Polish Spy Movies of the 1960s in Light of Transcripts from Meetings of Script Assessment and Film Approval Commissions

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of the unique reception of spy films made in the 1960s in the People’s Republic of Poland. In line with the tenets of New Historicism (cultural poetics), the New Film History and the historical poetics of film, the author focuses on the political, ideological and rhetorical nature of these movies, focusing especially on the analysis of various contexts in their historical setting. Analysis of the transcripts and minutes from script assessment and film approval meetings, important in terms of the process of producing a film and clearing it for distribution, helps to reconstruct both the disputes about the predominant features of the spy film at the time and the fears of its subversive reading. Analysis of these documents makes it possible to show the tensions, limitations and contradictions of the spy film formula of the time, related to cultural politics and the perception and use of genre conventions, to reconstruct the processes of negotiation of meanings, the interpretative strategies of the time, and the social and cultural tensions of the historical moment.