POLISH CINEMA IN A

TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT

Edited by Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

CONTENTS

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Polish Cinema Beyond Polish Borders

Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard

Section One: The International Reception of Polish Films

1 West of the East: Polish and East European Film in the UK

Peter Hames

2 The Shifting British Reception of Wajda’s Work from

Man of Marble (1977) to Katyń (2007)

Darragh O’Donoghue

3 Affluent Viewers as Global Provinicials: The American Reception of Polish Cinema

Helena Goscilo

4 Three Decades of Polish Films at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals:

The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s

Dorota Ostrowska

5 How Polish is Polish?: Silver City (2009) and the National Identity of Documentary Film

Charlotte Govaert

Section Two: Polish International Co-Productions and Presence in Foreign Films

6 Postcolonial Heterotopias in Marek Piestrak’s Estonian Co-Productions:

A Paracinematic Reading

Eva Näripea

7 Poland-Russia: Co-Productions, Collaborations, Exchanges

Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood

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: The Cases of Skolimowski and Stuhr

Lars Kristensen

Section Three: Émigré and Subversive Polish Directors

11 An Island Near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank Filmmaker

Jonathan Owen

12 Beyond Polish Moral Realisms: The Subversive Cinema of Andrzej Żuławski

Michael Goddard

13 Polanski and Skolimowski in Swinging London

Robert Murphy

14 The Elusive Trap of Freedom? Krzysztof Zanussi’s International Co-productions

Kamila Kuc

15 Agnieszka Holland’s Transnational Nomadism

Elżbieta Ostrowska

Notes on Contributors

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover image : from Walerian Borowczyk, Goto, Island of Love, (1969) (Ligia Branice and Jean-

Pierre Andréani)

Figure 1.1: Chapter 1, Hames: from Wajda, Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Zbigniew Cybulski and

Ewa Krzyzewska

Figure 2.1: Chapter 2, O’Donoghue: from Wajda, Man of Marble (1977), Krystyna Janda,

Bogusław Sobczuk

Figure 2.2: Chapter 2, O’Donoghue: from Wajda, Man of Iron (1981), Krystyna Janda and Jerzy

Radziwiłowicz

Figure 4.1: Chapter 4, D. Ostrowska: from Polanski, Knife in the Water (1963), Leon Niemczyk and

Jolanta Umecka

Figure 5.1: Chapter 5, Govaert: from Govaert, Silver City (2009), Peter

Figure 5.2: Chapter 5, Govaert: from Govaert, Silver City (2009), Mother and Son

Figure 5.3: Chapter 5, Govaert: from Govaert, Silver City (2009), Peter and Agnieszka

Figure 6.1: Chapter 6, Näripea: form Piestrak, Test of Pilot Prix (1979)

Figure 6.2: Chapter 6, Näripea: from Piestrak, Curse of Snakes Valley (1988)

Figure 7.1: Chapter 7, Kalinowska: from Zanussi, Persona non Grata (2005)

Figure 7.2: Chapter 7, Kalinowska: from Kolosov, Remember your Name (1974)

Figure 8.1: Chapter 8, Mazierska: from Szabo, 25 Fireman’s Street (1973), Lucyna Winnicka

Figure 9.1: Chapter 9, Smith: Godard, Passion (1982), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz

Figure 9.2: Chapter 9, Smith: Rivette, Secret Defence (1998), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Sandrine

Bonnaire

Figure 9.3: Chapter 9, Smith: Rivette, Story of Marie and Julien (2003), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and

Emmanuelle Béart

Figure 10.1: Chapter 10, Kristensen: from Cronenberg, Eastern Promises (2007), Jerzy Skolimoski

Figure 10.2: Chapter 10, Kristensen: from Kachanov, Ar’e (2008), Jerzy Stuhr

Figure 11.1: Chapter 11, Owen: from Borowczyk, Blanche (1971)

Figure 11.2: Chapter 11, Owen: from Borowczyk, Goto, Island of Love, (1969)

Figure 11.3: Chapter 11, Owen: from Borowczyk, Goto, Island of Love, (1969)

Figure 12.1: Chapter 12, Goddard: from Żuławski, On the Silver Globe (1978/1989)

Figure 12.2: Chapter 12, Goddard: from Żuławski, Possession (1980), Isabelle Adjani

Figure 14.1: Chapter 14, Kuc: from Zanussi, Bluebeard (1984), Margarethe Von Trotta

Figure 14.2: Chapter 14, Kuc: form Zanussi, Paradigm (1985), Benjamin Völz

Figure 15.1: Chapter 15, E. Ostrowska: from Holland, Angry Harvest (1985)

Figure 15.2: Chapter 15, E. Ostrowska: from Holland, Europa, Europa (1990)

Figure 15.3: Chapter 15, E. Ostrowska: from Holland, Washington Square (1995)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The 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 which financially supported this event: the Polish Film

Institute, the Polish Consulate in Manchester, the Polish Cultural Institute in London and Adam

Mickiewicz Institute. We also thank all colleagues and friends, who helped us to organize this event

and attended it, either giving papers or listening and commenting on those presented by others. The

lively discussions accompanying the papers 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 material used in

this book.

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 cinemas,i studies devoted to this phenomenon tend to

omit Eastern European cinemas, including Polish films, an area of special interest to the editors of

this volume. For example, Transnational Cinemaii does not include even one chapter devoted to

films or filmmakers from Eastern Europe. They are also typically omitted from the studies of

“world cinema”. Equally, histories of Polish cinema, irrespective of whether they are written by

Polish film historians working in Poland,iii Polish émigré authorsiv or non-Polish authors,v tend to

ignore transnational phenomena or do not account for their difference from films made within

Polish borders. Arguably Paul Coates’ consideration of the “temporary exile” of filmmakers like

Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, and the more permanent exilic condition of filmmakers like

Jerzy Skolimowski and Agnieszka Hollandvi in one of the chapters of The Red and the White is an

exception to this rule. However, at best this is only a start, since ultimately all of these examples are

seen in light of the national cinema problem of whether “prolonged absence may sap the will and –

more importantly – the ability to speak for one’s countrymen.”vii Despite the promise of a

consideration of Polish cinema post-1989 and “the question of co-production”,viii such

considerations are only secondary preambles to the main focus of the chapter on the cinema of

Kieślowski. But even here, the transnational dimensions of his work are de-empahsized, authorized

by a reading in terms of Kieślowski’s supposed “demotion of politics.”ix Ultimately, this points to

the need to expand the consideration of transnationality, co-production 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 cinema from the studies of transnational cinema and of transnationalism from the

discussions of Polish and Eastern European films, we have to first present the two crucial concepts

involved: national and transnational cinemas. As Stephen Crofts observes, prior to the 1980s critical

writings on cinema adopted common-sense notions of national cinema. “Along with the name of the

director-auteur, it 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 underpinning most of

these studies remained largely unproblematic until the 1980s, since which time they have grown

markedly more complex.”x We will list several reasons for this growing complexity, which has led

to the development of studies of “transnational cinema” as a sub-field of film studies and the means

of rethinking of the concept of national cinema as always, in a sense, transnational.

One reason, pointed by Crofts, is the reworking of the concept of the nation state by authors

such as Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm and John Hutchinson, who have departed from its

essentialist concept, pointing to factors such as “invented traditions” and the use of the media in

creating nations and states.xi If nation states are unstable, then their cinemas are also inevitably in

the state of flux. Poland, one can argue, fits this idea very well, due to its turbulent history,

including a long period when it lacked national sovereignty and frequent change of its borders.

Consequently, an early part of its film history (prior to 1918, when it regained independence)

inevitably belongs also to the histories of other states, such as Germany and Russia, hence is

transnational in the most basic sense.

The second reason why the idea of national cinema became so complex is the growing

importance of trans-border 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.”xii 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 the recreation of national cultures on foreign soil and enable the creation of

forms of solidarity and identity that do not depend on 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 neighbours, but also maintaining strong ties with 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.xiii

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

socialisation has taken place with the cross-currents of differing cultural fields. Among such young

people, facets of culture and identity are often self-consciously selected, syncretised and elaborated

from more than one heritagexiv. 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 in transnational ties, strongly related to questions of unequal economic

and cultural capital. Again, Poland, with its large trans-border 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 its cinema, which, as

we already mentioned, includes many émigré filmmakers, invites treatment in terms of

transnationality, cultural translation and hybridity.

The third reason why there is a turn towards 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 favour of genre and popular cinema and the growing

importance of international co-productions and international distribution. This is in a large part a

response to the expansion of neoliberal capitalism, and with that changed realities of financing

films, such as closing down some sources of national funding and opening up those for films whose

production involves more than one state. Moreover, traditional modes of film exhibition, in cinema

theatres 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 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 being produced in a single country, and transnational

on another, thanks to reaching a transnational, or even global audience.xv

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 catch-all 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 a film’s 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.xvi Hjort goes on to give no less than nine

modalities of a typology of transnational cinema, a list that may be by no means exhaustive.xvii

Another set of problems with transnational cinema are identified by Higbee and 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 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”.xviii In the

case of Polish cinema this means acknowledging its place in an unequal transnational political

economy of film distribution and exhibition, a situation which colours the transnational exchanges

that Polish cinema enters into. Other approaches to transnationality as a kind of regionalism, such as

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 transantional linguistic community, strategies of regionalism such as those

based around Viesegrad or the concept of the “second world” discussed below fit in to 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 offered by Naficy’s An Accented Cinema (2001). While treatment in such terms

addresses the political problematics of unequal transnational exchanges, it is often quite prescriptive

about the kinds of cinema it engages with. Moreover, its insistence on marginality risks itself

becoming a marginalising gesture, incapable of thinking popular and mainstream forms of

transnational cinema.xix In the Polish case, these questions of diasporic and exile 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 still economically marginalized in many instances, this

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 is not limited to transgressive auteurs such as Walerian Borowczyk or Andrzej

Żuławski, but is also 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.”xx It is just such a kind of

nuanced transnationalism that the chapters in this volume hoped to address in relation to Polish

cinema.

Lets 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 still clung to the “national”

paradigm. This was the consequence of such factors as a widespread rejection of an “enforced

transnationalism”, brought about by the Yalta Conference in 1945, which divided Europe into the

socialist East and capitalist West and ensured a subjugation of Eastern Europe to the colonial power

of the Soviet Union. Under such conditions, nation, treated in essentialist terms, was a powerful

means to resist the new transnational narrative of “brotherhood of socialist nations and people.” In

Poland, with its strong Catholic tradition and Catholic Church, which allowed for the development

of a parallel civic society and rendered it markedly different practically from all remaining socialist

countries, the reason to perceive its history in national and nationalistic terms, was particularly

strong. This enforced cohabitation of countries and nations of different traditions, many of which

felt more connected to the West of Europe, than to the East, was also an obstacle to creating a

regional, Eastern European identity, which the inhabitants of this region would recognize as its own.

Secondly, in the state supported industries, which was the case in Eastern Europe, national

cinemas and directors-auteurs were the dominant paradigm practically till 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 Berlinxxi. This was

particularly the case since popular and genre cinema, and its specific traits, such as the star system,

were in Eastern Europe looked at unfavourably as an ersatz of American popular cinema, the

appetite for which could not be fully fulfilled due to various economic and ideological

restrictions.xxii

In Poland, which was the largest European “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 1970s, where there was little competition from television, and video

recorders were not yet dreamt about, was an important national institution, as exemplified by

successes of films such as Teutonic Knights (Krzyżacy, 1960) by Aleksander Ford or Pan

Wołodyjowski (1969) by Jerzy Hoffman. Consequently, historians’ interest in them as emanations of

national culture overshadowed its relations with any non-Polish cinematic paradigms or its 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, actively resisting

the cultural hegemony of the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, under the communist regime certain aspects of Polish cinema reaching outside

national borders were not looked on favorably by the political authorities. This is especially the case

of the work of directors who left Poland due to, broadly speaking, political reasons, such as Jerzy

Skolimowski, Roman Polanski, 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 their subsequent films considered inferior

to their Polish works, if not an outright betrayal 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 career, their works produced abroad were rarely critically examined in

Poland. If this happened at all, the usual line adopted by the film historians and critics was that

abroad they lost their talent and 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, was expressed by the artist himself.xxiii No doubt the critics used

the claim about these artists’ loss of talent to 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 “official” dissidents. The only exception to this rule being Kieślowski, whose

much later exile in the context of post-communism seemed to be excepted from this accursed status,

due to being an expression of a new mode of European belonging that was suddenly considered

acceptable.

An additional reason why transnational approach was marginalized is a narrow definition of

what is “truly Polish” cinema and art in a wider sense. 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

audio-visual formsxxiv. 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.xxv. In fact, the term of “art cinema” was reserved

for these filmmakers as well as the experimental cinema of filmmakers such 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 Polish borders. One-screen cinemas, belonging to the state,

largely gave way to multiplexes, owned by multinational companies, which had no reason to

support Polish cinema – they only operate 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 unknown scale, a situation exacerbated by the multiplying of channels through which the

films can be accessed, which include not only cinema theaters and televisions, but also DVD and,

more recently, the Internet. Secondly, the privileging of the auteurist paradigm during the period

when Poland was under the communist rule made its cinema badly prepared to respond to the shifts

in European and indeed, world cinema, marked by the requirement to cater for 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 Haltof have described as the “freedom shock” of 1989,xxvi rather than the

sought after liberation from state control and censorship.

Of course, these changes have occurred over time and the impact of some of them is still

fully appreciated neither by filmmakers nor by film historians. Nevertheless, twenty years after the

collapse of communism, looking at Polish cinema in an international context became “an order of

the day.” This is demonstrated by the fact that the Polish Film Institute, the main institution

supporting Polish cinema in all its aspects, has special programs facilitating international co-

productions and assisting promotion of Polish films abroad. Receiving awards at the leading

international festivals by Polish films (or, more often, not receiving them) became also an important

theme of film criticism in Poland. A comprehensive discussion of recent books devoted to Polish

cinema, published outside Poland, was included in 2010 feature of Kino, the leading film journal in

Poland.xxvii Parallel to this is the recent appearance of a number of volumes on Polish cinema,

dealing with filmmakers outside of the usual auteurist canons, aimed explicitly at an international

readership. These range from the catalogue-like volumes Young Polish Cinemaxxviii and Polish

Cinema Now!,xxix to more challenging works such as Polish New Wave,xxx or Surrealism in Polish

Cinema.xxxi Both of these last two volumes 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 post-communist situation of Polish cinema has also enabled a fresh look at the work of

Polish émigré directors. This is in part because Roman Polanski (for Polish viewers Polański), Jerzy

Skolimowski and Andrzej Żuławski have made films in Poland or as Polish co-productions after

1989. Examples are 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 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.

Furthermore, the previously mentioned competition with foreign films that Polish films

encounter not only abroad but also in Poland, forces both filmmakers and those funding their films

to think about Polish cinema as a cinema which 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,xxxii film production has also received considerable support from

the EU MEDIA and Eurimage programmes.xxxiii Finally, Polish society has significantly changed in

the last twenty years, not least because over two million Poles left their country after 2004, adding

to the already large population of Poles living abroad. Hence, it has become more and more, to use

Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an “imagined community”,xxxiv rather than one attached to a particular

territory. Cinema plays an important role in “imagining” this community, including forging links

between those who live in Poland and those staying beyond its borders and catering specifically for

the tastes of Polish diasporas by, for example, producing films about migration. It should be

mentioned here that Polish emigrants are traditionally at the forefront of creating Polish cultures

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 cinemas. In this respect Poland shares a

similar fate to 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

cinemas.xxxv Paradoxically, the fall of the Berlin Wall, instead of bringing Eastern Europe closer to

the center of Europe and European film history, added to this marginalization. This is because

nowadays Eastern European cinemas and Polish cinema especially appear to be neither exotic

enough to grant a special treatment which they enjoyed during the communist period, being

regarded as a spokesperson of the oppressed peoples and cultures, nor 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 the Cold War

to a North-South divide based primarily on economic factors, accompanied by the rise of new

centers of economic power in locations such as India, China and Brazil. It is hardly coincidental

that these locations have also seen a renewed vibrancy in their national cinemas which in all these

cases reached transnational audiences as can clearly be seen in the cases of Chinese martial arts

cinema and Bollywood. Consequently, they are often used to illustrate transnational cinema.xxxvi

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 disproved by the recent successes of Romanian and Estonian

cinema. Nevertheless the privileged space formerly occupied by Eastern European cinemas in

global cinema of “other”, or “dissident” cinema has been fragmented and supplanted. Hence, the

cinemas of the region have been obliged to re-invent themselves if they want to attain an

international audience and even retain a domestic one.

Indeed, we observe attempts to counter this exclusion both in the sphere of theory and

cinematic practice. One such attempt is considering East 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 regions shifting boundaries, internal differences,

and constructed identities.”xxxvii 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 re-alignment of Polish cinema are demonstrated by the

Visegrad Fund, which supports cooperation between Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian cinemas.

However, such initiatives encounter internal resistance, resulting from the legacy of “enforced

cohabitation” which discourages the filmmakers who endured it in the past to treat others from the

same region as their allies. Moreover, the closer collaboration within a sub-region of the former

Eastern Europe sphere brings the risk of a growing distance from the remainder of the region, in the

case of Poland from, for example, from the Balkan countries and those belonging previously to the

Soviet Union.

This volume is intended to address the lack of studies situating Polish cinema in a

transnational context and address the aforementioned changes in the production, circulation and

perception of Polish cinema, which have occurred over the last twenty years. Its structure reflects an

argument, presented by many authors, that in order to account for 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 inter-related transnational phenomena, namely Polish international co-productions 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 performers have been present in

transnational contexts, throughout the modern history of Polish cinema. The final section will

examine the work of a range of Polish émigré and subversive auteurs, examining how, in each case,

elements of Polish identity have been combined with the potentials and limitations of specific

transnational contexts, to generate work that is at once Polish and foreign, national and

transnational. It will also be arguing against the critical neglect that much of this work has been

subject to, which is at least partially due to this liminal situation of being 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 East European cinema at large,

which during many decades served as Western European cinema’s main “other.” Hames’ meticulous

account pays attention to key film distributors of Polish films like Contemporary Films, as well as

the key film institutions, filmmakers and critics that enabled the dissemination of Polish films,

especially form the 1950s onwards. He argues that there was a political “leftist” project behind the

promotion of Polish film in the UK between the 1950s and the 1970s, and the relative decline of

both this project and the presence of Polish films on UK screens are interlinked. Nevertheless,

Hames expresses a guarded optimism about new tendencies in both academia and DVD distribution

that point to the re-emergence of interest in films of the region, beyond the distortions of any pre-set

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 60s and 70s to the present and suggests some of the reasons for this shift. For

O’Donoghoe, like Hames, the early critical reception of Wajda’s work on the part of 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.”xxxviii This is in marked contrast to the present decline in interest in

Wajda’s work, which is especially evident in the fact that Katyń (2008), as classical a Wajda work

as any produced in the 1950s, initially had difficulty finding UK distribution. O’Donoghue tracks

these changes between these two situations of reception, speculating as to whether the impact of the

new flux of Polish migration to the UK might be a 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 which 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 Krzystof Kieślowski, tracking

the North American fortunes of films made across his career, from the early documentaries and

features of the 70s and 80s to the much better known films he made outside of Poland in the 90s. As

she points out, Kieślowski’s reputation, in the United States, that has also considerably increased

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 at least 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 which, as

specific and crucial sites of transnational cinematic distribution, are sites that have also recently

been attracting considerable critical attention (Elsaesser 2005). 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 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 second world war. 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 with issues of Polish diaspora and questions the

limits of what constitutes a Polish film. Using social research informed by Jacobson’s theoretical

approach to communication and reception, this chapter clearly demonstrates how films like Silver

City, which are transnational not only due to their subject matter but also in their mode of

production, raise vital questions of what defines a film in both national and transnational terms. All

of the chapters in this section share an examination of the ways in which Polish cinema has

circulated beyond Polish borders in a variety of contexts and have affected a range of international

audiences.

The second section of the book engages with the phenomenon of Polish international co-

productions and 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 in the rise of production studies, which has recently been extended to

approaches to film production in East-Central Europe.xxxix This focus is pursued in this section via

two areas of engagement. The first three chapters examine the phenomena of Polish co-productions

which, far from being post-transition phenomena have a long if buried history. Eastern connections

are emphasized in the first two chapters by Eva Näripea and Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood

respectively. Näripea examines two examples of Polish director Marek Piestrak’s science fiction co-

productions 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 its borders and abroad, and yet have been subject to little in

the way of critical attention. Moreover, her argument explains the critical neglect of Piestrak films

as not fitting the privileged categories which were most often used in discussions of Polish films.

Hence, it can be used as a blueprint for analysis of other examples of “forgotten” Polish cinema in

Poland and abroad. Kalinowska discusses the changing relations between Russians and Poles as

reflected in two co-productions 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

case studies illustrate the profound differences between transnational production practices before

and after postcommunist transition, at the same time they point to the ways that both films

constitute an intercultural transnational dialog, “beyond the conditions of economic cooperation.”xl

The remaining three essays in this section 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 Aleksandra Bachleda-Curuś, who have all

appeared in films made in other European countries and the USA, 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

performance for different types of audiences. While the trajectory of each of the actresses engaged

with 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, often passing via various European detours.

The following two chapters focus instead 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). While always a liminal figure within French cinema, Radziwiłowicz’s

performances, which Smith analyses in meticulous detail, constitute a unique set of both physical

and expressive resources and “a unique performing presence on the French screen” (Smith, 206).

Kristensen’s chapter discusses the case of actors-directors, Jerzy Skolimowski and Jerzy Stuhr. Both

of them tended to play Russian characters, but whereas Skolimowski performed in Western cinema,

notably in White Nights (Hackford, 1985), and Eastern Promises (Cronenberg, 2007), Stuhr

appeared in several Russian films, largely unknown in a Western context. 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 chapter 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 both Polish and international film criticism. The consideration of the work of

these directors is vital for any transnational approach to Polish cinema as an “accented cinema” in

Naficy’s terms (Naficy, 2001), denaturalizing organic 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 have 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. While in cases such as Borowczyk and Żuławski, these complexities of

national and transnational identity are expressed via a singular and subversive cinematic aesthetics,

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 case 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 this section engage with the “accursed”, émigré directors Walerian

Borowczyk and Andrzej Żuławski, whose work in emigration 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 Walerian 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 and chaos. Michael Goddard’s

chapter explores the subversive film practices of Andrzej Żuławski in relation to both Polish and

transnational contexts, arguing that both his Polish and his exilic films 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 which 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, now 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, now combined

with a shift in attention from male romanticism towards female performativity.

This is followed by Robert Murphy’s chapter which situates Roman Polanski and Jerzy

Skolimowski in the context of Swinging London, showing that their relations to this temporarily

adopted environment were ambivalent and complex in both cases. While both filmmakers certainly

continued to develop their distinctive authorial styles in this new environment, they also adapted to

it 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 adaptation process, while emphasizing that even in

Polański’s attempts to make a cliché Hammer Horror film, it 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 England is only now

being fully articulated. Kamila Kuc’s chapter, in contrast, examines three of Krzysztof Zanussi’s co-

productions 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, and in fact is regarded as a key part of

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.

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 Polański,

rather than benefit from the transnational condition 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 (already referred to in this introduction), Ostrowska points out that while

transnationality is marked in some of Holland’s films like Europa, Europa (1990), in many of her

films made in the US it is barely marked at all. Nevertheless, Ostrowska argues that all of Holland’s

cinema can be seen as a form of cosmopolitan transnationalism, emphasizing the importance of

Holland’s Polish-Jewish orgins 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,

acts 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 re-evaluation 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 marignalized anti-realistic,

surrealist and anti-nationalistic 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 in which were never used before in Poland,

such as co-productions 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 Polish history as dominated by romantic ideas. In an era of advanced globalization,

this critical re-contextualization of Polish cinema is a timely and necessary one.

The transnational character of this study and is also demonstrated by the diverse nationalities

of the authors and their interests. They include Polish émigré scholars, as well as those coming from

countries such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Estonia. For

some of them Polish cinema is their main specialism, others study it to widen their knowledge of a

different national cinema or as an example of a different, non-national phenomenon. The majority

are film scholars, but some are practicing artists and archivists. Their joint effort 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.

i For example 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, Tim, “National, transnational or supranational cinema? Rethinking European film

studies,” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 27, no. 3 (2005): 315-31; Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen

Newman, ed., World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge.

2010); Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “ Concepts of Transnational Cinema: towards a critical

transnationalism in film studies“, Transnational Cinemas, vol. 1, no 3 (2010): 7-21.

ii Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London:

Routledge, 2006).

iii Tadeusz Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego: Tworcy, filmy, konteksty (Katowice: Videograf

II, 2009).

iv Marek Haltof, Polish National Cinema (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002).

v Paul Coates, The Red and the White: The Cinema of People’s Poland (London: Wallflower,

2005).

vi Coates, The Red and the White, 204-206.

vii Coates, The Red and the White, 204.

viii Coates, The Red and the White, 204.

ix Coates, The Red and the White, 207.

x Crofts, “Concepts of national cinema,” 385.

xi Crofts, “Concepts of national cinema,” 385-86.

xii Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in The

Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, second

edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 47-65.

xiii Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge,

1996); Steven Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism”, Ethnic and Racial

Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (1999).447-62.

xiv Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism”, 461.

xv Crofts, “Concepts of national cinema;” Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of

National Cinema”, in Cinema and Nation, eds. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London:

Routledge, 2000), 63-74; Mette Hjort, “Themes of nation”, in Cinema and Nation, eds. Mette Hjort

and Scott MacKenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 103-117.

xvi Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in World Cinemas,

Transnational Perspectives, eds. Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman (London: Routledge,

2010), 13-14.

xvii Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” 15-30.

xviii Higbee and Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema”, 9.

xix Higbee and Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema”, 10.

xx Higbee and Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema”, 18.

xxi Tim Bergfelder, “National, transnational or supranational cinema? Rethinking European

film studies”, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 27, no. 3 (2005): 315-31.

xxii Anita Skwara, “ ‘Film Stars Do Not Shine in the Sky Over Poland’: The absence of popular

cinema in Poland”, In Popular European Cinema, eds. Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau

(London: Routledge, 1992), 220-31.

xxiii An opinion conveyed in an interview conducted by Ewa Mazierska in 2008.

xxiv 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).

xxv Łukasz Ronduda and Barbara Piwowarska, eds., Nowa Fala: Historia zjawiska, którego nie

było/Polish New Wave: A History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed (Warszawa: Instytut Adama

Mickiewicza, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2008).

xxvi Haltof, Polish National Cinema, 180-82.

xxvii Beata Pieńkowska and Adam Wyżyński, “Polonica z różnych stron”, Kino, 12 (2010): 86-8.

xxviii Mateusz Werner and Lech Kurpiewski, eds., Young Polish Cinema (Warsaw: Adam

Mickiewicz Institute, 2007).

xxix Mateusz Werner, ed. Polish Cinema Now! (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2010).

xxx Ronduda and Piwowarska, eds., Nowa Fala.

xxxi Mikurda and Wielebska, eds., Dzieje grzechu.

xxxii Jerzy Płażewski, “Polish Cinema – A Return to Market Economy”, in Polish Cinema Now!,

ed. Mateusz Werner (Warsaw: Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2010), 157-60.

,

xxxiii PISF. Film Industry. PISF/Polish Film Institute Website. 2012. http://www.pisf.pl/en/film-

production-guide-1/film-industry, [accessed 24/02/2012].

xxxiv Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006 [1983]).

xxxv Ewa Mazierska, “Eastern European cinema: Old and new approaches”, Studies in Eastern

European Cinema, vol. 1, no 1 (2010): 5-16.

xxxvi Higbee and Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema.”

xxxvii Anikó Imre, ed., East European Cinemas (New York: Routledge, 2005), xvii.

xxxviii Darragh O’ Donoghoe, chapter two of this volume. xxxix 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, Vol. 3, no 1 (2012): 119-123.

xl Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood, chapter seven of this volume.