Agnieszka Holland Research Articles

Mister Jones and the depiction of the Holodomor on the world screen

ABSTRACT Agnieszka Holland’s film Mr Jones (2019) tells the story of the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who reported in the Western press about the mass famine (Holodomor) in Ukraine in 1932–1933. Few in the West were willing to accept the crimes of the Soviet regime against Ukrainians, which Jones carefully recorded and tried to convey to politicians, governments, and society in the West. However, his evidence was not widely accepted and attempts were made to discredit him in the media. He died prematurely under mysterious circumstances. This article explores the story of Gareth Jones’s uncovering of the Holodomor in relation to the depiction of the terrifying experience of watching death and dying on screen. As a large-scale co-production between Great Britain, Poland and Ukraine, Mr Jones calls for analysis as an auteur film conveying the tragic events of the Holodomor within the context of the present time. The powerful contemporary resonance of the film is based on the dangers of ‘fake news’ and their destructive consequences, and Ukrainians’ desire for international recognition of the Holodomor.

Anima(l) Moralia, or Righteous Anger: Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor

Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor ( Pokot, 2017), an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), tells the story of an old woman, Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), who advocates for animal rights and uses every measure to fight the local hunting culture. Due to the centrality of the relationship between human beings and the world of nature, Holland’s film refers to the recent debates aimed at de-centralizing the human subject. This article will argue, however, that despite its attempt to alter the human–animal relationship, Spoor conveys anthropocentric perspectives and as such it does not participate in the “non-human turn.” Instead, the film can be linked to the “emotional turn” taking precedence in the humanities during the last two decades, in that it expresses the director’s affective response to the political realities of contemporary Poland, especially its unshaken patriarchal power, which subordinates the social margins.

Life Wins in the West. Agnieszka Holland’s East-European Interpretation of The Secret Garden

The author of this essay interprets Agnieszka Holland’s cinematographic adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden as a work of an East-European creator musing on the essence of Western civilisation and comments on it in the context of the present-day questioning of the European unity, values, and standards in Polish culture. In the analysis of Holland’s cinematographic version of the novel, a special relevance is given to cultural (in)visibility of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. The East-West divide is interpreted in terms of divergent conceptualisations of the major human transformative actions: work and sacrifice. In the multimodal idiom of Holland’s film, the music composed by Zbigniew Preisner occupies a special place. The East-European interpretation of the children’s classic promotes a vision of Englishness (treated as a pars pro toto exemplification of the broader concept of “the West”) as a space of resilience and triumphant life, against manipulative messages presenting the West as a space of corruption and “culture of death”.

Filmmaker on democracy: The case of Agnieszka Holland’s work

This essay explores the influential role of cinematic artists in shaping discussions around democratic values and addressing contemporary European challenges. It focuses on the works and public statements of Agnieszka Holland, a renowned Polish filmmaker. Holland, known for her film Europa, Europa, predominantly explores individual experiences. However, these personal narratives are intricately interwoven with broader communal, historical-political, and cultural themes. This text aims to highlight key democratic principles through Holland’s perspectives, emphasising the educational impact of her films. Particularly, it examines how her work confronts various forms of discrimination, including those based on gender, religion, and nationality, while simultaneously fostering a ‘culture of dialogue’. The approach used in this research is an analysis of media content.

Przekład intersemiotyczny. Przypadek znaku drogowego, ekfrazy i adaptacji filmowej


 
 
 The article is an attempt to clarify and refine the ways of understanding two basic types of translation: from one language into another ethnic language (translation proper) – i.e. following the principles of translating homo- geneous systems of signs – and from one system of signs to another, e.g. verbal to iconic, or vice versa, which is sometimes called transmutation. Therefore, the starting point for the discussion is Roman Jakobson’s well-known typology of translation, which also took into account cases of intralingual translation within the same language, called rewording. However, the article mainly focuses on various cases of intersemiotic translation and thus transmutation, meaning situations where a text expressed in one system of signs is translated into a system of a different nature. The primary research question concerns what is actually being translated in such a situation and how this type of translation differs from a typical language-to-language translation. The article is chiefly theoretical, and the examples concern the cases of translating verbal signs into iconic ones, such as the rules governing traffic into a road sign, the translation of an image (a painting, photography) into a literary text (ekphrasis and its varieties), and a film adaptation. The equivalence of codes secures the adequacy of a linguistic translation. In the case of ekphrasis, the image is usually replaced by a verbal narrative, and in a film adaptation, the type and sequence of iconic signs must simply be invented because these sign systems are not directly equivalent, as Benveniste and Lotman believe. Examples that illustrate the main theses of the article are Jacek Kaczmarski’s art-inspired songs, several film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Polański, Kurosawa), and Agnieszka Holland’s film adaptation (Pokot [Spoor]) of one of Olga Tokarczuk’s novels.
 
 

Natural is not in it: Irony, Environment and Genre in Spoor (2017)

ABSTRACT Agnieszka Holland’s animal rights horror-thriller Spoor (2017) can be read as a revenge tale wherein women, non-hegemonic men and animals join forces against the hunters and, implicitly, against what they represent: the conservative worldview of the current nationalist government in Poland. Spoor offers a feminist, queer and ecological response to these values and, in the process, expands our comprehension of how ecocinema might look or feel. While narratively human-centred, the film uses several strategies to foster an aesthetic attunement to non-human beings and non-anthropocentric politics. However, Spoor also transcends ecocinema by putting itself in quotation marks. In its self-reflexive use of extreme genericity, Spoor exemplifies Nicole Seymour’s observation that politically engaged cinema can sometimes fail to follow the available scripts for ‘appropriate’ environmental feeling. This paper argues that, by merging tenderness and despair with more distanced modes, including irony, humour and metageneric playfulness, Spoor departs from serious approaches prevalent in environmental filmmaking, questioning the authenticity and proximity central to the very concept of ecology. Spoor’s aesthetic and affective complexity rests on blending fakery and feeling, which problematises existing ways of understanding how eco-films engage us.

Secret Agents, Informers, and Traitors: Agnieszka Holland’s Fever (Gorączka, 1980)

The article examines Agnieszka Holland’s film Fever (Gorączka, 1980) depicting the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland. While situating it in various socio-political and cultural contexts, the author examines the significance of the historical event and its parallels to the Solidarity movement. Special attention is given to the fact that both movements were infiltrated and surveilled by the state security apparatuses. Close analysis of the figures of secret agents featured in Fever focuses on their political significance and meanings to reveal how these expressed scepticism and distrust in the possibility of political change. As the author demonstrates, Fever questions the possibility of genuine revolutionary change, yet most importantly it presents the failure as a ‘national defeat’ rather than a crash of political aspirations of the working class and peasantry. Likewise, the Solidarity movement was also appropriated by the national discourse, while class-related political aspirations were marginalized and eventually corrupted. The article concludes with the claim that the figure of a secret agent proves paradoxically crucial in mobilizing and stabilizing national discourse as represented subtly, yet persistently in Fever.

“I inhabited the Land of Ulro long before Blake taught me its proper name”: Czesław Miłosz’s <i>Ziemia Ulro</i>/<i>The Land of Ulro</i>

Olga Tokarczuk, in her Nobel lecture of 7 December 2019, observed that the public nowadays prefers facts to fiction. This is an auspicious remark for my purposes, as my theme will be the autobiographical book of Czesław Miłosz, another Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who received his award in 1980, a year after Tokarczuk’s literary debut. The Blake of Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is part of a fictional world, a curious addition to the story: Agnieszka Holland’s film Spoor, adapted from the book and cowritten by the novelist, eliminates the Blake references without much (or perhaps any) loss to the plot. Conversely, the Blake of Miłosz’s Ziemia Ulro, initially published in 1977 (a round anniversary of Blake’s birth and death), is a vital part of life. I will first recall a few relevant details from Miłosz’s bi(bli)ography, then reflect on the character and quality of his tribute to William Blake. Unlike my chapter for The Reception of William Blake in Europe, whose profile dictated the method (that is, an overview) and the narrow focus on the role Miłosz’s book played in the history of the reception of Blake in Poland, I will engage here more intensively with Ziemia Ulro and, by doing so, postulate a much more extensive appeal of Miłosz’s work. In particular, I will be pointing to the importance and value of this book—​translated into English by Louis Iribarne as The Land of Ulro—​for international Blake circles.

Protest kobiet. Wizerunek katolicyzmu w wytwórczości współczesnych polskich reżyserek

In the second decade of the 20th century (especially in the years 2016-2020), a significant number of films by Polish female directors were released in which Catholicism and the Catholic Church were attacked. They were: W imię… [In the Name of…], Body/ciało [Body], Twarz (Mug) and Córka boga [The Other Lamb] – all directed by Małgorzata Szumowska; Dzikie róże [Wild Roses] by Anna Jadowska, Pokot [Spoor] by Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik, Wieża. Jasny dzień [Tower. A Bright Day] by Jagoda Szelc, Powrót, [Back Home] by Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, Maryjki [Marygoround] by Daria Woszek, as well as a documentary Komunia [Communion] by Anna Zamecka. The polemic related to the above-mentioned movies commented on the religiosity of Catholics and the quality of the institutional church (priests, hierarchies, methods of ministering and teaching), religious control and repression of corporeality and sexuality (including female sexuality), and Catholicism as the foundation of the patriarchal system. These films also feature elements of the "positive program", a proposal for a new cultural paradigm (new spirituality), organized around Nature, with the suggestion of matriarchy. From the point of view of social communication, the content and poetics of above-mentioned the films were similar, according to the author, to the content of the protests of the Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (Polish Women's Strike), which demonstrated in 2016 and 2020 against the tightening of abortion laws.

Discussion with the President of the European Film Academy, Agnieszka Holland

ABSTRACT This article transcribes an interview with the President of the European Film Academy, film director and scriptwriter Agnieszka Holland. It traces the filmmaker’s journey from her early filmmaking career and the potential influence of acting as a global citizen. Agnieszka Holland studied directing at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. She began her career as an assistant director to Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda as her mentor. In 1977, Agnieszka Holland made her co-directing debut with ‘Screen Tests.’ In 1978, Holland wrote her first screenplay for Wajda, ‘Without Anaesthesia.’ Her solo feature directing debut started with ‘Provincial Actors,’ which won the International Critics Prize at Cannes Film Festival (1980). Since then, she has directed over 30 films, won numerous awards, including the Golden Globe and Silver Bear Berlinale. Agnieszka Holland was nominated for a BAFTA and Emmy, while her films ‘Angry Harvest’ (1985), ‘Europa Europa’ (1990), and ‘In Darkness’ (2011) were nominated for an Academy Award. The emotional impact and foresight of these films have earned her international fame. Throughout her career, Holland’s vision of cinematography and the way reality is depicted influenced the further history of cinema.

Adaptations of Hybrids: Literary Plays with Genres in Contemporary Polish Cinema (Spoor and Darkness and Dark, Almost Night)

The article discusses the problem of genre hybridity and the play with genres from a comparative perspective on the example of Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk and Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as well as of their fi lm adaptations, directed by Agnieszka Holland and Borys Lankosz, respectively. In both novels, generic and stylistic hybridity does not only fulfi ll a ludic function, but more importantly serves to express a social critique, and their fi lm adaptations refl ect this. Spoor is a creative adaptation which – through the combination of genres and styles – questions ethical norms often regarded as axioms and prompts the viewer to reconsider the relationship between humans and animals. Dark, Almost Night approaches the complex combination of genres in the literary original in a reductive way, which affects its message. The study of adaptations should not focus on the issue of „fi delity”, but rather examine how the change of the medium transforms the original textual structures and their use of social discourses.

Female Revolution behind the Camera

The paper addresses the issue of discrimination against women in the world of cinema. The author examines the successive stages of the struggle pursued by women of cinema for equality and fair treatment in an industry dominated and ruled by men. The discussion covers the most important campaigns and movements challenging gender discrimination, such as #MeToo in the U.S. or the European #nobodysdoll, as well as watershed events from the author’s point of view, including the Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow – the first woman in history to receive the award for best director, Harvey Weinstein’s conviction for sexual assault, and the leak of Sony’s confidential financial documents. The public disclosure of these facts triggered a process that should be referred to as gender equalisation in the film industry. The author also takes a look at the latest events in the industry, such as Agnieszka Holland’s election as president of the European Film Academy. In addition, the paper also comments on the aspect of feminine nouns in Polish and the attitude towards them on the part of the women they are supposed to describe. Information is provided on the U.S. and European cinema markets, as well as some diagnoses of problems appearing so far and suggested solutions.

Female Revolution behind the Camera

The paper addresses the issue of discrimination against women in the world of cinema. The author examines the successive stages of the struggle pursued by women of cinema for equality and fair treatment in an industry dominated and ruled by men. The discussion covers the most important campaigns and movements challenging gender discrimination, such as #MeToo in the U.S. or the European #nobodysdoll, as well as watershed events from the author’s point of view, including the Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow – the first woman in history to receive the award for best director, Harvey Weinstein’s conviction for sexual assault, and the leak of Sony’s confidential financial documents. The public disclosure of these facts triggered a process that should be referred to as gender equalisation in the film industry. The author also takes a look at the latest events in the industry, such as Agnieszka Holland’s election as president of the European Film Academy. In addition, the paper also comments on the aspect of feminine nouns in Polish and the attitude towards them on the part of the women they are supposed to describe. Information is provided on the U.S. and European cinema markets, as well as some diagnoses of problems appearing so far and suggested solutions.

The Jew Uncut: Circumcising Holocaust Representation in Europa Europa

Film adaptations invariably yield insights into their written source material, at least to the extent that they elect to translate or omit what may be deemed the literature’s essential components. This is certainly the case for director Agnieszka Holland’s 1990 film, Europa Europa, which adapts Solomon Perel’s account of surviving the Shoah. By drawing on discourse in Holocaust studies and adaptation studies, and by examining the film adaptation’s points of alignment with what Perel records in his memoir, I argue that Europa Europa resists the dominant trend of de-Judaizing the Shoah in artistic representation. Europa Europa privileges explicitly Jewish content and an unmistakably Jewish point of view by focusing on the theme of circumcision. In doing so, the film succeeds in highlighting how the Shoah was, at its core, a campaign to annihilate not just the Jewish people, but also the longstanding principle of the Jewish covenant with the Eternal, as embodied by circumcision. Through its cutting and reshaping of the memoir’s details, Holland’s film seeks to establish a covenant with the viewer to bear witness to the Jewish spirit of the survivor’s testimony. The film presents a model for representing the Holocaust in art, a model that masterfully defies the de-Judaization of society that the Nazis envisioned and tried to make real.

“I like it close” – Jolanta Dylewska’s art of cinematography

The author presents the cinematographer and director Jolanta Dylewska, striving to define her cinematographic style. Although Dylewska began working independently as a cinematographer only after the turn of 1989, her position in the history of Polish and European cinema can be determined through awareness of her female pioneership in this profession, set against the background of generations of graduates of the Cinematography Department at the Lodz Film School. The researcher focuses on films that are the result of Dylewska’s collaboration with transnational directors, Agnieszka Holland (In the Darkness, Spoor) and Sergey Dvortsevoy (Tulpan, Ayka). The cinematographer denies that she has developed her own individual style, her goal is to find a style that will communicate the director’s vision. The researcher, however, finds characteristic features in her images, such as telling stories through landscapes and faces, including animals, and immersing the viewer in images – by using light and sharpness and bringing all the cinematographer’s technical expertise into play.

Paradoxes and resonances of Berlinale-2019

The article focuses on the analysis of the range of problems of contemporary socio-cultural expanses, based on the review of the films of the main program of the 69th Berlin International Film Festival. After all, the Competition program, one of the most respected cinematic forums in the world, articulates important topics: revealing the “pain points” of historical memory and political present, the vulnerable dimensions of our consciousness and collective unconscious, the accents of the multicultural environment, and more. The article provides detailed critical reviews of the following films: Synonyms directed by Nadav Lapid, Öndög directed by Wang Quan'an, By the Grace of God directed by François Ozon, The Golden Glove directed by Fatih Akin, Mr Jones directed by Agnieszka Holland, and others.

Border Trouble: Ethnopolitics and Cosmopolitan Memory in Recent Polish Cinema

The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016) and W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments.

Filmowiec nie może działać wyłącznie lokalnie. Z Krzysztofem Zanussim o współpracy z kinematografią niemiecką rozmawia Ewa Ciszewska

The paper presents an interview with Krzysztof Zanussi (born 17 June 1939), one of the most renowned award-winning Polish film directors. Some of his numerous films for television and cinema have been made in co-operation with German producers, including Manfred Durniok. His film Roads in the Night (Wege in der Nacht, 1979) was presented in 1980 in Cannes as part of the section “Un certain regard”. In Germany, Zanussi filmed not only some of his own screenplays, such as Imperative (Imperativ, 1982 – Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 1982), but also adaptations of Polish and German literature, for example House of Women (Haus der Frauen, 1977) based on a play by Zofia Nałkowska and Bluebeard (Blaubart, 1983) based on a novel by Max Frisch. In addition to those productions, he concurrently made films in Poland. Director of the TOR Film Studio since 1979. He produced films by such directors as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Agnieszka Holland. He currently works on a feature film entitled Ether.

Mothers, Monsters, Heroes and Whores: Reinscribing Patriarchy in European Holocaust Films

This article examines the portrayal of female Gentile rescuers in Holocaust films. We analyze two recent and somewhat unconventional Eastern European films, Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness (Poland, 2011) and Jan Hrebejk’s Divided We Fall (Czech Republic, 2000), which, to varying degrees, disrupt conventional narratives of selfless heroism and avoid the eroticized objectification of women common in many (particularly American) Holocaust films. Nevertheless, a detailed analysis reveals how these films also marginalize or erase women’s roles as rescuers, either in preference to narratives of dominative masculine heroism or in order to undertake a politico-religious appropriation of the Holocaust, each of which implicitly excludes and exploits the feminine. In both cases, the films trivialize women’s particular and complex historical experiences, including sexual violence, and subordinate them to masculine interests.

The colours of socialism: visual nostalgia and retro aesthetics in Czech film and television

Since the end of the 1990s, post-socialist nostalgia has been a powerful trend in Czech film and television. This article focuses on the examples of Filip Renč’s 2001 musical comedy Rebelové (The Rebels) and the Czech television series Vyprávěj (Tell Me a Story, 2009–2013), which both portray the period around the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Through an analysis of the visual style of the film and television series, as well as a discussion of the way the texts recontextualize the popular culture of the period they portray, the article proposes that Czech post-socialist nostalgia is more fruitfully viewed as “retro”, which is here differentiated from non-nostalgic depictions of socialism through a comparison with the mini-series Hořící keř (Burning Bush, directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2013). Although retro’s concern with surface and style can be interpreted as apolitical, the author argues that the political agenda of Czech retro texts needs to be understood by the ways they combine a fetishization of the aesthetic trappings of the period with a condemnation of the political system of the time.