negotiations known as the Round Table Talks, which took place between the regime and Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, Poland’s dictatorship ended without bloodshed. In 1989, the country held its first democratic elections in over fifty years. Most filmmakers in this series have had long careers that necessarily inter- twine with Poland’s intricate history. The series itself, however,
focuses on the HOW TO LIVE
Lenin Shipyards spread to other cities. At that time, many artists were passionately involved in the rapid political changes taking place (Królikiewicz and Łoziński would go on to make films about Solidarity’s key figures). Their cheers, however, were premature—Solidarity, at one point a union over 10 million strong, was dissolved in the winter of 1981. The Communist Party leader, General Jaruzelski, announced martial law. How to Live, which had finally been shown that year, was shelved again while fiction filmmak- ers such as Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Andrzej Wajda (whose Man of Steel epitomized the spirit of renewal) either stayed abroad or emigrated. Solidarity’s members were imprisoned or went underground. Only after the Eastern Bloc’s political landscape began to change again did Poland and its artists regain their autonomy. In the Soviet Union, this meant Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (“restructuring”) reforms. In Poland, after three months of
6
1970s and ’80s, on early experiments with form. Despite their overarching ten- dency towards metaphor and allusion, necessitated to some extent by state cen- sorship, the filmmakers show an impres- sively wide range of artistic modes and methods. Some catch the powerful in a lie, others demystify the regime’s dubious iconography, and still others introduce a
radical aesthetic borrowed from the visual arts. Łoziński, who trained as an engineer before discovering his pas- sion for film, investigates sociological mechanisms in intricate, wry psychodramas that speak directly to Polish realities. His works also probe memory, particu- larly his later, more introspective films. Królikiewicz, a longtime professor at the Łódź Film School who studied law before choosing directing, casts light on Poland’s social castaways in his striking hybrid films, which meld factual sources and persons. Wiszniewski, another lifetime Łódź resident, attacks government propaganda and worker-state myths in highly baroque tableaux. Meanwhile Dziworski, though no less a visual artist, favors a more contrapuntal technique, empha- sizing repetition and rhythm in films that range from movement studies to whimsical portraits. Among the younger generation, Drygas returns to the politically
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