No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period by Anna Krakus (review)

In a powerful scene from Krzysztof Zanussi's 1978 film Camouflage (Barwy ochronne), an actress recites Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski's poem to participants of an academic summer school. But her audience is consumed by a petty, nasty intrigue – the expulsion of a rebellious student from the school. The actress exclaims, "Oh life, life and constant concern for the accuracy of a step (one has to make)". Zanussi magnified the irony of the scene by casting in the role of the artist Halina Mikołajska, a Polish actress blacklisted for her role in the democratic opposition of the 1970s. Camouflage is a key example of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety (kino moralnego niepokoju), the second flagship of Polish cinema (the Polish School being the first), which offered a biting critique of a society in crisis and corruption under the rule of Edward Gierek (1970-1980).

It is baffling how underrepresented and often misunderstood the Cinema of Moral Anxiety is in film studies and historical research outside Poland. How was it possible that the state-owned film industry produced and distributed movies that polemised with its patron? What does it tell us about the late socialist period in Poland? And why did its appeal and impact remain confided to Poland only? These questions still await answers. Not a single book has been published on this subject in English, whereas only one monograph, Dobrochna Dabert's 2003 Kino moralnego niepokoju, exists in Polish.

Although Anna Krakus's No End in Sight is not a history of the Cinema of Moral Anxiety it analyses auteurs and titles often associated with this formation. The book comes across as original, refreshing and thought-provoking. Krakus has a penchant for making bold, sweeping statements that she convincingly verifies through effective writing, rigid analysis, and engaging narratives. Rarely have I read a first monograph which conveyed so much confidence and resourcefulness; this is by far the most intriguing English-language study of Polish cinema and its relationship with Marxism-Leninism published in recent years.

Firmly based in cultural analysis, No End in Sight focuses on the last two decades of the communist rule in Poland that saw the increased production of films with inconclusive narratives. Krakus calls this tendency "aesthetic unfinalizability" (2). This "refusal to end" constituted a "radical political act" against Marxist historical teleology, which promised the coming of socialist utopia (4). Krakus argues that this choice to avoid narrative closures not only reflected scepticism about Communism and disbelief in its ideological claims, but also documented a bid for alternative historiography, narratives and identities, all polemical in relation to the official discourse. These films, the author observes, "were also (…) questioning whether the People's Republic of Poland truly belonged to the Polish people (110)."

Rather than structuring her study chronologically or by sections devoted to specific directors, Krakus divides the book into four thematic chapters. Chapter one reconstructs the process of creation; chapter two links projections of inconclusive deaths to "the death of the [Marxist-Leninist] trope of immortality (66);" chapter three documents the contestation of socialist patriotism and its claims to represent national sovereignty; chapter four focuses on "plots of aimless movements" that question the very progression of historical time. The concluding postlude looks at Polish cinema after the exit from Communism.

By focusing on the phenomenon of open-ended movies, Krakus relates her study to the classic, transnational trope in film studies, recurrent in the examination of arthouse cinema. In doing so, she escapes the entrapment of narrow, nation-based and historicist approaches that have often permeated studies on Polish film. The selection of filmmakers also confirms her self-proclaimed transnational perspective. Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski are the most recognizable Polish filmmakers worldwide; Krzysztof Zanussi and Wojciech Has, partly in the shadow of the aforementioned two, also enjoyed critical international reception. Tadeusz Konwicki may be relatively unknown to Western cinephiles, but is a recognizable figure for...