Journal of Social History

Kunicki,, Mikołaj

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz033pmid: N/A

In a powerful scene from Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1978 film Camouflage (Barwy ochronne), an actress recites Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński’s poem to participants of an academic summer school. But her audience is consumed by a petty, nasty intrigue – the expulsion of a rebellious student from the school. The actress exclaims, “Oh life, life and constant concern for the accuracy of a step (one has to make)”. Zanussi magnified the irony of the scene by casting in the role of the artist Halina Mikołajska, a Polish actress blacklisted for her role in the democratic opposition of the 1970s. Camouflage is a key example of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety (kino moralnego niepokoju), the second flagship of Polish cinema (the Polish School being the first), which offered a biting critique of a society in crisis and corruption under the rule of Edward Gierek (1970-1980). It is baffling how underrepresented and often misunderstood the Cinema of Moral Anxiety is in film studies and historical research outside Poland. How was it possible that the state-owned film industry produced and distributed movies that polemised with its patron? What does it tell us about the late socialist period in Poland? And why did its appeal and impact remain confided to Poland only? These questions still await answers. Not a single book has been published on this subject in English, whereas only one monograph, Dobrochna Dabert’s 2003 Kino moralnego niepokoju, exists in Polish. Although Anna Krakus’s No End in Sight is not a history of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety it analyses auteurs and titles often associated with this formation. The book comes across as original, refreshing and thought-provoking. Krakus has a penchant for making bold, sweeping statements that she convincingly verifies through effective writing, rigid analysis, and engaging narratives. Rarely have I read a first monograph which conveyed so much confidence and resourcefulness; this is by far the most intriguing English-language study of Polish cinema and its relationship with Marxism-Leninism published in recent years. Firmly based in cultural analysis, No End in Sight focuses on the last two decades of the communist rule in Poland that saw the increased production of films with inconclusive narratives. Krakus calls this tendency “aesthetic unfinalizability” (2). This “refusal to end” constituted a “radical political act” against Marxist historical teleology, which promised the coming of socialist utopia (4). Krakus argues that this choice to avoid narrative closures not only reflected scepticism about Communism and disbelief in its ideological claims, but also documented a bid for alternative historiography, narratives and identities, all polemical in relation to the official discourse. These films, the author observes, “were also (…) questioning whether the People’s Republic of Poland truly belonged to the Polish people (110).” Rather than structuring her study chronologically or by sections devoted to specific directors, Krakus divides the book into four thematic chapters. Chapter one reconstructs the process of creation; chapter two links projections of inconclusive deaths to “the death of the [Marxist-Leninist] trope of immortality (66);” chapter three documents the contestation of socialist patriotism and its claims to represent national sovereignty; chapter four focuses on “plots of aimless movements” that question the very progression of historical time. The concluding postlude looks at Polish cinema after the exit from Communism. By focusing on the phenomenon of open-ended movies, Krakus relates her study to the classic, transnational trope in film studies, recurrent in the examination of arthouse cinema. In doing so, she escapes the entrapment of narrow, nation-based and historicist approaches that have often permeated studies on Polish film. The selection of filmmakers also confirms her self-proclaimed transnational perspective. Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski are the most recognizable Polish filmmakers worldwide; Krzysztof Zanussi and Wojciech Has, partly in the shadow of the aforementioned two, also enjoyed critical international reception. Tadeusz Konwicki may be relatively unknown to Western cinephiles, but is a recognizable figure for students of Central European literature. Krakus deserves a huge credit for revealing Konwicki’s less known face, that of a director, the maker of How Far, How Near, closely analysed in her book, and Salto, one of the most under-appreciated masterpieces of the 1960s. It would be interesting to know whether Krakus considers Polish cinema unique for its production of politically charged, open-ended films. While we can identify many instances when subversive aesthetics and narrative devices challenged modern authoritarian mythologies, two cases bear striking resemblance to the subject of No End in Sight. Both Yugoslavia’s Black Wave films and the new Iranian cinema of the 1990s opposed teleological histories and utopian endings advanced by Titoism and Iran’s theocratic regime. What is concerning in Krakus’s book is her treatment of history and nationalism. Krakus rightly claims that Gomułka’s “Polish road to Socialism” emphasized detours that fit national specificities and, in effect, delayed the coming of communist utopia (17). But did Gomułka, an ardent Polish nationalist who relied on Germanophobia and anti-Semitism, sincerely intend to “take the country there,” meaning the Soviet utopia? The Polish leader and his collaborators viewed People’s Poland as the end result of nation-building processes. The 1966 Millennium celebrations of the Polish statehood testified to this. The Polish leader presided over a nationalist-communist hybrid, which revealed its true colours, chauvinism and authoritarianism, during the anti-Semitic campaign in 1968 and the massacre of striking workers in December 1970. Thus, the Polish road to Socialism turned into the communists’ path to Polish nationalism. Gomułka was certainly not less nationalistic than Gierek, as Krakus seems to suggest (133). He used the unfinished business of Poland’s western borders, unrecognised by the Federal Republic of Germany until 1970, to stir the scare of German revanchism among population and delay a sense of closure in relation to World War II. These were the origins of “Polish nationalism,” which, according to Krakus, did not resist Communism, but expressed “allegiance with the Soviet Union (134).” Gomułka’s ethnocentric nationalism greatly differed from Gierek’s “patriotism of labour.” Following Gierek’s ascent to power, a war veteran was no longer the embodiment of supreme virtues; now the hero of the hour was a socialist technocrat modernising Poland. Despite my criticism, I do not dismiss Krakus’s central thesis; rather, I would like to add to it. “Gomułka’s (first) decade brought the collapse of Communism in its previous form,” writes social historian Marcin Zaremba. “The authorities filled this void with aggressive nationalism (Zaremba, 351).” If this diagnosis is correct we may conclude that 1968, the year of anti-Semitic campaign in Poland and the invasion of Dubček’s Czechoslovakia, marked the communists’ withdrawal from socialist utopia. The Polish filmmakers discussed in this book had already lost their faith in the 1960s; some of them might have never harboured it. But the combined shock of 1968 and 1970 was so dramatic that it had to be channelled into alternative visions: Polish romantic and democratic traditions (Wajda), morality tales (Kieślowski), surrealism (Has), Orwellian parody (Konwicki) or Catholicism (Zanussi), whose absence in No End in Sight is a curious omission. We should remember that the rival celebrations of the Millennium of Polish statehood and Christianity in the 1960s constituted the duel between the party state and the Church over the ownership of Polish national identity. It was also the clash between the two systems of beliefs, each adhering to its own teleology. Krakus’s book would significantly benefit from the inclusion of such details. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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