Life Wins in the West. Agnieszka Holland’s East-European Interpretation of The Secret Garden

Abstract

The author of this essay interprets Agnieszka Holland’s cinematographic adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden as a work of an East-European creator musing on the essence of Western civilisation and comments on it in the context of the present-day questioning of the European unity, values, and standards in Polish culture. In the analysis of Holland’s cinematographic version of the novel, a special relevance is given to cultural (in)visibility of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The East-West divide is interpreted in terms of divergent conceptualisations of the major human transformative actions: work and sacrifice. In the multimodal idiom of Holland’s film, the music composed by Zbigniew Preisner occupies a special place. The East-European interpretation of the children’s classic promotes a vision of Englishness (treated as a pars pro toto exemplification of the broader concept of “the West”) as a space of resilience and triumphant life, against manipulative messages presenting the West as a space of corruption and “culture of death”.