Judging from the rather lackluster Eastern European productions that entered the international festival circuit lately, I wouldn’t jump to pronounce the last few years a stellar period for cinema – not only in Eastern Europe, but on the international stage at large. Based on this assumption, I would argue that the repetition of tried and tested formulas and a certain lack of young blood in the veins of Poland’s forthcoming generation of cineastes help make contemporaneous Polish cinema appear lacking in creativity, and incapable of (re)defining its identity along the lines of former ‘waves’ – such as that of the Polish Film School – that helped make this country famous in world cinema in the sixties and the seventies.
With the few exceptions discussed below, this was the feeling in the air at the last two editions of the rather overlooked – if historically influential – Gdynia Film Festival in Poland. The launching pad of many a name in the Polish film industry since 1974, Gdynia (or Gdansk Film Festival, as it is also known for the city in which it originated) is one of the few film events that doesn’t boast the nowadays quasi-mandatory ‘international’ epithet in its title. What’s more, with 2018 marking 100 years of Polish independence last year, it seems that Polish cinema didn’t only go national but, as many feared, nationalistic, in a move that also describes the country’s politics.
Considering the films screened in the last two editions of the festival, it isn’t, however, nationalism per se that appears to be the problem here, but a certain incapacity of the vociferous art community to condemn nationalism from the opposite political camp in a way that overcomes the phase of facile experimentation that Polish art cinema has entered since the fall of socialism in 1989.1 Although battle cries against nationalism exist in fiction films such as last year’s Pewnego razu w listopadzie/Once Upon a Time in November (2017, Poland) and this year’s Mowa ptaków/Bird Talk (2019, Poland), from the films screened at the last two editions it appears that these attempts at political rebuttal, so to speak, are faint and somehow weak-hearted, as I hope to show in my following discussion of the two films. While it is understandable that lack of funding constitutes a valid reason for disgruntlement in the art community, I would argue nevertheless that arthouse Polish cinema has not yet matured or moved away from the style that characterized the first decade of postsocialist film, a style marked by the frustrations of economic transition which defined what I can only describe as Poland’s own version of chernukha cinema.2 This style left an undeniable imprint on Poland’s first postsocialist generation of directors like Xawery Żuławski and Jan Komasa (Wojna polsko-ruska/Snow White and Russian Red, 2009, Poland, and Sala samobójców/Suicide Room, 2011, Poland, respectively), and despite the ensuing work of promising veterans like Wojciech Smarzowski (whose Wolyn I will discuss later) the influence of this type of dark cinema with anti-socialist overtones was strongly felt in the films presented at the festival’s last two editions.
The talk of this year’s festival, the much-anticipated Mowa ptaków/Bird Talk (2019, Poland) is a case in point. Written by the director’s father, the celebrated Andrzej Żuławski,3 the film purports to be, at least in a self-promoted blurb praising it for its “stylistic tour de force [and] ecstatic finale” (Żuławski 2019) a weapon used by artists in the face of right-wing adversity. When adapting his father’s screenplay, Żuławski-the-son purportedly condemned—he states in an interview—the increasing isolation of Poland and the country’s increasing nationalism. (Bałaga 2019) (This is the same Xawery Żuławski who made Snow White and Russian Red mentioned above). But Bird Talk’s calling card sounds better than the film is: Instead of attempting to liberate the language of cinema, as Żuławski claims is his intent in the film, the director falls prey to a self-indulgent amour-propre and an ostentatious display of elitism. The film follows the friendship between two artists, a writer and a musician, walking a thin line between a bohemian lifestyle and poverty, and is structured around extensive monologue-styled conversations on literature, cinema, and philosophy, while adding the historical element in the person of a third character, a history teacher manhandled by young Poland’s increasingly right-wing, violent high school students. It is not the heavy-handed manner in which characters are written and the relationships between them perpetuated that makes Żuławski-the-father’s script self-absorbed. It is the postmodern, fragmented narrative, ultimately reminiscent of Jean-François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition, 1984) but inadequate for the visual medium, that ultimately doesn’t deliver, as the intellectually-heavy film tries too hard to be a philosophical reflection on today’s dangerously nationalistic society. Furthermore, shots of fictional characters mingling with real-life demonstrators in Poland’s November 11 nationalist rallies that became habitual in the years following 2008, do not help lend credence to a plot that suffers from cumulative disorientation as it unfolds. A far cry from “ecstatic,” as the director calls it, the ending is further proof that the writer/director—but also father-and-son duo—does not have a clear idea of how to handle either their characters or the situations in which they have been placed. As such, without any logical motivation, after an overlong diatribe delivered without a reason by the otherwise charismatic protagonist played by Sebastian Fabijanski, the final chapter introduces an aging Daniel Olbrychski in the role of the protagonist’s father (an alter ego of Żuławski the elder?) in a drawn-out scene that lacks both vibrancy and direction. More of a self-reflective artistic family drama than a comment on today’s society, Bird Talk feels unable to personify the much-needed cry against nationalism that it styled itself as.
Last year’s 2018 edition of the festival featured a similar film that, while not as eagerly awaited as Bird Talk, opened the way to the condemnation of right-wing nationalism from what are only lightly-assumed leftist positions. Like Żuławski, who fails to cast aside the shackles of the anti-communist expression that characterized most of the long-winded transition to democracy in Poland, Andrzej Jakimowski combines in his Pewnego razu w listopadzie/Once Upon a Time in November (2017, Poland) live footage from a violent neo-Nazi demonstration taking place in Warsaw in 2013 with the fictional account of an incidental young anarchist caught in that web of destruction. And ‘incidental’ is key here, since the appropriation of the hero’s anarchism occurs solely through chance (his mother only happens to take shelter in a leftist commune), mirroring the director’s half-hearted promotion of leftist values. Critical views of the vilified turn to conservatism in Kaczyński’s Poland notwithstanding, what makes Jakimowski’s film stand out therefore is not its political commentary as much as the camera’s distant observation of Marek, the pensive blue-eyed protagonist (played with obdurate endurance by Grzegorz Palkowski) in his attempt to bring some stability in the life of his homeless mother. It is through this maturing son/aging mother relationship that we see a Warsaw not exactly teetering on the edge of radical nationalism but one in which isolated anarchism effectively clashes with the sporadic ‘hooliganism’ of nationalist character. In that sense, Jakimowski’s film surpasses Bird Talk through its ability to paint its themes more cinematically than the effort of the Żuławski team. However, neither of the two films seems able to tackle in ways other than self-absorbed commentary the all-too-real atmosphere of political and cultural disorientation present in Poland’s society, as well as the identity crisis of the country.
Another hesitating effort of the cultural elite in its confrontation with the country’s right-wing government became clearer at this year’s edition through at least two films attacking the corruption of the incumbent Law and Order party: One is Bartosz Kruhlik’s Supernova (2019, Poland), awarded the directing debut prize, and the other is Marek Lechki’s Interior (2019, Poland). While Kruhlik demonstrates genuine talent for staging a drama in a single location and is able to realistically portray the aftermath of a horrible automobile accident involving a confrontation between an apathetic police force, the suffering village population, and the despicable representatives of the high echelons of the Polish government, the film comes across as slightly tendentious. What we have with Kruhlik as opposed to Żuławski is a better use of dramatic tools to tell a simple story, yet the results are comparable: A government employee gets away with manslaughter after running over a family of three, while an overzealous cop and the villagers watch impotently the unfolding of this unjust drama. In Supernova the storyline would have been more powerful had it not been tainted by the film’s heavy-handed thesis, the condemnation of high-level corruption. As it is, the message of the film is too obviously painted in all the scenes leading to the finale. Except for a mind-blowing beginning in which a battered wife leaves her alcoholic husband in the middle of a village road, and takes away both of their children, the film has the words ‘injustice’ written all over it, and so much so that it lowers the intensity of an otherwise perfectly realist drama.
Marek Lechki goes one step further. In Interior two stories driven by separate protagonists converge rather unconvincingly in the end to symbolically point to the similar fates of both a mistreated corporate employee and an upper-middle class government professional. Maciek has not been paid for a few months, yet his unsympathetic and corrupt boss refuses to give him his salary. This drives Maciek to a desperate act: He steals the boss’ car and escapes to the countryside, where he takes temporary shelter with relatives. The sought-after connection between him and the relatives refuses to materialize, and Maciek feels a connection only with the couple’s son who sports a similarly rebellious behavior. After a few more days on the road, which end with a metaphorical yet confusing fireworks display in a field, the story moves abruptly into the second segment of the film. In this story a local government aide who is also the mother of a young daughter is torn between advancing her career and revealing the unpalatable realities of small town politics to a visiting delegation of foreign dignitaries. While the premise is strong, Lechki goes out of his way to up the ante by having the protagonist’s daughter fall ill in the middle of the festivities. (It turns out there is nothing serious at stake after all: the girl simply ran a high fever). In one of the closing shots we see both Maciek and the downcast government employee symbolically cross paths in the town square without being aware, of course, of each other’s previous histories.
Instead of intensifying the government employee’s conflict between her humanity and her duty, the director maladroitly pushes the domestic angle, favoring the populist theme of protection of family life, which has the effect of whitewashing the seriousness of the film’s focus, namely the corruption of small-time politicians. As in the case of Bird Talk and Supernova, we notice that concepts take priority over the narrative, with weakening effects for the art of film. Here, as in other cases of contemporaneous Eastern European cinema,4 film becomes a vehicle for nothing short of propaganda, well-intended as this might be. The result in this case is that film characters become expressions of political concepts, while storylines are instruments for agitation. And this wouldn’t be a problem if it were approached from a politically-conscious position: However, unlike similar methods traditionally used to this end by Brechtian theatre or left-wing postmodernism, both Supernova and Interior attempt to make their points by way of employing a predominantly realistic style, despite some rather heavy-handed metaphoric visuals—such as the fireworks display—meant to portray the characters’ confusion and alienation from a world that is otherwise truly ugly and manifestly corrupt. Although they have their heart in the right place, so to speak, neither film portrays this reality convincingly, with the result that the mash of symbolism and realism ultimately detracts from the strength of cinema to remain faithful to its genre conventions while not exactly offering a new alternative to deliver its concepts.
This does not mean that such an alternative does not exist. At least two works presented at the last editions make us breathe a sigh of relief, one being Wojciech Smarzowski’s Kler/Clergy (2018) and the other Paweł Pawlikowski’s Zimna wojna/Cold War (2018). If Smarzowski’s last film seems to continue the director’s obdurate forays into controversial politics, (managing to get a special award from last year’s jury), nowhere is this more obvious than in the winner of the Golden Lion (and later Oscar) itself, Pawlikowski’s long-awaited follow-up to Ida (2013). Cold War goes beyond what was in the works of his predecessors a knee-jerk condemnation of socialism, offering an almost Wellsian portrait of both the “depraved” West and the “indoctrinated” East without, however, as much as approaching the temptations of clichés. Pawlikowski’s unwavering hand conducts rather than directs - and this is evident also from the film’s overall reliance on music from the backwaters of the Polish countryside to jazzy Paris. But it is the performances of the two protagonists who the director conducts as a miniature concert for two that ultimately help Pawlikowski score another hit: Based on the history of his own parents, who emigrated to Paris only to return thereafter to socialist Poland, the director casts Joanna Kulig (of Scarlet Johansson sensuality minus the vulgarity) in tandem with the tempered melancholy of Tomasz Kot as socialist cross-star lovers fallen upon the rejectable garden of delights of the capitalist West. What stands out with Pawlikowski is that the division between the former East and West acquires an almost spiritual quality, and it is this that so powerfully etches the black and white camerawork of Lukasz Zal in the memory of the spectator.
As powerful as these dramas may be, one fears that these impressive cinematic achievements somehow get lost in the large amount of new material produced in the last two years alone. As such, I would venture to argue that recent Polish arthouse cinema runs the risk of paling in comparison with the amount of historical dramas churned out by Polish studios since 2018. Viewed from this angle, one might even talk of a confrontation between a hesitant left, represented by Żuławski, Lechki, Kruhlik, and Jakimowski and the newly-assertive right, personified by what one could perfunctorily call historical dramas. Moreover, should such a confrontation between left and right in fact exist, as this was staged in the last two editions of the festival, it paradoxically appears as though it is the right that may gain the upper hand. Put differently, with the significant exceptions mentioned above, it almost appears that it is in historical films that we see a more convincing cinema, inasmuch as genre conventions are observed, which in turn might generate a larger and more favorable audience response for this genre. What I mean is that the late current of historically-themed films that Polish audiences started to witness around the 100-years-of-independence celebratory mark puts these films in a better position to prevail over their arthouse counterparts mainly because – if for no other reason – they are both better financed but also, one needs to state, better made.
Before analyzing them in detail, however, there is an addendum that needs to be brought into discussion in connection with these (mainly historical) films: In 2017 the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Polish government established the Polski Fundusz Audiowizualny or the Polish Audiovisual Fund. Even though the word on the street was that the centre was set up in order to save the Polish Film industry from its mid-life crisis, (Majmurek 2017) the concern of the intellectual community was that the fund would be “used to finance right-wing propaganda.” (ibid.) And indeed, judging from the type of productions the centre financed or helped finance, it is clear that the government favored and continues to invest in films that play up the country’s glorious past. However, as it will become clear in the upcoming analysis, whether the center had its hand or not in the production of certain historical films should not be relevant as long as those films fitted the historical bill they aspired to fill. As experience has plentifully taught us, monetary support does not necessarily guarantee a film’s quality, and the example of the difference between the productions of Piłsudski (Michal Rosa, 2019, Poland) and Legiony/Legions (Dariusz Gajewski, 2019, Poland), both shown this year in Gdynia, should illustrate this.
A socialist revolutionary leader that succeeded in liberating Poland from tsarist domination after a long strife started in the beginning of the century, Józef Piłsudski went down in history as post-partition-Poland’s first new leader.5 Even though his leadership would turn authoritarian in the inter-war years, one can see why his figure would be courted by a government bent on revamping Poland’s medieval and early modern greatness, when the country dominated the region politically in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before being partitioned between the Habsburg, Prussian and Russian empires in 1795. Exploring the pre-WWI tribulations of the country under the tsarist regime, Piłsudski-the-movie styles itself as a portrait of the early anarcho-socialist period in young Piłsudski’s life, which it follows only until the end of the First World War, therefore avoiding the marshal’s more controversial dictatorship years.
Despite the art community’s fault-finding with the titular character and the overly-patriotic theme, I find Piłsudski a balanced film, that is, a film that does not attempt to propagandize or reinterpret history, but one that, by focusing on a rather complex historical figure, attempts to unearth and explain what was a particularly difficult and confusing political context. As such, despite the nationalist overtones, director Michal Rosa does not hold any punches from depicting Poland’s early nationalist movement as nothing more than a gang of terrorists bent on committing political assassinations and holding up tsarist trains in order to procure material to win the violent revolt against imperial authorities. While the film can undeniably be sold as a nationalist vehicle to revisit Poland’s courageous fight against foreign occupation, the script offers enough loopholes through which one can deconstruct the heroic figure of the Polish marshal. His more than suspect ethics—both in terms of his penchant for violence as well as his relationship with his lover while still being married to his wife—do not dither from showing the imperfect man behind the mythical figure. Whether part of right-wing propaganda or not, this lends the character credence in ways that neither the protagonists of Bird Talk, Supernova or Interior can boast.
If Piłsudski received 7 million zlotys from the governmental fund, Legions, a film similar in theme and focusing on the same historical period, was also partially funded by the Audiovisual centre. However, Legions does not even come close to Piłsudski in its ability to convince the audience of its historical authenticity. An over-sentimental and overlong film, at 140 minutes, the rhythm in Legions breaks so often that one is under the impression of watching two films simultaneously: One featuring impressive battle scenes, and another following the romantic tribulations of a love triangle (a favorite theme for contemporary directors, it seems) gone awry. Ironically, the film follows the story of Piłsudski’s military legions created with the objective of overthrowing the same tsarist regime. However, as opposed to Piłsudski-the-film, in Legions the blurred focus is centered on an army nurse in-love with two men (she falls for the second after she believes the first dead) and a secondary storyline following the shenanigans of an officer and a soldier caught and imprisoned by the Russian army. (The nurse and the story are allegedly based on real characters and events). However, aside from flattening the image of the arch-enemy to such a degree that all Russians appear as nothing but angry wild monsters, the only skill of the director appears to be that of shooting engaging and credible battle scenes. Owing to some inspiration by Hollywood, he manages to turn the few confrontations between the Polish corps and the Russians into a visual spectacle. However, the misguided insistence on the romantic angle (particularly in a film supposed to glorify Poland’s past) fails to partner well with the well-choreographed action sequences, giving the film a deadly two-speeds direction which ultimately weakens both the historical accuracy effect and the strength of the narrative.
By contrast, in Michal Rosa’s biopic-like plotline there are continuing references to a hinted conflict between Piłsudski’s nationalism and socialist internationalism, which doesn’t only make for good ideological conflict, but remains one of the unanswered questions regarding the historical marshal’s life: Would it have been better to side with the internationalists to further the advance of a federative republic (which the marshal later championed) or was nationalism the only way for Poland to attain independence from the Russian Empire? By drawing this overarching question over the rather balanced historical portrait of a man whose early life contained enough adventure to suffice for an entire TV series, Piłsudski fits the historical genre perfectly well, and invites even some superficial theorizing on behalf of the spectator.
That said, it is equally clear that Rosa’s film, despite focusing on the numerous ties between Piłsudski and Russian socialists (which are accurately depicted), seems to be marked by more than a slight anti-Russian character, which the marshal’s anti-tsarism only partially motivates. This Russophobe tendency, which we will fully explore at the end of this article when discussing Agnieszka Holland’s latest work, is equally indebted to the early 2000s’ films of the likes of Xavier Żuławski, whose subtle crusade against the Communist heritage in Poland started with Snow White and Russian Red in which we are led to infer that the confusion of the main character – a stand-in for transition-era Poland – is to be blamed almost exclusively on Soviet socialism.
And there is no shortage of films following up on the anticommunist tradition: last year it was the work of cinematographer-turned-director Adam Sikora, Autsajder/Outsider (2018, Poland), that made this trend most pronounced. A tame revisiting of the Martial Law 1980s during which General Jaruzelski successfully, if temporarily, smothered the dissidence of the Solidarity Movement, Sikora’s film follows the tribulations of an art student wrongfully arrested by the communist authorities and dragged through the hell of prison life. I say tame because here, as elsewhere, there is evidence of a diminishment of some of the initial élan with which the first postsocialist directors condemned the recent past, a diminishment whose overall effect, one would only expect, is that of normalizing contemporaneous Polish cinema while contributing to a more mature reevaluation of the past in the future.
However, if Piłsudski was this year’s only indication that historically-themed film might be moving in the right direction, a good framework for solid historical film has already been laid since 2016. Unjustifiably overlooked by foreign critics, Wojciech Smarzowski’s6 film Wolyn (2016, Poland; screened at last year’s edition of the fest as Hatred) is in some ways the Schindler’s List of Eastern Europe for the uncensored brutality with which massacres between Ukrainians and Poles are portrayed in this former Polish territory during and after the retreat of the invading Nazis in World War II. Perpetrated mainly by Ukraine’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a political group with tangential admiration for fascism,7 the massacres on which the film was based took place in the territories of Galicia and Volhynia between the end of World War Two and the re-establishment of Soviet power over the region. If we are to believe Western historians, the massacres were motivated by Polish previous treatment of Ukrainian nationals in what amounted to an almost feudal state before the war, as well as retaliations for the Ukrainian nationalist killings of 1943. These together ensured that the number of 40,000-70,000 Poles killed by Ukrainians would be inseparable from the 20,000 Ukrainians killed by Poles in this ruthless genocide, at least according to Per Anders Rudling (2006: 171).8
Liable to generate continuing ethnic squabbles in a region that is far from politically stable,9 the film is nevertheless a must for its ability to stimulate further research into a dark historical episode that has been largely avoided by Western academic circles, let alone film directors. An ethnic-based genocide to sadly foreshadow the Yugoslav ones of the 1990s, the Volhynian massacres, even though one-sidedly portrayed—as in Smarzowski’s rendition—have the power to become an integral part of any retrospective of atrocity cinema, not to mention any syllabus on memory studies in this otherwise still obscure part of the world that was Eastern Europe in the 20th century.
But politics and history were not the only topic to garner attention at a festival that remains popular with Polish audiences despite the squabbles and the politics that came with it this year. Despite a dramatic boycott staged by the same Paweł Pawlikowski for the lack of transparency with which some of the selection of the films for the competition was effected, there was plenty of light-hearted laughter in the air as well. This is mainly due to the fact that the style of veteran director Marek Koterski seems to have finally come into its own after over two decades of transition-era cinema.10 His 7 uczuc/7 Emotions (2018, Poland), presented with a Special Award for “creating an original image of the world” in 2018 and screened again this year is a departure from both the symbolism of the Polish School classics as well as the anger of the post-socialists. If still a crossover between mainstream and art cinemas, what catches the eye in 7 Emotions is the innovatory decision to turn a certain perception of the world upside down by casting adults (and famous stars, at that) in a film about childhood, its dramatic emotional tribulations notwithstanding. As trite as this may sound on paper, and as much as it amounts to the film forcing its interpretation upon us, the overall effect is refreshing. In particular, the casting of the 1990s’ Polish diva, Katarzyna Figura, seen here as the aged version of the femme fatale playing a lascivious if passive primary school student, exerts an interesting reading that borders on spectatorial imagination - quite a rare process even for film reception theories.
If last year’s decision for awarding the Golden Lion to Pawlikowski was, I would argue, not politically motivated, not the same can be said about Agniezska Holland’s 2019 Golden Lion winner, Mr. Jones (2019, Poland, UK, Ukraine). Setting out to reveal the idealistic erstwhile delusions of Western socialists about communist Moscow, the veteran Polish filmmaker pours enough salt on the suppurating wounds of Polish communism in her latest release to make Żuławski’s films look tame by comparison. Treating a rarely explored subject, such as the Ukrainian Holodomor, or the man-made famine that made millions of victims in the view of current historians, the film is undoubtedly a necessary one. Mr. Jones is a journalist that risks a trip to Moscow and, exposing himself to personal danger, the Ukraine in the early 1930s to investigate suspicions vis-à-vis Stalin’s much-trumpeted project of building a better world. Jones is convinced, after a few days’ stay in Moscow that Stalin is lying, and that the truth is entirely different. When Ada Brooks, a Berlin-based journalist and Jones’ only friend in Moscow is confronted with Jones’ challenge of Stalin’s truths, she answers the impetuous Welsh journalist that there are more than one sides to the truth. However, at the end of the film, after becoming herself disillusioned and convinced of the veracity of Jones’ reporting on the famine, she changes her mind, accepting that Jones was right in reference to the Soviet government. In a letter she sends him after leaving Moscow, she acknowledges that there is indeed only one truth.
I would paraphrase this line to claim that this is also the film’s unbending message about Soviet Russia: There is only one truth, but that truth is invariably a Western one, as the only narratives about Russia in the 1930s (or academic literature for that matter) have been narrated from uniquely Western, and implicitly anti-communist positions. It is not that Stalin’s crimes, like the Ukrainian famine, should not be condemned, of course; or that the mistakes of early Soviet Communism should not be unmasked. It is that the position from which this condemnation and unmasking is effected is always Russophobic and anticommunist. By reinforcing the stance of Western liberalism vis-à-vis Communism—whether Communism is linked to Soviet Russia or it refers to any leftist ideology bent on threatening Western capitalism today—the filmmakers evidently endorse the writing of world history through Western lenses. As the rather ostentatious poster11 of the film itself makes clear, the film (not unlike the attempts of the Polish left to stage an opposition, as discussed above) becomes a clear condemnation of not only Stalinism, but of the East in general, while also denying the East the right to come to terms with its history on its own terms. Holland’s film puts therefore increasing pressure on the East to deny and condemn a past which the West forces the East to accept as its own.
I argue that there are therefore two tendencies that seem to describe recent Polish cinema: a leftist and a nationalist wave. However, neither extreme is refined enough to find a balanced approach to condemning the other side, favoring simplistic expression over metaphor. The language of cinema in the process is giving way to a language of political expression. With the exception of the work of Pawlikowski and Smarzowski12 whose sensibility makes their camerawork apolitical, and a remaining touch of Holland’s old-time greatness, Polish cinema is therefore indeed in a crisis, but this is not the crisis of an art smothered by the impending constraints of right-wing dictatorship. What Polish filmmaking suffers most severely of is a lack of talent and new expressive means to continue the Polish School tradition, or find a new voice in which the new generation of filmmakers can express their growing concerns.
In researching this article the author wishes to acknowledge the help of Anna Banacka.
Lucian Tion
PhD candidate
National University of Singapore
tionfiul@yahoo.com
1 Documentary films have recently been more successful at staging an opposition to nationalism, but these were not part of the festival, which focuses solely on fiction works.
2 Chernukha is a style of filmmaking underscoring the gore and confusion of the 1990s in Russian cinema.
3 Andrzej Żuławski was an émigré Polish director working in France in the 1970s and the 1980s where he made such films as Possession (1981, France) and L'important c'est d'aimer (1975, France).
4 See the recent work of such directors as Bulgaria’s Vesela Kazakova or Serbia’s Mila Turajlic.
5 For 123 years, Poland was partitioned between the Prussian, Russian, and Habsburg Empires, which dissolved the state proper from the map until its recreation at the end of World War One. This historical fact became in the last decades an important card in the hand of the nationalist regime.
6 Smarzowski’s transition era cinema includes films like Dom zły/ The Dark House which obsessively if gauchely explores Poland’s martial law period of the early eighties in a dark, minimalist style.
7 It is OUN-B that is featured in fact is Hatred, which stands for a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera, a radical nationalist and anti-Semite whose recourse to violence to ensure ethnic Ukrainian purity was notorious in the region. This group takes precedence over others in Smarzowski’s film, while a fictional character possibly referencing a group leader is portrayed in a particularly gruesome scene in which a young fighter is quartered by running horses.
8 Per Anders Rudling refers to OUN-UPA, the Ukrainian Insurrection Army faction, and lists this group as principal perpetrator of the killings in Volhynia. Per’s article is itself controversial as his view of the OUN-UPA goes as far as tacitly sympathizing with the Insurgent Army for their role in fighting what the author deems was Soviet aggression.
9 For the way in which history still affects present Polish-Ukrainian relations see Kataryna Wolczuk’s article.
10 A veteran to the younger generation, Koterski churned out a consistent number of (sometimes) popular hits starting in the mid-eighties, walking a fine line between dark comedy and a personal vision of humorously dark (post)socialist Poland.
11 The pig on Stalin’s face is not aleatory. It’s a reference to Orwell’s famous Animal Farm. In fact, Orwell makes several appearances in Holland’s film. Holland implies that Orwell’s writing of Animal Farm was influenced by Jones’ reporting on the famine. None of Orwell’s socialism is highlighted in any way in the film.
12 I am only referring here to the films screened at the last two editions of the festival. I am therefore not considering the work of other contemporary arthouse directors such as Agnieszka Smoczyńska or Tomasz Wasilewski whose recent films were rather well received by critics and seem promising indeed.
Lucian Țion is a Theatre Studies PhD candidate in his final year at the National University of Singapore. His PhD thesis explores the similarities and contrasts between East European and Chinese cinemas in the socialist and postsocialist eras. His articles were published in Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Senses of Cinema, and Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies.
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