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Abstract
People’s Poland in the 1970s is well-known for political rebellion, but the extent to which cinema aesthetics were radicalized following the death of revisionism in 1968 is still under-explored. In this paper, I show how late filmmakers Grzegorz Królikiewicz (1939–2017) and Piotr Szulkin (1950–2018) moved beyond the limitations of documentary realism and psychologized narrative that viewed political cinema as constituting a settled kind of knowledge to be transmitted to audiences. Instead, their early avant-docs embraced contingency in meaning and the viewer’s role in assembling it, forging an embodied, theoretical, micro style of cinematic communication. Articulating alienation in People’s Poland through the marginal and un-serious, the mess of labouring bodies and human feelings, they stand the biopolitics of the state on its head, opening the door to new possibilities and new ways of being together, much like the Solidarity movement itself. I read them in terms of what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge called the ‘haptic sensorium,’ the stirrings of feeling and sensation at the beginning of life from which human labour is drawn—and our irreducible ability to fight back.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to my editors Elżbieta Ostrowska and Ewa Mazierska; to Thaddeus Fortney and Alexander Kolokotronis for their perceptive comments on a draft at a critical juncture; and to Kamila Kuc, Mikołaj Kunicki, John MacKay, Kuba Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk, Mirosław Przylipiak and Masha Salazkina for their insight, encouragement and friendship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dominic Leppla received his PhD from Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University (CAN), for which he wrote on the political beyond the merely representational in cinema after 1968, focusing on the case of People’s Poland/Polish cinema and the sustained popular struggle against the state that resulted in the Solidarity movement. While at Concordia he organized as mobilization and communications officer for its graduate student worker union. He has published on the use of film theory (Frames 2012), and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Polish films (Handbook of COURAGE 2018). He lives in New Haven and teaches film at Quinnipiac University (USA).
Notes
1 Standard shorthand for Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, or PRL), which existed from 1947 to 1989.
2 Film units were in disarray after 1968 due to a state crackdown, and did not stabilize until the mid-1970s. Królikiewicz, supported by Krzysztof Kieślowski and others, unsuccessfully attempted to found the ‘Irzykowski Studio’ at the beginning of the 1970s as a haven for young filmmakers, an idea/precedent resurrected ten years later during the ‘Carnival of Solidarity.’ (Stok Citation1995, 42–43).
3 Królikiewicz and Szulkin’s initial features are thought to consist of a trilogy and tetralogy, respectively. Unlike Szulkin, Królikiewicz remained prolific in his documentary output throughout his career.
4 Although I focus on their second collaboration (Kluge and Negt Citation2014), this was initially formulated (Kluge and Negt Citation1993) with a different emphasis in the early 1970s, as a ‘proletarian public sphere’—part of the ‘context of living’ engendered by capital in a wide variety of vulnerable communities, which consist of potential counterpublics.
5 See Sylvia Harvey’s classic study on May, 1968 and militant cinema (Citation1980). A necessary, broader perspective is found in Gerhardt and Saljoughi (Citation2018).
6 For a piece that helpfully enlarges the term ‘experimental cinema,’ with a mind to explode critical binaries, see Gurshtein and Simonyi (Citation2016).
7 In Poland this was best represented in the previous decade by the patient, poetic style of observation of Kazimierz Karabasz (1930–2018), mentor to Kieślowski. Other outstanding contemporaries of Karabasz included Krystyna Gryczełowska (1930–2009) and Irena Kamieńska (1928–2016).
8 For example, Fabryka/Factory (dir. Kieślowski, 1970); Szkoła podstawowa/Primary School (dir. Tomasz Zygadło, 1971).
9 See note 2, but also a 1970 manifesto for engaged documentary by “The Krakow Group,” written by Kieślowski, Tomasz Zygadło, and ex-Party documentarist Bohdan Kosiński, to which Królikiewicz also signed his name. “Documentary Filmmakers Make Their Case (Poland, 1971),” (“Dokumentarzyści o dokumencie,” in Polityka 28 (1971)),” MacKenzie (Citation2014).
10 Beginning in 1976 and ceasing abruptly with the imposition of Martial Law in 1981, the term was coined by filmmaker Janusz Kijowski.
11 Ewa Mazierska has recently challenged the image of Wiszniewski as a subversive anti-Party filmmaker, charging him with mere postmodernist handwringing. Mazierska (Citation2017).
12 As Agnieszka Holland put it, “We were delighted that we could code the message in a film that ‘evil is linked with communism.’ It seems that this is the basic weakness of these films."” Quoted in Haltof (Citation2003), 465.
13 I do not have the space to argue this here, but it is worth noting a few recent, theorized political critiques by young scholars within Poland that seek to reclaim the radical potential of Solidarity over and above the limitations of political science ‘civil society’ reconstitutions of what was a militant working class movement in its initial guise (1980–1981). See Majmurek, Mikurda, and Sowa (Citation2009) and Majewska (Citation2018).
14 See the comprehensive definition offered by Adam Michnik in ‘The New Evolutionism,’ one of the most important essays for the intellectual opposition in the 1970s. Michnik (Citation1987), 135.
15 Collected in a book of essays, Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today. Kołakowski (Citation1978).
16 Brus wrote in the eminent tradition of Polish radical political economists like Michał Kalecki and Oskar Lange.
17 Political scientists favor this term, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, and I can find no better alternative.
18 See Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski’s discussion of the political domination of the bureaucracy and the mode of production under state socialism, in Kowalewski, “Give us back our factories! Between resisting exploitation and the struggle for workers’ power in Poland, 1944–1981,” in Ness and Azzellini (Citation2011), 191–192.
19 In this respect, Kołakowski had begun to encourage existentialism in the late 1960s. Hanak (Citation1985), 382.
20 On Kołakowski’s intellectual transformation, see “Jester and Priest: On Leszek Kołakowski: How the great Polish philosopher went from being an anticlerical scourge to an apostle of John Paul II,” Connelly (Citation2013).
21 Most influentially, in Kołakowski’s expatriate-penned “In Stalin’s Countries: Theses on Hope and Despair,” (Citation1971).
22 Influential for my understanding of this continuity are the writings and legacy of Soviet Marxist I.I. Rubin (1886–1937), whose primary work, on Capital, predates the discovery/dissemination of the Economic Manuscripts in the late 1920s. See (Citation1990).
23 While First Secretary Władyslaw Gomułka had set this path motion in the so-called ‘little stabilization’ of the 1960s, Edward Gierek regime’s in the 1970s would make collective consumption an all-out economic and propagandistic strategy, in part to hide the emperor’s lack of clothes (Bernhard Citation1993, 42–45).
24 Rare in Polish cinema but with kin in cult comedies, especially Marek Piwowski. See argument in Mazierska (Citation2016).
25 Especially his first three features, all starring Franciszek Trzeciak, which gives one giving the feeling that we are watching a single character across three films. Na Wylot/Through and Through (1972); Wieczne Pretensje/Endless Grievances (1976); Tanczacy jastrzab/The Dancing Hawk (1977).
26 See also the important intervention on bodies in Eastern European cinema made in a special issue from Mroz and Mazierska (Citation2016) and subsequent edited collection by Mazierska, Mroz and Ostroska (2018).
27 This point was made by the first serious study of the filmmaker, and still the best, by Mirosław Przylipiak (Citation1987). Other useful pieces—these are in English—include Zalewski (Citation1995) and Viren (Citation2014).
28 He made an earlier short about recruits, Mężczyźni /Men (1969), and the cruel treatment they faced, which, following the clashes of 1968, got him censured and denied its use for his diploma at the Łódź Film School. Hardt (Citation2011).
29 In this respect, Królikiewicz, like Bataille, is ultimately not a Surrealist, despite affinities. See Przylipiak (Citation2012). Also relevant is Kuba Mikurda, “Surreality. An unfinished project,” 146–159 in Wielebska and Mikurda (Citation2010).
30 An investigative “Workers Commission,” formed by workers and locals following these events estimated that 700 had died in Szczecin alone. Baluka and Barker (Citation1977).
31 Laba, 173.
32 I hasten to add that, while historical, my argument is also speculative—I am not looking at the actual public reception of Szulkin’s films, many of which were banned.
33 Cf. Kieślowski’s Szpital/Hospital (1977), 24 manic hours in the lives of doctors, confessing to camera on their breaks.