor. However, this latter reading would deny Skolimowski’s maternal link to Russia. I adhere to the first reading, but it should be pointed out that homophobia is an intrinsic part of the narrative plot of the film—for example, gay-friendly Britain is blamed for the downfall of the prodigy son of a Russo-British mafia boss. Furthermore, racism was an important part of the plot of White Nights, where Chaikov’s racist attitude toward the African American dancer is revealed as quintessential of the Soviet society that the KGB officer upholds. According to many popular Western films, postcommunist or not, Russians in particular and Eastern Europeans in general are racist and homophobic. But rather than assigning this bigotry to Skolimowski and his cinematic capital, I would argue, along the lines of historian Larry Wolff, that, in these films, the bigotry rests on centuries-long Eurocentric perceptions of Slavs as barbaric and uncivilized.25

Stuhr’s Russian Stardom The most important elements of Jerzy Stuhr’s cinematic capital are his associations with the Cinema of Moral Concern, his collaboration with Krzysztof Kieślowski, and his numerous roles in Polish comedies, such as Sex Mission (Seksmisja, 1984) and Déjà vu (1988), both directed by Juliusz Machulski.26 He owes his popularity in the Soviet Union and Russia and subsequent offers to play in Russian films to all of the above factors. Stuhr’s versatility is important to underline when dealing with the performance in Roman Kachanov’s Ar’e. Not unlike Gérard Depardieu, Stuhr combines seriousness with comic elements. According to Vincendeau, Depardieu’s Loubard (comic thug) performance is defined in terms of “an aggressive, and yet agile, display of his massive, thick-set body.”27 Added to this is a sexual potency, which differs from the appeal of the heartthrob, good-looking pinup boy/actor. By comparison, Stuhr’s characters tend to be lacking in sex appeal, or their alleged sexual energy or toughness is a source of comedy. Such is the case in Sex Mission (seen by nearly 35 million in the Soviet Union), where Stuhr plays Maximilian Paradys, a womanizer who attempts to take advantage of the fact that he finds himself in a male-free state, populated by attractive virgins.28 His exploits, however, turn out to be funny, as it is difficult to believe that the women will fall under his spell.

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In Déjà vu, Stuhr plays Johnny “the hit man” Pollack, who goes to Odessa to eliminate a former gangster member who has ratted on the Chicago mafia. He goes under the cover of visiting the grave of his Polish ancestors and as a butterfly collector (a somewhat ill-disguised Nabokov figure). It feels almost like he plays two different roles in this film: whenever he appears in one disguise, he makes the audience aware of his alter ego. The overall consequence of this role-switching is the sense that we are dealing with a star who is able to impersonate different characters while remaining himself. The impression that we are dealing with an actor rather than a character is augmented by Johnny’s heavily accented Russian speech. Besides, everybody in the film is speaking with an accent, especially the American mob (mostly Polish actors), which adds to the comedic effect. This accented speech is a marker of the Polishness of Stuhr’s character, which I earlier labeled as “passing with a difference.” Another example of Stuhr’s self-conscious performance is a situation in which Stuhr turns to the camera saying, “Everybody is the police here. Fantastic country!” Such words cannot be assigned to either the butterfly professor or the American gangster, but rather are attributed to Stuhr playing a Pole commenting sarcastically on the political organization of his “friendly” colonizer. In these performances, both of which are familiar to Russian audiences, it is the comedic elements of Stuhr’s cinematic capital that are accentuated. A sign of Stuhr’s star status in Soviet and Russian cinema is reflected in the fact that he is included in the popular pantheon of Russian actors and actresses, predominantly citing his roles in Sex Mission and Déjà vu. These films, according to the RUSactors website, have reached cult status in Russia.29 Stuhr’s own filmmaking, such as The List of Adulteresses (Spis cudzołożnic, 1994) and Love Stories (Historie miłosne, 1997), belongs to a funny-but-serious cinema, in which national stereotypes are displayed and examined. In particular, in these films he created the character of a serious and well-meaning man who is thwarted by adverse circumstances: a character well known from Polish literature and cinema, of which the most famous example is Piszczyk from Andrzej Munk’s Bad Luck (Zezowate szczęście, 1960). Not surprisingly, in Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman (Il Caimano, 2007) Stuhr plays a Polish producer, whose national identity serves to provide the outsider viewpoint on the Italian self, just as Radziwiłowicz did in Godard’s Passion (1982). In Ar’e this situation becomes more complex, as Stuhr’s character is composed of layers of identities. He is a Jew, in addition to being a Lithuanian expatriate

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living in Moscow since the end of World War  II who has assimilated many Russian customs. Before I move to the character Stuhr plays in Ar’e, however, it is necessary to introduce the film’s director. Roman Kachanov is the son of a well-known Soviet cartoonist, who also started his career by making animated films. Yet, the hallmark in Kachanov’s oeuvre become not animation, but quirky live-action comedies furnished with a strong tint of the absurd. Kachanov’s comedy is constructed by establishing an absurd situation and then sustaining it throughout an entire film. Such films as Demobbed (DMB, 2000) and Down House (Daun Khaus, 2001) conform to this description.30 Stuhr plays General Ivolgin in the latter, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot that attempted to update the famous work to contemporary times. Down House gives the first hint of Stuhr’s star persona with Russian audiences, indicated by the fact that he has his name on the poster of the film’s release. It is Stuhr’s name as a renowned Polish actor that functions as one of the film’s attractions. Within the film, Stuhr’s character is dubbed into Russian with no audible Polish accent. His voice is always a little out of sync, but never more than the voices of the other actors. Postproduction speech synchronization is a distinct feature of Kachanov’s films. Sound and image have a precarious relationship and thereby add to the grotesqueness of the characters and to the audiences’ distantiation from the spectacle. The casting of Stuhr is in line with Kachanov’s strategy of distancing himself from the traditions of high art by adapting Dostoyevsky’s iconic novel in a contemporary/futuristic setting. Nevertheless, despite the iconoclasm of the adaptation, the film remains faithful to Dostoyevsky by focusing on the main questions pertinent to his work, such as the relationship between materialistic pursuit and salvation. Kachanov’s films, including Down House, through the use of satire and the grotesque, criticize the greed, corruption, and hollowness of postcommunist Russia. Thus, they have much in common with the films Stuhr himself directed, such as Tomorrow’s Weather (Pogoda na jutro, 2003) and Twists of Fate (Korowód, 2007), which also offer scathing attacks on postcommunist reality, though in Poland instead of Russia.31 However, Stuhr’s films are less funny and more moralistic than Kachanov’s; in the former the moral message appears to be only a by-product of producing a comedy. In Ar’e, with Kachanov as the director and Stuhr as the star, the two personalities combine to produce a film that, similar to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella, 1997), has a strong moral message counterpoised with the hands-off distance of the comic take on the Holocaust.

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Ar’e As a “surprising and moving statement about the cruel fate of the Jewish people in the 20th century,” Ar’e is an interesting case to analyze since it was fully supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture, as opposed to being an Israeli-Russian coproduction.32 Stuhr plays Russian-Lithuanian Izraelia (Izya) Ar’e, who goes in search of his lost love—the love he knew while hiding on a roof in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. Izya, now a chief surgeon of a leading Moscow hospital, gets diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which tricks the flow of memory and the search for his childhood sweetheart Sonya. It is not that Izya has forgotten her. In fact, he frequently converses with the portraits on his studio desk: his grandfather, his mother and father, and his younger self, standing alongside Sonya. These still images are animated and alive during the conversation with Izya, which is a recurrent feature of Kachanov’s cinema, mixing animation with live action. In Ar’e these animated photographs are Izya’s direct linkage to his family, of which he is the sole survivor. With his young Gentile Russian wife, Izya travels to Israel to find Sonya, who emigrated after the war. Sonya has a son, who is the spitting image of the young farmer (played by the same actor) with whom they were hiding and with whom Sonya slept before he was killed by the Lithuanian militia. Her promiscuity was the main reason for Izya’s parting with Sonya rather than emigrating to Israel with her. To make the reunion with Sonya possible, Izya “marries” off his pregnant wife to Sonya’s son, but the wedding is bombed by a Palestinian terrorist and Sonya is killed. Later on, on his deathbed from cancer in Israel, Izya urges the young couple to have many children, and the film ends with the two—Izya’s ex-wife and her new husband—visiting the grave of Izya with the first child of their marriage, who is Izya’s son, while another child is evidently on its way. Although Ar’e is often accounted for as a coproduction between Russia and Israel, in reality it is closer to being an exclusively Russian film. Despite the film’s multiple languages and shooting locations in Lithuania, Russia, and Israel, it is produced exclusively by Studio Gor’kii and Polygon Eurasia.33 The Russian state funding and Kachanov’s RussianJewish identity make the film an expression of the Russian-Jewish selfrepresentational mode, as identified by Olga Gershenson. Examining Jewish representation in Russian cinema, Gershenson divides her analysis of Russian films concerning Jewish characters into two modes: selfrepresentation (when the Russian-Jewish director makes a film about Russian-Jewish characters) and representation by the Other (when the Jewish-Russian characters are portrayed by a Gentile Russian director).34

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Figure 10.2. Screenshot from Ar’e (dir. Kachanov, 2008): Jerzy Stuhr

In constructing a Jewish mode and a Gentile mode, this binary setup excludes the gray zone of transnational production practices.35 By contrast, I will consider Ar’e as being a borderline film, as displaying features of both modes of practice. By promoting the progression of the Israeli state explicitly through the narrative, Kachanov plays ironically with issues of Jewish repatriation. The casting strategy of Stuhr to perform the leading role is part of this ironic play, adding ambiguity to the film’s mode of representation. As with Lim’s Chinese geishas, the casting strategy of Ar’e accentuates transnationality by underlining differences and accentedness. In the same way that Columbia Pictures used the stardom of Li Gong and Ziyi Zhang as the attraction despite (or because of) their Chinese national identity, Stuhr is cast in Ar’e as the star attraction by the Russian director because he is Polish. It is the stardom of Stuhr in Russia that makes him ideal for Kachanov to project a detectable transnational difference. Accordingly, the camerawork in Ar’e constructs Stuhr as the star: the target audiences are meant to notice him as a star first and Jewish-Lithuanian second. For example, when Izya has been diagnosed with cancer and he begins his search for Sonya, we see him at his desk, but as soon as he starts making phone calls to Israel we get a close-up of Stuhr’s face, which is investigated even further with an additional zoom on Stuhr’s eyes, nose, and mouth, filling the whole screen. As Dyer has argued, the close-up is emphatic for the creation of film stars in Hollywood.36 Interestingly, the absence of this practice

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is what distinguishes European stardom from that of Hollywood. Vincendeau points out that French cinema “tends to place stars among an ensemble of actors rather than isolate them with close-ups.”37 This distinction would seem to exclude Russian cinema from the pantheon of European cinema, to which many would object, but I believe that Kachanov is making a point with the extreme close-up of Stuhr’s face, manifesting both external projection of international Jewry and particular internal self-perception of Jewish people in Russia. In the scene that follows, we get not only a close-up of Stuhr but also a nearly 360-degree pan-shot of Izya seated at his retirement ceremony, enduring a roast from his Muscovite employers. It is obvious that Ar’e plays around ideas of film star and national identity, and Stuhr’s role is intrinsically part of this project. Izya’s nationality (natsional’nost) as Jewish-Lithuanian, as opposed to Jewish-Russian, is underlined through Stuhr’s Polish identity. Another way in which the film constructs national difference is through depiction of Stuhr’s body. While Izya suspects his young wife of adultery, he has a love relationship with the female doctor who diagnoses his cancer. Stuhr’s character has a certain sexual potency, which is also retained in his surname Ar’e, which means “Lion” in biblical Hebrew. Ar’e, then, draws on Stuhr’s cinematic capital as the caricature of a lady’s man with a magnetism that exceeds that of most men with an equivalent body type. This not only fits in with Stuhr’s cinematic capital; it also corresponds to a Jewish male stereotype as oversexualized. Sander Gilman, in a survey of German literature, points out that for many male Jewish writers, “the body of the Jew, with all of its implications, itself becomes an icon of the perceived and internalized difference of the sexuality of the Jewish male.”38 The body is the difference for Ashkenazi Jews (European Jews of German descent) and what separates Jews from European Gentiles. In particular for male Jews, circumcision is the ultimate visual sign of Jewishness (think of Skolimowski as Hoffman in Circle of Deceit). However, this bodily difference is not often highlighted in cinema, the exception being Agnieszka Holland’s Europe, Europe (Europa, Europa, 1991), where we see the protagonist hiding his circumcision. In addition, Israeli Jews perceive themselves as more virile than Gentiles, a self-perception that is alluded to in Ar’e. Once Izya is in Israel, his body is accentuated as white Ashkenazi thanks to its being pale and corpulent. We see this quality especially in the scene at the Dead Sea, when Izya is bathing, or more correctly, floating, while Sonya is on the beach, disposing of her Israeli lover and employee, the dark-skinned and dark-mustached Haim.

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On the Kino website, some online reviewers have expressed their admiration for the film. It “has soul,” as one commentator points out, while another underlines Jerzy Stuhr’s part as a reason why the film is commendable.39 Thanks to his performance, the film avoids the dangers of most films that deal with the subject of Israel—namely, of being either anti-Semitic or apologetic for the State of Israel. Instead, it furnishes the film with subtlety and ambiguity. These qualities were recognized by Andrei Rogatchevskii, who in his KinoKultura review of the film wrote that “Kachanov deserves credit for a brave attempt to make a Holocaust film with a difference.”40 It is my argument that casting Jerzy Stuhr in the leading role is largely what makes this difference. Stuhr’s “Polish” body, his Polish star name, and his cinematic capital become the chief means through which difference and ambiguity can be underlined. However, these qualities were appreciated only by the critics and festival audiences, as the film was not seen by general audiences, getting only a very limited release in Russia. Ar’e won the viewer’s prize at the Amur Autumn Film Forum in Blagoveshchensk and got a favorable screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival, but without generating further interest.

Two Jerzys Passing with a Difference In conclusion I want to reiterate that there are many factors that account for the differences and similarities between Jerzy Skolimowski and Jerzy Stuhr’s performances. While Skolimowski is an epitome of the outcast nonconformist filmmaker, Stuhr is associated more with the mainstream of Polish cinema. Skolimowski plays predominantly in North American films and Stuhr in European films. Skolimowski’s characters conform to the Western stereotype of Russians; Stuhr’s roles are more in line with the way Russian perceive themselves. Together, they perfectly illustrate the opportunities and limitations for Polish actors in the transnational film industry. They also demonstrate that the way actors are used in cinema—especially those actors whose roles in foreign films represent a different ethnicity/nationality than their own—depends on their cinematic capital. This is because transnational actors have to somehow compensate for the fact of difference, just as the Polish actors Skolimowski and Stuhr did, in playing Russians. The typical result of such performance is “passing with a difference”—namely, incarnating well a specific type in the eyes of international audiences, but also bringing to their character an ambiguous, if not subversive, element.

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Notes 1. On Russian postcolonialism see David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet: Towards a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28; and Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). 2. Ewa Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 16. 3. Dale Hudson, “Just Play Yourself, ‘Maggie Cheung’: Irma Vep, Rethinking Transnational Stardom and Unthinking National Cinemas,” Screen 47, no. 2 (2006): 214; emphasis in original. 4. Ibid., 223. 5. Song Hwee Lim, “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transgender?” New Cinemas 5, no. 1 (2007): 43. 6. See Hye Seung Chung, Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-ethnic Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 55. 7. Mary C. Beltrán, “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious (and Multiracial) Will Survive,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 58. 8. Lim, “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transgender?” 48. This inquiry is part of a larger search for what the term “transnational” stands for. Elsewhere Lim together with Will Higbee have elaborated that “the term ‘transnational’ is, on occasion, used simply to indicate international coproduction or collaboration between technical and artistic personnel from across the world, without any real consideration of what the aesthetic, political or economic implications of such transnational collaboration might mean—employing a difference that, we might say, makes no difference at all.” See Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2010): 10. 9. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1979) and Heavenly Bodies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986); Ginette Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London: Continuum, 2000). 10. Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom, 220. 11. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58. 12. Jen Webb, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher, Understanding Bourdieu (London: Sage Publications, 2002). 13. Schlöndorff was recently awarded the Viadrina prize at the European University Viadrina for his service as a “film-diplomat” in German-Polish relations. On that occasion, Schlöndorff cited Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanal as a major influence on his filmmaking.

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14. Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski. 15. Skolimowski’s Success Is the Best Revenge (1983) nearly ruined the filmmaker financially and thus forced him to take acting roles. 16. White Nights is one of the films that Aleksandr Fedorov analyzes as an instance of Western screening of the Cold War conflict. He states that the film became “a vivid illustration of Reagan’s legendary thesis on the Soviet Union as ‘the Evil Empire.’” While Fedorov mentions the other stars of the film—Baryshnikov, Hines, Rosellini, and Helen Mirren—he makes no reference to Skolimowski. See Aleksandr Fedorov, “Transformatsii obraza Rossii na zapadnom ekrane: Ot epokhi ideologicheskoi konfrontatsii (1946–1991) do sovremennogo etapa (1992–2010),” Informatsiya dlya vsekh (Moscow: MOO, 2010), 57, online at http://www.ifap.ru/pr/2010/n100115b.pdf (accessed July 19, 2013). 17. Vincent Canby, “Baryshnikov in ‘White Nights’: Tale of Two Defectors,” New York Times, November 22, 1985. 18. Sidney Woody, “A Full Color Palette: Painter-Director Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls,” Austin Chronicle, February 9, 2001. Tim Burton says that for Mars Attacks!, “I sort of sectioned off the casting into two different types of people: people who I like, and then people who I thought represented certain aspects of culture and society that were more satirical.” See Burton on Burton, ed. Mark Salisbury (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 152. 19. Jordan Riefe, “David Cronenberg Interview,” UGO Entertainment (n.d.), accessed February 8, 2011, http://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/? id=17822§ionId=2. 20. Ibid. 21. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Interview with David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen: From Russia with Lugs,” Combustible Celluloid, August 24, 2007, http://www.combustiblecelluloid.com/interviews/cronenbergviggo.shtml. 22. Ibid.; on Peter Suschitzky, see also Duncan Petrie, The British Cinematographer (London: BFI, 1996), 141–42. 23. Riefe, “David Cronenberg Interview.” 24. Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski, 129; Peter Christensen, “Skolimowski’s The Lightship and Joseph Conrad,” in Before the Wall Came Down: Soviet and East European Filmmakers Working in the West, ed. Graham Petrie and Ruth Dwyer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 85–102. 25. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 26. On Kieślowski see Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 202. 27. Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom, 219. 28. Viewership is based on figures on http://www.kinopoisk.ru, accessed October 8, 2013.

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212 Polish International Coproductions and Presence in Foreign Films 29. RUSactors, Aktery sovetskogo i rossiiskogo Kino, “Jerzy Stuhr,” accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.rusactors.ru/a-z/shtur/. 30. They were cowritten with Ivan Okhlobystin, who also starred in the films. He later renounced his film work and served as a priest in the Orthodox Church in Moscow. 31. Ewa Mazierska, Postcommunist Polish Cinema: From Pavement Level (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). 32. “Arie,” Jewish Film Archive Online, accessed July 19, 2013, http:// www.jewishfilm.com/jz43.html. 33. Studio Polygon, which is at times cited as coproducing the film, was formed by Sergei Khotimskii and Maksim Garanin in 1999 while shooting Kachanov’s Demobbed (DMB, 2000). Khotimskii was also the producer on Ar’e, thus creating a line to Russian cinema rather than to Russian-Israeli transnational filmmaking. 34. Olga Gershenson, “Ambivalence and Identity in Russian-Jewish Cinema,” in Jewish Cultural Studies, vol. 1, Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation, ed. Simon  J. Bronner (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 175–95. 35. See Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 36. Dyer, Stars, 16–17. 37. Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom, 10. 38. Sander L. Gilman, Jews in Today’s German Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 88. 39. Kino, “Otzyv o fil’me Ar’e,” accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.kino. ru/forum/0/5/2/347.html. 40. Andrei Rogatchevski, “Roman Kachanov’s Ar’e (2004),” KinoKultura 13 (July 2006), http://www.kinokultura.com/2006/13r-arye.shtml.

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Part Three

Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors

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Chapter Eleven

An Island Near the Left Bank Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank Filmmaker Jonathan Owen In 1959 the notoriously elusive yet evidently fraternal Chris Marker lent both his name and his pet owl Anabase to Walerian Borowczyk’s short animation The Astronauts (Les Astronautes), the Polish director’s first film after his emigration to France. According to Catherine Lupton, Marker cosigned the film as a “favor” to Borowczyk, who then lacked a permit to work in his adopted country.1 Just as Marker provided The Astronauts with one of the creatures particularly privileged in his own cinema, so, a few years later, did Borowczyk’s wife and favored female star Ligia Branice appear briefly in Marker’s celebrated “stills movie” The Pier (La jetée, 1962). These wisps of collaboration point to the underexplored connection between Borowczyk and the “Left Bank Group,” a band of (mostly) French filmmakers, including Marker, who are alternately considered a “subset” of the Nouvelle Vague and its more literary and politically engaged counterpart.2 These gestures not only suggest a shared milieu and real-life sympathies, but also foreground tactics and tropes common to both the Parisian “movement” and the fiercely independent Polish émigré. The contribution of cherished mainstays from one’s domestic life, whether a pet owl or a spouse, points to the modest, artisanal, and “home-made” qualities of Borowczyk’s or Marker’s cinema: to that extent The Astronauts itself, a vignette concerning an eccentric inventor and his little home-made spaceship, is a portrait of the artists involved and the inscription of its own production methods. Even that perverse trading of fetish presences across this film and The Pier, with its implied symmetry or equivalence between feathered mascot and human muse, is apt when one thinks of the equation between Ligia and a caged bird made in the opening montage of Borowczyk’s live-action Blanche (1971), or indeed of Delphine Seyrig’s character A, Ernstian in feathery finery, in

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Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), the most famous Left Bank film of all.3 If Marker’s Anabase seems eminently at home in the Borowczyk universe, this is hardly surprising:4 another owl appears, immobile and uncredited this time, in Borowczyk’s 1963 short Renaissance, and birds and other animals are a recurrent presence throughout this director’s work, all the way up to the rutting horses and priapic monster of the notorious The Beast (La bête, 1975). A regard for the affective and symbolic power of animals connects Borowczyk not only with Marker but also with another Left Bank affiliate, Georges Franju. In a further, equally telling zoological connection, the caged German shepherds of Franju’s Eyes without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1959) will reappear in Borowczyk’s live-action feature debut Goto, Island of Love (Goto, l’île d’amour, 1968), the same wretched motif used twice to symbolize a cruel, tyrannical, and enclosed environment. Personal mascots, wise beings, mute victims of order, erotic avatars of disorder: to describe the shifting, multiple roles and functions of animals in this cinema-cum-bestiary is ultimately to indicate what, in general terms, Borowczyk shares with his Left Bank contemporaries. As this essay will reveal in comparing these auteurs at length, theirs is a cinema at once sensual and intellectual, idiosyncratic and universal, governed by a private logic of fetishism and opening out onto systemic repressions and twentieth-century traumas.

Borowczyk and the Left Bank Group: Points Communs My positioning of Borowczyk among the Left Bank filmmakers is undertaken in the slightly contrite recognition that this group has endured enough controversies of composition already. The Left Bank Group was never a group in any formal, doctrinal sense, and the name itself is a critically imposed label.5 It should be noted, however, that several key Left Bank affiliates (Marker, Resnais, Franju, and Agnès Varda) belonged to, and in Franju’s case helped found, the “Groupe des trente” (Group of Thirty), which lobbied in its 1953 Déclaration to retain institutional measures benefiting short film production and to introduce a qualitybased approach to the funding of shorts. As I shall suggest, Left Bank cinema, like that of Borowczyk, can be considered quintessentially a cinema of the court métrage (short film).6 The filmmakers most commonly claimed as belonging to the Left Bank Group proper are Marker, Resnais, and Varda, long-term friends and sporadic collaborators (as well as suppliers of furtive mutual cameos). Other suggested figures include Franju,

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Jacques Demy, Armand Gatti, William Klein, and several key Resnais collaborators who would become directors themselves: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Henri Colpi, Jean Cayrol, and Marguerite Duras. For my part, Franju seems the least debatable of these choices, while Demy’s grounds for inclusion seem chiefly a matter of his marriage to Varda and his professional apprenticeship (as opposed to the critical background of Godard, Truffaut et al.). The others have some claim on formal or thematic, as well as practical, grounds, the slenderness of Colpi’s and Cayrol’s filmographies or the lumbering failed pop art of such Klein films as Mister Freedom (1969) notwithstanding. Yet rather than intervene in these disputes over inclusion, we might simply observe how the Left Bank Group foregrounds questions about critical classification itself: the group’s problematic, much contested status with regard to both its own composition and its relation to the Nouvelle Vague might even be said to extend the subversive aspect of this cinema, to merge with its more deliberate attempts at questioning the solidity of established categories and systems. Indeed, the attempt to place much Left Bank cinema within existing generic categories is no less challenging than the effort to determine the group’s boundaries. Ironically, Borowczyk’s own resistance to categorization helps recommend his placement among the Left Bank filmmakers, for like them he creates a liminal cinema that settles itself on the borders between forms and incites us to question the nominal separateness of such categories as documentary and fiction, the essay and the narrative film, live-action and animation. If, incidentally, that last pairing might easily be seen as Borowczyk’s concern alone, we must remember that Marker also introduces animated elements into several of his early films, and to equally provocative effect. The technique of animating (or reanimating) still photographs that renders The Astronauts neither a liveaction nor an animated film anticipates a similar manipulation of stills in sequences from Marker’s ¡Cuba Sí ! (1961), and both films utilized the technical skills of the Arcady animation team. These films, along with The Pier, at one level signal the redundancy of trying to distinguish animation from “real” cinema, reminding us that the cinematic apparatus itself is (as Borowczyk puts it) a matter of “animated photographs”; that famous moment in The Pier that teases us with whether a woman’s flickering eye is the effect of “real” movement or “merely” a succession of stills provokes in turn the recognition that film, by its nature, is such a succession of stills. Yet as we shall see, Marker’s or Borowczyk’s liminal aesthetics also participate more generally in an ambivalent, in many ways antagonistic, engagement with classificatory or taxonomic procedures, of which the generic labeling of film criticism stands, for Borowczyk, as

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a particularly despised example. Equally crucial to the confounding of critical distinctions is the restless stylistic and technical hybridity of these filmmakers, who seem, early on at least, virtually to redefine their art from film to film, sequence to sequence. Borowczyk’s shorts, for instance, represent a furious ransacking of the animated repertoire, deploying everything from traditional stop-motion to crude cutout techniques. The Left Bank Group transcends national as well as generic boundaries, contradicting the tight localism implied in its name through its wideranging concerns and transnational identities. Thus any qualms about sullying the “pure” French grouping with the Polish Borowczyk are needless, and Borowczyk’s émigré status proves not aberrant but of the essence. It is not simply that Left Bank cinema’s aesthetics are suffused with the qualities of liminality, fragmentation, and “hybrid excess” that Hamid Naficy identifies as part of the “exilic” or “accented” style.7 Several Left Bank filmmakers were themselves émigrés or of non-French birth (Varda is Belgian, Klein an American, and Duras was born in Indochina), and this is before considering the group’s diegetic geographies and imaginary modes of belonging, which, in contrast to the Hollywood-besotted films of the Cahiers du cinéma group, have a definite “Eastern” bias. Often this means the Far East, whether the China of Marker’s Sunday in Peking (Dimanche à Pekin, 1955), the Japan of Resnais’s Hiroshima My Love (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959) and Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery (Le mystère Koumiko, 1965) and Sunless (Sans soleil, 1982), or the Vietnam of the joint Left Bank effort Far from Vietnam (Loin du Viêt-Nam, 1967).8 But Europe’s own Cold War Other is also a significant point of reference, to the extent that Raymond Durgnat could consider the Left Bank filmmakers “honorary Eastern Europeans.”9 Marker has assumed this virtual identity with playful literalness, having made claims of Eastern European family roots and adopting, in Sunless, the apparently Hungarian alter ego of Sandor Krasna. Specifically Eastern European referents are present in Left Bank cinema, especially in Marker’s work, preoccupied as it is with communism, revolution, and Soviet history. Durgnat, however, seems to base his designation not on literal depictions of the territory but rather on the preponderant motif of the “concentrationary universe,” the constricting, terrible, and artificial space that can serve both to evoke Nazi or Stalinist political tyranny and as the emblem of the more nebulous unfreedoms of routines, “conditioned reflexes,” and cultural systems.10 The motif specifically connects Left Bank cinema with the Eastern European Absurd of Kafka and Mrożek, and again with Borowczyk, whose oeuvre seems only infrequently to emerge from constricted, evenly lit interiors. The penitentiary

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spaces of Angels’ Games (Les jeux des anges, 1964) and Goto, Island of Love are fully invested with the Kafkaesque machineries of repression, and as we shall see, even Borowczyk’s later cinema of erotic “liberation” can plausibly be described as one of cruelty and manipulation. “Concentrationary” space does conjure other, less grave implications in the multivalent art of Borowczyk and the Left Bank, yet one can certainly identify their vision in large part as an antihumanist one of agency and caprice transposed from individuals to systems and mechanisms—in this regard it is unsurprising that Borowczyk, Marker, Franju, and Resnais were all masterful and committed practitioners of the short film, the form perhaps best disposed to forsake the individual drama for the study of structures. This is also a cinema decisively marked by the historical traumas of colonialism, the Holocaust, and totalitarian regimes, where even the retreat to apparently neutral or “apolitical” spaces may yield only a subtler resurfacing of those collective horrors. Is it of any significance that Marienbad, a town in the former Czechoslovakia, gives its name to Resnais’s depiction of a rococo yet deathly and hermetic society mired in clockwork ritual? This immersion in political trauma can be attributed in Borowczyk’s case to the direct experience of communist Poland, in Marker’s to a pronounced concrete and cultural engagement with the world beyond the Iron Curtain, and, more generally, to the average age of these filmmakers. Most of the Left Bank directors were, like Borowczyk, a decade older than their initially breezier Cahiers counterparts, which means the former had experienced World War II and Nazi occupation as adults. It is true that the Left Bank Group seems not only older in years, but “culturally” older, their films being more entrenched in the classical arts of literature and painting than the ostentatiously cinephiliac works of the Cahiers group. Borowczyk, too, has little of the cinephile about him, his points of reference being mainly the fine and graphic arts (unsurprisingly, given his training in painting and lithography) as well as literature: of his live-action features, only Goto and the regrettable aberration Emmanuelle 5 (1987) are not derived in some way from literary works, and Borowczyk’s long association with the French writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues parallels Resnais’s tight-knit collaborations with such literary figures as Duras, Cayrol, and Jorge Semprun. Mandiargues, like Cayrol, had surrealist leanings, while Raymond Queneau and Paul Éluard, whose respective texts accompany Resnais’s shorts Song of Styrene (Le chant du Styrène, 1958) and Guernica (1950), were former members of André Breton’s group.11 This hints at the significant surrealist influence on Borowczyk and the Left Bank Group, though as will be apparent later, Queneau’s

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Figure 11.1. Screenshot from Blanche (dir. Borowczyk, 1971)

involvement with the postsurrealist OuLiPo group, which practiced a literature of elaborate formal constraint, is relevant here too. Resnais, Franju, and Borowczyk were all subject to much praise and attention from the surrealist-oriented critic Robert Benayoun and his colleagues at the journal Positif, the Cahiers directors being, by contrast, the victims of much memorable invective. Visual tropes and styles borrowed from surrealist painters (Ernst, de Chirico, Magritte) are evident in a number of these films, yet surrealist affinities are equally apparent in those disturbing preoccupations and ideas that are often found implicated in representations of the traumatic, concentrationary world. The Left Bank cinema’s aforementioned generic liminality extends into the examination of the boundaries between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, in a return to the same Freudian waters of the uncanny queasily navigated by the original surrealists. Emma Wilson shows, for instance, how the concentration camp theme of Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955) affords a meditation on living death.12 The shock Resnais elicits in confirming that an apparently still image is really a moving one, the corpselike body of a camp inmate still a living one, will be sought again in that previously mentioned flickering of the eye amidst stillness in The Pier, and this last conceit will in turn be echoed precisely by Borowczyk, in the visibly moving eyes of the “dead” Ligia during the tragic finales of both Goto and Blanche. Adopting

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different aesthetic tactics, Last Year at Marienbad, which might be considered the most rarefied zombie film ever made, is a vision of the living dead condemned, in the manner of Freud’s account of the death drive, to compulsive cycles of repetition.13 Hal Foster describes the uncanny as that “point where desire and death interpenetrate in a way that brooks no affirmative reconciliation,” and clearly Left Bank cinema, like that of Borowczyk, has imbibed little of the affirmative tenor or the faith in an eros triumphant that are, after all, only one side of surrealism’s psychic story.14 Instinctual play restages, in stone gardens of delight, the familiar games of subjugation and violence, and the erotic muse proves to be an intimate with death (the multiple tombs of Ligia). A shuttling back and forth in this cinema between personal and political, psychic and collective, reveals a morbid affinity between those realms, as if in meager compensation for the failed reconciliation of the individual and the world. Emmanuelle Riva’s “She” in Hiroshima My Love longs to be devoured and destroyed, as was that once ashen city, while in Muriel, or The Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d’un retour, dir. Resnais, 1963) a man’s imagined lover turns out to be the Algerian girl he tortured as a soldier. If the desiring quest of the Machiavellian Grozo in Goto recalls that of X in Last Year at Marienbad—both films concern a glacially beautiful woman subjected to the obsessive and ultimately sinister pursuit of an outsider—Grozo’s fetishistic expression of his desire recalls Night and Fog. Grozo stuffs his bedroom with the clothes and personal accoutrements of the beloved Glossia (Ligia Branice again), romantic trophies that fragment and reify the very body to which they pay tribute. Such spoils uncomfortably evoke the Nazi-collected piles of spectacles, teeth, and hair seen in Resnais’s film, as does, more precisely still, the use of Glossia’s mother’s cut hair to pad the film’s bizarre fly-trapping boxes. “Disembodied” hair had also played a memorable role in Borowczyk and Jan Lenica’s short House (Dom, 1958). Consciously fostered or not, the visual parallels between the two films foreground the dehumanizing logic of Borowczyk’s images of desire, just as they alert us to the mordant surrealism of Night and Fog.

Collection and Classification While the preceding section sketches various characteristics shared by Borowczyk and the Left Bank Group, I now wish to focus in detail on their engagement with issues of archiving, classification, and ordering. Subsequent sections will extend this discussion, considering the same

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phenomena in relation to Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and in their combination with images of eroticism and excess. Having dealt with the concentrationary universe as a figure of political repression, my piece thus turns to concentration in its broader dimensions, as the amassing of similar objects in a single space, the marshaling of the collection. This new emphasis will both supplement and develop further the reading I have established of a darkly antihumanist cinema preoccupied by tyranny and trauma. Although the themes of order and classification have generally been marginalized by existing critical studies in favor of such themes as sexuality and memory, they are consistently explored throughout these films and arguably represent the most significant (and interesting) point of conjuncture between Borowczyk and the Left Bank filmmakers. To discuss ordering is perhaps even to unlock the key to this cinema, that notion tying together the combination of formalism and intellectualism in these works and capturing their dual concern with “big” politics and underlying cultural systems, the imbricated realms of social and intellectual “order.” More ubiquitous perhaps than the images of concentration camps and similarly repressive spaces in Borowczyk’s and the Left Bank artists’ oeuvres are the concentrationary sites of cultural, historical, or scientific interest, the collections of objects, documents, and data: from the museums featured in Marker and Resnais’s Statues Also Die (Les statues meurent aussi, 1953) and Marker’s The Pier, the library presented in Resnais’s All the World’s Memory (Toute la mémoire du monde, 1956), the war memorial of Franju’s Hôtel des Invalides (1951), and the eponymous “private collection” of Borowczyk’s 1973 short Une collection particulière all the way to the digitized personal encyclopedia of Marker’s Immemory (1997). It is also worth noting that Franju cofounded cinema’s own eccentric library of Babel, the Cinémathèque Française. Various meanings and functions are assigned to these spaces, some of them serving to muddy the opposition between the apparently constructive concentrationary space of the museum or archive and its destructive inverse, the space of camps and prisons. In All the World’s Memory, the Bibliothèque Nationale is even explicitly compared with a prison fortress. It is clear of course how archival space, with its rigor and enclosure, might offer a veiled representation of repressive political concentration. Yet there is more to this than spatial rhymes and metaphoric fancy, for museums or archives can themselves comprise the target of politicized critique. Indeed, in Statues Also Die the distinction between the constructive and destructive guises of concentrationary space is undone at a literal level, with the museum portrayed as an accomplice of Western

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imperialism. For this documentary portrait of the fate of indigenous African art, it is not simply that museums or galleries house colonial plunder: more importantly, such spaces attest to and aid in the destruction of the specific cultural meanings of artifacts formerly rooted in everyday practice, with the museum’s abstraction and isolation acting to deny more organic notions of culture for which art and utility are one. Seen in such terms the museum is a deathly and sterile space, a mausoleum of defunct civilizations and vanished meanings. It also emerges as an instrument of domination, and in this Marker and Resnais’s film exemplifies a more generalized awareness of the complicity between ideologies, repressive political aims, and nominally innocent cultural spaces. This awareness extends to the imbrication of taxonomic and classificatory practices—supposedly the preserve of curators, archivists, and scientists—with bureaucratic organization and the pursuit of an immobilized, rigidly controlled society.15 Such an interrelation of taxonomy and social order is implied not only when museums become prisons, as in All the World’s Memory, but also when penitentiary spaces themselves become museums and sites of classification, as with the scrupulously separated objects and elaborate hierarchies of Night and Fog and the division of different species between different slaughterhouses presented, and structurally respected, in The Blood of Beasts. Borowczyk’s Goto can be seen as the logical culmination of such observations, foregrounding the continuity between museum and concentration camp through its depiction of a tyrannical island fortress that is simultaneously a collection of mysterious, exotic, and outmoded objects. Yet museums, archives, and collections are equally significant here as sites of remembrance. If, as I have suggested, such spaces can be accused of subtle complicities with political domination, they can also bear the subversive function of testaments to past injustices and atrocities. This does not mean that such recuperation is always flawless: just as the museum tends by its nature to deprive objects of the significance they had in lived contexts, so it might fail to capture the essence of traumatic events, constitutively resistant as these may be to representation in any case. It is in this sense that Riva’s heroine, for all her museum trips, has never seen, or known, Hiroshima’s tragedy. As is well acknowledged, both Resnais and Marker are deeply preoccupied by memory and the difficulties of faithfully recalling the past, yet the past and its representation are themes of great relevance to Borowczyk too, not least as they relate to the diegetic reconstruction of vanished worlds. Through his devoted assemblage of authentic and intensely cathected historical objects, Borowczyk’s cinema approximates the museum in its capacity to preserve above all,

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to preserve the things we love. Conversely, the implication might be that the things we love are only such things as are found in museums, for in Borowczyk’s films desire seems to speak exclusively in the past tense. In literal terms the past designated is generally the historical past, abbreviated and remodeled as cloistered libertine fantasias that exploit the sensuality of antique decor and the fabled transgressions of real historical figures: Lucrezia Borgia and the “bloody countess” Erszébet Báthory feature in the film Immoral Tales (Contes immoraux, 1974). Yet there is also, inevitably, a personal and psychoanalytic resonance in Borowczyk’s emphatic attachment to the precapitalist, artisanal object. Visibly marked by the “hand of man,” such objects inscribe a corporeality that is “related in the psychic register to the maternal,” to that (illusory) infantile wholeness whose memory is preserved in the museum of the unconscious.16 Museum and archive spaces may then have a significant and integral relation with the political, mnemonic, and libidinal themes commonly associated with these filmmakers, yet they are also utilized to explore systems, ordering, and classification as subjects in their own right. I have already discussed the extensive influence of surrealism on Borowczyk and the Left Bank Group, and a surrealist poetics certainly informs these filmmakers’ fascination with aberrations of ordering, yet the concern for order and classification also positions this cinema within a postwar French avant-garde culture heavily indebted to structural and combinatory principles. For David Bordwell, such movements as the nouveau roman in literature, serial music, and of course structuralist methods of analysis evidence a kind of “structural turn” in French culture, with “textual components” held to form “a single structure,” “an order that coheres according to intrinsic principles.”17 A concern for taxonomic and classificatory procedures in particular is evident in contemporaneous theoretical texts such as Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses, 1966) and much more ludically in the postsurrealist literary group OuLiPo. While he never collaborated with either Borowczyk or the Left Bank Group (the occasional venture into cinema notwithstanding), OuLiPo affiliate Georges Perec might be considered these filmmakers’ closest literary cousin. A determinedly unclassifiable and continually self-reinventing writer (and one who, as the son of Polish Jews lost to the Holocaust, grapples imaginatively with exile, wartime trauma, and the concentrationary universe), Perec also shares this cinema’s deeply ambivalent fascination with lists, archives, and classificatory or taxonomic procedures. As in Perec’s writings, structures of classification emerge in this cinema as at once wondrous and dubious, striking and stifling, with such

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affects naturally augmenting at either pole the more comprehensively a system lays claim to the organization of reality. On the one hand, the temptation to order or classify the world appears entirely natural, even cozily familiar; yet on the other, it is perceived to result in monstrous, deadening impositions, in forms of “epistemological violence” that shackle “the diverse, dynamic actuality of life” to an inescapable “chain of signification.”18 What I want to examine first is the extent to which Borowczyk’s and the Left Bank Group’s engagement with ordering is a resistant, oppositional, and interrogative one, this dimension being perhaps the more salient on account of these films’ ostentatious stylistic and generic indeterminacy. While these aesthetic tactics may well be impelled by a puckish pleasure in mystification, they also tend to point, whether deliberately or not, to the artificiality and arbitrariness of established categories (artistic or otherwise). Such aesthetic practices have their parallel in subversive diegetic or representational tactics that I will now explore with regard to, again, All the World’s Memory and two Borowczyk shorts, Grandmother’s Encyclopedia in 13 Volumes (L’Encyclopédie de Grand-Maman en 13 volumes, 1963) and Une collection particulière. All the World’s Memory’s rhetorical motif of library as prison could be said to rebound more uncomfortably and precisely on the former institution than I have suggested. For it also indicates how the classificatory process depicted in this film aims at the elimination of chance, uniqueness, and “miscellany,” at that leveling of difference or exception that might elsewhere be termed totalitarian.19 Seen under the shadow of such a suggestion, the apparently triumphal proclamation at the film’s end of “a time when all enigmas will be resolved” has an ominous ring, auguring as it does a reality as comprehensively categorized and structured as the library’s own collection (supposedly) is. Sinister overtones are enhanced by the likening of the library’s patrons to “paper-crunching insects,” with its implications of a Kafkaesque or science-fiction dystopia, and by the glimpse of an attendant between the bookshelves who stares down, Panopticon-like, at the now literally fly-sized readers. Yet while the film’s commentary asserts totalization and the perfection of the bibliographic system, numerous images subtly reveal heterogeneity, incongruity, disorder, in what might be simultaneously a gesture of resistance against systematization and a reminder that no such system can truly proclaim itself flawless or definitive. The incongruities are both visual and generic: a paperback entitled Mars (itself a conflicted, disjunctive entity, for why should a book on astronomy be illustrated with a woman’s face?) nestles insolently amidst stern hardback volumes; piles of comics mingle with

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solemnly faceless tomes in a storeroom; and as examples of “the most precious, the most beautiful, the most rare” manuscripts, the commentary cites the de Goncourt brothers’ manuscripts, the Paris Codex, and the “memoirs” of fictional detective hero Harry Dickson. That both comics and Harry Dickson are known Resnais obsessions suggests directorial identification with such disruptive tactics, as does the illustration of a cat, a mark of Marker, in the Mars book. Yet what also emerges here is how the concentrationary institution itself becomes the accomplice of disorder and heterogeneous juxtaposition, the very exhaustiveness of the Bibliothèque’s archives placing them forever in danger of a subversive jostling of high and low cultures. Grandmother’s Encyclopedia stands as a further corrective to the pursuit of systemic totality in Resnais’s film, its own title also announcing systematizing ambitions and yet simultaneously chipping away at the encyclopedic pretense of completeness and perfection: why that arbitrary, odd, cursed number of “13 volumes”? The film proceeds as an alphabetically ordered enumeration of forms of transportation, set into motion via illustrated Victoriana. Yet this supposed encyclopedia ends after a mere three entries (with one form of transport per letter), a gesture of interruption that both cuts against the announced will to totalization and omniscience and calls a kind of wishful halt to the progressive interpretation, and perhaps domination, of the world. The motifs of transport and travel, along with the film’s location in a selfconfident, unabashedly imperial Victorianism, could be seen as tying the taxonomic aims of the encyclopedia not only to nineteenth-century rationalism but also to colonial expansion. The later Une collection particulière, while also betraying the obvious curatorial, classificatory, and acquisitive impulses that haunt Borowczyk’s cinema, can be considered to offer another such self-sabotaging structure, and one that acts, in a more concrete manner, to problematize the validity of particular categories. Although the film appears at first sight to deal with a collection of antique pornography, on closer inspection it can be seen to allude to the instability of the very category of pornography, a term that is, after all, a relatively recent one dependent on specific, shifting “systems of evaluation” and with little fixed content.20 The presence amidst these scandalous objects and images of the work of such “high” artists as Rembrandt, whose signature is emphatically displayed, points to the absence of clear lines of demarcation between the artistic and the pornographic. Why do we classify some things as art, others as pornography? Why the need, as Borowczyk has argued elsewhere, for such bad critical habits of separation?21

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Alternative Ordering, or Heterotopias on the Left Bank Borowczyk’s and the Left Bank Group’s overt tactics of negation and disruption are complemented by a perversely constructive bent, with the ruin of systems often ceded to the fevered creation and chronicling of new systems, to aberrant and unfamiliar forms of classification and order. In this regard the films exemplify the Foucauldian idea of heterotopias, identified by Kevin Hetherington as “sites of alternative ordering” where apparently incommensurate properties are brought together and the customary relations between things are overturned.22 The most famous example of such a violation of our normal ways of seeing is Foucault’s own, that of the Chinese encyclopedia imagined by Borges, which divides the animal kingdom into an outrageous series of mutually incongruous categories: “belonging to the Emperor,” “stray dogs,” “having just broken the water pitcher,” and so on.23 Such imagined or “exotic” taxonomies have been seen to illustrate the relativity of our established epistemological frameworks, to challenge “the naturalism of categories, that they constitute objective knowledge.”24 This is an effect pursued in the transnational cinema of Marker, as when, in an amusing yet not disrespectful anecdote from Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie, 1957), it is claimed that the Chinese—cast again as the architects of bizarre classificatory orders—originally believed the mammoth to be a species of mole. Is such a morsel of alien “naiveté” much more bizarre, incidentally, than would once have seemed the recently accepted notion of the relation between dinosaurs and birds? An alternative function of heterotopias, as Foucault’s reading of the Borges passage itself seems to suggest, is the affront to the very principle of systematization. Foucault describes how fragments from “a large number of possible orders” are gathered into the heterotopic nonorder, to reside together “without law or geometry,” deprived of the common measure or organizing principle that would render them a coherent whole.25 A similar sense of order as formalized disorder confronts us in Borowczyk’s Joachim’s Dictionary (Le Dictionnaire de Joachim, 1965). Borowczyk presents here a series of alphabetically ordered terms, allotting one term per letter no less scrupulously than in Grandmother’s Encyclopedia. With the animated protagonist propelled through the series and comically transformed by each new term, the film offers a crude visualization of the determination of language, the Lacanian principle of the signifier that swallows the subject. Yet this short also amuses and unsettles us through the “heteroclite” disjunctions between the various words, which are not only drawn indifferently from such disparate

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fields as medicine, musicology, and zoology, but range in meaning from the abstract to the trivially concrete: abstractions like “degeneration” and “realism” alternate with terms for physical objects such as “xylophone” and “kepi” (a term for the French military cap). No less of an apparent masquerade and mockery of order is the combination of tasks that the ruler Goto allots to Grozo, his emphatic enumeration of the chores comprising a peremptory, official, yet nonsensical yoking together of dogs, shoes, and flies. Do such seemingly arbitrary conflations simply offer a defamiliarized image of that real disorder in the world that we are inured to seeing as order? To regard Borowczyk and the Left Bank Group as alternately destroying and creating order may be less accurate than to see them as foregrounding the close, confused, even interchangeable relation between order and disorder, with their fictive institutionalization of chaos seeming to suggest, like Borges’s library of Babel, that disorder, repeated and reproduced, becomes order.26 Yet more affirmatively perhaps, this cinema can also be seen as inscribing a will toward order of an alternative kind, and its heterotopic constructions as suggesting either potential orders on the verge of becoming or new, transgressive forms of order in their own right. The heterotopic impulse is transposed, with all those implications and ambiguities at once preserved and given a more directly subversive edge, to social and spatial manifestations of alternative order, to the heterotopia in its concrete guise. Heterotopic space is rife throughout Left Bank cinema, traversing both highly artificial fantasy worlds (Marienbad) and supposed documentary actualities (the exemplarily surrealist flea markets, dense with strange juxtapositions, in The Blood of Beasts). Most of the locations in Borowczyk’s films could be called heterotopic in some way, their demonically involuted architecture crying out in fact for comparison with the dream China described by Foucault: “a ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communications.”27 I want, however, to focus specifically on the fortress world of Goto as an example of social and political heterotopia. Just as, according to Foucault, Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia suggests a composite of different taxonomic orders, so the island regime of Goto is composed out of disparate, and often supposedly incompatible, political, social, and even temporal orders. It seems a peculiar mishmash of monarchical rule (the hereditary leaders, each distinguished by a numeral), fascism (the black uniforms and military rituals), state socialism (the drab industrial environment and hard labor), and even capitalist-style “decadence” (the brothels); it also juxtaposes “slices of time,” being at

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Figure 11.2. Screenshot from Goto, Island of Love (dir. Borowczyk, 1968)

Figure 11.3. Screenshot from Goto, Island of Love (dir. Borowczyk, 1968)

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once redolent of twentieth century dystopias and mired in a perpetual fin de siècle (that time has literally stopped within the fortress can be seen to render Goto as much a vision of the living dead as Marienbad). Particularly significant here is the way Borowczyk seems to meld certain facets of Eastern and Western Europe, at least those belonging to a stereotyped Cold War imaginary: hard labor is rewarded with paid sex and shaved heads mingle with epaulettes and lace, as the tropes of Stalinist nightmare and capitalist indulgence are stirred together. Thus, like its predecessor, the Jarryesque animation The Theater of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal (Le Théâtre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal, 1967), Goto represents the coincidence between a “real,” remembered, state socialist Poland and the imaginary “Poland” in which King Ubu (Ubu Roi, 1896) is set: that fractured and contradictory locale that Jarry also designates as “Nowhere.” This is a vision of heterotopia as utopia, in the latter term’s literal, etymological meaning of “no-place”: Goto’s island is a no-place to the extent that it combines all places. In its hybridizing of “East” and “West” Goto could be seen to inscribe the liminality of an exilic consciousness that is culturally and psychologically in two places at once, although it might equally be said to parody the hackneyed image of Eastern European citizens yearning for Western luxury from within gray socialism. Yet I would suggest that this hybridizing or derangement of political and social space also has a number of more obviously subversive implications, of both a darkly critical and a more affirmative kind. To the extent that the film presents a disordered and incoherent universe, it may be said to indicate the real disorder, incoherence, and philosophical nullity of existing power, the contradiction of a rigorous political order that is underpinned by a feeble intellectual order. Exemplifying the capacity of heterotopias to mirror, invert, and interrogate the spaces of our real world, Goto embodies the absurdist critique of power as impotence. Pierre Brasseur’s incarnation of Goto III, though retaining the air of imperious power from his portrayal of malign authority in Franju’s Eyes without a Face, renders the ruler a slightly foolish, even infantile figure, and the island regime’s bizarre judicial ordering seems to concede its own randomness through elements of institutionalized chance, such as the staged combats between criminals in which the man who loses becomes the man condemned. The mixing of nominally diverse political orders might also be seen to hint at the commonality of all forms of repression, at the essential identity that belies putative ideological differences. This can be seen as the critical flipside to the intimation of human universality afforded by Resnais and Marker’s juxtaposition of different world cultures in Statues Also Die: the museum space, partly redeemed by its juxtapositional capacity, emerges again in this film

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as the heterotopia par excellence. On the other hand, Goto’s sociopolitical hybridity could conceivably be said to suggest, more positively, the idea of a rapprochement between sides, the same will to cooperation beneath ideological enmity that is imagined in Marker’s Letter from Siberia when, by means of creative geography, Soviet planes appear to extinguish a fire in Montana. Finally, we should not forget the roots of Goto’s heterotopia in a surrealist poetics of disparate juxtaposition. That poetics was originally intended as a formula for communicating and realizing our dreams and desires, and as such its deployment in Goto arguably imbues the oppressive realities evoked with a certain redemptive promise. The same might be said for the periodic flashes of color amidst black and white. Numerous touches of fetishism and perverse sexuality infiltrate this fortress world, and the very symbol of the fortress’s cruelly concentrationary nature—the aforementioned fly-trapping device—is also a Meret Oppenheim-like surrealist object with erotic connotations. The film could thus be said subtly to foreshadow Borowczyk’s later construction of full-blown erotic worlds; it could also be said, however, to present that interrelation of the erotic and the repressive, of excess and order, that the later films will repeat in a different form.

Sins and Signs Borowczyk’s turn toward more sexually explicit films in the mid-1970s has been painted, by Michael Richardson, for instance, as an abandonment of themes of “repression” in favor of a complementary focus on “liberation.”28 Yet while the new, eroticized worlds are heterotopic in more obviously, more literally transgressive ways than was Goto’s fortress, these depictions of sexual “liberty” also reprise the themes and tropes of old. The boundaries of the concentrationary universe continue to be felt, although now manifested in the walls of the château and the boudoir, and the murderous, subjugating rituals of Angel’s Games or Goto are not washed away in libidinal effusion. The Erszébet Báthory sequence of Immoral Tales, where young girls are selected, concentrated, and then destroyed, might even be seen as another concentration camp allegory, an association reinforced by the presence of showers and by a camera that virtually numbers, as well as fetishistically fragments, the collected nude bodies.29 If Goto’s world of rigid repression perversely embraced the aleatory, these new images of liberty seem subtly to reinscribe the authoritarian, the relaxed French censorship codes of the 1970s enabling Borowczyk to concoct erotically sugared pills of power and domination.

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Yet the obsessive rearrangements and fastidious framings of bodies in these later films also suggest the will toward the ordering and systematization of the erotic. Does not Borowczyk’s “lecherous” camera become from this vantage point a taxonomist’s instrument intent on charting difference and identity? The concentrationary nature of the films’ settings itself comes to suggest not only the space of the museum or collection, but also the foundational act of enclosure that, according to Roland Barthes, permits the establishment of new, self-contained structures.30 The spaces of such films as Immoral Tales or Love Rites (Cérémonie d’amour, 1988) are the laboratories of new systems, spaces where bodies and erotic acts are submitted to rituals, patterns, laws, and significations. Among his Left Bank contemporaries, Borowczyk’s erotic turn links him in obvious ways to Robbe-Grillet, whose own films, two of which took him to Czechoslovakia and so to Eastern Europe, combine formal experimentation with an explicit eroticism notoriously dominated by sadomasochism and bondage. Yet I think Borowczyk’s intertwining of excess and rigor, affect and reason, aligns him equally, if less overtly, with Marker. The fusion of such (purported) opposites is exquisitely addressed in an allusion from Sunless to the eleventhcentury Japanese courtier and writer Sei Shōnagon. An unsurprising object of interest for Perec and Peter Greenaway as well as Marker, Shōnagon devised countless eccentric lists, including, so Sunless informs us, a list of “things that quicken the heart.” Charting emotional events with the tools of taxonomy and rooting the systematic in the subjective, Shōnagon’s lists find twin descendants in Borowczyk’s ordering of the erotic and Marker’s attempt to create a museum of his memories, definitively realized in the CD-ROM Immemory. The subjection of affective, private, and scandalous things to formal structures, to the “establishment” forms of the museum or art gallery, can be seen, rightly in fact, as a ludic joke. The more sober implication of these oeuvres is that order, meaning, and systematization are our human lot, and extend into the most intimate or apparently intractable areas. Marker has even pondered whether his tactics of ordering memory only act to uncover an order already there, a “secret map” of memory.31 Borowczyk’s obsessive patternings of the erotic could be said to foreground how sexual and corporeal life are always already inscribed in systems of signification. It is worth noting how heavily immersed his erotic scenes are in textual and representational realms. The lovers of Story of Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1975) copy the poses seen in erotic illustrations while The Beast’s Romilda de l’Espérance records her bestial copulation with sketches and words: a circuit is charted from the imitation of

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textual models to the reconversion of sex into representation, as if signification, scriptural or figural, were both origin and object of the erotic. In a more explicit assertion of the inescapable determination of signs and systems, Marker’s correspondent in Sunless, contemplating “pornographic” images of animals, suggests how these images of “animal innocence” represent “the mirror of an impossible reconciliation,” and how the “earthly paradise” of a time prior to language and culture, to the constitutive interdictions of taboo, “may be a paradise lost.” From this point of view, the preponderant images of animals in Borowczyk’s or Marker’s work might assume a poignant wistfulness, especially when portrayed overtly in their tricksterish guise as destroyers of order. Yet if these filmmakers mourn the loss of the jouissance and plenitude associated with nonmeaning, they also disclose an excess within meaning itself, a chaotic profligacy of association, powered by what Marker identifies in Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat, 1960) as the “timeless urge to connect” disparate things. The emblem of that urge, in that film and others, is the owl, the creature that, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, marks a literal point of contact between Borowczyk and Marker and the one that captures the cerebral dimension of their disruptive cinema. These artists confer a half-jesting “official” stamp on activities we perform regularly, individually, and for our own pleasure: the hoarding and arrangement of favorite things, from mementos to fetish items. Redeeming the traumatic vision by its own mirror image, these filmmakers recall the concentrationary universe in its happier guise, where concentration signifies the expression of our desires and idiosyncrasies, the means of our pleasure, the founding of a private world. Acts of arrangement, ordering, or system building can in themselves be a source of pleasure, an expression of the individual imagination, with the recognized arbitrariness, relativity, or imperfection of systems seen simply as the spur or license to construct new ones. Borowczyk, like Marker and Resnais, could be said to take such a ludic, modest pleasure in ordering, although their aberrant structures can also be read as implicitly subversive gestures, systems in defiance of “the system.” The perversity of Borowczyk’s cinema consists as much in his idiosyncrasies of structure and arrangement as in any erotic perversity, and it is regrettable that his assault on moral order, the public order of propriety, has taken critical precedence over his provocative engagement with other kinds of order. Borowczyk’s perceived lapse into pornography long helped deny him such critical esteem as has been allotted the Left Bank filmmakers with whom he shares so many concerns and artistic gifts. Yet his relegation to the ghetto of pornography

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or sexploitation has a strange aptness to it, and not only in illustrating the perversity of established classification. The Left Bank directors themselves, like the early Borowczyk, always embraced the possibilities of the ghetto, whether that of the short film, the documentary, or the disreputably childish genre of animation. It may well be a greater betrayal when such troubling figures are awarded a place in the canon.

Notes 1. Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 60. 2. Richard John Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 297. 3. Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 82. 4. It is worth noting that an owl (the owl of Minerva, to be precise) was the symbol of Anatole Dauman’s remarkable company Argos Films, a longstanding supporter of Marker, Resnais, and Borowczyk. 5. Even the critical source of the term “Left Bank Group” is disputed, with Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Roud, and Claire Clouzot all having been suggested as originators of the label. Robert Farmer, “Marker, Resnais, Varda: Remembering the Left Bank Group,” Senses of Cinema 52 (2009), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/52/ marker-resnais-varda-remembering-the-left-bank-group/. 6. Kate Ince, Georges Franju (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 16. 7. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 12. Naficy includes Left Bank directors Marker and Varda among his examples of “exilic” cinema. 8. Initiated by Marker, Far from Vietnam is credited to Resnais, Klein, Godard, Varda, Joris Ivens, and Claude Lelouch. 9. Raymond Durgnat, “Borowczyk and the Cartoon Renaissance,” Film Comment (January–February 1976), 42. 10. Ibid., 41. 11. Dorota Ostrowska, Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 64. 12. Wilson, Alain Resnais, 31. 13. Slavoj Žižek, “Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: ‘Strange Shapes of the Unwarped Primal World,’” in Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 208. 14. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 17.

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15. Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), xxxiii. 16. Walerian Borowczyk and Carlos Clarens, “The Artist as Pornographer: Borowczyk Interviewed by Carlos Clarens,” Film Comment (January– February 1976), 47; Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 164. 17. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 276. 18. Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London: Continuum, 2006), 86. 19. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1998), 191. 20. Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 102. 21. Walerian Borowczyk et al., “Entretien avec Walerian Borowczyk par Michel Delahaye, Sylvie Pierre and Jacques Rivette,” Cahiers du cinéma 209 (February 1969): 31. 22. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering London: Routledge, 1997), 40. 23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1974), ix. 24. Lynn Meskell, Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 39. 25. Foucault, Order of Things, xvii. 26. Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 2000), 74. 27. Foucault, Order of Things, xix. 28. Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 117. 29. I am indebted to Daniel Bird for first suggesting the concentration camp angle here. 30. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 17. 31. Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 120.

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Chapter Twelve

Beyond Polish Moral Realism The Subversive Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski Michael Goddard Introduction: Żuławski versus Polish Realism When Andrzej Żuławski’s debut feature film, The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia część nocy, 1971) was released, it could only be received as a major scandal. Even in the relatively open and experimental context of “third generation” Polish cinema at the time, Żuławski’s film was an affront to the most “sacred” period of both Polish history and its cinematic representation—namely, the Polish experience of World War  II. This was, of course, a preferred subject of Polish school filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda and Andrzej Munk, whose representations of Polish martyrdom, whether romantically heroic or ironic, were no preparation for the delirious, brutal, and expressionist presentation of these events in Żuławski’s film. By the time of his third Polish feature, On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie, 1977/1988), Żuławski could not have been further removed from the dominant tendencies toward realism evidenced by the Cinema of Moral Concern, of which he was a particularly severe critic.1 Eventually production was halted on the film and was only able to be resumed, in a truncated form, eleven years later. Meanwhile, the director had initiated another series of films made in France, beginning with L’important c’est d’aimer (The most important thing: Love, 1975), which, while aesthetically and contextually very different, nevertheless can be seen as a continuation and development of this critical escape in the necessarily transnational context of making films in another European country. This chapter will look at these two strands of Żuławski’s cinematic career as related attempts to escape the limits of “moral realism” via expressive excess and argue that from the start this trajectory had transnational dimensions. Even in the case of productions taking place entirely within Poland, the films of Żuławski can be productively seen in terms of “accented cinema,” to use Hamid Naficy’s term, in that they

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transgress the borders of Polish national cinema, even if this is as much in stylistic as geographical terms or refers as much to internal as external exile.2 This chapter will therefore examine key films of this director, both those made in Poland and those made abroad as strategies against and beyond the dominant aesthetic and political tendencies of Polish cinema.

National and Transnational Dimensions of Żuławski’s Cinema Contextualizing the work of Andrzej Żuławski within Polish cinema is problematic. Recent attempts have tended to view his work through a variety of lenses including the Polish New Wave or surrealism, whereas critics at the time of his first films tended to see his as representative of the “third generation,” or “third Polish cinema.” The first generation were the immediate postwar filmmakers like Wanda Jakubowska and Aleksander Ford who embraced the prevailing doctrine of socialist realism; the second was the Polish school filmmakers like Wajda and Munk whose debuts took place in the 1950s; and filmmakers Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Żuławski, Witold Leszczyński, and others like them whose debuts were in the 1960s belonged to the third generation. Tadeusz Lubelski argues that these directors shared “a manifestation of the author’s identity and a tendency to poetic stylization.”3 However, such common traits are fairly vague and only point to the general idea of an auteurist art cinema, less obviously engaged with history or social issues than were earlier filmmakers. Nevertheless, the idea of “generations” is a persistent one in Polish cinema not only in terms of its filmmakers but as a cinematic theme beginning from Wajda’s debut feature, A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955). The fact that Third Part of the Night directly references both this film and, in its title, the idea of third Polish cinema, not to mention the idea of generations in its being based in part on Żuławski’s father’s memoirs, means that the idea of generations in and of Polish cinema cannot be easily dismissed. At the same time, it must be remembered that in addition to these national influences, there were already transnational dimensions of Żuławski’s career even prior to his making films outside of Poland that stemmed from his training at the French L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) rather than the more usual route of the Polish film school. Even before his career began, therefore, there was already an aesthetic response not only to Polish generations but to the French New Wave, which Żuławski was exposed to early on. Żuławski acknowledged

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the aesthetic significance of at least some of the work of Jean-Luc Godard, such as Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965), and was certainly inspired by Godard’s disregard for conventional narrative structures and expressive use of apparent limitations such as available light, handheld camera, and real locations.4 Nevertheless, his disparaging comments about the French New Wave in general serve to underline that he saw it less as a coherent cinematic movement than as just another site of generational conflict: “Infighting among a group of young [filmmakers] who, in the process of ousting the old hands, had found a way of making movies about their own cousins, mothers, fathers, and housekeepers . . . I saw nothing interesting from an artistic standpoint.”5 This quotation should be enough to indicate caution when using terms like “new wave” or “generations” in relation to Żuławski’s cinema, and yet it paradoxically underlines the centrality of such generational thinking to his conception of cinema. This brings us to a more recent way in which Żuławski’s work has been situated—namely, in relation to surrealism. This is apparent in Piotr Kletowski’s chapter in Polish New Wave that, while claiming that his auteurism and “thinking through form” positioned him in proximity to the French New Wave, refers in relation to his second feature, The Devil (Diabeł, 1972), to an “expressionist and surreal vision.”6 More specifically, two essays in the recently published A Story of Sin position Żuławski’s work in proximity to surrealist aesthetics.7 The nonexistence of any Polish surrealist movement, as equally nonexistent as any historical Polish new wave, leads to the idea that any surrealism in Polish cinema is the product of transnational appropriation in relation to national traditions. These dynamics of the appropriation of transnational aesthetics in a national context will be engaged in the next section in relation to Żuławski’s Polish films of the 1970s.

Cinema at the Limits of National Space from The Third Part of the Night to On the Silver Globe As already indicated, addressing Poland’s experience of war and Nazi occupation in The Third Part of the Night invites analysis as a revisiting of the Polish school, since this period was the subject of many key films belonging to this paradigm. As if to underline this point, the film explicitly refers to Wajda’s A Generation, in which the resistance fighter Jasió escapes his German pursuers by climbing a staircase, only to be trapped at the top of it. In Third Part of the Night a scene involving stairs is the

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crux of the film and is extended into a harrowing sequence in which the main character Michał (Leszek Teleszyński), having just seen his friend shot in the street, ascends a staircase and only escapes death when a man in his likeness is mistaken for him by the Germans. The drawn-out pursuit combines at once American genre conventions of the shoot-out from Westerns and gangster films with expressionist tendencies, all captured by a dizzying choreography shot with a handheld camera. In Żuławski’s treatment this staircase takes on the metaphysical implications of a type of “Jacob’s Ladder,” whose ascent and descent literally distributes life and death. In part the difference between these two films can be seen as reflecting that between Wajda’s generation who lived through the war, if only as children, and Żuławski’s generation who only know about the war from their fathers’ stories and from Polish cinema. But the film’s revision of the myth of Poland under Nazi occupation and of Polish resistance is more radical than a mere generational difference could account for. Every aspect of the film can be seen as either an exaggeration or a destruction of the myths perpetuated by Polish school cinema, even if, ironically, the film was made for Wajda’s Wektor film group and Wajda himself was one of the film’s main defenders. While the title of the film might well derive from the biblical Book of Revelation, which is cited at the film’s opening, it also clearly refers to the third generation of Polish filmmakers as the “third part” of Polish cinema after the Polish school. It is hard not to see the combination of the title and the revisiting of Wajda’s debut as the announcement of a new beginning for Polish cinema, one that takes a darker, more apocalyptic direction that would be echoed in Żuławski’s subsequent films. The opening scene announces this new direction as a reading from the Book of Revelation gives way to the brutal slaughter of Michał’s mother, wife, and child by mounted German soldiers, evoking the horsemen of the apocalypse, while Michał is walking with his father (Jerzy Goliński) in the nearby forest. The narrative context that the film provides for his sequence is sketchy and enigmatic, which leads to a reading of these events that is more fatalistic than historical, as if they are the playing out of a divine punishment. At the same time, the entry of the soldier on horseback into the family home seems a perverse inversion of the historical myth of the Polish cavalry attempting to meet the invading force of German tanks, which was the subject of Wajda’s fourth war film, Lotna (1959). However, even here, where the accent seems to be on revising the myths of the Polish school’s mythic presentation of the war, the visceral representation of Michał’s reactions seems to owe more to Hollywood genre films than to Polish cinema. In fact, it is as if

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Hollywood action cinema was being deliberately employed as a counterpoint to the Polish dimensions of the film. As such this influence operates as an alien dynamism employed deliberately to explode these myths not by abandoning them but by exaggerating them to the point where they become metaphysical rather than historical, even at times bordering on kitsch. This is nowhere more apparent than in the staircase scene referred to above, initiated by the death, on yet another staircase, of Michał’s A.K. (Home Army) comrade who is shot then falls over the railing virtually into Michał’s arms. We then follow Michał’s pursuit via a dizzying and dynamic handheld sequence during which he runs through streets, ducks down dark alleyways, climbs stairs, and at one point leaps off a roof onto a garbage heap, before ascending the final fatal staircase. Yet, if this sequence does owe something to Hollywood genre cinema, it is in a mutated form since the pursuers are rarely visible but rather act in the sequence as shadowy presences dispensing death from a position just outside of both the frame and Michał’s perception. The resulting visual sequence, aided by the fragmented electric guitar soundtrack, produces the type of effect that would characterize most of Żuławski’s subsequent films, presenting not so much reality itself as the delirium that it provokes, as several critics have observed.8 While it seemed that Żuławski had gone as far as possible in overturning everything that was sacred in Polish political and cinematic history, this tendency would be carried, at least in terms of what the censors would allow, beyond acceptable limits in his subsequent film, The Devil (1972). The Devil similarly dealt with a “sacred” moment of Polish historical trauma—namely, the late-eighteenth-century partition of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was less a revisiting of Polish cinematic history than of Polish romanticism, appearing almost as if it were the adaptation of an undiscovered work of Adam Mickiewicz, even if the script was an original one. Like the previous film, The Devil begins in horror, as the main character, Jakub (Leszek Teleszyński), is led away by the devil (Michał Grudziński), along with a terrified nun, from a scene of carnage in the prison/asylum to which he has been condemned for an attempted regicide fueled by patriotic motives. From this scene onward, the film comes across as if it were the film of Polish romanticism that Wajda should have made but did not due to stylistic and political compromises. Even more than The Third Part of the Night, the whole film takes place in a state of delirium filtered by Jakub’s madness or demonic possession. Jakub will subsequently, manipulated by his demonic companion, murder his mother, sister, brother, and best friend, all of whom are shown as human beings destroyed by

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the overturning of their world in the context of occupied Poland. For Kletowski this demonic possession is shown in Oedipal terms as a horrified response to a world upside-down in which “a father rapes his daughter who he takes for her dead mother, and a mother, desiring all the men in the world, wants to make love to her son.”9 Yet, the violence and destruction in the film clearly exceeds a familial Oedipal framework, and the family and the nation are represented as inseparable and permeable constructs, both subject to traumatic transnational forces in the form of marauding armies, spies, and traitors. In fact, the mythical model here is less Oedipus than Shakespeare’s Hamlet since Jakub not only returns to find that “all is not well” in the house of Poland but also encounters a group of nomadic and licentious actors who perform Hamlet and who number among his first victims. This mirrors the function of the play within the play in Hamlet that likewise results in tragic bloodshed. Again the symbolism of the film is multilayered; apart from its reading as a horror film of demonic possession, the most obvious interpretation of the film is as a metaphysical version of the partitioning of Poland, which led historically to the loss of independence for more than a hundred years. In the end the devil is indeed revealed to be a Prussian spy wanting to defeat a patriotic conspiracy on behalf of his military masters. On another level, however, the demonic treatment of Poland as an occupied territory clearly has another historical resonance: of Poland under communism. This latter aspect of the film was not lost on the censors, who banned the film until 1987. This reading of the film was based on real events in that it was partly inspired by the suppression of a student rebellion in 1968, after which a large number of the Jewish intelligentsia were subsequently expelled from Poland in one of the regime’s more notorious purges. Thus, the devil would be less a Prussian spy than a government informant or a surrogate for those parts of the population willing to improve their lives by spying on and denouncing their neighbors. If The Devil seemed more preoccupied with death and violence than with the affirmation of any new birth, Żuławski’s next Polish film, On the Silver Globe, would return to questions of genesis and genealogy, even though the film itself would remain “stillborn” for eleven years. When On the Silver Globe was being filmed, a new tendency in Polish cinema, the so-called Cinema of Moral Concern, was well under way. Initiated by Wajda’s formally atypical Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977), the term became applied to a group of realist films produced between 1976 and 1981 by Wajda, Zanussi, Holland, Kieślowski, and others, whose aim was to use cinema to critically illuminate aspects of contemporary Polish reality. A typical example of the Cinema of Moral

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Concern was Kieślowski’s film Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), in which a worker starts making amateur films, an activity that soon reveals shortcomings and corruption in the town in which he lives, and by implication in Poland in general. The implicit nature of these films’ critique was essential to how they worked; given the impossibility of making a direct political critique of the state, these films focused on particular situations and minor issues, with an assurance that their limited critique would be generalized by Polish audiences into a critique of the system as a whole. By these means some of the most celebrated productions of Polish cinema under socialism were produced even if later on some of the directors like Holland acknowledged that the making of good cinema was subordinated to getting the message across that “evil is linked with communism.”10 This paradoxically resulted in a cinema close to the longsince-rejected one of socialist realism in that, as Haltof argues, it tended to “produce types rather than real-life characters,” and to reduce complex situations to a simplified and moralized form.11 The limitations of this approach to filmmaking were hardly lost on Żuławski, who described it in the following terms: “Those young people . . . executed a coup d’état on cinema itself. They managed to create radiophony. Pictures were not needed.”12 For Żuławski cinematic politics and aesthetics are inseparable, and it is hard to imagine anyone more at odds with this prevailing tendency in late-1970s Polish cinema; perhaps the only thing On the Silver Globe shared with it was being equally the target of censorship—or rather more of a target since it was an unusual case of censorship not of a script but of a film in the middle of being produced (hence the stillbirth analogy). Ironically, eleven years later when Żuławski finally had the opportunity to complete his film, he would do so via the incorporation of documentary scenes of contemporary Poland, rendering the final film as at once a visionary fiction and a unique document of Poland under communism. As the director put it, the completed film is “simultaneously a film in itself and a history of that film. It is the history of a certain life and a certain country.”13 In this regard, despite being a unique example of epic science fiction, it needs to be understood as a critical alternative to the aesthetics of the Cinema of Moral Concern. By its heightening of expressive cinematic aesthetics, the film was rendered one of Żuławski’s most abstract and yet most political films. On the Silver Globe was even more remarkable in a formal sense than its predecessors, and it had the potential to make a revolutionary contribution to both the science fiction genre and to Polish cinema, had it only been completed in its envisaged form. In the first part of the film, a rider from a seemingly primitive tribe brings to some scientists a recording

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device that he claims fell from the sky. The recording device presents the history of a group of astronauts who landed on the Moon and proceeded to create there a new humanity, recounted entirely through these fragmentary recordings made by the device, which is initially attached to the space suit of one of the astronauts, Jerzy (Jerzy Trela). These audiovisual fragments tell a tale of degeneration as the astronauts, after their initial struggle for survival, generate a new human colony. Marta (Iwona Bielska), the only woman on the spaceship, after losing her lover Tomasz (Leszek Długosz), gives birth three times, which is enough to start a series of generations, whose development seems to be accelerated as is their degeneration into primitive ritual, cruel violence, and human sacrifice. While the original astronauts, especially Jerzy, try to hold on to their civilized rationality, it is meaningless in this new context, and they are powerless against this process that eventually turns them into objects of both religious worship and fear. As a result, they become a series of archetypal figures to be endlessly repeated. Soon Jerzy, the only survivor of the original colonists, becomes worshiped as the godlike figure of “the old man,” while still documenting the process whereby ever greater degrees of hierarchy, adornment, and violence escalate into full-fledged wars and organized religion. Ultimately the descendants of the colonists attempt to sail to the “other shore” of the sea where the colonists have made their home for the purposes of conquest and domination. The humans then become enslaved by the creatures they encounter there, the Shernes, and it is at this point that Jerzy returns to the desert where they first arrived and sends the recording back to “old earth.” This description, which is only an account of the first part of the film, does little justice to the richness of the imagery, and imaginative use of costume, settings, and performative ritual throughout the film. Shortly after the astronaut’s arrival, the viewer is plunged into a world of expressive performance and dynamic images that are highly disorienting and follow a logic that, though coherent, is more like being caught up in a ritual or a dance than the exposition of a linear narrative. In the unfolding of this history, the camera plays an active role as a situated observer, sometimes the object itself of a power struggle, filming the events in a disjointed but panoramic way, often by means of a wide-angle lens. It thus enacts a peculiar deformation of point of view: although most of the time associated with the figure of Jerzy, the old man, the film increasingly adopts the perspective of a semidivine outcast and therefore an observer who is both within and outside the world of the film. This position is emphasized both spatially in his association with the desert and temporally in his survival of successive generations of the colonists. This enables

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the constitution of the first part of the film as the cinematic equivalent of the “Old Testament,” which is complemented by the second part, in which the visual style and use of color and lenses are entirely different, as the “New Testament.” In the second part, a new astronaut, Marek (Andrzej Seweryn), arrives alone, and takes on the role of an unwilling, sacrificial, Christlike redeemer who will deliver humanity from its bondage to the Shernes. The sheer excess of this film—in every possible sense—in relation to the dominant tendencies of Polish cinema could not be greater, in terms of its narrative ambitions, formal experimentation, and ecstatic and ritualistic performances. Nevertheless, what was also present in the film was a political engagement with its own time, updating the anti-Christian message of the original novel. Where the echoes of the Bible in the original were likely meant as a critique of the violence of monotheistic religion, in the film there is a clear allegory of life under communism as an attempt to construct a utopian world that becomes increasingly cruel, violent, hierarchical, and prone to degeneration. This is not to say that the film is an equivalent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, since aesthetically it has a richness that surpasses any simple didactic interpretation; nevertheless, the questions it raises about human history and social organization go well beyond what was acceptable in the context of state socialism. In the director’s own words, the science fiction in the film was used as a mask;14 and while the original censors who approved the script did not see beyond the mask, or only noticed the film’s anticlericalism, the new minister for cinema, Janusz Wilhelmi, clearly did, and he not only demanded that filming cease but ordered the immediate destruction of all sets, props, and costumes. It is purely by chance that there was any surviving copy of the film extant when Żuławski was given eventual permission to complete the film in 1988. The decision to use documentary sequences of contemporary Poland at the end of the communist regime reinforces this political reading of the film since it seems to imply an equivalence between the science fiction world presented on the screen and a strangely dislocated view of contemporary Poland as an alien world. As Łukasz Ronduda puts it, these added scenes “make science fiction appear to be a commentary on the situation of communist modernity, in which the cult of rationalization and the supervision over all aspect[s] of life became a new variation on religious faith.”15 The shutting down of production of the film meant not only that after a difficult eighteen months of filming, no film was completed, but also that Żuławski himself was placed on a blacklist and forbidden on any film set. It was during this extremely difficult time, compounded by the stress of his wife, Małgorzata Braunek,

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leaving him, that Żuławski came up with the idea for his next film, Possession (1980), which would be made in Berlin.

Possession as Transnational and Transitional Family Narrative The emphasis so far has been on the disjunction between Żuławski’s cinema and dominant tendencies in Polish national cinema; that said, Possession clearly calls out for a truly transnational analysis seeing as it is a film conceived of in Poland; shot in Berlin with a French producer; starring actors from France, New Zealand, and Germany; and based on a script by an American and funded by American money. It is also the only film that Żuławski ever made in English, and that has had a wide international cult audience, despite being censored for periods of time in the United Kingdom and elsewhere as a “video nasty.” Nevertheless, Possession, in contrast to many of the films Żuławski made in France beginning with The Most Important Thing: Love (L’important c’est d’aimer, 1975), maintains strong links with the Polish context; indeed, Żuławski claims that it was only made in Berlin because this was as close as possible to making it in Poland or the Eastern bloc. It is for these reasons that this film will be dealt with separately and apart from the series of films Żuławski made in France, which had in fact already begun beforehand. If the fate of Possession under censorship was not as severe as its predecessor, its circulation as a censored horror film has led to many distortions in the reception of the film, not least of which is the bracketing out of its sociopolitical context. While the film takes on the mask of the horror film, as had The Devil before it and as On the Silver Globe had done with science fiction, there is much more to Possession than the mere presentation of shocking scenes of abjection and the horror provoked by a woman’s relationship with a tentacled monster. Even today, however, there are critics who only perceive these aspects of the film. I will attempt here to bring out the geopolitical dimensions of the film, to show how, perhaps more than any other film by Żuławski, it is a direct expression of his relations with contemporary Polish reality. In Possession, Żuławski uses the Wall as a deliberate way of looking back at Poland and the world he had recently left behind. In The Other Side of the Wall,16 the documentary feature that accompanies the recent DVD rerelease of Possession, Żuławski places great emphasis on these Polish aspects of the film, saying not only that for him this was the only reason to base the film in Berlin but also that for him the monstrous

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miscarriage conceived and nurtured by Anna is an analogy of the communist regime itself. One does not necessarily have to embrace this reading of the film to be struck by the extent the film emphasizes the Cold War and the divided constitution of Europe—from the initial job of Marc (Sam Neill) that seems to be that of a Cold War spy to the ending of the film in an apparent nuclear apocalypse. Beyond this, the real center of the film is the account of the disintegration of a couple, and the quest of the male character to understand an affective metamorphosis that has no logical explanation; as in Godard’s Contempt (1964), for Anna (Isabelle Adjani), love has turned into revulsion, a process that the rational male protagonists in both films are unable and unwilling to understand. At any rate, the film begins on this level with no hint of any fantastic dimension, except for the seemingly irrational behavior of Anna, which seems at first to stem simply from her guilt at having taken on a lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), whom she refuses to relinquish. Some critics have limited the “real” events of the film to this beginning, arguing that the rest takes place in Marc’s head as he descends into madness or a process of Jungian self-realization;17 however, nothing in the film legitimizes such a black-and-white distinction. Instead, as in the surrealist idea of the permeation of reality by the imaginary, a monstrous, fantastic dimension emerges by degrees as it is revealed that Anna’s new love is not for Heinrich but for a tentacled creature, a thing that is growing in a dingy Kreuzberg apartment that Anna visits whenever she has the chance, and with which she is involved in rationally inconceivable sexual relations. While there are various reasons to account for this, “the thing” is a singularly unstable entity that appears first as a dark and glistening eye, then as a pathetic pulsating octopus, a phallic-shaped being with tiny eyes, a tentacled and virile half-human monster, and ultimately an almost exact replica of Marc. This metamorphic thing is finally given an explanation of a kind as the result of a violent miscarriage in a Berlin subway, which presumably took place during Marc’s absence, but at the same time it seems to be the pure embodiment and materialization of evil. However, this evil is not something abstract, but something that has been produced between Anna and Marc, signifying the darkness that has come to contaminate their relationship.18 On another level, one has to take seriously that this “monster” is somehow from the East, the effect of Berlin’s being a Western outpost surrounded by an evil and abject force that, despite the Wall, finds a way of infecting the characters’ lives. As Anna’s doppelganger, who comes from East Berlin, says at one point in the film, “Where I’m from evil is easier to spot, because it’s personified in people,” a statement that is metonymic for Żuławski’s view of Poland and the whole of the Eastern bloc.

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Figure 12.1. Screenshot from Possession (dir. Żuławski, 1980): Isabelle Adjani

Possession, despite the darkness of its subject matter, was a new beginning for Żuławski’s career, and perhaps for this reason reworks his Polish debut, The Third Part of the Night, in intriguing ways. Not only is the famous staircase shootout reprised toward the end of the film but also the apocalyptic tone is similar, especially in the ending of the film. More than this, Possession is the apotheosis of the expressionist theme of the double in Żuławski’s work. Not only is Marc doubled, first by his substitute Heinrich, whose feminine, open personality supplants Marc in Anna’s affections and desires, and then by the monster itself, a fact underlined by its finally becoming Marc’s replicant, but Anna also has her doubles: in her schoolteacher lookalike and in her parable of the two sisters of “faith and chance.” This account of the process she is undergoing as a splitting into these two sisters is associated with the miscarried monster, making it also Anna’s double, referred to in her dialogue as “her faith,” which she is obliged to care for—if not, all that will be left is meaningless chance. The revelation about Anna’s splitting into these two parts is tellingly given to Marc in the form of a film taken by Heinrich, which marks a substantial shift in the film from Marc as rational male trying to investigate and control the desire of the female Other to a less conventional story of both of them on parallel journeys into and through madness, to a confrontation with their various doubles. Interestingly, this personal quest that seems

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tied up with conjugal and familial relations is always opening up to others, whether Anna’s friend Margie and her lover Heinrich, the schoolteacher Helena, and finally Marc’s shady Cold War colleagues, yielding the sense of a not merely personal but world-political apocalypse. Again, while it would be banal and against the aesthetics of the film to reduce it to autobiographical details, it is tempting to read it as a transfiguration, not only of Żuławski’s breakup with his wife but also the breaking of contact with Poland and the emotional ambivalence surrounding this other divorce that ranges from nostalgia to resentment. The increasingly desperate attempts on Marc’s part to hold on to his family, however contaminated or distorted it might be by evil and unfathomable forces, is the masked expression of Żuławski’s real struggle and wrenching loss: not only of his family but also of his former social context.

Żuławski’s “French” Cinema: Performativity, Intertextuality, and Cinema in a Transnational Context As has already been suggested, the series of films Żuławski made in France—beginning with The Most Important Thing: Love, continuing in the 1980s with La femme publique (The public woman, 1984), L’amour braque (Limpet love, 1985), and Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (My nights are more beautiful than your days, 1989), and culiminating with Żuławski’s last completed film, La fidelité (Fidelity, 2000)—are aesthetically and stylistically distinct from his Polish work. One obvious difference is a relative shift from male “romantic” protagonists to female “performers,” whose performance is central to the films’ themes and style. Similarly, whereas his Polish films were based on his own scripts or based on stories written by his male ancestors, with the exception of Limpet Love, his French films tended to be adaptations, often of the work of young, relatively unknown female novelists, a tendency that was also apparent in his one later film made in Poland, Szamanka (1996). However, with Żuławski the practice of adaptation is a complex one since, in all cases, he transformed the original texts according to his cinematic vision and, in two cases, added layers of intertextuality by incorporating direct references to the novels of Dostoyevsky. It is as if the best way Żuławski, as an émigré Polish filmmaker, could continue making films was to situate himself somewhere between Dostoyevsky’s nineteenth-century novels and contemporary French fiction. Despite these complexities, it is still possible to treat these films as a response to and an exceeding of the limits of Polish national cinema, even as the director

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shifted from a confrontation with these limits to an exploration of what lay beyond them. In The Most Important Thing: Love, female performance is emphasized from the very first scene, in which Servais (Fabio Testi) bursts onto a film set to snap pictures of the once famous actress Nadine (Romy Schneider), now performing in a Z-grade movie and being directed abusively by her female director. While it is purportedly an adaptation of Christopher Frank’s novel La nuit Américaine (Day for night, 1972), Żuławski changes the context completely, not only by showing the actress’s descent in such a brutal and extreme way but also by depicting this as Servais’s own professional world, since whenever he is not being a tabloid paparazzi he is taking perverse porn pictures for a dubious underworld boss—instead of photographing artists and intellectuals, as his literary counterpart does. More importantly, Żuławski uses the narrative situation of the novel to generate an intense and disturbing scene in which the actress is subject to multiple mediated looks: the look of the camera on the set, the look of Servais’s tabloid still camera, and the third look of the camera by means of which we are seeing the film—the only look that actually sees her not as an exploitable surface appearance but as a talented and emotional performer, expressing an affective inner life. To dramatize this difference, Żuławski begins the film with a contrast between two camera movements—that of the on-set film camera pushing forward toward Nadine, as the actual camera is tracking backward, thereby distinguishing these two views of the actress’s performance. This is reinforced later as the actress is being berated by the director and first becomes aware of a third gaze, that of Servais’s camera. She pleads with him to stop, not to film her like this (straddling a bloodstained body in a role unworthy of her, in heavy artificial makeup); yet it is this meeting that initiates the contact between the two lovers. This is reinforced by the Georges Delerue music that at this point is highly reminiscent of his romantic theme used in that other film about filmmaking, Contempt (Le mépris, dir. Godard, 1963). More than this, this sequence shifts the alignment of Servais’s gaze from exploitation to love, or from the on-set to the off-set camera, as it instills in him the desire to photograph her properly, to find a role worthy of her, and ultimately to become her lover. The film’s complexity is not limited to this formal reflexivity, however, but also reflects its transnational constitution as a French, Italian, and West German coproduction. While The Most Important Thing: Love was hardly a big-budget “Euro-pudding,” this international funding of the film explains, as with Possession, the presence of performers from a variety of European countries, including, in addition to Testi, Klaus Kinski,

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Figure 12.2. Screenshot from The Most Important Thing: Love (dir. Żuławski, 1975)

who dominates his scenes as a theater director, whose obsessional approach to his production leads to its artistic failure. As such, Kinski’s role as director of the play within the film, which is the artistic complement to the exploitative film within the film already described, is also a stand-in persona for Żuławski himself, and his Polish origins would certainly have been part of what made him ideal for this role. Schneider, as an Austrian actress working in France, whose career had undergone a similar if less drastic decline to that of the character she plays, is also to some extent a Central European outsider to the French context. All of these transnational influences, not least of which is the foreignness of the director, who was at that time only in temporary exile in France, decenter the film from merely being a French art movie or a continuation of the French New Wave. So despite the many references to French popular and cinematic culture, especially via the character of Jacques Chevalier (Jacques Dutronc), whose cinephilia and cultivated immaturity are reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s performances in the films of Godard and Truffaut, the film presents a foreign perspective on the French context in which it takes place. This perhaps accounts for the recasting of the novel’s intellectual milieu into that of the seedy porno underbelly of cultural production, a milieu more accessible to diasporic artists than that of high culture. At the same time, without constituting a critique of capitalism per se, the film uses the idea of porn to emphasize the exploitative

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dynamics of Western media culture, a milieu seen as every bit as distorting of human relations and creativity as the world of socialist Poland. This transnational constitution of the film is not unrelated to the ways in which it foregrounds representational practices and performances in relation to film, photography, and theater. While Żuławski’s Polish films were already mediated by a combination of Polish cinematic and literary representations with transnational cinematic styles, in the films made in France these processes of mediation and performance that cross different media are foregrounded, to the extent that the films are more about these different mediations and their corresponding performances than about any underlying reality. Even the main love affair in The Most Important Thing: Love is expressed via these mediated performances since Servais’s love for Nadine is expressed first by wanting to take better, more worthy photographs of her, and then by finding her a suitable theatrical and artistic role, manipulated from “behind the scenes,” as if he wanted to influence her life in a manner similar to a cinematic or theatrical director influencing a performance. The “love” referred to in the title (which would originally have been the same as the novel, La nuit Américiane, if this very title had not just been appropriated by Truffaut’s recent selfreflexive film) is therefore highly mediated by a series of performances, not only of Nadine as an actress but also by Servais as a seedy photographer, who in the end comes to reject the more unsavory and exploitative dimensions of his professional role. This combination of transnational elements, with a focus on practices of performance, mediation, and representation, would only be intensified in the films Żuławski would make in France in the 1980s when his temporary exile had become permanent. In The Public Woman, this emphasis on female performativity takes center stage in the story of a young actress, Ethel (Valérie Kaprisky), who tries to succeed in movies while supporting herself by posing nude for pornographic pictures then lands the lead role in an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. Here, self-reflexivity takes on new dimensions, since the film is concerned with representational practices from literature and cinema to exploitative photography but also stages a bleeding between these practices and the world of the film. The director of the film, Lucas Kesling (Francis Huster), who is also cast in the lead male role of Stavrogin, seems to be playing out the nihilistic themes of the novel in his extracinematic life, especially in his manipulation of a Czech couple—the woman Elena, who seems to have been murdered, and the man Milan, who is manipulated into a political assassination. Similarly, Ethel “performs” not only in front of the still or moving camera but also in her relationships with Kesling and Milan, especially when

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she deliberately “becomes” the dead woman Elena, in order to get closer to Milan and to learn more about the sinister events surrounding the production of the film. In a sense she is performing all the time since as an unknown struggling to survive in a world based on performances, all she has is her performance, and most elementally the performance of her body as dramatized by her acting in the creation of erotic photographic images. The tension between these attempts to capture her performance, which she resists via frenetic and aggressively choreographed movements of such violence that they send her photographer into cardiac arrest, is a more brutal and raw encapsulation of her struggle in front of Kesling’s camera and indeed in relation to him more generally. This performativity is presented in an explicitly intertextual framework between the almost banal story of a young actress trying to succeed in the exploitative world of cinema and the thematic concerns of The Possessed that are echoed in the extracinematic events already referred to. Mediating between these two texts is the process of filmmaking, the foregrounding of which makes this film considerably more self-reflexive than any other film by Żuławski. As if to emphasize this, the opening scene of the film turns out not to be happening in the present world of the film but is a scene from The Possessed, in which a woman, played by Ethel, delivers some money to Stavrogin, who is besieged by creditors. However, it turns out that this scene is yet to be made but is only Ethel unsuccessfully reading for the part, a decision that is then overturned by the director, who is less interested in her skills and experience as an actress than in her inner self. This opens the way for numerous scenes of filmmaking in which the boundaries between what is inside and outside the film become increasingly porous. This is rendered explicit by a scene in which Ethel is failing to separate her performance from her own emotions about Kesling and also failing in Kesling’s eyes to deliver an adequate performance, in lines that give some insight into Żuławski’s own practice as a director: “Playing each scene separately isn’t enough. I don’t want you to play each scene; I want you to play your role! What matters is what is between each scene, the truth of the character.”19 In terms of transnationality the film makes several masked references to Poland and Eastern Europe. First, it is located between, in the intertextual sense of being a film based on a French story in a French context that at the same time is concerned with the making of a film based on a Russian novel; both this cinematic context and the adaptation of Dostoyevsky represent key changes between the original story and the film. Then there is the identity of the director: in the film he is presented as a German filmmaker and enfant terrible, modeled at least partially

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on Rainer Werner Fassbinder—his later toying with political violence being an explicit reference to the Fassbinder’s supposed support of the Red Army Faction. However, Kesling “is” no more Fassbinder than he is Żuławski, but rather a complex and composite figure expressing at once ideals of genuine creativity and the failure to live up to these ideals, represented via the manipulation and betrayal of those he comes into contact with. The transnational resonances of the film do not end there but are also present in another innovation of the film: the rendering of the political crime that Kesling manipulates Milan into committing—namely, the assassination by a Czech dissident of a Lithuanian archbishop, Schlapas. Not only does this latter virtuous figure clearly resemble the Polish pope, John Paul II, but it also echoes his connection to Eastern European dissidence. So it is not just that one could draw a line between Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, as between France and Russia, and arrive at Poland, but that the film is making oblique reference to Poland’s recent political experience of the Solidarity era while at the same time referring to political violence in Western Europe. While this hardly renders the film one of “moral concern” (and this entire subplot could be considered to be background relative to the foregrounded issues of creativity and performativity), it nevertheless gives the film a transnational, trans-European resonance and reference to the still divided situation of Cold War Europe. This transnationality is also evident in Żuławski’s following film, Limpet Love, which is less a literal adaptation of Dosoyevsky’s The Idiot than a contemporary reworking of it, played somewhere between a comic strip and a gangster film. Here the intertextuality is not with any French original but with various aspects of Western popular culture ranging from comics to the French New Wave and arguably, as one of Żuławski‘s most choreographed films, to modern dance. Again there is a reference to political violence as Micky’s gang conduct themselves as something of a cross between James Cagney–style gangsters and urban guerrillas. The film also starts with an encounter on an improbable train journey from Hungary, casting the “idiot” as an Eastern European migrant, again making reference to Cold War Europe and decentering the film from being merely a modern-day “French” adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel. While not foregrounding these elements and being less explicitly self-reflexive than The Public Woman, Limpet Love nevertheless generates a transEuropean aesthetic space in which the tragic events of Dostoyevsky’s novel are played out against the experience of migration and diaspora, which becomes especially evident in Léon’s dealings with other members of his displaced Hungarian family, many of whom are involved with theatrical performances and in general are “performing” for their hosts in

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order to secure their otherwise precarious existence in France. In both these films the emphasis on performativity and modes of representation and expression is inseparable from trans-European and transnational dynamics that destabilize the French context and continually point to Eastern European if not Polish cultural and political experiences. Passing over the later films made by Żuławski in exile, which express these experiences of transnationality to a more or less explicit extent, it is worth finishing this chapter by briefly considering the one film he made subsequently in Poland, Szamanka (The She-Shaman, 1996). Żuławski has referred to this as a film made “without masks,” and this certainly seems to be the case in its brutal presentation of the situation of contemporary postcommunist Poland. In this film, gangsterism and violence seem to be lurking behind every ugly corner, and everything from intimate relationships to scientific inquiry and the Catholic Church seems irremediably corrupted. Yet the response to the film, which may indeed have been informed by a rejection of this picture of contemporary Poland, tended to focus almost exclusively on the alleged maltreatment of Iwona Petry, the actress who played the main role of “the Italian,” the presentday shamaness whose behavior comes to echo that of her ancient predecessor, the victim of whichher anthropologist lover Michał (Bogusław Linda) has dug up. While much of this attention was in the tabloid press, it was sufficiently echoed in Polish film criticism to constitute a near total rejection of this film as an unethical and, by implication, inaccurate portrayal of contemporary Poland.20 Critics have also seen the film as misogynist in its reduction of the female figure to an almost animalistic level of eroticism and violence, while her lover Michał still maintains a professional life. Some of this criticism, however, attributes this violence to Żuławski alone, when in fact it was already present in the original and arguably feminist novel, again written by a young female novelist, Manuela Gretkowska. In other words, the violence and horror in the film was intended as an attack on the patriarchal values dominant in postcommunist Poland, an attack that the film certainly transforms and intensifies but does not necessarily submit to any misogynist agenda. Considering that both Gretkowska and Żuławski were exiles at the time, the film can legitimately be read as an exilic view of contemporary Poland from the perspective of the insider who has become an outsider. In this sense, regardless of whether The She-Shaman is considered a great or minor film within Żuławski’s oeuvre, it is very much an example of accented cinema, in the quite literal sense of making strange the familiar, by seeing it with critical eyes that have become foreign. Certainly, Żuławski made no attempts to please Polish audiences whether popular or critical, but

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given the subsequent tendency of Polish cinema toward grim social realism, the film is both prescient of, and in many ways goes beyond, more recent attempts to represent conditions in postcommunist Poland. Of course, such realism was perhaps not at all what Żuławski was even attempting, and yet his description of the film as being “without masks” and related to the idea taken from Przybyszewski of the “naked soul” render it an attempt to create an expression not so much of the surface reality but of the underlying power dynamics, violence, and prevailing misogynist gender relations in contemporary Poland.21 As such it is as much against prevailing tendencies in Polish cinema, such as genre films and the then nascent “new cinema of moral concern,” which it both preempts and critiques, as his 1970s Polish films were challenges to the cinema of the Polish school and rejections of the Cinema of Moral Concern. In both contexts, what Żuławski rejects is the separation between aesthetics and politics, in favor of an expressive cinema the politics of which lie precisely in its refusal to turn away from horror, sex, and violence, without at the same time abandoning aesthetic expressivity and invention. In this chapter, the expressive strategies in the films of Andrzej Żuławski have been examined as subversive responses to hegemonic realist styles in Polish cinema ranging from the Polish school and the Cinema of Moral Concern to the equally hegemonic genre cinema and social realism in postcommunist Polish cinema. I have argued that the expressive excess in these films has a political dimension and has been perceived as a danger to the social and political values represented by and in old and new moral realisms. At the same time I have demonstrated how Żuławski adopted a range of transnational styles and genres but still succeeded in adapting them to his own creative ends. Żuławski’s cinema very much merits being considered as a form of accented cinema, one that draws on Polish national cinematic traditions but then combines them with transnational elements ranging from genres and styles to modes of performance and cinematography. In his films made outside Poland, this transnationality becomes even more pronounced not only because the films were made as European coproductions, but because often transnationality played a key thematic role, dramatizing Żuławski’s own experience of exile. Nevertheless, even when Żuławski seemed to be expressing himself in a foreign language, not only linguistically but in relation to other cinematic traditions like the French New Wave, a stubborn Polish accent still remained, just as when making films in Poland, and especially after his return in the 1990s, he seemed to be introducing a foreign accent into Polish cinema, speaking its language but strangely, hence the disturbing effect on Polish critics and audiences. This is something like the

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way Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe Franz Kafka in terms of a “polylingualism of one’s own language,” referring to the way in which the Czech Jewish writer managed “to be a sort of stranger within his own language,” in his making what they call a minor use of the German language.22 In a similar way, Żuławski’s cinema can be understood as an accented as well as a “minor” Polish cinema, not in the sense of being insignificant but of putting Polish cinema into a different key, a key that is intrinsically “polylingual” in style.

Notes 1. Żuławski, cited in Łukasz Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański: Excerpts from the History of Polish New Wave,” in Polish New Wave: The History of a Phenomenon That Never Existed, ed. Barbara Piwowarska and Łukasz Ronduda (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, 2009), 40. 2. See Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 11–13, 31–32. 3. Tadeusz Lubleski, “Was There at Least a Bit of the New Wave in Polish Cinema?” in Piwowarska and Ronduda, Polish New Wave, 20. 4. Żuławski, cited in Piotr Kletowski, “Andrzej Żuławski’s The Third Part of the Night, The Devil and On the Silver Globe as Specimens of Polish New Wave Auteur Cinema,” in Piwowarska and Ronduda, Polish New Wave, 72. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 73, 74. 7. Kuba Mikurda and Kamila Wielebska, eds., A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema (Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art, 2010). 8. Kletowski, “Specimens of Polish New Wave,” 74–79. 9. Ibid., 75. 10. Agnieszka Holland, cited in Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 155. 11. Ibid. 12. Żuławski, cited in Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański,” 40. 13. Ibid. Strangely this was hardly the first such example of an unfinished Polish film that was subsequently supplemented by documentary materials. Munk’s The Passenger (Pasażerka, 1963) had to be completed with a voiceover accompanying production stills due to the sudden death of its director, and Skolimowski’s Hands-Up (Ręce do góry, 1967/1981), while adopting a formally different procedure, is another example of a film supplemented by documentary materials responding directly to censorship.

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14. Żuławski, interviewed in Daniel Bird and Andrzej Żuławski, “The Other Side of the Wall,” special feature, Possession DVD (London: Second Sight, 2010). 15. Ronduda, “Skolimowski, Królikiewicz, Żuławski, Uklański,” 40. 16. Bird and Żuławski, “Other Side of the Wall.” 17. Ewa Strzalek-Smalls, “Who’s Possessed? The Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski as an Example of Visionary Art,” in Żuławski, ed. Daniel Bird (Keele, UK: Keele University Press. 1998), n.p. 18. For a fascinating reading of the film, tightly focused on the unstable, “mucousal” figure of the creature, see Patricia MacCormack, “Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigiray and Zulawski’s Possession,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 1 (2010), http://cjpmi.ifl. pt/1-mucous-monsters-and-angels/. 19. Kesling, in Le femme publique (The Public Woman, dir. Andrzej Żuławski, 1984). 20. For an example of Polish criticism of Szamanka, see Jan Olszewski, cited in Ewa Mazierska, “Witches, Shamans, Pandoras: Representation of Women in the Polish Postcommunist Cinema,” Scope, June 2002, n.p., http:// www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=jun2002&id=268§ion= article. According to Mazierska, Olszewski’s “main concern is the fate of the actress, Iwona Petry, [and he] argues that her experience had to be traumatic and degrading.” This was a common reaction to the film for both Polish critics and audiences. 21. On Przybyszewski’s concept of the naked soul, see Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of Califronia Press, 1992), 330–33. The naked soul is a kind of spiritual essence animating reality but remaining untouched by its compromises, an absolute only accessible in modernity via art. As such it could be seen as not unrelated to a secular mysticism or indeed shamanism. 22. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26–27.

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Chapter Thirteen

Polanski and Skolimowski in Swinging London Robert Murphy Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End (1971), very different though they are in style and subject matter, both set their stories in a London that is an odd combination of the familiar and the alien.1 Both films explore the effect of a sexual revolution that has dredged up unexpected anxieties and dangers for young people entering into a world where—as Mick Jagger puts it in Performance (1971), “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” One might expect Polanski and Skolimowski, refugees from the gray wastelands behind the Iron Curtain, to revel in the pleasures of colorful, liberated London. Instead, they retain an outsider’s skeptical pessimism, and thus are able to reveal a society driven by guilt, insecurity, prejudice, and sexual uncertainty. This chapter will analyze how and why Repulsion and Deep End are able to offer such resonant and convincing representations of life in Sixties Britain. Polanski came to London in 1964, when “Swinging London” was still a secret shared by a small elite of musicians, artists, fashion designers, photographers, and media personalities. Its manifestation in films was hinted at in zany satires like Nothing but the Best (Clive Donner, 1964), but it was not until John Schlesinger’s Darling, released in mid-1965, that it was to become a recognized phenomenon. Polanski made Repulsion to fit the vogue for psychological horror films as a way of securing funding for more personal projects, but he cleverly uses London locations and the climate of sexual permissiveness to add depth and resonance to his tale of repression and madness. Skolimowski did not arrive in England until the end of the decade, by which time the United Kingdom’s economic problems had tarnished the bright hopes of a prosperous, classless society and permissiveness had degenerated into sleaze and exploitation. Deep End, where vulnerable young people live out hopes and dreams in a world of false glamour and real poverty, shows startling insight into a society where progress seemed to have stalled.

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“Swinging London” The 1960s was the last (one could argue the only) decade when British films were distributed widely in the international market. The success of the James Bond films, the phenomenal popularity of the Beatles (and of their modestly budgeted first film, A Hard Day’s Night) and other British bands, the daring new British fashions (epitomized by the miniskirt), and the exuberance of British youth culture—captured, ironically, in Tony Richardson and John Osborne’s zany adaptation of Henry Fielding’s eighteenth-century novel Tom Jones—all contributed to making London the cultural capital of the world. The economic foundations for this evanescence of cultural vitality, however, were weak. Although living standards rose by 130 percent between 1955 and 1969 and unemployment remained very low, the British economy was plagued by old-fashioned practices, rigid hierarchies, and appalling labor relations.2 This applied to the film industry as much as other British industries. The 1960s saw a precipitous decline in cinema admissions as television drew away the audience and both the Associated British Picture Coporation (ABPC) and the Rank Organization, the two large, vertically integrated companies that dominated all aspects of the industry, became increasingly sclerotic. One might have expected British film production to scale down to match the increasingly meager returns from the domestic market (as it would do in the 1970s). On the contrary, it boomed as American money, attracted by the myth of “Swinging London,” poured in. Between 1961 and 1966 United Artists, Paramount, MGM, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, and Warner Bros. (as well as “mini-majors” such as Avco-Embassy and Filmways) set up production offices in London. By 1967, 90 percent of the financing for British films came from American sources.3 Despite Time magazine’s breathy endorsement, “The guards now change at Buckingham Palace to a Lennon and McCartney tune, and Prince Charles is firmly in the longhair set,” surprisingly few of the visiting directors bought into the myth of Swinging London.4 Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), made in black-and-white and immersed in Cold War politics, might be forgiven for showing London as dismal and noirish. But the two subsequent Le Carré adaptations, Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (1966) and Frank Pierson’s The Looking Glass War (1969), are equally somber. Lumet’s film alternates between the palatial end of Chelsea, where a wretched James Mason lives unhappily with his “nymphomaniac” wife, and the wastelands of South London, where Harry Andrews’s pensioned-off policeman tends

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his rabbits and strong-arms small-time crooks. Things get even darker in The Looking Glass War as elderly spymasters Ralph Richardson and Paul Rogers cynically exploit the innocence and idealism of the young men played by Anthony Hopkins and Christopher Jones. Ritt, Lumet, and Pierson were working from novels with a particularly gloomy view of the world. But the films make no attempt to lighten Le Carré’s vision, and it now seems odd that the Americans should choose to make films—excellent though they are—that defy genre conventions and provide a pessimistic counterpoint to the James Bond films that encouraged them to come to London in the first place. Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967), both scripted by Harold Pinter, equate permissiveness with decadence and are similarly jaundiced in their view of British society; Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) and Ray Milland’s Hostile Witness (1968) avoid the bright new lights and set their intriguing tales in a black-and-white London peopled by eccentrics and urbane sophisticates. American directors who do engage with Swinging London slow things down to a geriatric pace by featuring ageing or at least familyfriendly Hollywood actors—Gregory Peck in Arabesque (dir. Stanley Donen, 1966), Deborah Kerr and David Niven in Prudence and the Pill (dir. Fielder Cook, 1968), Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love (dir. James Clavell, 1968). Part of the problem was the gulf between the generations. Even “young” directors like John Schlesinger, Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson were forty or older by 1966 and were distanced from the “swinging” scene. A sprinkling of European directors came closer. Negatives (1968), made by Hungarian refugee Peter Medak, caught something of Swinging London’s penchant for exotic fantasy, and François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) cleverly played on its countervailing tendencies of technological gadgetry and back-to-nature idealism. Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) engaged more directly with Swinging London. The director’s adaptation of Julio Cortázar’s short story, “Las babas del diablo,” shifted the setting from Paris to London and turned Cortázar’s amateur photographer into a professional fashion photographer at the heart of the “swinging” scene. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker complained that the ageing Italian failed to capture “the humor and fervor and astonishing speed in youth’s rejection of older values.”5 But Antonioni had done his research thoroughly—quizzing Terence Stamp on his insider’s knowledge before passing over him for the central role of Thomas, and commissioning Francis Wyndham, whose color supplement essay “The Model Makers” had alerted him to London’s exuberant energy and restless social mobility, to prepare an extensive report on the

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social, professional, and sexual habits of working-class fashion photographers David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy.6 Unsurprisingly, Antonioni’s skepticism has stood the test of time better than Kael’s naive enthusiasm for the new trends, and Blowup now looks perceptive and revealing in its rendering of Swinging London.

Polanski and Repulsion In this fluid and conflicted context it is interesting to consider how two young Polish directors, Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, reacted to Swinging London at a time when the “Polish way to socialism” under Władysław Gomułka was proving disappointingly timid in mitigating the rigors of Eastern bloc communism. Polanski’s first feature, Knife in the Water (Nóz w wodzie, 1962), won the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival, but its jazzy score, amoral characters, and refusal to take a clear moral line was frowned on by the Polish authorities.7 The young director moved to Paris, but expected offers failed to materialize and Polish expatriate producer Gene Gutowski persuaded him to come to London. Having felt distinctly underappreciated in Paris, Polanski welcomed the warmth and openness of London: “I soon found that, whereas neither my shorts nor Knife in the Water had lifted me out of the rut of obscurity in Paris, London responded to youthful talent; I had gained a reputation there quite fast. This after all was the era when Cockney photographers and an obscure Merseyside pop group became celebrities overnight.”8 Soon he was partying at the Ad Lib Club, mixing with Victor Lownes, the Playboy Club impresario, going out with glamorous starlets like Jill St. John and Jacqueline Bisset, and even experimenting with LSD. The British film industry proved less welcoming. Polanski arrived too early to take advantage of American largesse (though he would eventually secure a budget of £2 million from the MGM-backed Filmways to make Dance of the Vampires in 1967), and the declining empires of Rank and ABPC gave little encouragement to unconventional new talent. Woodfall, the production company set up by Tony Richardson and John Osborne in 1959 to film their stage success Look Back in Anger, might have been a natural home for Polanski’s project, a bizarre black comedy then called If Katelbach Comes (eventually to be filmed as Cul-de-Sac). In 1958 Richardson had included Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe as one of the “Polish Voices” in a “Free Cinema” program he had organized at the National Film Theatre with Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. But

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Woodfall had already produced its own absurdist drama, N. F. Simpson’s One Way Pendulum (dir. Peter Yates, 1964), and it had fared badly with both critics and audiences. The only door that opened for Polanski was a seedy one in Soho, where Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser ran Compton Films, a small production company responsible for a string of exploitation films. If Katelbach Comes hardly fit their profile, but the links between art and sex films were surprisingly close in the 1960s (the two men had met when Tenser had recruited girls from Klinger’s striptease club for a stunt to publicize Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (And God created woman, 1956), and Klinger at least was sufficiently aware of Polanski’s European reputation to want to work with him. They had observed Hammer’s success with contemporary horror thrillers in the wake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and after the shenanigans they had endured during the production of Robert Hartford-Davies’s gothic horror The Black Torment, they gambled that a talented director and a contemporary setting might produce better results. Polanski was happy to compromise: Gerard Brach and I wrote Repulsion with one over-riding aim in mind: to ensure that Klinger and Tenser financed it. To hook them, the screenplay had to be unmistakably horrific; they were uninterested in any other kind of film. Anything too sophisticated would have scared them off, so the plot of Repulsion—a homicidal schizophrenic running amok in her sister’s deserted London apartment—including bloodcurdling scenes that verged on horror film clichés. Any originality we achieved would have to come through our telling of the story, which we wanted to make as realistic and psychologically credible as we could.9

Hammer’s psychological thrillers—Seth Holt’s Taste of Fear (1961); Michael Carreras’s Maniac (1963); and the Freddie Francis trilogy Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964), and Hysteria (1965), all scripted by Jimmy Sangster—are an interesting bunch of films within the parameters set by Psycho and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1955). But their concern is with suspense rather than social reality, and their characters are thin and stereotyped. Polanski’s Repulsion attempts the harder task of inserting art cinema themes—alienation, disturbed sexuality, the dividing line between reality and fantasy—into a genre horror film. Although much of the film takes place in the increasingly paranoid environment of Carol Ledoux’s flat (shot on a set at Twickenham Studios), it conveys a powerful impression of Sixties London. Carol (Catherine Deneuve) works in a beauty parlor—shot in Vidal Sassoon’s fashionable London salon. But instead of chirpy young women

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having their hair cut into Mary Quant bobs, we see ugly old ladies having their decaying flesh pampered. In contrast to the convivial, spacious flat shared by Francesca Annis and her friends in Compton’s The Pleasure Girls (1965), Carol and her sister share a gloomy, old-fashioned mansion block apartment with a creaking lift and an old lady with an old dog as their neighbor. When Carol is left alone while her sister goes on holiday with her married lover, her mind starts to unravel. Her isolation fosters increasingly frightening and dangerous illusions. When a potential boyfriend, and subsequently her bullying landlord, force their way into her flat, she kills them and retreats into catatonia. In the sort of carefree sequence we see in Darling (1965) and Georgy Girl (1966), Carol strolls through the streets of South Kensington, a stone’s throw from the King’s Road, the heart of Swinging London. But Polanski’s view of the burgeoning permissive society is cruelly hostile, and even when the sun is shining the world seems alien and strange. At lunchtime she walks past a group of workmen, one of whom crudely propositions her (he reappears later as her fantasy rapist). When she goes home in the evening, the workmen have gone, but the dark hole of their temporary worksite threatens to draw her in. The sense of unease continues as Carol stares fixedly at a large crack in the pavement and a bedraggled trio of buskers slowly moves across the screen. They too reappear, playing in the street below Carol’s flat; their melancholy cacophony, like the noise of the nuns playing ball in the neighboring convent, helps create the aura of disjointed reality that complements Carol’s increasingly disorientated view of the world. Katherine Shonfield argues that “for Carol to traverse the streets of London is an ordeal where she unavoidably faces the visual intrusion of another’s eye.”10 But Carol has sunk so far inside herself that she is shut off from the world around her. She does not react to the workman’s suggestive “Fancy a bit of the other, darling?” and later she crosses Hammersmith Bridge to wander oblivious past a street accident, showing no curiosity or interest in her surroundings. The emphasis is less on London as a frightening or threatening place than on Carol’s dissociation from it. John Orr compares Repulsion with Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), where Deborah Kerr’s gentle governess Miss Giddens is almost driven mad in a ghostly country house where she is marooned with two young children and an old housekeeper.11 Clayton’s intimations of the uncanny are less outré than Polanski’s but—in the boy’s passionately aggressive kiss, in the beetle emerging from the mouth of a stone statue— equally unsettling. Production values are superb, with Freddie Francis’s cinematography maintaining an illusion of ghostly insubstantiality

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throughout the film. But Miss Giddens’s madness—if such it is—is something to be surmised afterward. In Repulsion we are taken into Carol’s world, but we soon learn that what is real to her—the dreadful cracks, the rapist intruder, the clutching hands coming out of the wall—are not objectively real. While we are watching The Innocents, we see too much from Miss Giddens’s point of view to doubt the emanation of evil coming from the seemingly innocent children, and the ghostly apparitions appear as real to us as they do to the frightened governess. A more fruitful comparison can be drawn between Repulsion and Clayton’s next film, The Pumpkin Eater (1964), in which Anne Bancroft’s desolate upper-middle-class housewife drifts into madness when she realizes that she is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the lives of her husband and children and is denied satisfaction in having more babies to add to her already considerable brood. Much of the action takes place in London—including a memorable breakdown scene in Harrods, but it is a stately, quiet London with no intimation of the cultural revolution to come. Here the movement of the narrative is in the opposite direction to that of Repulsion: Bancroft’s Jo starts the film in a process of mental disintegration and—after convoluted flashbacks tell her story—ends in sanity and the tentative possibility of happiness. Harold Pinter’s script transforms Penelope Mortimer’s conventional novella, consistently stressing the strange and disjointed. Jo’s anguish is juxtaposed with less explicable forms of madness—the apocalyptic preacher who knocks on her door, the rabid hairdresser who subjects her to a jealous rant, the envy-ridden businessman who demands titfor-tat sexual favors because his wife is having an affair with her husband—that make her retreat into herself seem like an understandable reaction to a mad, cruel world. Jo’s sexuality—a restless discontent that causes her to ditch one partner for another, coupled with a zest for having babies—might contradict society’s norms, but it is fundamentally healthy. Carol is much more deeply disturbed. Lucy Fischer argues that “though ostensibly an adult, Carol’s reaction to male sexuality might well be compared to that of the pre-pubescent girl who cannot yet envision consummating a sexual act.”12 She borrows from Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment to draw parallels between Repulsion and “Beauty and the Beast,” one of Bettelheim’s “Animal-Groom” tales, where the narrative shows a young girl’s revulsion at her suitor gradually transforming into love as “she discovers her own attraction to men and learns to respond to their promise of erotic pleasure.”13 This scenario goes horribly wrong in Repulsion. For the first quarter of the film we share the view of the other characters that

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Figure 13.1. Screenshot from Repulsion (dir. Polanski, 1965): Catherine Deneuve and John Fraser

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Carol is dreamy, shy, perhaps lonely and depressed—understandable for a young woman in a foreign city where she has no close friends and her sister is having an affair with a dominating, lecherous married man. She is courted by the dashingly handsome Colin (John Fraser), who is assertive but gentlemanly, significantly different from the other men in the film who all exude a slimy machismo. Colin shares Carol’s sensitivity, expressing disgust at the unappetizing meal she cannot bring herself to eat; furiously tearing himself away from the kiss his buddy playfully plants on his lips. But his sensitive masculinity hardly registers with Carol. She is unresponsive to his assiduous attentions and, to his annoyance and frustration, forgets about their date. Only when he kisses her does she react—flying out of his car, desperately wiping her lips till she reaches the bathroom and washes out her mouth. It is as if she has been kissed by a frog. But it is Michael (Ian Hendry), Carol’s sister’s married lover, who is the prince disguised as a beast. He claims possession of Carol’s space with his razor and his toothbrush. He wakes her with his noisy lovemaking. He steals her sister away from her. But her violent dislike masks a fascination. When she finds his soiled, discarded vest, she cannot help herself from holding it to her face before casting it away and retching. Later, after the killings, she soothes herself by ironing it (although by this time she is too far gone to notice that the iron is unplugged). In Repulsion’s bleak denouement, it is Michael who pushes his way through the huddle of shocked neighbors who have crowded into the flat and carries her away—a sad and ironic parody of a husband carrying his wife over the threshold of their new home. Unlike the Hammer psychological thrillers, with their emphasis on suspense, illusion, and the manipulation of reality for malign purposes, Repulsion is dominated by disturbing sexual imagery. The cracks in the walls and pavement; the black hole of the workmen’s hut; the fetuslike skinned rabbit; the shriveled, sprouting potatoes with their connotations of aged female genitalia give way to more graphic sexual imagery— clutching hands come out of the wall, a rapist forces his way into her room. Polanski could—as Hammer did with Seth Holt’s Taste of Fear and Michael Carreras’s Maniac—have set his story in France and striven for a Clouzot-like atmosphere of macabre trickery. Or as Tony Richardson and Jean Genet would do with Mademoiselle (1966), tell a Marcel Pagnol–like tale of repressed sexuality in a backward community. But by setting Repulsion in Swinging London Polanski brings the problem of Carol’s sexuality and the way people react to it into a sharply contemporary world. All the men in the film (with the exception of Michael) make the mistake of seeing Carol as a typical Sixties “dolly-bird,” whose pretty

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face, shapely body, and blonde mop of hair make her an obvious object of desire. She might be “playing hard to get,” but the idea that she finds the prospect of sex with men disgusting and frightening never occurs to them. Repulsion sends a warning that the permissive society would not necessarily lead to carefree libertarianism but would bring to the surface forces of destructive malevolence—a warning that would have a cruel relevance to Polanski’s own life.

Skolimowski’s Deep End Jerzy Skolimowski, like Polanski, studied at the Łódź Film School in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He established himself as a writer in his collaboration with Andrzej Wajda on Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960) and Polanski on Knife in the Water and as a director with three semiautobiographical films about Polish youth: Identification Marks: None (Rysopis, 1965), Walkover (Walkower, 1965), and Barrier (Bariera, 1966). He made Le départ in Belgium with Jean-Pierre Léaud in 1967 but did not leave Poland until 1968, in the aftermath of the controversy around his film Hands Up! (Ręce do góry, 1967). By this time there was a more receptive climate for European art cinema directors in Britain, and initially Skolimowski found support and financing easier to obtain than did Polanski. After a misconceived epic, The Adventures of Gerard (1970), shot on location in Spain and in the CineCittà Studios in Rome with an international cast, which included Eli Wallach, Claudia Cardinale, and the then up-and-coming British actor Peter McEnery, Skolimowski made Deep End (1970), a small-scale and personal film set around a southwest London bathhouse. With music from the avant-garde rock band Can, a German supporting cast, and a loose and unpredictable plot, the film could have been viewed as an early entry in the New German Cinema had it been made in German, and it is something of a paradox that a film shot largely in Munich should seem so resonant of London at the beginning of the 1970s.14 By the end of the 1960s, when Skolimowski came to England, British film critics were sick of the idea of Swinging London, and Penelope Houston, the editor of Sight & Sound, complained that the British film industry was like a “jaded party, dragging exhaustedly on into the night in its bedraggled fancy dress surrounded by its odds and ends of boutique bric-a-brac, and deaf to the ambulance sirens coming louder up the street.”15 This was a period of confusion and disruption as crisis-ridden Hollywood companies economized by closing down their London offices

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and British cinema seemed about to expire among turgid musicals, tiredly formulaic horror films, and unfunny comedies and period romps. But a number of interesting British films—David Greene’s The Strange Affair (1968) and I Start Counting (1969), Jack Gold’s The Reckoning (1969), John Boorman’s Leo the Last (1970), Eric Till’s The Walking Stick (1970), Gerry O’Hara’s All the Right Noises (1971), and Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973)—all sounded loud warnings about disillusion and decay. It is among this group of films, where realism and fantasy freely combine, that Deep End belongs. Although optimism had evaporated and sleaze, corruption, and decay seeped into all aspects of society, Skolimowski, who had upset the Polish authorities with Hands Up!, found London a safe and pleasant refuge: “The people are calm and nice and there isn’t too much traffic— or cigarette smoking which I despise. It’s aesthetically pleasant: the red buses, the black taxis, the green parks. In New York you have to look for nice things among the dirt and ugliness, but in London everything is perfect. Even the ugliness is beautiful.”16 Jan Dawson, in her perceptive Sight & Sound review, regarded the Munich setting as a license for Skolimowski to present a London of his own creation “compounded in equal parts of swinging myth and squalid observation, garishly colored discotheques and faceless smoke-stained streets, uneasily juxtaposed to produce a territory midway between fantasy and reality, a world of deceptively glittering surfaces with nothing to fulfil their tantalising promise.”17 In Deep End much of the action takes place in a public washhouse where people without bathrooms come for their weekly bath—a reminder that British society was poorer and more primitive than the images of Swinging London might lead us to suppose. Films like Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), Peter Collinson’s Up the Junction (1968), and Jack Gold’s The Reckoning (1969) had already revealed the squalor that lay beneath the surface, but Skolimowski is less concerned with social deprivation than with the absurdities of everyday life. As he told one interviewer, “I am fascinated with the opportunity of smuggling the impossible into the everyday.”18 Deep End is a series of disjointed vignettes rather than a tightly organized narrative. Mike, a fifteen-year-old boy (John Moulder-Brown), starts his first job as a public baths attendant and becomes obsessed with his older female colleague Susan (Jane Asher). He is induced into a bizarre sexual arousal ritual by a blowsy older woman (Diana Dors); on a night out in Soho he eats multiple hot dogs from a genial Chinese street seller, runs off with a cardboard cutout of a stripper, and finds himself trapped in a room with a prostitute with a broken leg in a plaster

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cast. After a row with Susan, the couple at last come together as they melt snow in the emptied pool in order to find the diamond dislodged from her engagement ring. Ewa Mazierska points out that Skolimowski’s films “are permeated by strangeness and contain unexpected juxtapositions, non sequiturs and black humour.”19 In Deep End the unfamiliarity of the German actors—Karl Michael Vogler as the lecherous swimming instructor, Erica Beer as the plump cashier, Louise Martini as the brokenlegged prostitute—with their slightly stilted delivery, enhances the surrealism of the film’s world, and the brief glimpses of “real London”—the recognizable street corners in the studio-recreated Soho, the run-down empty streets Mike cycles down on his Falcon racing bike, the exterior and pool of the old Cathall Baths in Leytonstone, the London underground sequence where Mike confronts Susan with the cardboard cutout of a stripper he thinks is her—create an oneiric London that shimmers between reality and fantasy. Deep End disconcerted studio executives and puzzled audiences. Poorly distributed and misleadingly advertised, the film fared badly at the box office. Critics were much more enthusiastic: Jan Dawson in Sight & Sound, Nigel Andrews in the Monthly Film Bulletin, Gordon Gow in Films & Filming, and Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice praised it highly. In 1975 Mitchell S. Cohen wrote about it as “a film that deserved a better deal” in the “Forbidden, Forgotten, Neglected and Unlucky Films” issue of The Velvet Light Trap; it was included in the first edition of Danny Peary’s Cult Movies in 1981; and it was described as “probably Skolimowski’s best film” by Nigel Andrews in the program notes for a National Film Theatre retrospective in 1983.20 Despite only being available on murky unofficial video/DVD copies, Deep End’s cult reputation continued to grow, and a revival in interest in Skolimowski after his return to filmmaking with Four Nights with Anna (Cztery noce z Anna) in 2008, prompted reanalysis of Deep End: by Ewa Mazierska in her auteurist study of the director; John Orr, in his iconoclastic Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema; and Christopher Weedman in a perceptive essay in the online journal Senses of Cinema. In the summer of 2011 the British Film Institute released a new print of the film and a digitally remastered DVD that does justice to Charly Steinberger’s astonishingly fluid handheld camerawork and reveals the sophistication of Skolimowski’s symbolic use of color. The openness of Skolimowski’s narrative tempts critics to follow their own predilections. Peary cannot resist speculating on how the film might have been received with a different ending, one “where perhaps Mike coaxes Susan into his bed, becomes a ‘man,’ winks at the camera, rejects

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Susan for being such a sexual tease, returns to his former girlfriend Kathy, and lives happily ever after.”21 Orr insists on an “Oedipal” interpretation of the sequence where a domineering Diana Dors grabs Mike by the hair and uses him as a stimulus to orgasm while fantasizing about George Best scoring a goal that glosses over Mike’s distress and disgust at having his head forced into a woman’s over-ample breasts.22 For Mazierska Susan’s death (“a just punishment” for humiliating Mike) is a necessary part of the pre-Oedipal phase of a child’s development: “after killing Susan Mike cries ‘Mummy,’ as if he realized that by killing Susan his severance from his Mother’s body has been completed.”23 Susan is given scant sympathy by any of the academic critics. For Orr she is a foxy tease who “amuses herself with married men”; for Weedman she is a modern liberated woman, “who plays with the affections of multiple male suitors and uses sex as her bargaining chip.”24 Surprisingly, given her feminist viewpoint, Mazierska condemns Susan as “the ultimate ‘Soho semi-bitch’ of the 1970s, bright, hedonistic, cheeky, promiscuous and immoral” and categorizes her as “a classy call girl”—which is hardly compatible with her mopping out bath cubicles and sewing up cuddly toys to make ends meet.25 In fact, Asher’s Susan is a much more likable character than the Sixties girls played by Julie Christie in Darling, Charlotte Rampling in Georgy Girl, and Judy Geeson in To Sir with Love, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, and Three into Two Won’t Go. Susan’s “promiscuity” is limited to her relationship with her fiancé (who she seems reluctant to spend the night with) and her long-standing affair with her former schoolteacher. Susan’s impulsiveness—slapping Mike’s face when he fondles her breasts in the cinema but then turning round to give him a passionate kiss; calling the dog to her and then throwing a snowball at it—is funny rather than cruel (neither the dog nor Mike are in the least put off by her actions), but is also indicative of her profoundly unsettled and discontented mental state. Susan is sexually liberated but unhappy; her wealthy boyfriend is an anonymous bore; her vain, middle-aged lover a manipulative seducer whom—in one of the film’s most satisfying moments—Susan furiously denounces; other men, including the maintenance man who precipitates the tragic ending by refilling the pool, are relentlessly predatory. Mike resists this permissive tide, bewildered by the sexual demands of the big-breasted customer played by Diana Dors; he ignores the shy blandishments of the cashier; and he cheerfully rejects the offer of sex from his former school friend Kathy. He thinks he wants sex with Susan, but

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what drives his obsession is his disapproval of the fact that she is having sex with other men he deems not worthy of her. His yearnings, though perhaps unrealistic, are not pathetic, and Skolimowski never mocks or judges him. Susan finds his warmth and openness enticing, and in rejecting her older lover and repulsing her fiancé she acknowledges that Mike is right. But she is shrewd enough to know that his adolescent passion is not going to offer her anything more than temporary respite from the cruelties of the world, an impossible reversion to the innocence that has been stolen from her by her schoolteacher and that can never be regained. When Mike petulantly swings the huge hanging light they have lowered, accidentally stunning her as she walks away, Mazierska deems that her fate “can be regarded as a warning to women who attempt to elude male control and imagination.”26 But this trivializes the film almost as much as Peary’s yearning for a “Confessions of a Swimming Bath Attendant” ending. Mike, like Susan, is erratic and at times irrational, but his obsession is little more than a schoolboy crush and has no sinister overtones. Although Susan doesn’t bother to nurse him through his sexual anxieties, Mike’s inability to consummate their relationship is a subconscious recognition of the impossibility of reconciling his fantasy of Susan with the real, flawed, vulnerable woman she is. Her death is a tragedy of everyday life (she had generously returned to Mike to allow him to make love to her after he surrenders the diamond), a reminder of how easily and carelessly life can be snuffed out. It is a more sophisticated resolution than that of most Sixties British films, but its unexpected refusal to tie up the narrative in a conventional way is shared by a handful of other films about inappropriate relationships released around the same period. In David Greene’s I Start Counting, Jenny Agutter’s schoolgirl crush on her older foster brother leads her into a near fatal encounter with a serial killer; in Gerry O’Hara’s All the Right Noises, Tom Bell’s affair with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl ends with her solving her pregnancy problems by herself, condemning him to the messy reality of family life; in Eric Till’s The Walking Stick, Samantha Edgar shops her lover to the police, despite the fact that his confidence trickery has turned into love and cured her of her sexual insecurity. The women in these films suffer but survive; Susan is unable to escape the net of male desire, but she has more in common with them than she does with the submissive, throwaway women of gangland films like Get Carter (1971) and Villain (1971) or the terrorized victims of thrillers such as And Soon the Darkness (1970), Blind Terror (1971), and Sitting Target (1972).

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An Outsider’s London Skolimowski’s London in Deep End is more stylized than Polanski’s in Repulsion. The baths provide the setting for most of the action, but unlike Carol’s lonely flat, this is a public space, almost a microcosm of a London where permissiveness has gone sour and poverty still reigns. By not building up to a tragic end, by not encouraging us to choose between Mike and Susan, by not imposing a message, he makes her death an authentic tragedy, pointless and unnecessary, that resonates back through the film giving it meaning and significance. The same can be said about Polanski and Repulsion, a much colder and bleaker film, but one that ends with a display of compassion and tenderness as Michael, Carol’s sister’s flawed, lecherous lover, carries away the now hopelessly mad girl. Polanski and Skolimowski both enjoyed their time in London, but their experiences were very different. Polanski arrived as Swinging London was taking off and quickly adjusted to a cosmopolitan lifestyle, which would take him on to Hollywood and massive commercial success with Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. Skolimowski came when the “swinging” had stopped and the realities of British economic decline were becoming apparent. This suited his quieter lifestyle, but he proved less surefooted in his career choices and less eager to cut his links with his homeland. It would be wrong to assume they are similar filmmakers: Polanski’s films are sharply focused and unsentimental to the point of cruelty; Skolimowski’s are discursive, quixotic, and unpredictable. But for both of them, their troubled, dangerous childhoods in German-occupied Poland meant that they shared a sensibility that, though far from puritanical, made them instinctively skeptical about the prevailing spirit of sexual liberation and cultural change.27 Neither Polanski, trying to preserve a degree of integrity and significance while making a genre horror thriller for an exploitation company, nor Skolimowski, making a film at the tailend of the Sixties and bound to shoot much of it in Germany, can be said to be centrally concerned with Swinging London, but in Repulsion and Deep End they both display an outsider’s vision that strips away sentimentality and soothing fantasy to reveal a darker and more troubled society in London in the 1960s.

Notes 1. There are excellent DVDs of both Repulsion and Deep End. Odeon’s release of Repulsion (2010) has a particularly useful commentary by Roman

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Polanski and Catherine Deneuve. The BFI release of Deep End (2011) has a good “Making of . . .” documentary with commentary from a happily reunited John Moulder-Brown and Jane Asher; revealing interviews with Skolimowski, Charly Steinburger, Chris Sandford (who was employed as dialog coach as well as playing Susan’s boyfriend); editor Barrie Vince; and art director Anthony Pratt. 2. Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006), 191. 3. Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI, 1992), 258. 4. Piri Halasz, “London: The Swinging City—You Can Walk across it on the Grass,” Time, April 15, 1966. 5. Pauline Kael, “Review of Blow Up,” reprinted in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 32. 6. Alexander Walker, Hollywood England (London: Harrap, 1986), 316. 7. For First Secretary Gomułka’s violent reaction to Knife in the Water, see A Ticket to the West (2003) included on the Anchor Bay DVD release of Polanski’s film. 8. Roman Polanski, Roman by Polanski (London: Heinemann, 1984), 185. 9. Ibid., 182. 10. Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City (London: Routledge, 2000), 71. 11. John Orr, Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 101–8. 12. Lucy Fischer, “Beauty and the Beast: Desire and Its Double in Repulsion,” in The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, ed. John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 87. 13. Ibid., 85. 14. Deep End was an Anglo-German production (which explains why much of it was shot in Munich). The German coproducers, Maran Films, had enjoyed considerable success with Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and would go on to finance Skolimowski’s adaptation of Nabakov’s King, Queen, Knave (1972). The British coproducers, Kettledrum, had backed Peter Medak’s Negatives (1968), which had costarred Skolimowski’s Brigadier Gerard, Peter McEnery, and would go on to finance the first Monty Python film, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971). The German company appears to have been the major partner. 15. Penelope Houston, “Seventy,” Sight & Sound (Winter 1970), vol. 40, no. 1, 4. 16. Dan Yakir, “Polestar,” Film Comment, November 1982, 29. 17. Jan Dawson, “Deep End,” Sight & Sound (Winter 1970–71), vol. 40, no. 1, 16. 18. Nigel Andrew, “Jerzy Skolimowski,” NFT Booklet, June 1983, 22.

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19. Ewa Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist (London: Berghahn Books, 2010), 72. 20. Mitchell S. Cohen, “Deep End: Passion in a Public Bath,” Velvet Light Trap (Winter 1975), vol. 41, no. 1, 37. 21. Danny Peary, Cult Movies (London: Vermilion, 1982), 66. 22. Orr, Romantics and Moralists, 155. 23. Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski, 65. 24. Orr, Romantics and Moralists, 155; Christopher Weedman, “Optimism Unfulfilled: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End and the ‘Swinging Sixties,’” Senses of Cinema, no. 56 (2010), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/ deep-end/. 25. Mazierska, Jerzy Skolimowski, 69. 26. Ibid., 59. 27. It is worth noting that both Catherine Deneuve, who married the photographer David Bailey in 1965, and Jane Asher, Paul McCartney’s girlfriend for most of the 1960s, were closely associated with “swinging” London.

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Chapter Fourteen

The Elusive Trap of Freedom? Krzysztof Zanussi’s International Coproductions Kamila Kuc Krzysztof Zanussi’s career spans four decades, with more than half of his films being made abroad, featuring reputable actors such as Scott Wilson, Robert Powell, Max von Sydow, Brigitte Fossey, Leslie Caron, and Valeria Golino. It was in the 1980s that Zanussi made the majority of his international coproductions, which on the whole have been badly received in Poland. It seems that the director’s frequent commissions abroad contributed to the loss of audiences in his native country.1 Zanussi’s coproductions constitute a rather complex subject. There are at least two ways of looking at them: from the point of view of their funding, distribution, and exhibition, or from the perspective of their themes and style in relation to the director’s Polish work.2 The latter approach constitutes the guiding principle in this chapter. I wish to argue against a common view among many Polish critics that Zanussi’s coproductions demonstrate a certain regression and lack of style in the director’s oeuvre.3 On the basis of three particular titles—Imperative (West Germany/France, 1982), Bluebeard (West Germany/Switzerland, 1984), and Paradigm (West Germany/France/Italy, 1985)—I will argue first that, on the contrary, as an auteur Zanussi presents a certain continuity of themes and characters in his films made both in and outside of Poland. Second, I propose that some of these coproductions—and here Bluebeard is the most illustrative—offer a degree of formal innovation reminiscent of that present in some of Zanussi’s best Polish films, especially Illumination (Iluminacja, 1973). Finally, I suggest that his foreign works are more sexually explicit than any of the films made in Poland. In her book on Roman Polanski, Ewa Mazierska defines the director as a “cultural traveller,” because his films are shot and set in many different countries. Mazierska believes that Polanski uses filming as a way to explore other countries and traditions and that his films represent his own journeys (literal and metaphorical).4 The same could also be

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said about Zanussi. Interestingly, almost every one of his Polish films contains a foreign element in it, often signifying the characters’ need to escape from their current circumstances: in The Structure of Crystal (Struktura kryształu, 1969) Marek, a famous scientist, is educated in the United States; in Quarterly Balance (Bilans kwartalny, 1975) Marta’s friend, Róża, lives in the States; in Camouflage (Barwy ochronne, 1976) a university summer camp has many foreign exchange students; in The Constant Factor (Constans, 1980) the main character, Witek, travels to Asia for work and is fascinated by the continent’s traditions; in At Full Gallop (Cwał, 1996) Hubert’s father lives in the United Kingdom; and in Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (Życie jako śmiertelna choroba przenoszona drogą płciową, 2000) Doctor Berg travels to Paris to seek medical expertise. Zanussi’s cinema is organic: fragments of certain films appear in others, as seen in his 2009 film, Revisited (Rewizyta), in which we revisit the characters from Family Life (Życie rodzinne, 1971), Camouflage, and The Constant Factor and observe their dilemmas at later stages of their lives. There is, perhaps, one major difference between Zanussi’s coproductions and his films made in Poland: the latter ones seem more autobiographical, the most illustrative being At Full Gallop. Why did a director like Krzysztof Zanussi, whose early films were seen as masterpieces of cinema by many Polish critics, decide to go abroad to make films? The answer to this question is not straightforward. I would like to suggest that Zanussi’s desire to achieve the status of an international filmmaker was closely linked to his fascination with European auteur cinema. In addition, history did not seem to inspire him in the same way as it did Andrzej Wajda, for example. Zanussi had one goal: to become a filmmaker, rather than a “Polish filmmaker,” which would have, more or less, meant that his films had to deal with strictly Polish themes and characters (war, history, heroism, and so on). From his early years as a film student, Zanussi was fascinated with such iconic filmmakers as Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Luis Buñuel, but his first and foremost passion was for the existential cinema of Ingmar Bergman, who inspired him to become a director when he was a physics and philosophy student: “Bergman was for me a god. I came to film-making only because I discovered Bergman. He institutionalized auteurist cinema . . . That’s what inspired me. I did not want to be a film-maker who did commissioned work, I wanted to make films that were put forward by me and written by me.”5 However, a European movement closer to home seems to have been more instrumental for this young aspiring film director:

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I remember going to Helsinki as a film student for the Youth Festival . . . Before I left I was supposed to meet Wajda . . . I knew already about the Nouvelle Vague, and I was ready to embrace it enthusiastically, and Wajda said: “No, we are against it. We don’t care, this is a kind of light-hearted, egocentric cinema—we are making cinema that touches the nerve of social life, so don’t praise them. Talk about our independent approach to these issues. We don’t forget history, we are a part of history, and we fight against history—but we are not individuals, like those French are.”6

Upon his return from Helsinki, Zanussi made Students (Studenci, 1963), a fourteen-minute-long film shot in the spirit of the Nouvelle Vague. The film is set during the student vacation and is based on improvisation—Zanussi placing the camera in the center of the events simply to “observe” them. His taste for “difference” was not appreciated, as he was almost expelled from the Łódź Film School.7 Thus, as a result of Students, from the very beginning of his career, Zanussi positioned himself outside the tradition of Polish cinema. Such tradition constituted a realist cinema, an expression of the artist’s mission as a romantic prophet and teacher, who sees himself as responsible for bringing “a message to society.”8 Zanussi’s cinema is indeed “egocentric,” though his films have hardly been “light-hearted” in the sense of Wajda’s remark about the New Wave in the passage quoted above. Thus, I would suggest that his move toward an international career constituted an attempt to escape from the shackles of the Polish obsession with history. Instead, Zanussi wanted to explore a more freewheeling approach to filmmaking, as represented by his fascination with the French New Wave and its preoccupation with the contemporary lives of young people rather than the effects of history on their lives. It seems that in his films, Zanussi got a genuine pleasure out of experimenting with ideas, but the issues he was dealing with were rather complex. The time had come for a more personal cinema: a new cinema, with new heroes, that such directors as Wajda admitted he failed to understand. Throughout his career—and this, in my opinion, includes his coproductions—Zanussi explored existential dilemmas while searching for his own, personal style of filmmaking. Paul Coates remarks that “not until the arrival of Zanussi was a new style created that other directors could assimilate: that of low-key television drama. Zanussi replaced the pathos-laden style of the Polish school with scrupulous attention to the everyday.”9 Zanussi’s world, as Coates suggests, is a contemporary one, and his characters are idealists, endlessly searching for their place in the world. Alongside filmmakers such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Agnieszka Holand, Zanussi was associated with the Cinema of Moral Concern, and

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like Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, he refused to cultivate the tradition of the Polish romantic hero. Unlike the charismatic and mythical Maciek from Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament, 1958), many of Zanussi’s characters can be considered antiheroes: outsiders, who do not know their purpose in life and have no commitment to any political or social cause. Like Skolimowski’s Andrzej Leszczyc from the Identification Marks trilogy—None (Rysopis, 1964), Walkover (Walkower, 1965), and Hands Up! (Ręce do góry, 1967/1981)—Zanussi’s characters stand in opposition to the tradition of a romantic hero and thus constitute an accurate representation of the new generation. Their antiheroism is also symbolic of a shift in attitude among the new filmmakers: the desire to break away from the past, both in terms of themes (history) and the employment of the new film language. Such antiheroic characters exist in both Zanussi’s Polish films, such as Illumination, and his coproductions, like Imperative. Zanussi’s films also contain classical, universal themes, such as the struggle between good and evil, or faith and reason. As I proposed earlier, in his coproductions Zanussi stayed faithful to his landmark themes and characters. For example, the theme of humanity’s dual nature—that is, the split between body and soul—features in his Polish films The Structure of Crystal (1969) and Camouflage as well as in coproductions like The Role (Rola, 1971, West Germany/Poland), The Catamount Killing (1974, USA/West Germany), Imperative, and Paradigm. The theme of personal freedom versus sacrifice exists in his Polish films Family Life and Quarterly Balance and in coproductions such as A Year of the Quiet Sun (Rok spokojnego słońca, 1984, West Germany/USA/Poland) and Wherever You Are (1988, West Germany/ Poland). The subject of alienation and the search for the meaning of life appears in Illumination, The Constant Factor, and Quarterly Balance as well as in Imperative and Inventory (Stan posiadania, 1989, Poland/West Germany). One of Zanussi’s most prominent themes, that of the struggle between good and evil, together with the conflict between reason and faith, is dealt with in Camouflage, Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease, Imperative, and Paradigm. The three films discussed in this chapter, Imperative, Bluebeard, and Paradigm, share many characteristics. It is perhaps no accident that all three titles were scripted by Zanussi (although Bluebeard was based on Max Frisch’s novel, and Paradigm was inspired by Leszek Kołakowski’s essay “Can the Devil Be Saved?”), with the music of Wojciech Kilar and the cinematography of Sławomir Idziak. What these films also have in common is that they were made in the 1980s after the introduction of martial law in Poland, which had an enormous effect on Polish cinema. In

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April 1983 Wajda was accused of oppositional activities and was removed from his position as the head of the film studio X.10 Additionally, since 1981 the Polish Filmmakers Association had been suspended, and eventually Wajda, who was its head, also resigned. Many films were banned by the authorities, including Wajda’s Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza, 1981), Wojciech Marczewski’s Shivers (Dreszcze, 1981), Janusz Zaorski’s The Mother of Kings (Matka Królów, 1987), and Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation (Przesłuchanie), which was released only in 1989. At that time the Cinema of Moral Concern ceased to exist, and from then on Polish cinema was often referred to as either “silent” or “exiled.”11 Generally speaking, making films in Poland at that time proved to be a rather difficult task, and besides such filmmakers as Bugajski and Holland, Zanussi was among those who decided to emigrate. Zanussi himself commented on the issue of making films abroad in the following fashion: For a long time I had been wanting to make films abroad. When today I look for an answer to why I was tempted, besides the worst suspicion, that it was to do with the foreign currency (which was not unimportant, but which lost its charm, since the Polish zloty has become an exchangeable currency), I come to the conclusion that something else was at stake: with all that inferiority complex, which the Poles tend to demonstrate in comparison with richer civilizations, what counted for me was the desire to show and prove that I can manage, that a Pole can do it.12

Furthermore, Zanussi believed that taking up the challenge of an international career was the only way to make films during the period of martial law: “In those circumstances [after the initial closure of Wajda’s film unit X] I understood that my existence depends on what I do abroad, as in our country the market was shrinking from year to year.”13 Making films abroad also meant that the director was not a slave to any country and any particular convention of filmmaking: “The success of a film in the West reduced all the insecurities in a filmmaker; it proved that our experience is also important behind the borders of our camp, that we have something to say.”14 But he was also aware of the fact that in many ways working abroad constituted “the trap of freedom, a very elusive freedom, which one tries to relieve through going from one place to another and from one producer to another until someone accepts the artist’s own interpretation of the social problems and events.”15 Imperative was one of the first films Zanussi made abroad in the 1980s. It received the Special Jury Mention and the Best Actor Prize

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for Robert Powell at the International Film Festival in Venice.16 It is the story of a young mathematician, Augustin (played by Powell), living in a small town in Germany and struggling to free himself from the clutches of rationality. In the opening scene we see him jumping naked out of his window onto a snowy pavement in front of his girlfriend, Yvonne (Brigitte Fossey), who believing he is mentally disturbed decides to leave him. Augustin considers mathematics a mere speculative construction, not applicable to understanding life’s patterns and not useful in attempting to understand anything about reality. Aware of his progressing spiritual crisis, he visits a local theologian, who ironically suggests he seeks the help of a psychiatrist. The only consolation Augustin finds is in a friendship with his professor, who introduces him to an Orthodox priest, with whom he debates the meaning of God and faith. Unable to discover any stable or worthwhile values, he falls into a deeper depression. Although Augustin’s journey seems to be a spiritual one, he cannot accept the form of spiritual mysticism proposed by the priest. He finally is convinced he has found the Absolute, when in an outrageous act of profanation he steals a holy icon from an Orthodox church. Soon afterward Augustin is placed in a mental hospital, where his monologue on suicide shatters any hope the viewer has for his recovery. Zanussi seems to be suggesting that the price for obtaining genuine spiritual values in general, and not only Orthodox faith, which features in the film, in the contemporary world is madness. There is not much stylistic experimentation in Imperative, apart from Zanussi introducing color in the last dreamlike scene, in which Yvonne tells Augustin how happy she is that he seems better. Although Imperative appears less stylistically adventurous, in terms of its subject matter and characters it could be considered close to a foreign equivalent of Illumination. Augustin, both in his physique and attitude, resembles Franciszek (Stanisław Latałło) from Illumination. Both films refer to the philosophy of Saint Augustine, who believed that in their ordinary cognitive existence, human beings require a special divine assistance. Thus, in both films, the male characters are concerned with discovering the truth about the world and themselves through their search for “divine illumination,” as they confront a reality they cannot comprehend. Imperative thus constitutes the continuation of themes and characters typical of Zanussi’s Polish work. Like The Structure of Crystal, Illumination, and Paradigm, it is a discursive piece, with heavy reliance on dialog. According to the director himself, Imperative seems to be “the most expressly religious work” he ever made.17 This ascetic, philosophical essay can be seen as a comment on the decline of the West, as represented by the contrast

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between Augustin and the Orthodox priest, to which I will return at a later stage. Bluebeard, a coproduction of the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland, is Zanussi’s own adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel of the same title. Like Imperative, the film was appreciated at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the TV Award in 1984.18 In Charles Perrault’s original seventeenth-century tale, Bluebeard married and murdered seven wives. In Frisch’s play, of the six former wives of Dr. Felix Schaad (Vadim Glowna), five are still alive, but Rosalinde Z. (Barbara Lass), his sixth wife, has been found strangled in her luxury apartment. The doctor is on trial for her murder but is eventually acquitted for the lack of evidence. The opening scene of the film depicts a still shot of a half-naked Rosalinde, lying on a sofa in a compromising pose, strangled with a black tie and with a sanitary napkin stuffed in her mouth. From this stark, sordid scene the film cuts to Schaad’s interrogation in the courtroom, which is then intercut with old pictures of Rosalinde smiling, as Doctor Schaad’s statements become more convoluted and contradictory. In a series of flashbacks, the film reveals Schaad’s fragile, neurotic nature, reinforced by the failure of his unfulfilling relationships. Rosalinde’s death contributes to his sense of guilt, which is so strong that no verdict can erase it. In one scene Schaad is depicted in a white, clinical environment, sitting in his hospital room, whispering to himself, “I am guilty. Ever since the age of fourteen, I always felt guilty,” as he pours himself another drink. “What is guilt?” he asks himself. “I am not the killer.” The film jumps between Schaad’s recollections of the trial, pictures of Rosalinde, and testimonials by his ex-wives (one of them, Jutta, is played by a leading figure of the New German Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta). In the final scenes Rosalinde herself appears in an empty courtroom being asked whether she knows who strangled her. She does not answer, but smiles instead. The last we see of Schaad, he is in a hospital bed after having driven into a tree, guilt-ridden. The film plays on ambiguity and confusion; even at the end the viewer is not certain whether the verdict is a just one. In Bluebeard Zanussi reveals a desire to experiment with style, through his use of inventive camera angles and cinematography. The scenes in the courtroom are shot with claustrophobic camera angles, reinforcing the oppressive feeling. The intercuts of the courtroom scenes with pictures of the dead Rosalinde and the relentless close-ups of Schaad are shot with 360-degree pans that reflect Schaad’s paranoid state of mind and add to the stifling atmosphere of the film. These are juxtaposed with depictions of nature, shot with wide angles, in the moments when we see

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Figure 14.1. Screenshot from Bluebeard (dir. Zanussi, 1984): Margarethe Von Trotta

Schaad walking through a forest, contemplating the trial. In one such scene Schaad is describing a certain dream in which he could fly. This scene is shot upside-down, through a reflex lens, and followed by a long-shot, suggesting the need for escape from the oppressive circumstances of the courtroom, as well as from his own burden of guilt. Bluebeard leaves a lot to the imagination. Zanussi’s distinctively imaginative use of camera angles, color, and music speaks for itself without having to rely on words, as was often the case in his Polish films. According to Maria Racheva, “Bluebeard becomes a masterpiece of film plastic and of unforgettable portraits. Unfortunately, in spite of its magnificent form, the film does not reveal anything more than the novel of Frisch.”19 Zanussi, who admitted that Bluebeard was just “an exercise in calligraphy,” confessed: “Bluebeard is not a piece of my personality. I did my best to stay loyal and correct toward Max Frisch. During the shooting I felt like the conductor of the music of someone else.”20 In my view, however, the film is a convincing portrait of a vulnerable man, tormented by alienation and despair, conveyed by an experimental style. At the same time, the main character of Bluebeard is like many of

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Zanussi’s male characters in his Polish films: lost, confused, and torn apart by his emotions. Unfortunately, like many of Zanussi’s coproductions, it is all but unknown to Polish audiences. The last coproduction I would like to discuss in more detail is Paradigm, a film that tells a story of a young, rather priggish theology student, Hubert (Benjamin Völz), whose poverty forces him to seek financial help from a weapons manufacturer, Gottfried (Vittorio Gassman), to continue his studies. Although in principle the boy detests the man’s business activities, in the end he accepts his money. Soon afterward, he meets an unhappily married woman, Sylvie (Marie-Christine Barrault), who is on the verge of suicide. Hubert falls in love with her. Forced to interrupt his studies when the woman becomes pregnant, he finds himself making drastic choices. Paradigm could be considered a melodrama, in which until the very end the viewer, like Hubert, does not know that Sylvie is Gottfried’s wife, who seduced the naive Hubert into a scheme to kill her husband for his money. In the final and most poignant scene of the film, which is the confrontation between the two men, Gottfried destroys the boy’s naïveté through an act of humiliation. Thus Hubert has to accept a crushing truth: that the evil rests within him. That evening Gottfried dies of a heart attack, leaving all his fortune to the young man. Sylvie offers her own child to Hubert in exchange for the factory he inherited from her husband. Hubert agrees, choosing poverty but regaining his spiritual connection with God, which he had lost during the course of his involvement with this femme fatale. Paradigm thus appears to be a continuation of Zanussi’s preoccupation with the theme of good versus evil and the problem of humanity’s dual nature. Once again, the director demonstrates that there are no blueprints and no clear-cut solutions in life, but what one must attempt to achieve is to remain at peace with one’s own conscience. The film’s dark and sordid mood is reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979); for example, the opening scene, where a beggar is feeding a rat on the river, is shot in a monochromatic, dark palette. This appears apocalyptic, as does the murky industrial landscape at the beginning of the film, with its dark fog surrounding steel factory workers, filmed in warm yellows and reds. Then there are the deep shadows of the poor interior of the house where Hubert lives with his mother, as well as the chiaroscuro lighting in the film’s final scenes. Sławomir Idziak, Zanussi’s usual cinematographer, created a visual world that verges on the abstract and visionary. As Tomasz Kłys points out, the film’s world, created in ghostly green and black, and vaguely situated in terms of the historical

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period of Italy around the 1920s, is in fact an abstract construct—beautiful but dangerous at the same time. Kłys compares it to Bosch’s paintings or stills from Visconti’s The Damned (La caduta degli dei, 1969, Switzerland/Italy/West Germany).21 In Kłys’s opinion, Paradigm is “a work of art” and visually the most beautiful of all Zanussi’s films, which further reinforces my argument that Zanussi’s coproductions are not necessarily of a lesser quality than his Polish films.22 But as Kłys remarks, this film was hardly ever shown in Poland, and it never received much critical attention abroad either. Perhaps not unreasonably, Kłys blames this on Zanussi’s taste for metaphysical conundrums, his Catholicism, the film’s moral conservatism, and on the leftist, liberal sympathies of many European critics.23 It seems that some of Zanussi’s coproductions, especially Bluebeard and Paradigm, allowed him to explore the formal side of filmmaking as well as to become familiar with the different approaches to international filmmaking. Additionally, another aspect differentiates them from the director’s Polish films. His coproductions, such as Bluebeard, Paradigm, as well as some foreign productions, such as not discussed here, Long Conversation with a Bird (Das lange Gespräch mit dem Vogel, Germany, 1992), are all more sexually daring than any of his Polish films. This is no doubt linked to the fact that they are based on sources other than Zanussi’s own scripts. Besides Bluebeard, Long Conversation was based on a Nabokov-like drama by another German playwright, Tankret Dorst. At stake is also the question of foreign, Western audiences and the fact that by making these films abroad Zanussi was free from any constraints he might have had to face from the Polish censors. As exciting and challenging as working abroad might have been in the 1980s, this approach was not without consequences. Paul Coates points out that when directors such as Wajda and Zanussi left to direct some of their “foreign” films after the imposition of martial law, it was “not just to secure relatively free utterance but also because the native industry’s undercapitalisation at a time of spiralling national debt lent it an early openness to co-production.”24 He believes that “in the process, however, the questions of identity central to these filmmakers’ earlier works, and to the Polish artist’s status as unofficial national spokesperson, often suffered repression.”25 Coates continues that in the 1980s, both Wajda and Zanussi became “temporary exiles.”26 Zanussi seemingly paid a high price for it: his foreign films not only failed to attract much interest in his native country, and he also apparently lost many of his devoted fans. According to Zanussi, one important problem of reaching foreign audiences is the language barrier: “I recognize my dialogues translated

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into French, German, Italian easily, but there is no way to adapt them the same way into English. They have to be written from scratch, that is how different is their [English speakers’] way of thinking.”27 In one of the scenes in Imperative, Augustin is wondering why the Serbian priest keeps up the church that remains empty at most times. He wonders how the priest has survived so many years in a country that has an opposed belief system. For Augustin people in the West represent different values; they think in different categories. His words seem to relate to Zanussi’s thoughts on the differences between his native and foreign audiences. Additionally, the desire to make films abroad narrows down the range of possible subject matter to discuss. This narrowing is often linked to cultural differences. For example, the role of religion is different in Poland than what it is in America, as is the role of family and professional life. The director is aware of the fact that in wanting to make internationally acclaimed films in English, one needs to think in English, but as a Pole, one then stops being oneself. This, as he says, was possible for directors such as Forman or Polanski, “who fell in love with America and its way of thinking and do not wish to follow Germans, Poles, Italians or the Spanish in their deliberations on ‘whether God exists.’”28 On the other hand, Zanussi cites Tarkovsky’s foreign films as a counterexample: “Tarkovsky’s films made in Italy and Sweden seem to be a genius proof of the fact that neither the language barrier, nor the different context stopped him from being himself—despite the fact that he did not at times understand what his actors said on the set.”29 Zanussi states that “these small films” he made in the 1980s, whether in West Germany, France, or Italy, “were a way of trying to find a terrain” where he “could move around swiftly and freely.”30 Zanussi’s contemporary, Agnieszka Holland, believes that “martial law, despite what is generally thought of its political reasons and consequences, was something very unfortunate for Polish culture and generally for a certain formation of the intelligentsia. When it came to cinema, martial law turned out to be murderous, because it killed our audiences.”31 She also remarked that her film Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte, 1985, West Germany) was sold to thirty different countries but did not even reach Polish TV. For similar reasons, she says, Zanussi’s German films did not reach Poland.32 In this context it is perhaps worth quoting Wajda from the 2008 Sight & Sound interview: The image is cinema’s essential element and its international language. At the end of Ashes and Diamonds, the death of Maciek on the rubbish heap was a successful association, as many in Poland spoke of

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the “garbage of history.” But for those who did not understand sociopolitical changes in Poland it was also a slap in the face as Maciek was the film’s hero. A certain level of limitation in comprehending national cinema is unavoidable. The question is whether these films allow viewers to understand the director’s effort.33

What does Zanussi himself think of a reason why many of his international productions were not well received in Poland? Could the very construction of his characters as outsiders and antiheroes have had anything to do with it? Yes, perhaps, and I have often been criticized for being an outsider myself. As a filmmaker I do not have huge support groups behind me, unlike many other filmmakers. It is not easy to be an outsider and I quite often long for some enormous power to take me under its wings, yet I know that I would partially have to give up my freedom for that. Poland indeed has this tendency to create romantic heroes that go back to the nineteenth century. On the other hand, portraits of a Polish intelligentsia are also our specialty, and I definitely had a say in creating such [portraits].34

Ever since Zanussi’s first film, Students, the director marked his position as a maverick of Polish cinema. While his Polish films demonstrate the attempt to place Poland on the map of a wider cinematic discourse, his participation in coproductions prove his need to exercise the very craft of filmmaking. Though at times they might have been “exercises in calligraphy,” as the director himself once called Bluebeard, I would argue that they present a valuable subject for future research and deserve wider critical attention. By taking up the challenge of an international career Zanussi exposed himself to criticism coming from many different quarters, but for him artistic freedom was more important than enjoying the status of a national prophet. These international coproductions allowed him to engage in projects that he would not have been able to realize in Poland. Additionally, the director believed that making films abroad freed him from being a slave to one critical outlook and reception, as well as to a single national audience.35 Thus I would suggest that Zanussi’s coproductions are vital to an understanding of his career since they illustrate the director’s belief in freedom and add to the multiplicity of his films. It is my contention that they are strongly related to the rest of his work: while there are shifts of focus and approach, the coproductions and the Polish films can be seen as a work of an (international) auteur. Nevertheless, there was a price to pay in that the freedom Zanussi

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attained abroad came at the expense of his home audience and, to some extent, of his reputation within the context of Polish cinema.

Notes I would like to offer my special thanks to Michael O’Pray for his comments on a draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank both editors for their valuable suggestions on the final version of this piece. 1. Tomasz Kłys, “Krzysztofa Zanussiego kino intelektualne,” in Kino polskie w dziesięciu sekwencjach, ed. Ewelina Nurczyńska-Fidelska (Lodz: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1996), 85. 2. Mirella Napolska, “Zanussi—Writing with His Camera,” in 9th Era New Horizons International Film Festival Catalogue (Wrocław: n.p., 2009), 417. 3. Ibid. 4. Ewa Mazierska, Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 187. 5. Krzysztof Zanussi, quoted in Peter Cowie, Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 108. 6. Ibid., 107; emphasis in original. 7. Napolska, “Zanussi—Writing with His Camera,” 17. 8. Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 180. 9. Paul Coates, “Zanussi: Who Is My Neighbour?” in The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema (London: British Library, 1994), 140. 10. Haltof, Polish National Cinema, 164. 11. Ibid. 12. Zanussi, “Obrona kosmopolityzmu,” Kino, no. 2 (1992): 17. 13. Zanussi, Pora umierać (Warsaw: Prószyński i S-ka, 1999), 185. 14. Ibid., 48. 15. Maria Racheva, The Cinema of Ideas: Krzysztof Zanussi (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1985), 6. 16. Stanisław Zawiśliński, ed., Krzysztof Zanussi—Przemiany (Kraków: Ha!art, 2009), 60. 17. Zanussi, quoted in Napolska, “Zanussi—Writing with His Camera,” 441. 18. Zawiśliński, Krzysztof Zanussi—Przemiany, 160. 19. Racheva, Cinema of Ideas, 33. 20. Zanussi, Pora umierać, 189; Napolska, “Zanussi—Writing with His Camera,” 442. 21. Kłys, “Krzysztofa Zanussiego kino intelektualne,” 90.

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22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 91. 24. Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 205. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Zanussi, “Obrona kosmopolityzmu,” 18. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 17. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Agnieszka Holland, quoted in Zbigniew Benedyktowicz, “Zaproszenie do rozmowy,” Kino, no. 2 (1992): 14. 32. Ibid. 33. Michael Brooke and Kamila Kuc, “Lest We Forget: An Interview with Andrzej Wajda,” Sight & Sound 18, no. 6 (June 2008), 36. 34. Zanussi, interview by author conducted at 9th Era New Horizons International Film Festival, Wrocław, 2009. 35. Zawiśliński, Krzysztof Zanussi—Przemiany, 13.

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Chapter Fifteen

Agnieszka Holland’s Transnational Nomadism Elżbieta Ostrowska In a sense I’m homeless, and that is the most natural condition in the world today. —Agnieszka Holland I am glad that I am a nomad. —Roman Polanski

In the above epigraphs, Agnieszka Holland and Roman Polanski refer to their life and work outside of their native Poland. However, whereas Polanski calls himself a nomad, somebody who abandons the notion of a fixed home, Holland identifies herself as a homeless person, somebody deprived of a home. Their rhetoric is different, yet it is interesting that Polanski, the nomad, directed The Tenant (Le Locataire, 1976), one of the most insightful portraits of exilic exclusion, whereas Holland, the homeless person, has not developed a significant interest in exilic narratives. Neither has she developed a consistent body of thematic concerns. Moreover, her creative strategy seems to be aimed at “being at home” within any cinematic convention or style, whether art cinema as in Olivier, Olivier (1992) or popular TV drama as in the three episodes of The Wire she made for HBO between 2004 and 2008.1 Her films can be located within multiple discourses of contemporary cinema: art, national, European, Hollywood, popular, feminist, and queer. Each of these discourses demands the use of different codes, and in each case Holland rearticulates her message in new ways, successfully mobilizing them to communicate with a range of audiences. However, as opposed to Polanski’s case, her capability of using so many “languages” does not result in her being rooted in any of them. None of them are her filmic mother tongue. As a cinematic artist Holland, despite her strong position within contemporary

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(trans)national cinema, leads a nomadic existence that continues to result in the critical marginalization of her work. Europa, Europa (1990), for example, develops an original approach to Holocaust representation, and this partly depends on its transnationalism. Despite the film’s international box-office success and widespread critical acclaim, it was not nominated as a German film for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1991 precisely because of its transnationality. As Susan Linville writes: Despite the fact that the Bundesamt fűr Wirtschaft (Federal Office for the Economy) had already officially designated it a German production, Manfred Steinkűhler, business manager for the German film export union which administers the Commission’s selection process, asserted unequivocally that the film was not German and indicated that the main reason for the film’s rejection were its Polish director and French participation. In effect lacking pure German bloodlines, Europa, Europa came to be seen as the product and expression of a kind of cultural miscegenation as a film body trying to pass as German, and as impostor [sic] not unlike Solly himself.2

The transnationality of another film by Holland, Total Eclipse (1995), the story of a tormented homosexual relationship between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, has also been subjected to critical dismissal. In his utterly negative review of the film, Todd McCarthy writes, “The seriously conflicting accents of the three leads immediately cause an international co-production migraine that doesn’t ease for the entire running time.”3 McCarthy was not alone in his critical disapproval of the film. Most American critics have rejected it. In an essay, Edward Baron Turk analyzes the ideological contexts of the poor critical reception of the film in the States, naming it “a contemporary film maudit.” He points out, “Creative work sometimes fails to find a substantial audience for reasons that have less to do with artistic quality than with the ideological climate prevailing at the time of their appearance.”4 He claims that the critical as well as box-office failure of Total Eclipse was due to its “thorough deviation from prevailing norms of American gay cultural politics.”5 He argues that Holland’s film was at odds with the gay conservatism dominating in the 1990s. Likewise, it was against a tendency to accommodate gay themes within mainstream cinema, as exemplified by Philadelphia (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1993) or In and Out (dir. Frank Oz, 1997). As a result, Total Eclipse, in challenging both the conventions of Hollywood biopics and the then dominant model of gay cinema, was rejected by critics as well as audiences.

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If Total Eclipse was at odds with a prevailing American ideology, Holland’s first Hollywood film, The Secret Garden (1993), was criticized by one British scholar for its conservatism and complicity with the ideological underpinnings of the British Empire. According to Karen Wells: The film adaptation of the book was made nearly 40 years after the end of British rule in India, when Britain had become a multicultural society, and so might be expected to reassess its former colonial relations in a post-colonial context. The film does not take up this task, preferring to overlook the imperial context of the original story whilst maintaining an association between identity, blood and soil which collapses English nationality into whiteness.6

Regardless of the validity of Wells’s argument, it is clear that The Secret Garden is another of Holland’s films that does not fit a certain ideological framework. These instances of rejection have not only occurred outside her home country; some of her films were also rejected by audiences in her native Poland, for much the same reasons. For example, To Kill a Priest (1988), a film presenting a fictionalized version of a murder of the Solidarity priest Jerzy Popiełuszko, by the communist secret police, was criticized for privileging the character of the assassin at the expense of the religious martyr. This was compounded by Holland’s use of American thriller conventions, which some saw as inappropriate to the subject matter.7 In addition, she was admonished for not meeting the demands of the then dominant position that required a privileging of the Catholic religion. Thus, Holland’s films often were at odds with the ideological paradigms within which they were produced and distributed. As such they seem ideologically and aesthetically “homeless,” just like their maker. Furthermore, Holland’s films made abroad, often as international coproductions, do not easily fit the framework of national cinemas, and hus her work has, quite understandably, been mostly overlooked in critical writing on this subject. Nor is her work examined in the recently abundant writing on transnational cinemas.8 Although Naficy, in An Accented Cinema, mentions Europa, Europa as an example of a “homeless” film, he also comments on Germany’s decision not to nominate the film for an Academy Award.9 These two absences do not signify an utter disinterest of international film criticism in Holland’s work, yet her films are usually located within other contexts than (trans)national cinemas. For example, Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte, 1985) and Europa, Europa are often examined as Holocaust films, and Paul Coates analyzes To Kill a Priest and The Third Miracle (1999) in his book on religion and film.10 Emma Wilson offers a close reading of Olivier, Olivier (1992) in

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her psychoanalytic discussion of the cultural significance of the motif of missing children in contemporary films, and finally Washington Square (1997) is an object of consideration in essays and books on filmic adaptations of Henry James’s work.11 Why then is Holland, who has been working for twenty-five years abroad and thus can be seen as epitomizing the concept of transnational filmmaking, virtually absent from a critical analysis of this model of cinema? To answer this central question, I intend to offer a closer analysis of the concept of transnational cinema. I will also examine selected aspects of Holland’s work produced outside of Poland that locate it on the margins of various cinematic discourses. Unlike the authors of three Polish monographs on Holland, I will not attempt to prove her status as a cinematic auteur who is preoccupied with recurrent themes or motifs and displays in her work a recognizable stylistic unity.12 Instead of searching for common factors in her oeuvre, I intend to focus precisely on its versatility, its generic as well as thematic inconsistency. I will argue that these features can be seen in a very specific relation to transnational cinema and must be treated as evidence of a significant cultural nomadism.

Transnational Cinema Holland’s belonging to transnational cinema is obvious, as she has made her films in many countries and many of them are coproductions. In his seminal book An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy focuses on exilic and diasporic filmmaking, which is perhaps the most culturally significant mode of contemporary transnational cinema.13 If the first phase of Holland’s career abroad can be seen as belonging to exilic cinema (she decided to stay in France when martial law was enforced in Poland in 1981), the second phase, in particular after the 1989 collapse of communism in Poland, cannot be located within this category.14 Neither is Holland a diasporic filmmaker, as she has remained moderately active in Polish filmmaking in recent years.15 Although Naficy emphasizes that “‘accented cinema’ . . . is by no means an established or cohesive cinema,”16 he adds this definition: “the accent emanates . . . from the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production mode.”17 Further, he claims that accented films share certain stylistic features that differentiate them from the universal and unaccented speech of the dominant model of cinema. The concern of accented films with territoriality is, according to Naficy, one of their most frequent thematic motifs. In locating Holland’s films against the background of accented cinema, it

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seems that this is not the most suitable conceptual milieu for their consideration. Not all of her films fall under the category of an artisanal mode of production; some of them had a moderately high budget. Nor do all the films feature deterritorialized subjects or focus on spatial politics to a significant degree.18 Neither do her films seem to be accented stylistically; they even tend to be formally transparent. Although geographically, politically, socially, and culturally displaced, Agnieszka Holland occupies a marginal position within “accented cinema” that itself is marginal to the dominant model of cinema. An explanation of Holland’s peripheral position within the realm of accented cinema can be found in Mette Hjort’s discussion of transnational cinema. She suggests the transnational should be used “as a scalar concept allowing for the recognition of strong or weak forms of transnationality.”19 She also offers another useful distinction: between “marked and unmarked transnationality. A film might be said to count as an instance of marked transnationality if the agents who are collectively its author (typically directors, cinematographers, editors, actors, and producers) intentionally direct the attention of viewers towards various transnational properties that encourage thinking about transnationality.”20 Europa, Europa represents both strong and marked transnationality due to a number of factors: it is a coproduction, with an international crew and cast; German, Russian, and Polish are spoken in the film; and finally the film itself deals with the uncertainties of ethnic and racial identity. However, films such as Olivier, Olivier, Washington Square, and Copying Beethoven (2006) do not easily lend themselves to be read within the scope of strong and marked transnational film practices. Hjort’s typology of various types of transnationality might also be useful in explaining Holland’s marginalization within the critical discourse on the topic. Although Hjort emphasizes that these types sometimes intersect with one another, Agnieszka Holland’s films can be considered as representing a cosmopolitan transnationality that is, as Hjort claims, “defined by the cosmopolitanism of the particular individuals who exercise executive control over the filmmaking process.”21 With her own mixed PolishJewish ethnicity and migratory life experience (dating back to 1965 when she started her studies at the Czech film school FAMU), Holland is a perfect example of the cosmopolitan figure. Gordana Crnković, who also sees Holland’s work as cosmopolitan, writes, “The body of her films constitutes a cosmopolitan opus” and is “based on active interaction with existent local and national cinema cultures and filmmakers.”22 Made in various countries, Holland’s films travel across various themes, cinematic conventions, and ideological systems. A target or point

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of destination seems to be quite indefinite. Without a semantic or stylistic center, her films appear as cosmopolitan per se. For, as Rebecca Walkowitz argues, there are two principal characteristics of cosmopolitan style: “an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege.”23 Holland’s war-themed films reveal this “aversion to heroic tones” in the most evident manner. In the fictional realities of both Angry Harvest and Europa, Europa there is an obvious lack of a discourse on heroism. The characters are neither heroic nor antiheroic figures. Although Leon Wolny, the protagonist of Angry Harvest, hides a Jewish woman, a deed usually considered heroic, the egocentric motivation and the sadomasochistic complex he develops toward Rosa annihilate the heroic dimension of the situation. The mundane prevails over the heroic. The penultimate scene of Angry Harvest epitomizes a minimalist style that produces semantic ambiguity. In this scene, Leon discovers that Rosa has committed suicide in a cellar. Earlier scenes explain the motives for her tragic decision. Leon had planned to bring Eugenia, an impoverished noblewoman, to his house, hoping to propose to her. Therefore, he feels it is no longer appropriate to keep his Jewish lover and therefore arranges a new hideout for her. Rosa begs him to let her stay in the cellar, but Leon refuses. Terrified of the prospect of being separated from Leon, Rosa kills herself. The scene in which Leon finds his dead lover begins with a lowangle shot with the camera placed inside the cellar. We see Leon’s boots from above, as he stands next to the cellar door. Demanding that Rosa come out from her hideout, he appears more as her executioner than her savior. When he gets no response from her, he kneels and then we see his face as he looks into a dark hollow space of the cellar. Simultaneously, his voice changes; now a tone of anxiety takes over from the previously dominating note of power. This change occurs within one long take. Thus, the viewer observes an instant transformation of Leon’s persona: initially a powerful master of life and death over Rosa; a few seconds later he appears as a frightened (or perhaps abandoned) lover. Next, Leon decides to step down into the cellar. He leaves the space of his house that he controls and enters a space that is Rosa’s domain. Only within this space can she contest Leon’s will, even if this is through her suicidal death. Paradoxically, refusing to be saved for the second time by Leon on his rather than her conditions, she exercises her subjectivity and gains an existential freedom. In turn, Leon, in having to accept Rosa’s death, is forced to accept the limits of his own subjectivity. One image strikingly conveys this meaning. After burying Rosa’s body in the cellar, we see a slightly high-angle shot of him lying on a heap of soil. This

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Figure 15.1. Screenshot from Angry Harvest (dir. Holland, 1985)

closing image of the scene is a reversal of an opening low-angle shot. The low- and high-angle shots are clearly used to signify respectively a powerfulness and then a powerlessness of the character. Thus, during the scene an important transformation occurs: Leon, initially a master and a victimizer, is eventually presented as a helpless man in despair, which is reinforced through the shot composition and dialog. His body is curled into a fetal position as he says: “God why did you leave me?” Clearly, within the feminine space of Rosa’s basement hideout—as dark and closed as a womb—Leon experiences a regression, becoming a helpless child deserted by his (Holy) father. In this short scene, through mise-enscène, Holland has managed to disclose contradictory impulses in Leon’s behavior that establish his persona as both a victimizer and a victim. Likewise, Rosa’s significant absence in the scene marks her transgression of her status as a victim. Finally, in the scene, as in the whole film, Leon’s does not serve as the privileged perspective; initially he is shown from Rosa’s point of view, even if she is already dead, and his POV shots are only used later. The simulation of a visual perspective of the dead Rosa signifies the symbolic power that she has acquired through her decision to commit suicide. More generally, the lack of a privileged perspective

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makes the viewer’s alignment to both characters equal, and consequently, one is unable to develop a full allegiance to (n)either. The film itself does not offer a moral or an emotional center. Decenteredness characterizes Holland’s films made abroad through its lack of an aesthetic coherence as well as their destabilized fictional worlds. This links her films with the idea of cultural nomadism rather than with the concepts of exile or diaspora. As John Durham Peters explains, “Diaspora, like exile, is a concept suggesting displacement from a center.”24 The existential situation of exile or living in diaspora strengthens the notion of a center through a nostalgic memory of it. In turn, “nomadism dispenses altogether with the idea of a fixed home or center.”25 Further, the author argues that exile and nomadism “[represent] options within contemporary debates about identity; globally speaking, exile goes together with notions of primordial identity and nomadism with constructed identity.”26 The model of nomadic identity is further elaborated by Rosi Braidotti, who claims the cultural nomad is “a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. Nomadism is an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries. It is the intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing.”27 In Holland’s films, these acts of trespass and transgression occur in relation to both fictional realities and formal strategies.

Nomadic Identities Decenteredness as a characteristic of a nomadic identity refers to a distanced and alienated relationship to a range of familiar cultural factors. In Holland’s films, national, ethnic, class, religious, gender, and sexual aspects of identity are constantly in question and are at the heart of her project. In her first film made abroad, Angry Harvest, the problem of a destabilized identity is at its very center. In it, Rosa’s Austrian citizenship is stripped from her as if it were a piece of clothing, leaving only a vulnerable bodily ethnicity that becomes an object of abuse for Leon. Yet, wartime destabilizes his identity as well, as his economic position improves. Experiencing a social advancement, Leon still feels socially and culturally inferior. He projects his oscillation between superiority and inferiority, having power and being powerless, onto Rosa. He simultaneously worships and degrades her. As Paul Coates notes, “Leon’s duality corresponds to the chronic partiality of all his actions: neither priest nor

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layman, rich nor poor, ‘good’ nor ‘evil,’ he is always riven, locked in a position in between.”28 Rosa responds to her existential situation in an equally dual manner: she is revolted by Leon, yet he arouses warm feelings in her too; she feels trapped in the basement of his house, yet she does not want to leave it; she finds sex with Leon degrading, yet it is comforting as well. The relationship between these two destabilized identities can only be transitory, and Rosa’s eventual suicide seems inevitable. In Europa, Europa the process of destabilization is further extended. To survive the Holocaust, the film protagonist, Solly, plays a constant masquerade. The scene opening the central film narrative offers a kind of a prologue to the game.29 Before the scene begins the viewer hears Solly’s monologue in which he introduces himself: “I was born on April 20, 1925, in Peine, Germany, Europe.” After finishing his brief introductory speech, he repeats this line again as if already doubting these facts. The flashback accompanying these words returns to the day of Solly’s circumcision. Thus, two crucial components of Solly’s persona are foregrounded; his Jewish ethnicity and his placement within a certain political situation (Nazi Germany). Only these two facts will be irreducible and irreplaceable during his journey of survival. However, to survive he will take up an identity and discard it once it is useless in his struggle for life. The first scene of him taking a bath before his bar mitzvah can be seen as his symbolic preparation for these acts of identity masquerade. The opening long-shot presents his naked body as he stands on a rim of a bathtub and looks out of the window. On a street, he sees a marching Hitler Youth unit marking a beginning of the Kristallnacht. Solly’s naked body appears as a kind of corporeal tabula rasa. Later on, he and others will attempt to inscribe on his body various, often contradictory, ideological meanings. Various uniforms will fit him equally as if his body were of a special flexible substance adjusting to a protective shell of clothing. When Solly hears the sounds of broken glass, he jumps off the bathtub— his penis briefly visible—and stands again on the rim of it; his feet are shown in a close-up. He looks out of the window for the second time. Both the window and the bathtub rim mark a spatial in-betweenness, a liminality. These images foreshadow his future need to play with his identity in its lack of stability and constant trespass of borders. However, the brief image of his penis emphasizes that these masquerades will also be acts of transgression because of the limits established by his own body. As Ruth Johnston argues: More specifically, the film documents the hero’s engagement in a series of masquerades that call into question different aspects of identity:

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Figure 15.2. Screenshot from Europa, Europa (dir. Holland, 1990) nationality, religion, race, class, linguistic capability, genetic inheritance, sexuality, and finally, the one tangible sign of difference—his circumcision. Not only do these categories often conflict with one another, but each category is itself unstable and subject to deconstructive pressures.30

However, the ending of the film, in which the real Salomon Perel (whose biography served as an inspiration for the film script) appears and proclaims his Jewishness, radically undermines this fictionalized process of deconstructing various aspects of identity, as analyzed by Johnston and other critics. He declares that his ethnicity served as a strong linchpin around which he constructed his postwar life in Israel. Therefore, it can be argued that in this extradiegetic ending the film itself contradicts its earlier discourse developed within the narrative. If the fictionalized story puts into doubt—or perhaps even destroys—the notion of a singular and coherent identity, the ending solidifies the category of identity in presenting the real Salomon Perel as finally discovering his “true self.” Thus, all the masquerades played out by Solly are not undertaken in order to reveal the performative aspect of identity but are used instead to hide, or protect, a “true self” that can be unearthed in the post-Holocaust era. The discrepancy between the fictionalized life of the filmic Solly and the narrative coda provided by Salomon Perel in the film ending is a radical example of a semantic contradiction that also characterizes other films by Holland.

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The character of Helen O’Regan from The Third Miracle also offers a case of a complex ethnic and national identity. The fluidity of her identity is additionally reinforced by her virtual absence from the principal narrative. She appears only in flashbacks. As a candidate for Catholic canonization, her persona is recovered from the past during the process of “interrogation” to sustain an argument for her potential sainthood. Her character is introduced in an opening flashback scene that serves as a prologue to the main narrative. The action of the scene takes place, as an intertitle informs us, in “Bystrica, a town in Slovakia, 1944.” It begins with a long take presenting a small cluttered room packed with sleeping people. The sequence shot starts with a naive painting of the Madonna and Child and finishes with a medium-long shot of a masturbating man. Within a single shot, Holland manages to create fictional reality as disconcertingly contradictory. In the same long take, one sees numerous figurines of the Madonna standing on one table and rows of empty bottles on the other. Both figurines and bottles are similar in shape, and some distant explosion similarly shakes both. They are just objects. To start a film about sainthood with a collection of “holy” figurines placed within a more than mundane milieu introduces a tone of skepticism that will be developed later on with the characters of Father Shore, who is experiencing a crisis of faith, and a German archbishop, Werner, who is a music connoisseur full of contempt for folk religiosity. At some point, we identify the people in the room as Roma. Applying a cultural stereotype attendant to this ethnic group, one can assume that the numerous figurines of the Madonna were stolen. This may reinforce the skepticism already introduced into the scene; perhaps the alleged sainthood of Helen is also an act of usurpation? Later on, the scene shows the collective panic of the people of Bystrica trying to escape an air raid by Allied forces. Instead of joining the others, little Helen, holding in her hand one of the figurines of the Madonna, starts running in the opposite direction, toward the big statue of Our Lady. Once she reaches it, she starts praying. Next, we see only closeups of Helen, her father, a priest, and a wounded German soldier on a truck. A realistic soundtrack is replaced with nondiegetic music of heavenly choirs. The viewer’s visual perspective becomes significantly limited. Clearly, something unusual is happening, yet it is hidden from us. The scene ends with a close-up of Helen establishing her as the potential center of the story. However, the narrative is much more concerned with absence than her presence. Helen’s character as reconstituted in various flashbacks or stories epitomizes nomadic identity. Not only was she an immigrant from Eastern

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Europe living in the United States, she was also Roma, traditionally represented as a member of a marginalized ethnic minority within the Slovakian nation. In the opening flashback scene, young Helen signifies various social and cultural disadvantages. She is a female child representing an ethnic minority living in Eastern Europe, on the margin of Europe itself. It can be argued that Helen in her alleged sainthood fits a cultural stereotype of Eastern Europe as a realm of spirituality, whereas the West has been radically drained of it in the era of modernity. The same cultural stereotype can be found in Julie Walking Home (2002) in the figure of a healer. These characters can be seen as Holland’s act of “Orientalizing” Eastern Europe. Certainly, as a Roma she serves as an archetypal figure of a nomad who leaves places, objects, and people behind. In this context, her later decision to desert her sixteen-year-old daughter, Roxane, and to move to a monastery acquires a new meaning. A monastery in itself serves as a transitory place between an earthly existence and an eternal life; it is an archetypal place of in-betweenness—a place of detachment rather than attachment. Helen’s identity remains open as well. The missing “third miracle” that is needed for the completion of the process of her canonization suspends her in-between sainthood and ordinariness. However, the ending of the film contradicts the openness of the discourse on identity. In the closing scene of the film, Father Shore is shown as “a good shepherd” of his parishioners who managed to overcome his crisis of faith, whereas Roxane resolves her family trauma and comes to terms with her femininity through maternity. Therefore, the narrative process of “interrogating” identities results in solidifying the previously destabilized identities of the protagonists. Father Shore’s religious dilemmas echo a similar torment experienced by Stefan (also played by Ed Harris), one of Father Alek’s murderers in Holland’s earlier film To Kill a Priest. Truly convinced of the righteousness of his mission “to kill a priest” who he thinks endangers the idea of communist Poland that he believes in, he is also fascinated by his would-be victim’s persona. In various situations, he seems to fully respond to Father Alek’s religious faith, but he is also unable to abandon his own faith in communism. He cannot transgress the ideological and philosophical border between the two realms they respectively inhabit. Consequently, he also occupies a space “in-between” that results in his split identity as substantiated in the scene in which he watches a recording of himself participating in a mass conducted by Father Alek. He intently looks at himself mimicking other people’s religious behavior as if seeing in the recorded image his contradictory alter ego, or his (potential?) “angelic” doppelganger. Paul Coates calls Stefan’s behavior

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in the church both “appropriate” and “inappropriate” in arguing that “Holland’s treatment of Stefan subtly dissects his entrapment in the most virulent stages of resistance to conversion.”31 Thus, Stefan’s story can be seen as a perverse search for transgressing and deconstructing the ideologically firm identity of a functionary of the communist system. When he draws a gallows on his door, he symbolically transgresses his position as a victimizer as if predicting that his crime will be and needs to be followed by a punishment. Finally, as Coates notes, “his ‘I’ is no longer unitary.”32 Yet, his destabilized self is contrasted with the definite personality of Father Alek, whose portrayal seems to fit a hagiographic mode of representation rather than the realistic one adopted by Holland in the film to depict Poland’s concrete political situation of in the 1980s. Stefan’s vulnerable and punctured identity is counterpointed with the cocooned religiosity of the priest. Holland’s discourse on identity becomes contradictory once again. Similar confusion and uncertainty occurs in Julie Walking Home. In this film various conflicting ideologies and sociocultural milieus are juxtaposed. Multiethnic and multicultural Canada (epitomized by the protagonists, who are children of Polish and Jewish immigrants) is contrasted with an ethnically and socially homogeneous Poland. Polish Catholicism, presented mostly as an empty ritual, is contrasted with both Jewish secularized rationalism and the Orthodox Church’s apparently genuine spiritualism. The latter is additionally reinforced by the figure of a Russian healer, Alexy, who is provided with a spiritual power that allows him to cure people. Ideological contradictions inscribed within the film accompany a stylistic hybridity, from melodrama with its aesthetic excess to a documentary-like detached observation. The eponymous character of Julie travels across these contradictory ideological and aesthetic realms without developing any strong attachment to them. Initially, she vehemently declares herself to be anti-Catholic and antireligious, yet she decides without any hesitation to go to Poland to see the healer, a miracle maker, hoping he will cure her son’s tumor. Moreover, the miracle occurs—her son’s illness goes away. Yet, it returns when Julie engages in a sexual relationship with Alexy. The open ending of the film does not explain any of these events. The presence of the supernatural within a tangible world is neither confirmed nor denied. Neither do we know whether Julie believes in it or not. The only certainty offered by the ending is her pregnancy. Again, as in Europa, Europa, only the body seems to mark identity. Regardless of Julie’s earlier acts of probing various roles and identities (a betrayed wife, a suffering mother, a passionate lover), she is finally presented as a motherly body.33 Throughout the film, the

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heroine seems to roam across various realms of life, looking around, asking herself numerous questions concerning things she sees and experiences, questioning and eventually discarding all of her previous beliefs. Her pregnant body and the prospect of motherhood appear as the only verities accessible to her. Within a universe of conflicting ideologies and discourses, it is only one’s body that can provide a (nostalgic) promise of a regained identity. Yet, this hope is more often than not destroyed in Holland’s films.

Transgressive/Regressive Bodies Washington Square develops a complex body discourse. The second scene of the film—which was added to Henry James’s original story—presents the celebration of Doctor Sloper’s birthday. His adolescent daughter, Catherine, prepares herself to sing a song in honor of her beloved and worshipped father. In a crosscutting sequence the viewer sees, alternately, close-ups of Catherine and her Aunt Lavinia, who accompanies her on a piano. With every close-up of the girl, her plump face reveals more and more tension and discomfort. She starts singing the song a couple of times, yet she only manages to emit a few sour notes, to her own embarrassment and that of all the gathered guests. The camera ruthlessly pinpoints the child’s tormented face for the last time in a close-up and then tracks down to show her plump legs in red shoes and a stream of urine flowing down on the carpet. Tellingly, this is one of many bodies in Holland’s oeuvre that are a source of torment and pain. As Paul Coates notes, “Agnieszka Holland’s central theme is entrapment . . . The fundamental trap, the one that always betrays one, is the body itself.”34 In Washington Square, this bodily betrayal foreshadows the next ones, equally humiliating and painful—those of her father and her lover, Morris Townsend. Catherine’s urinating body fits Kristeva’s concept of an “abject body.” Her urine is precisely the kind of fluid produced by a body that destroys the category of le corps propre (a clean and proper body). As Nick Mansfield discusses Kristeva’s theory, “We forever try to shore up a defensive position, strictly mapping a fixed line between inside and outside, but the correct perimeters of our clean and proper bodies are forever broken, punctuated by the physical flows that cross them: flows of urine, tears, shit, vomit, blood (especially menstrual blood), sweat and semen.”35 These fluids prove our bodies are not sealed off protecting an ideal ego. The borderline between the inside and outside of a body

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Figure 15.3. Screenshot from Washington Square (dir. Holland, 1995)

becomes ambiguous and in that way undermines the possibility of an internal integrity. In a broader sense, abjection, as Mansfield argues, is to be seen as a “destabilization of all systems of order, meaning, truth and law.”36 This occurs because abject bodies always and inevitably occupy a space in-between, challenging the hope that borders can protect singular and well-defined selves. Catherine is introduced into the fictional reality as an abject body that destabilizes the bourgeois ideological system. I would argue she retains this position throughout the film as is ultimately confirmed in the last scene, which is a reversal of the first. In a long-shot, we see Catherine with several kids playing around as they sing together. Now, the close-ups of Catherine do not oppress her but revel in her contentment with the situation.37 When Aunt Lavinia brings in Morris, she calmly confesses she loved him once and then she asks him not to come again. Unlike the heroine of The Heiress, an earlier adaptation of James’s novel made by William Wyler in 1949, she does not search for revenge. In fact, when Wyler’s Catherine executes her revenge she demonstrates her internalization of the patriarchal. She acts as a man would, and she humiliates her former lover in the same way he humiliated her. Holland’s Catherine does not feel an urge to revenge her humiliations. Instead, she decides to live her own life, neither as a daughter (as she is disinherited) nor as a wife or a spinster (since she refused some attractive marriage offers). Contesting and finally refusing all of these projects of identity available to women within the patriarchal system, she

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locates herself on its margins. Yet, it is in this marginal position that she finds solace and fulfillment. Abject bodies that serve to destabilize various types of social or cultural order densely populate Holland’s films. These abject bodies articulate the idea, emphasized by Braidotti, of the nomadic “intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing.”38 In Total Eclipse there are scenes in which both protagonists are presented as abject bodies. When Rimbaud arrives at Verlaine’s house for the first time and is welcomed by the latter’s wife and her mother, he announces, to their embarrassment, he needs to piss. Later, while dining with them he eats with his fingers, belches, and plays with his saliva, drooling it down his lips and gathering it back. When meeting other poets, he provocatively destroys a somewhat pompous event, calling a recited new poem “a shit” and finally urinating on one of the manuscripts. Thus, the conventionality, or artificiality for that matter, of the verse is not only symbolically but physically annihilated. By repeating the word “shit,” referring to a “man’s juices,” and finally urinating, Rimbaud is forcefully injecting corporeality into the realm of abstract and sublime poetry. Verlaine is also frequently presented as an abject body that is always producing an excess of various fluids. His eyes are always teary, his lips are wet with saliva, and his forehead is constantly sweating. It is as if Verlaine’s body were tainting his surrounding with sticky and smelly fluids. This certainly is not “a clean and proper body.”39 In one scene, his lover, Rimbaud, cuts Verlaine’s palm with a knife. The wounded man screams like an animal, and blood flows down tainting his hand and the table. A poet is thus transformed into a wounded body. Later in the film, there is a symmetrical reversal of this scene when Verlaine makes a hole in Rimbaud’s palm with a bullet shot. Corporeality seems to be at the very center of their relationship. When they meet in the Black Forest, after Verlaine had served two years in prison, Rimbaud asks a crucial question: “And here, in the wilderness, I offer you an archetypal choice, a choice between my body and my soul. Choose.” Verlaine says he chooses the body. Rimbaud responds saying: “Let the ninety-eight wounds of our Savior burst and bleed.” Interestingly, he invokes Jesus, the archetypal figure belonging to both eternity and mortality, through referring to his wounded and bleeding body. In this context, Holland’s constant and firm emphasis on the poets’ abject bodies is understandable as a genuine act of transgression only realizable through bodies. Not surprisingly numerous critics have vehemently criticized the film’s preoccupation with corporeality. Todd McCarthy in his review in Variety complains, “According to this film, the exchange of bodily fluids, not of intellectual and artistic ideas,

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was the important thing between these two legendary poets.”40 Clearly, it is precisely the concept of abject bodies the critic finds unacceptable. The body also occupies a privileged position in another of Holland’s films about art and creativity, Copying Beethoven. The motif of corporeality is introduced in the first flashback scene in which Anna Holtz visits Schlemmer, an impresario of Beethoven. The old man, who suffers from cancer, asks the young woman to help him with a chamber pot. When she, equally embarrassed and disgusted, refuses, he helps himself and we listen to him urinating. The pot amplifies the sound as if it were the membrane of a musical instrument—a provocative and perverse way to start a film about a genius. Beethoven himself foregrounds his corporeality in an equally provocative manner. When talking to Anna about his piano sonatas, he mockingly guesses she likes the Moonlight Sonata, simultaneously pulling his trousers down, turning his back to her, and literally mooning the scared and embarrassed girl. Later in the film he explains to the disoriented Anna, “I’m opening up music to the ugly, to the visceral,” saying also that God lives “in the guts.” Clearly, Holland’s Beethoven is another transgressive figure who, with his attempts to find beauty in ugliness, tries to destabilize an accepted model of music and notion of art. Again, Holland presents this act of transgression through an abject body. In her films, Holland not only destabilizes cultural discourses about the body; she also disrupts its dominant cinematic mode of representation as discussed by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”41 Europa, Europa, for example, offers a male body as an object of the gaze. There are two possible explanations for this: either the scopic regime of the film deconstructs the visual strategy typical of classical Hollywood cinema or the male subject of the film is positioned as feminine. In his essay, William Donahue prefers the latter: “on the one hand . . . her camera lingers over Hofschneider’s adolescent masculinity, and on the other . . . she ‘feminizes’ her man by making him the relatively passive object both of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic viewers—that is, both of the cinematic audience and of Solly’s fellow fictional figures.”42 Interestingly enough, the author finds Holland’s mode of representation unacceptable. He claims that her “strategy of “feminizing’ Perel . . . is simply suspiciously sensuous. Suspicious not because of the sexuality per se, but because it serves to make palatable—indeed, enjoyable— an otherwise quite disturbing story.”43 Apparently, Donahue worries that Solly’s beautiful body contradicts the truth about the Holocaust. Tellingly, he takes up a position represented by an intradiegetic Soviet officer who shows Solly pictures of the “real” Holocaust survivors.

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Moreover, the author ignores the sadistic aspect of the cinematic gaze as elaborated by Mulvey. Solly’s naked body appearing in the first segment of the narrative establishes him as a vulnerable object for both the other characters and for the viewer, whose positioning within the cinematic text becomes significantly destabilized. On the one hand, the narrative establishes Solly’s status as a victim, facilitating the process of spectatorial allegiance based on empathy. On the other hand, the scopic regime of the film that transforms the character of Solly into an object to be looked at provides the viewer with visual pleasure. This power, an inherent aspect of visual pleasure, undermines, if not annihilates, the narratively produced empathy. In other words, Holland’s film instigates contradictory spectatorial impulses that may usefully interrogate the cultural system of representation of the Holocaust.

Homeless Cinema This chapter has shown how Agnieszka Holland’s cinematic nomadism is evident through transnational aspects of her films’ production and filmic discourse. Her characters have decentralized identities and abject bodies that destabilize various ideological orders. It is necessary to point out here that Holland’s films also destabilize divisions between art cinema and popular cinema. She predominantly uses codes of popular cinema while punctuating these with radical intrusions of “alien” stylistic devices that belong to the domain of art cinema. These aesthetically “alien” moments in Holland’s films are brief and scarce, like the sequence of Mary’s dream in The Secret Garden, and thus they are all the more intense in their destabilization of an otherwise cohesive and transparent cinematic form. Holland’s cinema does not easily fit any aesthetic convention or ideological paradigm, and thus it exemplifies a facet of transnationality that is often diminished or overlooked within contemporary critical discourse on transnational cinema. As Katarzyna Marciniak argues in her book Alienhood, transnational identity is not always “a liberatory position that allows an exile a special epistemological insight because, frequently, aliens experience the transnational status as a condition marked by painful disorientation, ostracism, or even abjection rather than by a feeling of emancipation.”44 Thematic and stylistic destabilization in Holland’s films serves to signify in key ways this disorientation. This also relates to her marginalization from mainstream cinematic and cultural discourses. Her work does not belong to art cinema or popular cinema. She cannot be identified with any national cinema or with dominant models of

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transnational cinema (i.e., diasporic and exilic cinema). Holland successfully mobilizes various cinematic codes to communicate with a range of audiences, yet she has, apparently, no great desire to completely inhabit and live within any of them. She is a cinematic polyglot who is fluent in many languages. Yet she always speaks them with an accent; none are her mother filmic tongue. Consequently, her films are not easily domesticated within dominant critical discourses on cinema. They are as homeless as their nomadic author.

Notes Epigraphs: Quoted in Roger Cohen, “Holland without a Country,” New York Times Magazine, August 8, 1993, 32; and in Gordana  P. Crnković, “Inscribed Bodies, Invited Dialogues and Cosmopolitan Cinema: Some Brief Notes on Agnieszka Holland,” Kinoeye, no. 5 (2004), http://www. kinoeye.org/04/05/crnkovic05_no2.php. Roman Polański, “Kino według Polańskiego” [Fragments of Polanski’s interviews], Film na świecie, nos. 264–65 (1980): 15. 1. This artistic strategy is employed by most of the filmmakers working abroad as it significantly conditions their professional activity. 2. Susan E. Linville, “Europa, Europa: A Test Case for German National Cinema,” Wide Angle, no. 3 (1995): 40–41. 3. Todd McCarthy, “Review: Total Eclipse,” Variety, September 10, 1995, http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117910122.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 &p=0. Emphasis added. 4. Edward Baron Turk, “Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse, a Contemporary ‘Film Maudit,’” French Review, no. 2 (1998): 260. 5. Ibid., 264. 6. Karen Wells, “Embodying Englishness: Representations of Whiteness, Class and Empire in The Secret Garden,” in Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities, ed. Rachel Carroll (London: Continuum, 2009), 132. 7. Maria T. Stalnaker, “Agnieszka Holland Reads Hollywood,” in Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, ed. Halina Stephan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 325. 8. Cf. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006); Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, eds., World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010). 9. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 54.

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10. Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Paul Coates, Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003). 11. Emma Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003); on Holland’s Washington Place, see Susan M. Griffin, ed., Henry James Goes to the Movies (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); and Laurence Raw, Adapting Henry James to the Screen: Gender, Fiction, and Film (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006). 12. See Mariola Jankun-Dopartowa, Gorzkie kino Agnieszki Holland (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz/terytoria, 2000); Sławomir Bobowski, W poszukiwaniu siebie: Filmowa twórczość Agnieszki Holland (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2001); and Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, Agnieszka Holland (Warsaw: Biblioteka “Więzi,” 2009). 13. Naficy, An Accented Cinema. 14. John Tibbetts considers Holland’s films as made in exile; however, he also names as such Andrzej Wajda’s films made abroad, which hardly fall under this category. John  C. Tibbetts, “An Interview with Agnieszka Holland: The Politics of Ambiguity,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, no. 25 (2008): 136. 15. An example of Holland’s recent work is her direction in 2007 of two episodes of the TV series A Team/Ekipa, which was a kind of family project realized together with her sister, Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, and her daughter, Kasia Adamik. 16. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 4. 17. Ibid. 18. Europa, Europa offers the most evident example of a deterritorialized subject. 19. Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in Ďurovičová and Newman, World Cinemas, 12–33. 20. Ibid., 13–14. 21. Ibid., 20. 22. Crnković, “Inscribed Bodies, Invited Dialogues.” 23. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 2. 24. John Durham Peters, “Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (London: Routledge, 1999), 20. 25. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 26. Ibid., 31. 27. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 22, 36.

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28. Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 170. 29. The first scene preceding the opening credits is an oneiric scene of Solly in Hitler Youth uniform as he tries to get out from the water he is swimming in. The second is a flashback of Solly’s circumcision, which serves as a background for the opening credits. 30. Ruth Johnston, “The Jewish Closet in Europa, Europa,” Camera Obscura, no. 52 (2003): 5, 6–7. 31. Coates, Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy, 140. 32. Ibid., 141. 33. Interestingly, the closing scene does not offer any close-up of Julie. The viewer sees long or medium-long shots of her, mostly of a profile of her body, thus emphasizing her pregnancy. 34. Coates, The Red and the White, 168. 35. Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 82–83. 36. Ibid., 85. 37. The difference in cinematography is produced by means of a slightly changed camera angle. In the first scene, Catherine’s close-ups are frontal, which makes an impression she is pinned out with the camera lens as if it were a needle. In the last scene, the camera is slightly angled, thus the view varies from 7/8 to 3/4. Thus, the camera’s look becomes less invasive. Also, the lighting is softer than in the first scene in which the girl was lit with a frontal hard lighting mostly. 38. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 36. 39. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3. 40. McCarthy, “Review: Total Eclipse.” 41. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 746–57. 42. William Collins Donahue, “Pretty Boys and Nasty Girls: The Holocaust Figured in Two German Films of the 1990s,” New England Review, no. 4 (2000): 114. 43. Ibid., 114–15. 44. Katarzyna Marciniak, Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xiv.

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Selected Bibliography

The works listed below comprise a selected bibliography of those cited in this volume. The works that are selected are key academic books and articles on Polish and transnational cinema, and on relevant cultural theories and critical approaches, with an emphasis on those works that are available in English. Full references are given in the notes at the end of each chapter. Allan, Sean, and John Sandford, eds. DEFA: East German Cinema 1946–92. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999. Alter, Nora M. Chris Marker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006. Annus, Epp. “Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Socialism.” In Hybrid Spaces: Theory, Culture, Economy, edited by Johannes Angermüller, Katharina Bunzmann, and Christina Rauch, 25–36. New York: Transaction; Münser: LIT Verlag, 2000. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.  M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. “The Heteroglot Novel.” In The Bakhtin Reader, edited by Pam Morris, 88–123. London: E. Arnold, 1994. Balski, Grzegorz, ed. Directory of Eastern European Film-Makers and Films 1945–1991. Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1991. Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971. Bazin, André. “Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl.” In What Is Cinema? vol. 2. Translated by Hugh Gray, 158–62. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

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Bergfelder, Tim. “National, Transnational or Supranational Cinema? Rethinking European Film Studies.” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 3 (2005): 315–31. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. London: Penguin, 1991. Beumers, Birgit, ed. The Cinema of Russia and the Soviet Union. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Bial, Henry. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Bird, Daniel, ed. Żuławski. Keele, UK: Keele University Press, 1998. ———. “Żuławski and Polish Cinema.” In Eyeball Compendium, edited by Steven Thrower, 147–50. Godalming, UK: Fab Press, 2003. Biskupski, M.  B.  B. Hollywood’s War with Poland 1939–1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John  G. Richardson, 241–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Caes, Christopher. “The New Naîveté: Recent Developments in Polish Independent Cinema.” In “Polish Cinema.” Special issue, KinoKultura 2 (November 2005). http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/2/caes.shtml. Coates, Paul. Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. ———, ed. Lucid Dreams: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1999. ———. The Red and the White: the Cinema of People’s Poland. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. ———. The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema. London: Verso, 1985. Cook, Pam, ed. The Cinema Book. 3rd ed. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Cowie, Peter. Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. ———. “Wajda Redux.” Sight & Sound 49, no. 1 (Winter 1979–80): 32–34. Crofts, Stephen. “Concepts of National Cinema.” In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 385–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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———. “Reconceptualising National Cinema/s.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 3 (1993): 49–67. Cunningham, John. Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. Davies, Norman. God’s Playground: A History of Poland. Vol. 2, 1795 to the Present. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Ďurovičová, Nataša, and Kathleen Newman, eds. World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1986. ———. Stars. New ed. London: BFI, 1998. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe.” In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 82–107. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Ezra, Elizabeth, and Terry Rowden, eds. Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2006. Falkowska, Janina. Andrzej Wajda: History, Politics and Nostalgia in Polish Cinema. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006. Falkowska, Janina, and Marek Haltof, eds. The New Polish Cinema. Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 2003. Faraday, Georges. Revolt of the Filmmakers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall of the Soviet Film Industry. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. ———. Power/Knowledge. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980. ———. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald Bouchard, 113–38. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Frappat, Hélène, and Jacques Rivette. “Interview with Jacques Rivette.” Histoire de Marie et Julien DVD. France: Arte Video, 2004. Fritzsche, Sonja. “East Germany’s ‘Werkstatt Zukunft’: Futurology and the Science Fiction Films of ‘Defa-Futurum.’” German Studies Review 29, no. 2 (2006): 367–86. Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Garbowski, Christopher. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Decalogue” Series: The Problem of the Protagonists and Their Self-Transcendance [sic]. New York: Columbia University Press; Boulder: East European Monographs no. CDLII, 1996. Geraghty, Christine. “Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performance.” In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 183–201. London: Arnold, 2000. Gershenson, Olga. “Ambivalence and Identity in Russian-Jewish Cinema.” In Jewish Cultural Studies. Vol. 1, Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation, edited by Simon J. Bronner, 175–95. Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008. Gilman, Sander L. Jews in Today’s German Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Golovskoy, Val. “Art and Propaganda in the Soviet Union, 1980–5.” In The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, edited by Anna Lawton, 264–82. London: Routledge, 1992. Griffin, Susan M., ed. 2003. Henry James Goes to the Movies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–1979, 120–38. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Haltof, Marek. The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. ———. Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema. Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. ———. Polish National Cinema. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002. Hames, Peter, ed. The Cinema of Central Europe. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. ———, ed. The Czechoslovak New Wave. 2nd ed. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, 1996. Hayward, Susan. French National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993. Hetherington, Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge, 1997. Higbee, Will, and Song Hwee Lim. “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.” Transnational Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2010): 7–21. Higson, Andrew. “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 36–46. Hill, Annette. Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres. London: Routledge, 2007.

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Hjort, Mette, and Scott MacKenzie, eds. Cinema and Nation. London: Routledge, 2010. Imre, Anikó, ed. A Companion to Eastern European Cinema. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012. ———, ed. East European Cinemas. New York: Routledge, 2005. Insdorf, Annette. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Iordanova, Dina, ed. The Cinema of the Balkans. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. ———. Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. Jäckel, Anne. European Film Industries. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Language in Literature, edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 62–93. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1987. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Karpiński, Maciej. The Theatre of Andrzej Wajda. Translated by Christina Paul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kelertas, Violeta, ed. Baltic Postcolonialism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Kickasola, Joseph G. The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski. New York: Continuum, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kuhn, Annette, ed. Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. London: Verso, 1990. Lim, Song Hwee. “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transgender?” New Cinemas 5, no. 1 (2007): 39–52. Linville, Susan E. “Europa, Europa: A Test Case for German National Cinema.” Wide Angle 3 (1995): 38–51. Lubelski, Tadeusz. Historia kina polskiego: Twórcy, filmy, konteksty. Katowice: Videograf II, 2009. Lupton, Catherine. Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. MacCormack, Patricia. “Mucous, Monsters and Angels: Irigiray and Zulawski’s Possession.” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 1 (2010). http://cjpmi.ifl.pt/1-mucous-monsters-and-angels/. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Marciniak, Katarzyna. Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Mazierska, Ewa. “Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches.” Studies in Eastern European Cinema 1, no. 1 (2010): 5–16.

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———. Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. ———. Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. ———. “Polish Cinematic Dystopias: Metaphors of Life under Communism—and Beyond.” Kinema (Fall 2004). http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=77&feature. ———. Postcommunist Polish Cinema: From Pavement Level. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. ———. Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Mazierska, Ewa, and Elżbieta Ostrowska. Women in Polish Cinema. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006. McArthur, Colin, ed. Andrzej Wajda: Polish Cinema. London: BFI Education, 1970. Michałek, Bolesław. The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda. London: Tantivy Press, 1973. Michałek, Bolesław, and Frank Turaj. The Modern Cinema of Poland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Mikurda, Kuba, and Kamila Wielebska, eds. Dzieje grzechu: Surrealizm w kinie polskim [A story of sin: Surrealism in Polish cinema]. Kraków: Korporacja Ha! Art, 2010. Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Towards a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, 746–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Murphy, Robert. Sixties British Cinema. London: BFI, 1992. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Näripea, Eva. “Transnational Spaces of Science Fiction: An Estonian-Polish Co-production The Test of Pilot Pirx (Test Pilota Pirxa / Navigaator Pirx, 1978).” In “Estonian Cinema.” Special issue, KinoKultura 10 (March 2010). http://www.kinokultura.com/specials/10/estonian.shtml. Neupert, Richard John. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Orr, John. Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Orr, John, and Elżbieta Ostrowska, eds. The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. ———, eds. The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

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317

Ostrowska, Dorota. “Languages and Identities in the Contemporary European Cinema.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 15, no. 1 (April 2007): 55–65. Ostrowska, Elżbieta. “Krystyna Janda: The Contradictions of Polish Stardom.” In Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture, edited by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, 37–64. Vol. 15 of Indiana Slavic Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Peary, Danny. Cult Movies. London: Vermilion, 1982. Petrie, Duncan. The British Cinematographer. London: BFI, 1996. Petrie, Graham. History Must Answer to Man: The Contemporary Hungarian Cinema. Budapest: Corvina, 1978. Polanski, Roman. Roman by Polanski. London: Heinemann, 1984. Posadas, J. The Process of Permanent Revolution in Poland. London: Revolutionary Workers Party, 1981. Raw, Laurence. Adapting Henry James to the Screen: Gender, Fiction, and Film. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006. Richardson, Michael. Surrealism and Cinema. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Ronduda, Łukasz, and Barbara Piwowarska, eds. Nowa Fala: Historia zjawiska, którego nie było [Polish New Wave: A history of a phenomenon that never existed]. Warsaw: Instytut Adama Mickiewicza, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2008. Sandbrook, Dominic. White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Abacus, 2006. Sconce, Jeffrey. “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style.” In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 534–53. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam, eds. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Shonfield, Katherine. Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City. London: Routledge, 2000. Skwara, Anita. “Film Stars Do Not Shine in the Sky over Poland: The Absence of Popular Cinema in Poland.” In Popular European Cinema, edited by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, 220–31. London: Routledge, 1992. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. 2nd ed. New York: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Soldovieri, Stefan. “The Politics of the Popular: Trace of Stones (1969/89) and the Discourse on Stardom in the GDR Cinema.” In Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, edited by Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 220–36. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. ———. “Socialists in Outer Space: East German Film’s Venusian Adventure.” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 382–98.

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Selected Bibliography

Stalnaker, Maria T. “Agnieszka Holland Reads Hollywood.” In Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, edited by Halina Stephan, 313– 30. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond. London: Routledge, 2006. Stok, Danusia, ed. Kieślowski on Kieślowski. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Sulik, Bolesław. A Change of Tack: Making The Shadow Line. London: British Film Institute, 1976. Taylor, John Russell. Directors and Directions: Cinema for the Seventies. London: Eyre Methuen, 1975. Thompson, Ewa M. Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Tibbetts, John C. “An Interview with Agnieszka Holland: The Politics of Ambiguity.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25 (2008): 132–43. Toubiana, Serge. “Lumières de la Passion.” Cahiers du cinéma 325 (May 1982): 18. Vertovec, Steven. “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (1999): 447–62. Vincendeau, Ginette. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. London: Continuum, 2000. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Webb, Jen, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher. Understanding Bourdieu. London: Sage Publications, 2002. Weedman, Christopher. “Optimism Unfulfilled: Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End and the ‘Swinging Sixties.’” Senses of Cinema, no. 56 (2010). http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/deep-end/. Werner, Mateusz, ed. Polish Cinema Now! London: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2010. Werner, Mateusz, and Lech Kurpiewski, eds. Young Polish Cinema. Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2007. Wilson, Emma. Alain Resnais. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. ———. Cinema’s Missing Children. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Woodward, Stephen, ed. After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. “Psychoanalysis and the Lacanian Real: ‘Strange Shapes of the Unwarped Primal World.’” In Adventures in Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont, 207–23. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

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Contributors

Michael Goddard is senior lecturer in media and postgraduate coordinator in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford. His current research centers on Eastern European cinema and media culture; contemporary music and noise; and film, media, and political theory. He recently completed a book on the cinema of the Chilean-born filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (London/New York: Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2013) and has coedited two volumes on noise (London/New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012–13). He is currently conducting a research project, Radical Ephemera, examining radical media ecologies in film, video, radio, and social movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Helena Goscilo is professor of Slavic and East European languages and cultures at the Ohio State University. She writes primarily on culture and gender in Russia, and secondarily on visual genres. Her publications in the last two years include Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (ed., Indiana University Press, 2010), Reflections and Refractions: The Mirror in Russian Culture (Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, 2010–11), Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic (ed., Routledge, 2011), Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (ed., Routledge, 2012), and Embracing Arms: Cultural Representations of Slavic and Balkan Women in War (ed., Central European University Press, 2012), all but one coedited. Among her current projects are a volume preliminarily titled Fame in Flight: Russian Aviation with Vlad Strukov. Charlotte Govaert worked for national public television in the Netherlands as a producer-director of factual programming. She has a degree in Dutch literature and media arts as well as a PhD in film and visual culture. Currently, she produces Beeld voor Beeld, a documentary film festival in Amsterdam about cultural diversity.

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320

Contributors

Peter Hames is visiting professor in film studies at Staffordshire University and a program adviser to the London Film Festival. His books include The Czechoslovak New Wave (2nd ed., Wallflower Press, 2005, Czech translation, 2008, Polish translation, 2011), Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and as editor, The Cinema of Central Europe (Wallflower Press, 2004) and The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy (Wallflower Press, 2008). He contributed to Marketa Lazarová: Studie a dokumenty, ed. Petr Gajdošík (Prague, 2009) and Best of Slovak Cinema, 1921–91 (Bratislava: Slovak Film Institute, 2013) and recently coedited Cinemas in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 (with Catherine Portuges, Temple University Press, 2013). His articles have appeared in Sight & Sound, Vertigo, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Kinema, KinoKultura, and Kinoeye. Izabela Kalinowska is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University. She works in the areas of Polish and Russian literatures and cinemas. She is the author of Between East and West: Polish and Russian Nineteenth-Century Travel to the Orient (University of Rochester Press, 2004) and of numerous articles dealing primarily with issues of gender and nation in Polish and Russian cinema, including “Mothers and Lovers: The Melodramatic Dimension of Polish-Soviet Friendship” (Historyka 41, 2011); “Russian Heritage Cinema and the Polish Question” (Universals and Contrasts, Spring 2012), and “From Orientalism to Surrealism: Wojciech Jerzy Has Interprets Jan Potocki” (Studies in Eastern European Cinema 4, no. 1 [2013]). Lars Kristensen is a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skövde, Sweden. His research focuses on representation in cinema, transnational and postcolonial filmmaking, and bicycle cinema. After receiving his PhD at the University of St. Andrews, he has held temporary positions at the University of Central Lancashire and University of Glasgow. He has published mainly on cross-cultural issues related to Russian cinema and is the editor of Postcommunist Film: Russia, Eastern Europe and World Culture (Routledge, 2012). Kamila Kuc completed her PhD dissertation in the history of Polish avant-garde film at Birkbeck College (University of London). She has coedited a book on the subject (forthcoming with Columbia University Press, 2014) and is currently authoring a manuscript based on her dissertation. She is a film historian, critic, and curator (Laura Mulvey

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Retrospective, ERA New Horizons Film Festival, Wrocław, Poland). She is also a coeditor of the first collection in Polish of Laura Mulvey’s most influential essays. She has published on the subject of Polish cinema in a variety of books, magazines, and journals. She currently teaches film history and theory at Kingston and Brighton University. Ewa Mazierska is a professor of contemporary cinema at the School of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Central Lancashire. Her publications include European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Nabokov’s Cinematic Afterlife (McFarland, 2011); Jerzy Skolimowski: The Cinema of a Nonconformist (Berghahn Books, 2010); Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2008); Roman Polanski: The Cinema of a Cultural Traveller (I. B. Tauris, 2007); Polish Postcommunist Cinema (Peter Lang, 2007); Women in Polish Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2006), with Elżbieta Ostrowska; and Crossing New Europe: The European Road Movie (Wallflower Press, 2006) with Laura Rascaroli. She is currently working on a book about representation of work in European cinema. Robert Murphy is a emeritus professor in film studies at De Montfort University. He has written several books about British cinema, and Smash and Grab, a history of the London underworld in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also the editor of Directors in British and Irish Cinema and The British Cinema Book. He is currently working on Shadows Are My Friends: British Film Noir for BFI Publishing. Eva Näripea received her PhD in 2011 for a dissertation “Estonian Cinescapes: Spaces, Places and Sites in Soviet Estonian Cinema (and Beyond).” She coedited Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc (2008) with Andreas Trossek, and a special issue on Estonian cinema for Kinokultura: New Russian Cinema (2010), with Ewa Mazierska and Mari Laaniste. Her most recent collaboration is the edited volume Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours on Screen, with Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (forthcoming with I. B. Tauris). Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist in the Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin. He has published and presented conference papers on film, radio, and archives (including an essay on Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai in the Irish Journal of French Studies, 2001) and contributes to the online journal Senses of Cinema.

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Dorota Ostrowska is the author of Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (2008) and European Cinemas in the Television Age (2007), with Graham Roberts. She teaches history of film and visual media at Birkbeck, University of London. Elżbieta Ostrowska teaches film at the University of Alberta (Canada). Her publications include Women in Polish Cinema (ed. with Ewa Mazierska; Berghahn Books, 2006), The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World (ed. with John Orr; Wallflower Press, 2006), The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance (ed. with John Orr; Wallflower Press, 2003), Gender-Film-Media (ed. with Elżbieta Oleksy; Rabid, 2001), Gender w kinie europejskim i mediach (ed.; Rabid, 2001), Przestrzeń filmowa (Rabid, 2000), Gender in Film and the Media: East-West Dialogues (ed. with Elżbieta Oleksy and Michael Stevenson; Peter Lang, 2000). Jonathan Owen is a teaching fellow in film studies at the University of St. Andrews. His doctoral thesis, on Czech New Wave cinema, was completed at the University of Manchester. He has published articles and contributed chapters on Czech, Slovak, and Polish cinema and is author of the monograph Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (Berghahn Books, 2011). Alison Smith is lecturer in French and European film studies at the University of Liverpool. She is the coauthor with Douglas Morrey of Jacques Rivette (Manchester University Press, 2010) and has also published monographs on Agnes Varda (Manchester University Press, 1998) and on the aftermath of 1968 in French cinema. She has contributed a chapter on women cinematographers in the French film industry to Andrew Dawson and Sean Holmes’s collection on “Working in the Global Film and TV Industry” and has published recent articles on language exchange in French cinema.

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Index

Accident, The, 260 Adjani, Isabelle, 246, 247 Adventures of Gerard, The, 267 Afonia and the Bees (Afonia i pszczoły), 151 Ahn, Philip, 195 Air So Pure, An (Un air si pur), 179, 188, 189 Alexander Nevsky (Aleksandr Nevskii), 26 Alien, 116 All the Right Noises, 268, 271 All the World’s Memory (Toute la mémoire du monde), 222, 223, 225 Almodóvar, Pedro, 60 Alphaville, 121 Altman, Robert, 166–67, 170 Ancient Tale: When the Sun Was God, An (Stara baśn: Kiedy słonce było bogiem), 60 And Soon the Darkness, 271 And Then There Was Jazz (Był jazz), 27 Anderson, Benedict, 2, 9, 19 Anderson, Lindsay, 12, 30–31, 36, 38, 50, 84, 88, 260, 261 Andrews, Harry, 259 Andrien, Jean-Jacques, 176 Andrzejewski, Jerzy, 42, 50, 82 Angelo, Yves, 179 Angels’ Games (Les jeux des anges), 219, 231 Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte), 285, 291, 294–97 Annis, Francesca, 263 Antczak, Jerzy, 62 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 260–61 Appadurai, Arjun, 2

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Apple Game, The (Hra o jablko), 32 April (Kwiecień), 90 Arabesque, 260 Ar’e, 194, 203, 204–9 Asher, Jane, 268, 270 Ashes, The (Popioły), 91 Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament), 26, 28–29, 34, 37–38, 42, 44, 90, 278, 285 Assassination in Sarajevo (Sarajevski atentat), 157 Assayas, Oliver, 195 As the Days Pass, as the Years Pass (Z biegiem lat, z biegiem dni . . .), 47 Astronauts, The (Les astronautes), 215 At Full Gallop (Cwał), 276 Bachleda-Curuś, Alicja, 14, 153, 168–70, 171 Bad Luck (Zezowate szczęście), 26, 91, 204 Bailey, David, 261 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 98, 117, 126, 132, 148, 152 Bancroft, Anne, 264 Barrault, Marie-Christine, 283 Barrier (Bariera), 28, 267 Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 198–99 Báthory, Erszébet, 224 Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potyomkin), 128 Béart, Emmanuelle, 184, 186 Beast, The (La bête), 216, 232 Beatles, The, 259 Beckett, Samuel, 183 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 305 Before Night Falls, 199, 202

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324

Index

Benayoun, Robert, 220 Benigni, Roberto, 205 Bennent, Heinz, 246 Bergman, Ingmar, 25, 32, 34, 39–40, 48, 60, 95, 276 Bettelheim, Bruno, 264 Bhabha, Homi, 128 Bielska, Iwona, 243 Big Shots, 199 Bisset, Jacqueline, 261 Birth of a Nation, 195 Black Beach, The (La plage noire), 174, 179, 183–84, 188–89 Black Torment, The, 262 Blanche, 215, 220 Blind Chance (Przypadek), 26, 64–65 Blind Terror, 271 Blood of Beasts, The (Le sang des bêtes), 223, 228 Blowup, 260–61 Bluebeard (Blaubart), 16, 275, 278, 281–82, 284, 286 Boorman, John, 268 Border Street (Ulica Graniczna), 83, 89 Borges, Jorge Luis, 227, 228 Borgia, Lucrezia, 224 Borowczyk, Walerian, 5–6, 15, 215–34 Bosch, Hieronymous, 282 Bossak, Jerzy, 82 Bouquet, Stéphane, 181–82 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 196 Brach, Gerard, 262 Brandauer, Klaus Maria, 163 Brandys, Kazimierz, 40, 42 Branice, Ligia, 215, 220, 221 Brasseur, Pierre, 230 Braunek, Małgorzata, 42, 244 Brecht, Bertolt, 129 Bresson, Robert, 276 Britannia Hospital, 38 Brownlow, Kevin, 30 Brylski, Ryszard, 168 Bugajski, Ryszard, 34, 279 Bunny Lake Is Missing, 260 Buñuel, Luis, 276 Burton, Tim, 199–200 Buzek, Agata, 168

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Cagney, James, 253 Caiman, The (Il caimano), 204 Camera Buff (Amator), 26, 44, 64–65, 242 Camouflage (Barwy ochronne), 26, 276, 278 Can (band), 267 Cardinale, Claudia, 267 Caron, Leslie, 275 Carnage, 58 Carreras, Michael, 262, 266 Catamount Killing, The, 278 Catherine and Her Children (Kateřina a jeji děti), 32 Cayrol, Jean, 217, 219 Chęciński, Sylwester, 135 Cheung, Maggie, 195 Chinatown, 57 Chopin’s Youth (Młodość Chopina), 28, 83, 89 Christie, Julie, 270 Chukhrai, Pavel, 63 Chytilová, Věra, 32 Cinema of Moral Concern, The, 16, 26, 32, 77, 89, 156, 203, 236, 241–42, 253, 255, 277, 279 Cinémathèque Française, The, 222 Circle of Deceit (Die Fälschung), 197– 98, 208 Citizen Kane, 29, 67 Clavell, James, 260 Clayton, Jack, 263, 264 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 117 Closely Observed Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky), 34 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 262, 266 Coates, Paul, 277, 284, 300–301 collection particulière, Une, 222, 225, 226 Collinson, Peter, 268 Colpi, Henri, 217 Conrad, Joseph, 29, 41, 43 Constant Factor, The (Constans), 26, 44, 276, 278 Contempt (Le mépris), 238, 246, 249 Copying Beethoven, 293 Cortázar, Julio, 260

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Index Crash, 106 Cronenberg, David, 14, 58, 194, 197, 200–202 !Cuba Sí !, 217 Cul-de-Sac, 63, 261 Curse of Snakes Valley (Klątwa Doliny Węży), 115–18, 120–24, 126–29 Cybulski, Zbigniew, 25, 39, 50, 155 Czech New Wave, 25, 29–30 Czyżewska, Elżbieta, 154–55 Daisies (Sedmikrásky), 29 Damned, The, 284 Dance of the Vampires, 261 Danton, 38, 41, 46, 49 Darling, 258, 263, 270 Davies, Norman, 43 Day for Night (La nuit Américaine), 249, 251 Day of the Great Adventure (Dzień wiekiej przygody), 23 De Niro, Robert, 170, 196 Deadly Affair, The, 259–60 Decalogue, The (Dekalog), 12, 26, 34, 48, 58, 67–68 Deep End, 16, 29, 258, 267–71, 272 Déja vu, 135, 203–4 Delerue, Georges, 249 Deleuze, Gilles, 256 Deluge (Potop), 62 Demme, Jonathan, 290 Demobbed (DMB), 205 Demy, Jacques, 217 Deneuve, Catherine, 262, 265 Depardieu, Gérard, 46, 180, 196, 203 Depardieu, Guillame, 182, 186 Departure, The (Le départ), 58, 63, 267 Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat), 233 Desnitskii, Sergei, 128 Devil, The (Diabeł), 238, 240–41, 245 diaboliques, Les,262 Die Hard, 66 Dignity (Godnośč), 32 Długosz, Leszek, 243 Donahue, William, 305–6 Donen, Stanley, 260

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325

Donner, Clive, 258 Donovan, Terence, 261 Don’t Touch the Axe (Ne touchez pas la hache), 182, 186 Dors, Diana, 268, 270 Dorst, Tankret, 284 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 40, 148, 205, 248, 251–52, 253 Double Life of Véronique, The, 61, 63, 65–66, 68 Down House (Daun Khaus), 205 Drabiński, Adek, 167 Dreyer, Carl, 276 Duffy, Brian, 261 Duras, Marguerite, 217, 219 Durgnat, Raymond, 218 Dutronc, Jacques, 250 Dyer, Richard, 196, 207 Eastern Promises, 14, 58, 194, 200–202 Eco, Umberto, 123, 129, 132 Eighth Day of the Week, The (Ósmy dzień tygodnia), 80, 90 Eisenstein, Sergei, 26, 128, 176 Ekberg, Anita, 167 Éluard, Paul, 219 Emmanuelle 5, 219 Emmerich, Roland, 170 Eroica, 26, 28, 90 Essential Killing, 8 Europe, Europe (Europa, Europa), 17, 208, 290, 291, 293, 294, 297–98, 301, 305–6 Everything for Sale (Wszystko na sprzedaż), 26, 28, 40 Excuse Me, Is It Here They Shoot People? (Przepraszam, czy tu biją?), 26–27 Eyes without a Face (Les yeux sans visage), 216, 230 Fahrenheit 451, 260 Falk, Feliks, 27 Family Life (Życie rodzinne), 26, 276, 278 Far from Vietnam (Loin du Viêt-Nam), 218

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326

Index

Farrell, Colin, 170 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 252 Fellini, Federico, 39, 48, 158 Fidelity (La fidelité), 248 Fielding, Henry, 259 Figura, Katarzyna, 14, 153, 165–68, 170, 171 Five from Barska Street (Piątka z ulicy Barskiej), 83–84, 90 Flood (Powódź), 82 Fonda, Jane, 161–62 Ford, Aleksander, 6, 25, 28, 34, 77, 80, 83–84, 89–90, 95, 156, 237 Forman, Miloš, 25, 285 Fossey, Brigitte, 275, 280 Foucault, Michel, 117, 121, 123, 224, 227, 228 Four Nights with Anna (Cztery noce z Anną), 8, 269 Francis, Freddie, 262, 263 Franju, Georges, 216–17, 219, 220, 222, 230 Frank, Christopher, 249 Fraser, John, 265–66 French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), 78, 81, 215, 217, 237–38, 250, 253, 255, 277 Frič, Martin, 24 Frisch, Max, 278, 281, 282 From a Night Porter’s Point of View (Z punktu widzenia nocnego portiera), 65 Fuller, Samuel, 79 Ga-ga: Glory to Heroes (Ga, ga: Chwała bohaterom) 165 Gajer, Václav, 32 Game, The (Gra), 155–56 Ganz, Bruno, 197 Gassman, Vittorio, 283 Gates to Paradise, 42 Gateway of Europe, The (Wrota Europy), 169, 170 Gatti, Armand, 217 Geeson, Judy, 270 Gehr, Ernie, 99 Generation, A (Pokolenie), 26, 28, 31, 37–39, 85, 90, 237, 238

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Genet, Jean, 266 Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter), 164 Georgy Girl, 263, 270 Get Carter, 271 Ghost Writer, The, 57–58 Gierek, Edward, 41, 139 Giertych, Jędrzej, 41–42, 52 Gilman, Sander, 208 Glowna, Vadim, 281 Godard, Jean-Luc, 14, 56, 60, 95, 116, 121, 161–62, 163, 174, 176, 178, 180, 181, 186–87, 204, 217, 238, 246, 249, 250 Goddard, Michael, 165 Golino, Valeria, 275 Gomułka, Władysław, 261 Gong, Li, 207 Gold, Jack, 268 Gorin Jean-Pierre, 161–62 Goto, Island of Love (Goto, l’île d’amour), 216, 219, 220, 221, 223, 229–31 grand paysage d’Alexis Droeven, Le, 174–75, 176, 188, 189 Grandmother’s Encyclopedia in 13 Volumes (L’Encyclopédie de GrandMaman en 13 volumes), 225 Great Family, A (Bolshaya semya), 84 Green, Joseph, 23 Green Bird, A (Der grüne Vogel), 163 Greenaway, Peter, 232 Greene, David, 268, 271 Gretkowska, Manuela, 254 Griffith, D. W., 195 Gruszka, Karolina, 168 Guattari, Félix, 256 Guernica (film), 219 Gutowski, Gene, 261 Hackford, Taylor, 14, 198 Hadzic, Fadil, 157 Hall, Stuart, 3, 28, 96, 99, 103, 111 Hanák, Dušan, 157 Hamlet, 241 Hands Up! (Ręce do góry), 197–98, 267, 268, 278

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Index Hannerz, Ulf, 2, 19 Happy Days (play), 183 Hard Day’s Night, A, 259 Hartford-Davies, Robert, 262 Has, Wojciech Jerzy, 7, 77, 81, 86, 91, 158 Heave-ho! (Hej-rup!), 24 Heiress, The, 303 Hendry, Ian, 266 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, 270 Higbee, Will, 4–5 Hines, Gregory, 198–99 Hjort, Mette, 4, 17, 293 Hiroshima My Love (Hiroshima mon amour), 218, 221 Hitchcock, Alfred, 262 Hobsbawm, Eric, 2 Hoellering, George, 24–25 Hoffman, Jerzy, 6, 60, 62, 152 Holland, Agnieszka, 1, 5, 9, 15, 17, 27, 58–59, 62, 77, 134, 208, 241, 277, 279, 285, 289–307 Holt, Seth, 262, 266 Hopkins, Anthony, 260 Hostile Witness, 260 Hôtel des Invalides, 222 House (Dom), 221 Houston, Penelope, 267 Hudson, Dale, 195 Hunting Flies (Polowanie na muchy), 26, 42, 91 Huppert, Isabelle, 176–77 Huster, Francis, 251 Hysteria, 262 I Start Counting, 268, 271 Idiot, The (novel), 40, 205, 253 Identification Marks: None (Rysopis), 267, 278 Idziak, Sławomir, 61, 66, 278, 283 If . . . , 30 If Katelbach Comes (Cul de Sac), 261–62 Illumination (Iluminacja), 26, 275, 278, 280 Immemory, 222, 232

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Immoral Tales (Contes immoraux), 224, 231, 232 Imperative (Imperativ), 16, 275, 278, 279–81, 285 In and Out, 290 In Darkness (W ciemności), 62 Inner State (Stan wewnętrzny), 164 Innocents, The, 263–64 Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje), 39–40, 42, 267 Interrogation, The (Przesłuchanie), 279 Inventory (Stan posiadania), 278 Irma Vep, 195 Jackiewicz, Aleksander, 161 Jacob, Irene, 61, 66 Jagger, Mick, 258 Jakobson, Roman, 13, 96–100, 103, 111 Jakubisko, Juraj, 158 Jakubowska, Wanda, 28, 83–94, 89, 140–41, 237 James, Henry, 292, 302, 303 Jancsó, Miklós, 25, 30, 33, 166 Janda, Krystyna, 14, 45, 153, 156, 160– 65, 169–70, 171, 176 Jankowska-Cieślak, Jadwiga, 156 Jánošík, 24 Janowska, Alina, 39, 50 Jarry, Alfred, 187 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 44, 46 Jean Paul II (pope), 253 Jędrusik, Kalina, 155 Joachim’s Dictionary (Le Dictionnaire de Joachim), 227 Jolie, Angelina, 167 Jones, Christopher, 260 Jordan, Neil, 170 Jovovich, Milla, 170 Julie Walking Home, 300, 301–2 Kachanov, Roman, 194, 197, 203, 205–9 Kael, Pauline, 260–61 Kafka, Franz, 218, 256 Kanal (Kanał), 26, 28, 37–38, 44, 77, 85, 90–91 Kaprisky, Valérie, 251

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328 Karabasz, Kazimierz, 90 Karpiński, Maciej, 46 Katyń, 12, 33–34, 37–38, 42, 47–49, 54–55, 62, 151 Kaurismäki, Mika, 199–200 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy, 34, 62, 77, 86, 90–91, 155–57 Kazansky, Gennadi, 83 Kerr, Deborah, 260, 263 Kheifits, Iosif, 84 Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 1, 7, 12, 16, 26, 31–34, 44, 48, 56, 58–59, 61–78, 134, 169, 194, 203, 241–42, 277 Kilar, Wojciech, 278 King, Queen, Knave, 58 King Ubu (Ubu Roi, play), 187, 230 Kinski, Klaus, 249–50 Klein, William, 217, 218 Klinger, Michael, 262 Kłys, Tomasz, 283–84 Knife in the Water (Nóż w wodzie), 57, 62, 80–82, 90, 197, 261, 267 Knights of the Teutonic Order (Krzyżacy), 6, 90, 157 Kolosov, Sergei, 14, 135, 139–42, 149, 152 Kolski, Jan Jakub, 151 Kolya (Kolja), 33 Kołakowski, Leszek, 278 Konwicki, Tadeusz, 85, 90 Koumiko Mystery, The (Le mystère Koumiko), 218 Kowalska, Anka, 165 Korczak, 33, 38, 47 Krauze, Andrzej, 41, 52 Krauze, Krzysztof, 33 Kreuzpaintner, Marco, 170 Kristeva, Julia, 302 Królikiewicz, Grzegorz, 7 Krzystek, Waldemar, 151 Kubrick, Stanley, 67 Kurosawa, Akira, 32 Kusturica, Emir, 33 Kutz, Kazimierz, 90 L.A. without a Map, 199 Laban, Rudolf, 181

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Index Lalanne, Jean-Marc, 184, 190 Landscape after Battle (Krajobraz po bitwie), 40 Laputa, 163–64 Lass, Barbara, 281 Last Day of Summer, The (Ostatni dzień lata), 85–86, 90 Last Stage, The (Ostatni etap), 28, 83, 89, 140, 158 Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), 216, 221, 228, 230 Le Carré, John, 259, 260 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 250, 267 Lefort, Gérard, 189 Left Bank Group, 215–19, 221, 224–25, 227, 228, 232, 233–34 Legally Blonde, 68 Legend, A (Legenda), 135, 139 Lejtes, Josef, 24 Lem, Stanisław, 70, 118 Lenica, Jan, 221 Lesiewicz, Witold, 90 Leszczyński, Witold, 237 Leo the Last, 268 Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie), 227, 231 Letter to Jane, 161–62 Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (Zycie jako smiertelna choroba przenoszona droga plciowa), 144, 276, 278 Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella), 205 Life on the Hortobagy (Hortobágy), 24 Lightship, The, 202 Lim, Song Hwee, 4–5, 195, 207 Limpet Love (L’amour braque), 248, 253–54 Linda, Bogusław, 254 List of Adulteresses, The (Spis cudzołożnic), 204 Little Dramas (Małe dramaty), 90 Little Moscow (Mała Moskwa), 151 Loach, Ken, 268 Łomnicki, Jan, 135 Londoners, The (Londyńczycy), 168

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Index Long Conversation with a Bird (Das lange Gespräch mit dem Vogel), 284 Lonsdale, Michael, 182 Look Back in Anger (play), 261 Looking Glass War, The, 259, 260 Losey, Joseph, 30, 260 Lotna, 26, 28, 39, 158, 239 Louppe, Laurence, 181–82 Love (Szerelmesfilm), 157 Love in Germany, A (Eine Liebe in Deutschland), 47 Love Rites (Cérémonie d’amour), 232 Love Stories (Historie miłosne), 204 Lownes, Victor, 261 Lucas, George, 117 Lumet, Sidney, 259, 260, 268 Lvoff, Jean, 188 Machulski, Juliusz, 135, 203 Mademoiselle, 156, 266 Magic Voyage of Sinbad, The (Sadko), 83 Maids of Wilko (Panny z Wilka), 62 Majewski, Lech, 7 Makavejev, Dušan, 30 Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza), 26, 37–38, 41–47, 49, 62–63, 161–62, 175, 279 Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), 14, 26, 32, 37–38, 40, 42, 44–46, 160–62, 163, 174, 175, 176, 185, 241 Man of the Crowds (L’Hommedes foules), 188 Man on the Tracks (Człowiek na torze), 26 Maniewski, Maciej, 165, 167 Maniac, 262, 266 Mansfield, Nick, 302–3 Manuscript Found at Saragossa, The (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie), 91 Marczewski, Wojciech, 279 Marker, Chris, 15, 215–19, 222, 223, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232–33 Mars Attacks!, 199 Martyrs of Love (Mučedníci lásky), 30 Mason, James, 259

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Maspero, François, 188, 189 Mazierska, Ewa, 269, 270, 271, 275 McEnery, Peter, 267 McTiernan, John, 66 Medak, Peter, 260 Memories of a Geisha, 195 Men of the Blue Cross (Błękitny krzyż), 26, 90 Menzel, Jiří, 34 Mephisto, 163, 164 Michnik, Adam, 41, 52 Mickiewicz, Adam, 168–69 Mikhalkov, Nikita, 136, 144–45, 148–50 Milczenie (The Silence), 90 Milland, Ray, 260 Miłosz, Czesław, 82 Mister Freedom, 217 Monde Aden, Le (newspaper), 189 Monroe, Marilyn, 167 Moonlighting, 29, 58, 201 Moretti, Nanni, 204 Moreau, Jeanne, 155–56 Morgenstern, Janusz, 156 Mortimer, Penelope, 264 Most Important Thing: Love, The (L’important c’est d’aimer), 236, 245, 248, 249–51 Mother Joan of Angels (Matka Joanna od Aniołów), 91, 155–57, 158 Mother of Kings, The (Matka Królów), 279 Moulder-Brown, John, 268 Mrożek, Sławomir, 218 Mulvey, Laura, 305–6 Munk, Andrzej, 26, 28, 34, 77, 90–91, 204, 236, 237 Muriel, or The Time of Return (Muriel ou le temps d’un retour), 221 My Nights Are More Beautiful than Your Days (Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours), 248 My Nikifor (Mój Nikifor), 33 Naficy, Hamid, 218, 236–37, 291, 292–93 Nasfeter, Janusz, 90

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330

Index

Nastasya Filippovna, 40 Negatives, 260 Negri, Pola, 153 Neill, Sam, 246 Němec, Jan, 30 New German Cinema, 267, 281 Niemczyk, Leon, 82 Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), 220, 221, 223 Night Train (Pociąg), 90, 155 Nightmare, 262 Nights and Days (Noce i dnie), 62 Niven, David, 260 No End (Bez końca), 26, 32, 48, 64–65 Notting Hill, 195 Nothing but the Best, 258 November Night (Noc Listopadowa), 40 Nowina-Przybylski, Jan, 23 O Lucky Man!, 30–31 Olbrychski, Daniel, 38, 42 October, 176 Offence, The, 268 O’Hara, Gerry, 268, 271 Olivier, Olivier, 289, 291, 293 On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie), 236, 241–44, 245 Ondine, 170 Ondříek, Miroslav, 30 One Way Pendulum, 262 Oppenheim, Meret, 231 O’Regan, Helen, 299–300 Orr, John, 263, 269, 270 Orwell, George, 243 Osborne, John, 259, 261 Ostrowska, Elżbieta, 161, 162, 169 Other Side of the Wall, 245 OuLiPo group, 220, 224 Out 1, 182 Oz, Frank, 290 Pacuła, Joanna, 154 Pagnol, Marcel, 266 Pan Tadeusz, 168–69 Paradigm (Paradigma), 16, 275, 278, 280, 283–84 Paranoiac, 262

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Pasikowski, Władysław, 61 Passenger, The (Pasażerka), 90, 158 Passion, 14, 174, 175, 176–78, 179, 180, 181–82, 186–87, 204 Peary, Danny, 269–70, 271 Peck, Gregory, 260 People on the Road (Ludzie w drodze), 90 Perec, Georges, 224, 232 Perel, Salomon, 298, 305 Performance, 258 Perrault, Charles, 281 Persona Non Grata, 14, 134–35, 137, 144–51 Personnel (Personel), 65 Petry, Iwona, 254 Pharaoh (Faraon), 62, 91 Philadephia, 290 Pianist, The, 8, 57–58, 63, 168 Piccoli, Michel, 174, 179, 181, 183, 188 Pick-up on South Street, 79 Pier, The (La jetée), 215, 217, 222 Pierrot le fou, 238 Pierson, Frank, 259, 260 Piestrak, Marek, 13, 15, 115–33 Pieyre de Mandiargues, André, 219 Pigs (Psy), 61 Pinter, Harold, 260, 264 Pip, The (Pestka), 165 Piwowarski, Radosław, 165, 167 Piwowski, Marek, 26, 31 Playboy, 166, 168 Player, The, 166–67 Pleasure Girls, The, 263 Poitier, Sidney, 260 Polanski, Roman, 6, 8, 15–16, 33, 57–58, 62–63, 69–76, 80–81, 86, 90, 93, 168, 197, 258, 261–67, 272, 275, 278, 285, 289 Polish New Wave, 155, 197, 237–38 Polish school, 16, 24–25, 26, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 86, 89, 155, 236, 237, 238–39, 255, 277 Poor Cow, 268 Popiełuszko, Jerzy, 291 Possessed, The (novel), 40, 251–52 Possessed, The (Les Possédés), 180

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Index Possession, 245–48, 249 Powell, Robert, 275, 280 Preisner, Zbigniew, 61, 66 Preminger, Otto, 260 Prêt-à-Porter, 166, 167 Promised Land (Ziemia obiecana), 40, 62 Provincial Actors (Aktorzy prowincjonalni), 27 Prudence and the Pill, 260 Przybyszewski, Stanisław, 255 Psycho, 262 Ptushko, Aleksandr, 83 Public Woman, The (La femme publique), 248, 251–52 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 83 Pumpkin Eater, The, 264 Quarterly Balance (Bilans kwartalny), 26, 276, 278 Queneau, Raymond, 219 Radziwiłowicz, Jerzy, 14, 45–46, 163, 174–91, 204 Raging Bull, 196 Rampling, Charlotte, 270 Ray, Satyajit, 39 Real End of the Great War, The (Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny), 90, 155 Red Army Faction, 253 Red Psalm (Még kér a nép), 33 Red Shoe Diaries, 166 Reich, 61 Reisz, Karel, 260, 261 Reckoning, The, 268 Remember Your Name (Zapamiętaj imię swoje), 14, 135, 137, 139–44, 149–50, 152 Renaissance, 216 Repulsion, 16, 258, 261, 262–67, 272 Resnais, Alain, 15, 158, 216–17, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 230, 233 Return of Vasili Bortnikov, The (Vozvrashcheniye Vasiliya Bortnikova), 83

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Revisited (Rewizyta), 276 Richardson, Ralph, 260 Richardson, Tony, 156, 259, 261, 266 Rimbaud, Arthur, 290, 304 Rimskij-Korsakov, 83 Ritt, Martin, 259, 260 Riva, Emmanuelle, 221, 223 Rivette, Jacques, 164, 180, 181–86, 189–90 Robakowski, Józef, 7 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 217, 232 Roberts, Julia, 167, 195 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 46 Rogatchevskii, Andrei, 209 Rogers, Paul, 260 Role, The (Rola), 278 Romeo Must Die, 195 Rosemary’s Baby, 57, 272 Rotha, Paul, 28, 86, 93 Rough Treatment (Bez znieczulenia), 26, 37, 44 Rybkowski, Jan, 90 Salto, 90 Samson, 39–40, 90 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 163–64 Sangster, Jimmy, 262 Sara, 61 Scaachi, Greta, 166–67, 170 Scar, The (Blizna), 64–65 Schindler’s List, 48 Schlöndorff, Volker, 197–98 Schlesinger, John, 258, 260 Schnabel, Julian, 199–200 Schneider, Romy, 249, 250 Scott, Ridley, 116 Season of Monsters (Szörnyek évadja), 166 Secret Agent, The, 41 Secret Garden, The, 291, 306 Secret Defense (Secret défense), 180, 182–83, 188, 189 Semprun, Jorge, 219 Serene Velocity, 99 Servant, The, 260 Seweryn, Andrzej, 46, 244 Sex Mission (Seksmisja), 203–4

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332

Index

Shadow (Cień), 90–91 Shadow Line, The (Smuga cienia), 29, 43 She-Shaman, The (Szamanka), 8, 254 Shivers (Dreszcze), 279 Short Cuts, 167 Short Film about Killing, A (Krótki film o zabijaniu), 48, 67 Short Film about Love, A (Krótki film o miłości), 48, 67 Shout, The, 201 Siberian Lady Macbeth, A (Sibirska Ledi Makbet), 24 Silence, The (Milczenie), 90 Silver City, 13, 95–112 Sitting Target, 271 Skolimowski, Jerzy, 1, 6–9, 14–16, 25, 28, 30, 50, 56, 58, 81, 91, 194, 196, 197–203, 208, 209, 237, 258, 261, 267–69, 271, 272, 278 Ślesicki, Maciej, 61 Slow Motion (Sauve qui peut (la vie)), 178 Sobczuk, Bogusław, 45 Sokhurov, Alexander, 27 Some Like It Hot, 165 Song of Styrene (Le chant du Styrène), 219 Spielberg, Steven, 48, 70, 117 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The, 259 St. John, Jill, 261 Stalin, Joseph, 84 Stamp, Terence, 260 Star Wars, 117 Statues Also Die (Les statues meurent aussi), 222, 230 Stawiński, Jerzy Stefan, 90 Steinberger, Charly, 269 Story of Marie and Julien, The (L’Histoire de Marie et Julien), 184– 86, 189–90 Story of Sin (Dzieje grzechu), 232 Strange Affair, The, 268 Strike!, 43 Structure of Crystal, The (Struktura kryształu), 276, 278, 280

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Students (Studenci), 277, 286 Stuhr, Jerzy, 14, 60, 69, 194, 196, 197, 203–9 Success Is the Best Revenge, 201 Sulik, Bolesław, 28–29, 34–35, 43 Summer Storm, 170 Sunday in Peking (Dimanche à Pekin), 218 Sunless (Sans soleil), 218, 232, 233 Suschitzky, Peter, 201 Švankmajer, Jan, 33 Sweet Rush (Tatarak), 63, 164 Szabó, István, 157, 158, 163 Szapołowska, Grażyna, 169 Szpilman, Władysław, 57, 82 Szulkin, Piotr, 165 Talking Heads (Gadające głowy), 65 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 60, 276, 285 Tarr, Béla, 27 Taste of Fear, 262, 266 Tchórzewski, Krzysztof, 164 Tear of the Prince of Darkness, The (Łza księcia ciemności), 115 Teleszyński, Leszek, 239 Tenant, The (Le Locataire), 289 Tenser, Tony, 262 Testi, Fabio, 249 Test of Pilot Pirx, The (Test pilota Pirxa), 115–28 Teutonic Knights (Krzyżacy), 6 Theater of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, The (Le Théâtre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal), 230 Thief (Vor), 63 Third Miracle, The, 291, 299 Third Part of the Night, The (Trzecia część nocy), 26, 236, 238–40 Three Colors Trilogy, 26, 34, 48, 66–68 Three into Two Won’t Go, 270 Till, Eric, 268, 271 Tin Drum, The (Die Blechtrommel), 197 To Save a City (Ocalić miasto), 135, 139, 149 To Sir with Love, 260, 270 To Kill a Priest, 291, 300–301 To Kill This Love (Trzeba zabić tę miłość), 156

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Index Tom Jones, 259 Tomorrow’s Weather (Pogoda na jutro), 205 Tonight a City Will Die (Dziś w nocy umrze miasto), 90 Top Dog (Wodzirej), 27 Total Eclipse, 290–91, 304 Trade, 170 Train to Hollywood (Pociąg do Hollywood), 165–66, 167 Trap (Pułapka), 167 Trela, Jerzy, 243 Truffaut, François, 25, 60, 95, 217, 250, 251, 260 25 Fireman’s Street (Tüzoltó utca 25), 157, 158–60 Twists of Fate (Korowód), 205 Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa), 261 Tykwer, Tom, 69 Tyszkiewicz, Beata, 155 Uklański, Piotr, 7 Ulica Graniczna (Border Street), 83, 89 Umberto D., 86 Umecka, Jolanta, 82 Under the Phrygian Star (Pod gwiazdą frygijską), 155–56 Unvanquished City (Miasto nieujarzmione), 82, 91 Up the Junction, 268 Varda, Agnès, 216–17, 218 Verlaine, Paul, 290, 304 Vertovec, Steven, 2–3, 19 Villain, 271 Vincendeau, Ginettte, 196, 203, 208 Visconti, Luchino, 284 Völz, Benjamin, 283 von Sydow, Max, 25 von Trotta, Margarethe, 281, 282 Vor (Thief), 63 Wajda, Andrzej, 1, 6–7, 12, 14, 16, 24–26, 28–29, 32–33, 37–55, 59–60, 62, 69, 77, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 134, 151, 158, 160, 162–63, 164, 168–69,

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174, 180, 236, 237, 238–39, 241, 267, 276, 277–78, 279, 284 Walking Stick, The, 268, 271 Walkover (Walkower), 91, 267, 278 Wallach, Eli, 267 Washing Machine (Vortice mortale), 166 Washington Square, 292, 293, 302–3 Wałęsa, Lech, 46–47 Waśko, Ryszard, 7 Wedding, The (Wesele), 26, 31, 39 Welles, Orson, 67 Wherever You Are, 278 White Bus, The, 30 White Nights, 14. 198–99, 201–2, 203 White Soup (Żurek) 168 Wilder, Billy, 165 Wilhelmi, Janusz, 244 Wilson, Scott, 275 Winnicka, Lucyna, 14, 153, 155–60, 163, 171 Wionczek, Roman, 32 Wire, The (TV Series), 289 With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem), 151 Wodzirej (Top Dog), 27 Wójcik, Jerzy, 169 Wong, Russell, 195 Workers ’71 ( Robotnicy ’71), 64 Wood, Ed, 116 Wyler, William, 303 Wyndham, Francis, 260 Wyspiański, Stanisław, 31, 39–40 Yates, Peter, 262 Year of the Quiet Sun, The (Rok spokojnego słońca), 58, 63, 278 Yiddle with his Fiddle (Yidl mtn Fidl), 23 Zamachowski, Zbigniew, 68 Zanussi, Krzysztof, 1, 7, 16, 26, 44, 58–59, 63, 134–38, 144–51, 237, 241, 275–87 Zaorski, Janusz, 279 Zarzycki, Jerzy, 82, 91 Zhang, Ziyi, 207 Żuławski, Andrzej, 5–6, 8, 15–16, 26, 34, 236–56

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“This interesting and lively volume identifies and fills a gap in the study of cinema in general and Polish cinema in particular: that of Polish cinema’s transnational dimension. The book’s consideration of the long-standing relevance of transnationalism to this important cinematic tradition is overdue.” — PA U L C O ATES , professor of film studies, University of Western Ontario

E WA M A Z I E R S KA is professor of film studies at the University of Central Lancashire. M I C H A E L G O DDA RD is senior lecturer in media at the University of Salford.

Cover image: From Walerian Borowczyk, Goto, Island of Love (1969): Ligia Branice and Jean-Pierre Andréani.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.urpress.com

I N A T R A N S N AT I O N A L C O N T E X T

Contributors: Peter Hames, Darragh O’Donoghue, Helena Goscilo, Dorota Ostrowska, Charlotte Govaert, Eva Näripea, Izabela Kalinowska, Ewa Mazierska, Alison Smith, Lars . Kristensen, Jonathan Owen, Michael Goddard, Robert Murphy, Kamila Kuc, Elzbieta Ostrowska

POLISH CINEMA

Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context addresses this lacuna in film studies, offering extended analysis of this national cinema’s global influence. Contributors assess the reception of Polish films in Europe and North America, Polish international coproductions, the presence of Polish performers in foreign films, and the works . of subversive émigré auteurs like Andrzej Zuławski and Walerian Borowczyk. The collection presents familiar films and filmmakers in a new and revealing light, while also focusing on lesser-known filmmakers and aspects of Polish cinema. The resulting volume moves the discussion beyond the border of Polish national belonging.

Mazierska and Goddard, eds.

The opening up of Poland economically and politically to global influences after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, coupled with the rise of transnational approaches to the study of film, presents ideal conditions for examining Polish cinema from a transnational vantage point. Yet not only have studies of Polish cinema remained largely within a national framework but Polish cinema, as well as many other Eastern European cinemas, has been virtually excluded from new research in transnational cinema.

IN A

WP OALG N D TV I IC I SN H E C IR N EA MA R AE N SN N AT O NE AL CONTEXT

FICTIONALIZED Edited by

Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

Var iations on a Theme

J O H N W. B A R K E R