Krakus , Anna No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 362 Krakus, Anna. No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018. xiv + 263 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.95 (paperback). Anna Krakus’s intellectually stimulating study of Polish cinema in the 1970s and 1980s brings into focus the political implications of narrative irresolution. The book explores a tendency among artists to avoid closures and argues that this inclination was directly related to the sociopolitical context of the late socialist era. Artistic strategies rejecting conclusions contradicted socialist ideology, which was purpose-based and assumed a teleological model of history that promised a utopian closure in the form of ‘pure Communism’ (p. 2). In this sense, Krakus argues, those strategies should be read as a political gesture, not merely as a passing artistic trend. At the centre of Krakus’s analysis is the notion of aesthetic unfinalizability, a term borrowed from Bakhtin but used in the book outside the theoretical framework of Bakhtinian dialogism. Unfinalizability refers here to openendedness encompassing multiple aspects of a cinematic work; it pertains not only to how a film ends but also to ‘all the openness that happens before an ending’ (p. 3). As such, aesthetic unfinalizability can manifest itself at both the structural level (e.g. in unresolved story lines) and the level of themes (e.g. in preoccupations with immortality). Krakus begins her investigation by discussing ‘poiesis and production history’ (chapter one). She explores how personal artistic processes and political concerns affected artists’ relationship with their works and how they translated into the open-ended nature of their films and texts. The chapter’s recurring argument is that the works of this period often feature alter egos who represent their authors’ struggles with endings and point to political demands of the time. The following chapters discuss themes of immortality and resurrection (chapter two), failed construction and broken-down monuments (chapter three), and stagnation and timelessness (chapter four). According to Krakus, death is often depicted in Polish culture of the late socialist period as inconclusive, which makes it an ‘aesthetically unfinalizable topic’ (p. 100). Authors of this period blur the distinction between life and death and reject death’s finality, often presenting those themes through unending and circular narratives. These motifs, Krakus argues, are a response to the political rhetoric that granted figurative immortality to certain leaders and ideas (p. 106), a response that aimed to ridicule the idea of the permanence of socialism but also expressed anxiety regarding a possible return of old Stalinist policies. REVIEWS 363 Monuments and unsuccessful construction, which are at the centre of discussion in chapter three, provide another set of examples of how aesthetic unfinalizability was used to oppose socialist ideology. Through their critique of political monuments and focus on failed building efforts, artists exposed false promises of socialism and countered its teleological foundations. At the same time, Krakus argues, they suggested the corruption of the building blocks of Poland’s political system and thus questioned whether the Polish People’s Republic belonged to the Polish people (p. 110). The last chapter points to the subversive aspects of unfinalizability by discussing cinematic and literary explorations of time. The main focus of this chapter is on works that erase differences between beginning and end and challenge temporal distinctions between past, present, and future. The goal of these experiments was to ‘capture the essence of time as nonteleological flow’ (p. 154). In the late socialist era, artists investigated the nature of time and depicted events during which time passed ‘towards nothing’ (e.g. standing in lines); in this way, they questioned the movement of time and embraced ‘timelessness and shapelessness’ (p. 154). Those ideas and thematic preoccupations, Krakus suggests, responded to the socialist rhetoric of progress and indicated its bankruptcy. For the most part, Krakus’s book concentrates on selected works of Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Tadeusz Konwicki, Krzysztof Zanussi and Wojciech Has. Krakus approaches these works from multiple perspectives, extending her investigation to such areas as film scores (pp. 142–44), script versions (pp. 113–14) and unmade projects (pp. 30–31). She skilfully foregrounds several...