European Cinema and Intertextuality His Ewa Mazierska

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.Once this demand diminished, the workingclass declined too, as the capitalist West does not want Polish coal orships.A similar conclusion is evinced in the episode by Machulski,where a number of trendy scriptwriters, discussing what Solidarity svictory gave Poland, after a long brainstorm come to the conclusionthat the only tangible benefit is sushi, which they themselves eat whendiscussing their project.Although Poles did not eat sushi before 1989,after this date the Japanese food hardly found its way to the menu ofthe working classes.More positive representation of Solidarity and its times are offered inthe films of some younger directors, such as Piotr Trzaskalski, AndrzejJakimowski or Małgorzata Szumowska.Szumowska openly claims thatthanks to Solidarity she now lives in a free country.By and large, how-ever, a sense of disappointment, sadness and nostalgia dominates overjoy in Solidarity, Solidarity & It partly results from the filmmaker s look-ing back at what is regarded as the most noble chapter in Polish postwarhistory and which, consequently, has been the subject of mythologisa-tion.The films give the impression that the noble chapter is definitelyclosed and those responsible for its end are not the old communists,but people who came from the Solidarity camp.Or, to put it differently,it is not martial law which killed Solidarity and solidarity, but the year1989.This opinion is even suggested by Lech Wałęsa, who describes hisgeneration as people able to fight and win, rather than reap the fruit oftheir victories.Typically for portmanteau films, Solidarity, Solidarity & is very hetero-geneous in terms of subjects and styles.Whilst some authors constructshort feature films with distinctive plots, others limit themselves to edit-ing archive footage; whilst some focus on events from the years 1980to 1981, others discuss the legacy of Solidarity in contemporary Poland;whilst some choose as their characters ordinary people, others favourwell-known politicians.That said, certain tendencies can be identified.The most striking is the prevalence of personal narratives.Filmmakerssuch as Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda tell the viewers abouthow their filmmaking was related to the history of Solidarity.Zanussimentions how the shooting of his film about Pope John Paul II, Daun paese lontano (Giovanni Paolo II), which took place in the winter of1981, and required showing Russian soldiers and tanks in the centre ofKraków, caused political upheaval.This was because passers-by took the158 European Cinema and Intertextualityextras clad in Russian uniforms to be real Russian soldiers, interveningin Poland, which was a rational assumption because at the time Russianintervention in Poland was very likely.Andrzej Wajda invites Janda,Radziwiłowicz and Wałęsa, the actors and characters of Man of Iron, toreminisce with him on the 1980s and imagine the future of Solidarity.Małgorzata Szumowska talks about her father, an oppositional journalist.Other directors, such as Jan Jakub Kolski and Filip Bajon, include intheir narratives characters named after them, respectively Janek andFilip.Of course, this prevalence of personal stories in the film pointsto the domination of (private) memory over (public) history.Solidarity,Solidarity & draws attention to the fluid character of both memory andhistory and the need to represent the past over and over again, jux-taposing, clashing and synthesising the testimonies of witnesses andthose who have only mediated access to past events.In the last film to discuss in this section, Dom zły (The Dark House,2009), directed by Wojciech Smarzowski, the work of memory is mostforegrounded.The film is set in several planes of action, each marked by adistinctive cinematography.One is the year 1978, when a zootechnician(a profession strongly associated with the communist past, nowadayspractically extinct), named Edward Zrodoń, on his way to his new job inthe cooperative farm (PGR) stops at a farmhouse belonging to the Dziabasfamily in the remote area of the Bieszczady mountains (Figure 4.3).Thesecond plot is set during a winter day in 1982, shortly after the imposi-tion of martial law in Poland.A police investigation team is visiting acrime scene, trying to solve a multiple murder case from four years ago.The third temporal order is only indicated by the occasional changesin colour to black and white and the freezing of frame in the secondnarrative.These changes can be explained by the fact that one of thepolicemen makes a video-film during the investigation, to documentthe place of the crime.Yet, in my view, they also suggest that what weare watching is the reconstruction/recreation of the past made fromtoday s, post-martial-law perspective.Although Polish reviewers did not notice, or did not regard it asimportant to mention, this third perspective and plan of action, prac-tically all of them pondered on the intertextual character of The DarkHouse.Jacek Szczerba of Gazeta Wyborcza even offered to the readersa Short Guide to The Dark House, listing numerous antecedents toSmarzowski s film, such as Fargo (1996) by the Coen Brothers, a playNiespodzianka (Surprise) by Karol Hubert Rostworowski, and its twotelevision adaptations, as well as Shakespeare s Macbeth and the paint-ings of Pieter Bruegel (Szczerba 2009).In addition, The Dark House alsoPolish Martial Law on Screen 159Figure 4.3 Marian Dziędziel as Zdzisław Dziabas and Arkadiusz Jakubik as EdwardZrodoń in Dom zły (The Dark House, 2009), directed by Wojciech Smarzowskiresembles Gruz 200 (Cargo 200, 2007) by Aleksey Balabanov and harksback to Smarzowski s previous film, Wesele (The Wedding, 2004), alsoset in the Polish province and focusing on the primitivism, greed andbarbarity of its inhabitants.Yet, even those critics who were most suc-cessful in cataloguing the items in Smarzowski s intertextual luggageadmitted that his film works very well as a realistic story about Polandbefore and during martial law.In my view, the references to other worksare mobilised to create rather economically a synthetic view of Polandin this period.To this portrayal I would like to turn now.Smarzowski shows us the events taking place in one house, belongingto the Dziabas family, where hideous crimes took place and were inves-tigated with a delay.This house is a metonym of the Polish provincewhich, in turn, stands for the whole country.The house is really darkor, according to the original title, bad or evil.Everything there turnsout to be vicious: people who initially offer the stranger friendship andcooperation, treat him badly and destroy themselves in the process [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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