“The fascination with dead forms was a key element of our culture.” —film critic TADEUSZ SOBOLEWSKI
“Wiszniewski leaves the problem of truth to the spectator.” —HENRYK WANIEK, actor in Wiszniewski’s Story of a Certain Love Affair
Echoing Karl Marx, the Czechoslovak writer Milan Kundera once wrote that history repeated itself “first as a tragedy, then as a farce.” Kundera, like many Marxist intellectuals of his time, be it in Prague, Warsaw, or London, eventually soured on ideology. The period after World War II had been a spree to rebuild the devastated European cities, but also a time of crazed Stalinist witch- hunts for “foreign spies.” After the carnival of evil—tor- tures, political trials and murders, the invasion of Prague in 1968—there was a sense by the 1970s that history had entered a new stage, wearing a clown’s mask. It is this specter of history, of absurdity and hopelessness, that haunt the chimeric films of Wojciech Wiszniewski. Like Marcel Łoziński, Wiszniewski studied at the Łódź
Film School under the legendary Polish documentarian Kazimierz Karabasz. And like Łoziński, he strayed from the master’s more strictly observational ethos. In 1975, Wiszniewski wrote in a magazine, Studio, “Through its constant exploitation, television has discredited ‘the talk- ing heads’ formula. Now the only option left is a cinema that is truly polemical, suggestive in its creative form, making use of symbols, metaphors and allegories. A work that seeks synthesis and whose vision of the world is dialectical.” Wiszniewski’s quest for dialectics spurred him to use the medium in a self-reflexive manner. He deconstructed images and borrowed freely from public
discourse, mainly from propaganda, to then discredit it. In a sense, he presaged our contemporary concerns with the power and manipulation of mass media. He did it with an unparalleled artistic gumption. Long after the old slogans have become faint echoes of once living lan- guage, his images have the power to ignite. History enters as farce in Wiszniewski’s stylistically
daring Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver, made in 1975. Just over twenty minutes, the color short is an embodiment of Wiszniewski’s artistic cri de coeur: It parades as a biopic but is so ostentatiously staged it stands the dichotomy of nonfiction vs. fiction, unmediated truth vs. artistic construct on its head. The eponymous Gościmińska is a real-life weaver, once a national poster girl for skyrocket productivity. Retired, she has been relegated to recap- ping her illustrious career at socialist student meetings. As in Foreman on a Farm and Man Who Fulfilled 552% Quota, his other films about worker-heroes whose prodi- gious feats inspire envy, in Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver, Wiszniewski confronts the actual person with her myth. Somewhere in the process of becoming a class fighter, this ordinary woman has lost her individuality. We see this as Wanda stands under a sprawling social-realist poster of her young visage. As the camera pans, the gar- ish image thwarts her figure. In fact, almost everything in Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver is grotesquely scaled: an
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