Embracing Arms: Cultural Representation of Slavic and Balkan Women in War

Chapter 1 Invisible Deaths: Polish Cinema’s Representation of Women in World War II

Chapter 1 Invisible Deaths: Polish Cinema’s Representation of Women in World War II Elżbieta Ostrowska Entering the “Forbidden Zone” In her essay “Women in the Forbidden Zone: War, Women, and Death,” Margaret R. Higonnet notes that “death, it seems, is indeed what differentiates men from women in wartime […] war and death are understood to define manhood” (1993, 193). For women, she argues, war and war death constitute a forbidden zone. This symbolic exclusion seems to operate not only within real life experience but is also worked through in cultural representations, though recently films have offered images of female war heroism that attract serious critical attention.1 The discursive dichotomy of war experience and its cultural representations described by Higonnet can also be applied to the Polish experience of the Second World War. While direct military confrontation between Poland and Germany in 1939 lasted less than two months, the beginning of the Nazi occupation marked the immediate development of an underground movement on Polish soil. Women entered the “forbidden zone” of armed resistance against the Nazis soon after Germany became the occupying 1 As, for example, in Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick 1996), in which a heroic female death is initially denied to save the masculine notion of honor and bravery (see Tasker 2005, 172–89). 30 EMBRACING ARMS power.2 The climactic point in breaking with the traditional gendering of war was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the iconography of which ushered women into “the forbidden zone.” Many Polish films representing the Second World War and Nazi occupation offer images of courageous women and girls, often shown as holding significant positions within underground formations and performing heroic deeds. Contrary to Higgonet’s binary model, they also die. Their deaths, however, rarely occur on screen. Despite their entry into the masculine zone of war and death in actual historical experience, Polish women’s participation has not been adequately represented within Polish cinema, evidenced by the virtual absence of on-screen images of their deaths, probably motivated by ideological considerations. It is my contention that this unrepresented death serves as a “structuring absence” that governs the systematic signifying practices of Polish cinema. This absent female death assumes greater significance if juxtaposed with the abundant images of male death, usually represented as a lavish visual spectacle. Whereas the 2 In her introduction to the non-fiction book Girls from “Umbrella” [Dziewczęta z “Parasola”], documenting Polish women’s contribution to the fight against the Nazi occupier during the Second World War, Danuta Kaczyńska, herself a member of the resistance movement, writes: “Bullets did not spare us, we got injured, we got shot as often as our male fellows, if not more often” (5). The content of the book confirms this introductory statement, giving numerous examples of female bravery in acts that frequently resulted in death. Polish society tends to be fairly ignorant of such facts, for although it is common knowledge that women were involved in the resistance movement and participated in the Warsaw Uprising, they are usually perceived as merely supporting their male fellows in the fight. Kaczyńska’s book does not by any means offers a revisionist perspective on wartime femininity; nor does it attempt to equate female fighters with the masculine model of wartime heroism. On the contrary, the author presents material that expands the concept of war heroism. She foregrounds the significance of ordinary everyday activities that are usually absent in cultural representations of the Second World War, as they do not easily lend themselves to the processes of mythmaking. She provides readers with material that helps them to see heroism beyond the framework of the familiar ruling myths. Interestingly, she often draws on male testimonies to enhance the ordinary heroism of female conspirators. For example, she includes Eugeniusz Schielberg’s account of his experience of the illegal transport of weapons, which was most often a female job: 31 Invisible Deaths masculine body is often displayed for the viewer’s gaze as vulnerable and damaged—especially in Andrzej Wajda’s war films—the female body is largely kept intact even when lifeless. Most frequently, the death of female characters is overwhelmingly marked by their disappearance . My chapter examines various narrative and visual strategies employed by major Polish filmmakers to render the female wounded body or female death invisible within the celluloid fictional world. Such an examination will reveal the ideological underpinnings of these...