Poland Daily: Economy, Work, Consumption and Social Class in Polish Cinema by Ewa Mazierska (review)

Poland Daily, Ewa Mazierska's extensive new study of Polish cinema, is a bold and welcome act of revisionism in the field of Eastern European cinemas. Its freshness of perspective applies most obviously to its chief critical objective, which is to retell the history of Polish screen imagery 'from below', that is, with regard to the representation of the lives – and, above all, livelihoods – of ordinary Polish citizens. In a striking departure from the traditional emphasis on Polish film's preoccupation with war, defeat, and the more lavish tragedies of history, the characters who populate Mazierska's book are not resistance fighters, martyrs or soldiers, but manual labourers, technicians, functionaries, small-time entrepreneurs and, not least, prostitutes. Sex work has been a surprisingly recurrent presence in Polish film and one skilfully employed as a kind of gauge of shifting realities and attitudes, from a problem lamented in patriarchal and conservative terms during Poland's interwar and communist years to something upheld as 'wonderful work' amid the widespread unemployment of the 1990s.

The book is structured in a lucid chronological fashion covering, over its three respective parts, the interwar years, the state socialist period, and the post-communist, neoliberal era. Each part is preceded by a condensed but detailed social, economic and political survey of the specific period together with a summary of developments in the film industry. This historical material, together with the wealth of films analysed in detail, make the book, among other things, an excellent and thorough primer on Polish film and social history. If certain familiar points of reference (Wajda's war trilogy, for instance) are, in the interests of thematic focus, absent here, there are whole forms, even whole periods, of cinema that come into overdue visibility.

Mazierska is judicious, for instance, with Poland's silent period, often written off or contrasted negatively with other silent cinemas, and notes that while interwar cinema at large was threadbare, "provincial and amateurish," it could also produce "magical spectacles" (73). In her hands, this unashamedly entertainment-driven era of melodramas, comedies and musicals is also shown to be socially telling, even if the solutions it offers to undesirable realities are themselves often of a magical sort. More strikingly still, Mazierska reassesses the abject, shame-ridden cinema of 1950s socialist realism, considering these films in terms of that aesthetic's actual goals – as activist 'works in progress' – and showing how, in such areas as the representation of women, these pedestrian and exhortative works now appear in even a better light than the freer, more sophisticated films of the 1960s. It is refreshing too to see Polish documentaries included alongside narrative features, and to see documentary considered not merely as verification of the fictional representations but as a form with its own aesthetic and discursive history.

Most importantly, the book's thematic reclamation of the lowly and unsung includes rescuing Polish popular cinema from its longstanding status among critics of condescension and neglect, challenging any simplistic equation of auteurism and subversive critique, of popular cinema and conformism. She even argues that in the 1970s popular films "became the new avant-garde" (187), highlighting, say, the experimentally episodic, mosaic-like structure of Piwowski's Cruise (Rejs, 1970) as well as that film's withering vision of 'bad work' and regulated leisure. That said, her admirably attentive and searching analysis also suggests how this nominally critical portrait of Polish 'real' socialism might equally evoke pleasure (and, nowadays, nostalgia) and how the filmmaker's attitude towards his under-educated subjects is not free of its own condescension.

It is Mazierska's sensitivity to the ambivalence at work in her selected texts, as well as to their divergences of perspective on the same periods and phenomena, that stops the book from offering an overly unified or monolithic image of any given era. Similarly, the book refuses to consign the films to being mere slavish reflections of existing social life...