The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities

3. Contiguous: The German-Polish Interzone

Chapter 3 Contiguous The German-Polish Interzone We attend to the interzones that conciliate because we cannot assume that neighbors have contact with each other or that people living side by side willcommunicatewitheachother.Interzonesaremorethanandlessthanpoints ofcontact;theyarethespaceswherethatwhichissundered,rent,anddivided, adjusts, concedes, compounds, and ameliorates; the interzone is that space in which a negotiation of difference transpires. This negotiation allows contact between and among those who would otherwise not find themselves on commonground .InPosenintheearlypartofthetwentiethcentury,preciselyduring that period of rupture and division, in the “shatterzone” as Bartov and Weitz have called it, the Palace cinema of Franciszek Dymarski and Herman Mittelst ädt offered an important meeting space in the context of the new technology of cinema and its entertainments. On the geopolitical level it is indeed possible that state borders can demarcate a barrier across which there is silence. It is a matter of understatement to note that World War II had devastating effects on German Polish relations. The Palace and all such spaces were gone. It is a further matter of understatement to note that the war had a devastating effect on both the German and the Polish film industry. The common cinematic apparatus was sundered and silence dominated for decades. If the previous chapter focused on the period of the postimperial, this chapter then returns us to the period of the transition from the national to the transnational. It explores the quality of the cinematic apparatus to reach across borders and to conciliate the divided. Contiguous • 77 Interruption in Communication: The Image of the West in Poland In terms of nation-building in the postwar period, one of the “positive” results might be considered that it resulted in a clear distinction of film industries. The cinematic and state apparatus on both sides of the border aligned well if notfully.UndertheplannedeconomyinthePeople’sRepublic,theannualPolish film production was around thirty feature films per year, roughly the same number of films produced by the DEFA studios in East Germany. The West German film industry, although it experienced significant market swings, was largerthanboththeEastGermanandPolishfilmindustriesbytwotofourtimes. Nevertheless, in these new (inter)national conditions, it lost the role it played inthepastasthecenteroffilmproductionforCentralandEasternEurope.The relations among the three film industries were tenuous at best, with a general turning away of all three from the immediate neighbors. Intheseconditionswecannoteaturntonationalorientedspectatorship.In the1950sandintothe1960s,inWestGermanyfilmcouldcontendrelativelysuccessfullywithstrongcompetitioninthetheatersfromHollywoodproductions . The productions of the DEFA film studios in the GDR confronted a repressive StalinistculturaldictateandfrequentcensorshipsothattheblossomingofGDR filmtookplacelaterthantheneighboringcountries.InthePeople’sRepublicof Poland,theorientationtowardnationalproductionswasstrongestandlongest lasting. Stanisław Kuszewski reports, for instance, that although Polish films comprised only 11–12 percent of the market, they drew 34 percent of the audience , indicating an audience with a strong orientation toward the productions of the national cinema. This number is made more significant by the fact that the films had to compete with an equivalent number of films from the Soviet UnionandfromHollywood,aswellassignificantnumbersoffilmsfromFrance (twenty-one in 1973), Italy, and Great Britain.1 Thematically in Germany, both East and West, the neighbor to the East did notappearonthescreen.InPolandhowever,theGermanwasaconstantfigure. The new conditions removed the market limits to antagonistic filmwork discussed in the previous chapter, and thus the German figure came to serve as a negativenationalfoil.JustastheIIIReichandantifascismservedanimportant ideological function in the cinema of the GDR, the III Reich and the German as NazioccupierwasarepeatedmotifofPolishcinema.Furthermore,though,the Poles reached further back into the Prussian past. In building on a memory of division and occupation through representations of the Germans, in part Polish film also alluded, albeit obliquely, to that which could not be displayed or discussed. The image of the German was an image of trauma and anxiety that 78 • Chapter 3 referenced both the Nazi and Prussian past but also the Warsaw Pact present and the Russians as occupiers. In the period 1946–1975 every sixth film was set in World War II, and Kuszewski notes that numerous other films contained sequences set during that period.2 Asnotedthereareafewexceptionstothedisruptionincommunication.Na Krawedzi[OntheEdge] (Podgorski, 1972) tells an action espionage cross-border tale under the influence of the Cold War. A decade later, during the period of martial law in Poland a few directors worked outside the country under conditions of greater artistic freedom and during that time Krzysztof Zanussi filmed Imperativ (1982) in Germany.3 A wordy art film with an international cast, the film exhibits a certain neutrality toward Germany. PerhapsthemostsignificantexceptionwasAndrzejWajda’sadaptationofZiemiaObiecana [ThePromisedLand](1975).WładysławReymont’sclassicofPolish literaturesissetinturn-of-the-centuryŁódźandtellsthetaleofthreefriends—a Pole, a Jew, and a German—who set out to make their fortune in the booming...