To understand Poland of the 1970s and ’80s, the years that gave rise to most of the nonfiction films in this series, we must look to its history and geography. Situated in Eastern Europe, between two powerful neighbors Germany and Russia, Poland has suffered multiple parti- tions, invasions, and wars in its long existence. The Polish language was also at times forbidden by the occupying powers, stoking the Poles’ fierce sense of national unity. It is then no surprise that the painful experience of war overshadowed the childhoods of some of this series’ filmmakers: Grzegorz Królikiewicz, born in 1939, months before the outbreak of World War II, lost his father to the German prisoner-of-war camps; Marcel Łoziński, born in Paris a year later, spent most of the war in orphan- ages while his parents fought in the French Resistance. The war leveled Poland’s cities and took over 6 million lives. Then, with the Yalta Treaty, the country fell under Joseph Stalin’s protectorate. It became a communist sat- ellite. During the 1950s’ bloody settling of scores, Stalin’s henchmen hunted down, murdered, or deported the anti-communist Home Army (AK)—the same soldiers who had waged partisan warfare against the Nazis. This violence and the crimes that the Soviets had committed against Poles during the war became taboo to speak of. Królikiewicz and Łoziński would break it in the 1990s, but for decades Poles lived with the bitter knowledge that there was a glaring discrepancy between history as it had actually happened and as it appeared in textbooks or in the state-controlled media. Meanwhile, a brief political thaw after 1956 made
fictional retellings of war heroism possible. It gave rise to the Polish Film School, with classics such as Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds or Andrzej Munk’s Heroism and Bad Luck. Also in the 1950s and ’60s, precur- sors to the nonfiction filmmakers in this series rallied for broad social changes. Among them, Kazimierz Karabasz
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and Władysław Ślesicki signaled the Polish artists’ desire to break with the suffocating rhetoric of socialist real- ism, after Stalin’s death in 1953 freed them to explore subjects previously considered untouchable. Karabasz and his peers documented abysmal housing conditions, empty stores, vandalism, and systemic failures in educa- tion and health care in what became known as the “black series” documentaries. They wanted to liberate nonfic- tion cinema from functioning as a servile propagandist tool, which had showed reality as it should be rather than as it was. Thus, they no longer manipulated reality to ideological ends but rather observed it. This period of the so-called small stabilization ended
when Eastern Bloc troops invaded Prague in 1968. In a way, 1968, with all the pent-up violence it unleashed, is the instigating point for this series. Throughout the 1970s, Poles went on massive strikes. It was an era of police brutality but also of workers learning to orga- nize and to defend themselves. In film, the “black series” nonfiction filmmakers had paved the way for feature fic- tion directors such as Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Agnieszka Holland, who gave rise to the cinema of moral concern, pitting an individ- ual in a desperate fight against the corrupt state. But the younger nonfiction filmmakers were also ready to make their mark—among them, Królikiewicz, Łoziński, and Wojciech Wiszniewski made feature-length debuts, while Bogdan Dziworski produced increasingly auda- cious shorts. These filmmakers honored Karabasz’s Griersonian vision but defied his purely observational style. This new group came into its own in the late 1970s and early ’80s, a period of general radicalization. Just as in politics, so in art: it had become clear that the attempts to confront the system had not yet shaken it. The coun- try was stagnating, and Poland’s workers and artists were becoming restless.
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