Marxist biopolitics? The avant-docs of Grzegorz Królikiewicz and Piotr Szulkin in People’s Poland

Abstract

People’s Poland in the 1970s is well-known for political rebellion, but the extent to which cinema aesthetics were radicalized following the death of revisionism in 1968 is still under-explored. In this paper, I show how late filmmakers Grzegorz Królikiewicz (1939–2017) and Piotr Szulkin (1950–2018) moved beyond the limitations of documentary realism and psychologized narrative that viewed political cinema as constituting a settled kind of knowledge to be transmitted to audiences. Instead, their early avant-docs embraced contingency in meaning and the viewer’s role in assembling it, forging an embodied, theoretical, micro style of cinematic communication. Articulating alienation in People’s Poland through the marginal and un-serious, the mess of labouring bodies and human feelings, they stand the biopolitics of the state on its head, opening the door to new possibilities and new ways of being together, much like the Solidarity movement itself. I read them in terms of what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge called the ‘haptic sensorium,’ the stirrings of feeling and sensation at the beginning of life from which human labour is drawn—and our irreducible ability to fight back.