No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period. By Anna Krakus

Abstract

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.