Pathways into the past: framing the Polish People's Republic in two recent road films (Ida and Ticket to the Moon)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article offers a comparative genre-oriented discussion of two recent Polish feature films that stand out from the growing body of Polish road cinema, namely Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida (2013) and Jacek Bromski's Bilet na księżyc/Ticket to the Moon (2013). Set in 1960s Poland, both productions combine the narrative format of a buddy road movie with a coming-of-age story and make the main character's transformative journey through the People's Republic lead up to a retreat from life under state socialism. On the one hand, this disjunctive ending prefigures the break with the communist system of the late 1980s and reflects the widespread (cinematic) consensus about the desirability of the current sociopolitical order over the previous one. On the other hand, the third-act countermovement on which both films close is embedded in a different approach towards the communist past and the post-communist present: whereas the story of frustrated self-realisation depicted in Ticket to the Moon indirectly relates to Poland's transformation into a liberal democracy and its integration into pan-European structures, Ida's story of belated self-discovery (through postmemory) is inextricably bound up with the ‘pluralisation’ of collective memory after the fall of communism.