A Companion to Eastern European Cinemas by Imre Anikó;

Author:Imre, Anikó;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

Aesthetic (Re)visions

15

The Impossible Polish New Wave and its Accursed Émigré Auteurs

Borowczyk, Polański, Skolimowski, and Żuławski

Michael Goddard

Introduction

The recent (2008) publication of a bilingual volume entitled Polish New Wave/Polska Nowa Fala, edited by Barbara Piwowarska and Łukasz Ronduda and featuring ­contributions by both leading Polish film critics and younger writers generally more engaged with contemporary art and culture, has raised important questions that go well beyond simple questions of cinema historiography. As will be ­discussed further below, technically speaking there never was a new wave in Poland in the same way that there was in France or, to give a more comparable example, Czechoslovakia; as a historical entity it doesn’t exist – and yet it is possible to ­reconstruct it. This fact is acknowledged in the subtitle of the book, The History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed. However, the interest of the book goes beyond ­historical debates over whether there were at least elements of, or the potential for, a new wave cinema movement in Poland in the 1960s. More than this, one of the key effects of the volume is to confer cultural and aesthetic value on a range of generally marginalized filmmakers, including Andrzej Żuławski, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, and Witold Leszcyński to give only three examples.

The extent to which these filmmakers have been marginalized in Polish film history and criticism can be confirmed by the brief and dismissive one or two ­paragraph mentions they and their films receive in works like Marek Haltof’s Polish National Cinema (2002), relative to that accorded to the work of filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda or Krzysztof Zanussi. Yet this is not a simple case of ­proposing an alternative new wave canon to the dominant “historical” or “realist” one; after all both Zanussi and Wajda had their brushes with the new wave, and the former was even part of the cinematic retrospective that the book was published to accompany. Rather, what this book suggests is a different prism through which to evaluate the historical accomplishments of Polish cinema, a prism emphasizing artistic experimentation over social realism and formal risk-taking over historical engagement. As such it suggests an overturning of the dominant critical approaches to Polish cinema and the prejudices towards social realism that have distorted the image of Polish cinema and arguably Polish cinema itself from the Communist period right up until the present. This is the case whether one looks at the work of Polish or international critics for whom the holy trinity of Wajda–Kieślowski–Zanussi (possibly with a few other directors form the Polish School or the Cinema of Moral Concern thrown in for good measure) is usually seen as sufficient to sum up Polish cinema as a whole, even in books published as recently as Paul Coates’s The Red and the White (2005). So whether or not the concept of an impossible Polish New Wave is a sustainable critical construct, the effort at opening up critical engagement with Polish cinema beyond its sacred heroes and critical clichés is something to be applauded and continued.

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