Krzysztof Kieslowski Research Articles

A Fistful of Dollars: Polish Cinema after the 1989 Freedom Shock

The year 1989 was a turning point not only in Polish history but also for the Polish industry. The state-controlled and -owned industry was transformed into independent studios/companies which could now make their own decisions about finances and production. The year 1990 brought another important and long-awaited decision: the abolition of censorship. Film producers and directors became responsible for both the content and the financial success, or failure, of their products. On one hand, this decision gave companies considerable freedom in the sphere of coproduction and distribution in the West. On the other, in spite of limited government subsidies during the transition period, this independence forced them to concentrate on the commercial aspect of their productions. As a consequence of these recent political transformations, hidden archives and victimized dissidents no longer constitute the Polish film landscape. The last banned film, Ryszard Bugajski's Przestuchanie (Interrogation, 1982), was released in 1990 following the distribution of other shelved films dealing mostly with the psychosocial pressures of Stalinism, such as Jerzy Domaradzki's Wielki bieg (Great Race, 1981), Agnieszka Holland's Kobieta samotna (A Lonely Woman, 1981), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Przypadek (Blind Chance, 1981), and Janusz Zaorski' s Matka Kr6low (Mother of Kings, 1982). But by the time of their release, some of these temporally dislodged films had lost much of their artistic impetus. Interrogation, Blind Chance, and other political films of the early 1980s are members of a dead class; political metaphors and symbols prevalent before 1989 no longer dominate the industry. Film-making has ceased to be a national and social mission and has once again become a strictly professional endeavor. Rather than being more than cinema, it has now shrunk (without negative connotation) to being simply cinema, and exists somewhere on the margins of Polish life.

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

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