"The Political" in the Films of Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski

Abstract

Films of Polish directors are frequently called or are said to reveal content. This essay constitutes an introductory proposal for a new project exploring issues which I have been working on for some time. The project deals with the questions of politics in Eastern European film and how they manifest themselves in works by Polish film directors. For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to focus on Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron along with Krzysztof Kieslowski's Without End and A Short Film about Killing, works which can be considered representative of the Polish film. Before concentrating on the films of the two directors, I would like to devote some attention to the very concept political, which, in general, is being applied indiscriminately to all levels of film analysis. On the one hand, film theoreticians describe films as political or as implying and revealing content. On the other hand, analysts of the formal aspects of film talk about film form or about films made politically. In relation to film, then, the very word political gets used in several senses on two different levels of analysis: one of the senses applies the term to film interpretation in general and the other to a particular grouping of films. On one level, the concept political pertains to the process of interpreting any film, and, on another level, the defines films which form a polyphonic heterogeneous patchwork which includes social problem films, resistance films, revolutionary films, ideological films, and so on labeled according to the researcher's methodology, intention, and focus.1 Generally speaking, the two domains in which appears in relation to film can thus be identified as film criticism and film, the category. In the interpretive sense, the term political is sometimes used to refer to a radical, new approach to an analysis of any film. The word political is applied to any film interpretation which differs from the established interpretive norms of its time. On the one hand, denotes contestation and revolt against the given and the existing, but on the other hand, the term indicates a strong declaration of new critical values as opposed to old ones. Within the context of film interpretation, radically (or resistant) readings and poststructuralist readings illustrate the way in which the term