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Introduction

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Polish Review has not dedicated a cluster to Polish film since 2002, when this “prominent, significant” national art form was re-emerging from an onslaught of Hollywood blockbusters and their domestic clones.1 Over the next two decades, the Polish film industry underwent seismic changes, as lighter, more user-friendly and significantly less expensive technology enabled young filmmakers to shoot and edit at will; several new film schools arose, competing with the legendary Łódź Film School for male and female candidates; and Polish films and series began streaming on Netflix and other platforms. Above all, the creation in 2005 of Polski Instytut Sztuki Filmowej (PISF: the Polish Film Institute) galvanized virtually all aspects of filmmaking in a demanding capitalist environment.2 Consequently, domestic output skyrocketed in terms of sales, streaming, and awards bestowed at national and international festivals.In lieu of retracing this recent history, our introduction highlights the focus and import of the five essays constituting the current cluster. As luck did have it, our contributors—three of them young Polish scholars—not only present provocative critical analyses of specific films, but also question received judgments about “tasteful” versus “tasteless” productions, auteur cinema versus slick entertainment, and lucrative features versus challenging documentaries. The diversity of the five entries mirrors, however modestly, the diversity and complexity of contemporary Polish film, film criticism, and film history.In the opening contribution, Helena Goscilo briefly characterizes the 1990s after the downfall of PRL (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, The Polish People's Republic, 1952–1989) as a turbulent, financially beleaguered decade, marked not only by an influx of Western movies targeting mass audiences but also their Polish macho imitations. Fortunately, the new century ushered in a veritable revolution in Polish film, with the establishment of PISF playing an incalculable role in recasting the infrastructure of the industry, enhancing distribution, supporting talented new professionals, and reversing the traditional misogynistic consignment of women to the periphery of film production. Goscilo devotes most of the chapter to a compressed mini-gallery of new talents among the savvy younger generation of directors and actresses/actors who have netted multiple awards at film festivals and acquired stellar international reputations, thereby restoring Polish cinema's former worldwide reputation for excellence.Sebastian Jagielski's piece examines Andrzej Żuławski's (1940–2016) “scandalous” Szamanka [She-shaman, 1996], a memorably controversial film with a script by the feminist Manuela Gretkowska (b. 1964) that upon its limited release became anathematized by the cinematic establishment and sundry film critics. Both categories railed against it as tawdry and worthless, voicing moral revulsion at its relentless sexual and physiological explicitness and its raw portrayal of violence. With considerable panache, Jagielski rescues She-Shaman from this reception via a socio-political reading of its plot and symbolic aesthetics, while simultaneously placing it in a deftly particularized cinematic and social context. Jagielski contends that in the film Żuławski—the enfant terrible who spent many successful years in France—polemicizes with the new capitalist privileges ascendant in 1990s’ Poland but denied to women, the lower classes, and provincials. And the visual impact of sexual and bodily drama onscreen lends force to the film's politically transgressive vision of the decade's inequities.Few recent directors have enjoyed an award-studded career comparable to that of Agnieszka Smoczyńska (b. 1978), whose debut full feature, Córki dancingu [The lure, 2015], caused a sensation by its unprecedented hybridization of genres traditionally deemed incompatible, leading to The Lure's inclusion in the prestigious Criterion Collection. Łukasz Wodzyński's article dissects two of her lesser-known but equally original films, spotlighting the female protagonists of her early short Aria Diva (2007) and her sophomore full feature, Fuga [Fugue, 2018]. Adopting a psychoanalytical approach, he swims against the current of existent interpretations by making an impressively nuanced case for fluidity of selfhood in both films, whereby two contrasting personae reflect the ambivalence or instability of a single identity. In short, Wodzyński credits Smoczyńska with considerable subtlety as he adroitly avoids the pitfalls of a reductive feminist reading, despite the gynocentric nature of all her films. Her feminist credentials as well as her intrepid deviation from conventions of genre are beyond doubt, nonetheless, and possibly account for her membership in a small cohort of Polish directors invited to direct anglophone films—a distinction that has elevated her international status in the profession.By contrast, Wojciech Smarzowski (b. 1963) belongs to those directors lionized in Poland but unknown abroad. In her intriguing article, Paulina Duda investigates the possible reasons for this critically-acclaimed filmmaker's limited distribution. She proposes a reevaluation of Smarzowski's place in Polish film history and the international market, tracing his thematic link with auteurs such as Jan Jakub Kolski and Dorota Kędzierzawska, who focus on provincial, marginalized Polish subjects, and his stylistic embrace of the fast-paced storytelling and crude humor used by successful commercial filmmakers such as Patryk Vega and Władysław Pasikowski. Pointing out the ever-blurrier dividing line between high art and well-made entertainment, Duda argues that Smarzowski's hybrid art should not be denied international marketing because of old-school notions of audience appeal. She also examines instances in which committees charged with nominating films for the Academy Awards rejected Smarzowski's works as “too Polish” in implied contrast to a Romanticized “Polishness” as heroic nation or nation-martyr.Fiction films, however they are categorized, comprise the most lucrative sales in the industry, yet Polish documentaries, which enjoyed a high reputation in the PRL, are flourishing once more in the early twenty-first century, boosted in large part by the fast-increasing presence and achievements of female documentarians. The last article, by Beth Holmgren, signals the important place of both phenomena in our cluster. Holmgren's decision to showcase Hanna Polak (b. 1967) illustrates female aspirants’ different paths to the director's “chair.” In contrast to younger women trained in film school, Polak first stumbled across her heartbreaking subjects— abandoned children in Moscow and trash pickers subsisting in the city's enormous dump—and thereafter played catchup in mastering cinematography and editing in order to film them. Holmgren closely analyzes Polak's evolving artistry vis-à-vis her very different sets of subjects in the award-winning short Children from the Leningrad Station (aka The Children of Leningradsky, 2004) and her full-length masterpiece, Something Better to Come (2014). Whereas Polak cedes her protagonists in Children agency over their own stories through affective monologues and authoritative voice-overs, in Something Better to Come she maintains an ambitious balancing act between one charismatic protagonist's always imperiled success story and the memorial she personally curates onscreen for the many subjects who perished on Moscow's trash mountain.By focusing on different aspects of contemporary Polish cinema, the five entries point to the rich variety that is one of its salient features. Unhindered by censorship and ideological prescriptions, directors of the post-PRL generation energize and publicize the industry by regularly tackling original and controversial topics, collaborating with colleagues beyond Poland's borders, and occasionally helming anglophone films—which typically attract larger audiences. Similarly, some Polish actors/actresses appear in foreign productions and number among the ranks of international stars tracked by admiring fans. And streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime facilitate Western viewers’ access to some of the best and/or most popular Polish films and series,3 while social media's information about European and American film festivals brings prize-winning Polish film professionals closer to fans of gripping visual narratives frequently set in unfamiliar locales that possess enormous appeal. In short, Polish cinema and its personnel currently are thriving both at home and abroad.We thank our young colleagues for participating in this cluster; Halina Filipowicz for encouraging us in this endeavor; the staff of The Polish Review for seeing the issue through to publication; and the anonymous reviewers of the cluster's contents for investing their time and effort in the review process.
DOI: 10.5406/23300841.70.1.01
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407322010
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