Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (31 page)

Yet the way the film posits questions about the aesthetic and political quality of the forbidden Sotsrealist materials is surprising
in its subtlety and intelligence. Wajda didn’t use a single second of ‘real’ archive materials, and every black-and-white newsreel or old propagandistic fragment we watch is utterly fabricated by the director. Through the eyes of Agnieszka, as she slowly discovers the mystery of Birkut, embodying the time of the title’s Great Heroes made by the state, we are also ravished and gradually seduced by the aesthetics that accompanied them. Wajda, obviously on Birkut’s side, finds himself unable to simply mock sotsrealism. And in the end, he unconsciously adopts some of its principles - heroism, monumentalism, pathos, characters so positive that they’re rendered incredible - to make the second part of his film,
Man of Iron
, situated in the Solidarity strikes in the Gdansk shipyards in summer 1980.

Agnieszka doubly represents her generation here – the same who abroad sang ‘we could be heroes” or “no more heroes”, where heroes disappeared, because either their time has passed or they got discredited. Way ahead of the later Hollywood use of fabricated old newsreels (as in the dreadful
Forrest Gump
and Woody Allen’s superior
Zelig
), Wajda posits the question of the authenticity of history as historical material and also as a style, which, now forgotten and denounced, is at every step being recontextualized in his film by the sheer stylization of what “has been”. The episodes from Birkut’s life are constantly flirting with socialist realism, the then-compulsory style, using its strictly monumental features to the utmost filmic effect. Is Wajda endorsing sotsrealism or ridiculing it? Is he in favor, fascinated or just coldly looking at it? Is he just quoting Eisenstein, or playing with old cinema, a style that in the West, was already then known as “postmodernism”? He’s doing all of those things at once. Through the use of the wonderful, mimetic/illusionist powers of the cinema, we at the same time watch the illusion AND the forbidden archive material which was supposed to rot away from the public eye in the cellars forever.

The film is the first proper reassessment of socialist realism not only in Polish cinema, but also in visual arts. Agnieszka, this new,
dynamic woman symbolizing her own time in the best sense, is suddenly confronted with a past she has no grasp of. Her film on Birkut is pulled, she’s hopeless, she blames herself for opening too many wounds from Birkut’s life – but that brings her to his estranged son, a former student, who, in a typical idealistic romantic gesture drops education and starts working in a factory, as a belated homage to the killed father, to his memory and to affirm his working-class background.

4.10 Men as Giants. Wajda repeats the Sotsrealist Gesture in Man of Marble

Krystyna Janda, playing Agnieszka, embodied a new woman – a bit imaginary, with a bit of wishful thinking, being bold, forthright and jeans-clad, fearless and self-assured. She was a feminist without even realizing it. She looks exactly as if she came from a Second Wave demo or a women’s lib Agnes Varda feminist film. She was a feminist, in a patriarchal socialist Poland full of open sexism, and what’s more, men recognized her as their equal and respected her. To this day I think Agnieszka was a phantom. She never really existed, she was the projection of a director who wanted a real opposite gender partner whom he respected, although she may be partly based on Agnieszka Holland, prominent director of the Cinema of Moral Concern, who also later became famous in Hollywood. In this sense Agnieszka’s fate was prophetic of many Polish women involved in conspiratory politics, the Solidarity movement – and there was no shortage of women in the democratic opposition – who never really reached any significant positions first within the union, and then within the party system or government in “free” Poland. Their often-crucial role was never properly acknowledged. This is predicted in the film, by the sudden change Agnieszka undergoes, when she becomes the companion and wife of Birkut Jr, and later a mother of his child in
Man of Iron.
Her decisiveness disappears, she is interned in prison,
from which she’s beatified in her role as a suffering mother, subjugated both to ‘the cause’ and her husband, a Gdansk shipyard worker.

Even the characteristic transubstantiation of matter from one film to another – from Marble, symbolizing the Stalinist past, to Iron, symbolizing the iron will and boldness of the Gdańsk shipyard resistance, no doubt - rings ironic, given who used “Man of Steel” as his pseudonym.
Man of Iron
represented the optimism of Solidarity’s first years, completed during the euphoria of Gdansk in summer 1980, only partly predicting that what will happen will be another facadism of behind-closed-doors decisions, and yet another betrayal of the workers. It also glossed over the ideological discrepancies and disagreements within Solidarity itself. It’s an incredibly idealistic image of the time, the way Wajda would have liked things to happen: people getting together, a peaceful revolution and a more just world for all. Today we know, too bitterly, how wrong he was, yet it’s intriguing that when given an opportunity to finally show Polish society in its most ideal form, he chose an idealized realism – the very style he was supposed to reject.

And what about Agnieszka, our absent Woman of Marble? There’s another aspect to the film, which became clear with the next leading role of Krystyna Janda, only year later in 1981, in Ryszard Bugajski’s
Interrogation
, where Stalinist repressions were shown from another angle, in the most shocking depiction of that period ever committed to the screen. After playing her contemporary, obsessed with the Stalinist past and doing their victims justice, Janda took the part of one of
them.
In
Interrogation
(finished just a few days before Martial Law was declared that December) she’s playing Tonia, a revue-cabaret singer and dancer, touring with a troupe and performing for soldiers and peasants across the miserable landscape of the ruined post-war country. Living the life of a gypsy, careless, constantly under the influence of alcohol, she doesn’t even notice when one day she’s captured by two hangers-on
and taken to the secret police commissariat. There she is brutally groped as part of a “forensic examination” while she’s still unconscious from alcohol.

This symbolic “rape” of her body is done repeatedly by other means, when she’s thrown like a sack of potatoes to the overcrowded cell and then wakes up to gradually realise what has happened to her. She’s accused of collaboration with “the enemies of the people”, and her reaction suggests she didn’t even realise these Stalinist processes and purges were going on behind the closed doors. Despite her initial fragility and erratic, unreliable character, the more atrocities, humiliation, violence, terror and abuse she experiences from her secret police perpetrators (the terrifying Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, Security Police), mostly psychotic sadists, to “break” her, the more defiant and stronger she grows. Fascinatingly, Bugajski shows Stalinism as indeed the nightmare of patriarchy as such: from the female victim’s perspective and with men as their ruthless abusers, predominantly as a specific abuse done to women’s bodies. Feminine Tonia is, in the course of the tortures (she’s near-drowned, beaten, isolated, refused food, kept awake, used sexually, denied contacts with her family and finally betrayed by her husband) turned into a pale ghost of herself, with her charms erased, as a special kind of humiliation – to leave a permanent sign. But she grows something else instead: courage, strong will and fearlessness in the face of the state repression apparatus. She’s repressed as a woman: her interrogations are to prove her fault on the basis of her promiscuity and humiliate her chiefly as a “whore” without dignity who sleeps around, so that she’s in a way punished for her sluttiness, not for real treason against the state.

The “treason” is typically Kafkaesque, and the punishment is for something she hasn’t done but she’s supposed to realise as her guilt. In the course of the film also her “fault” becomes meaningless: her oppressors don’t really care what she’s done, the only thing that matters is her
self-criticism
, admitting the crimes she
hasn’t committed (because the socialist state “never makes mistakes”), written and signed, and this is exactly the thing Tonia repeatedly denies them. It’s also a story of solidarity growing in most uninviting conditions: the brutalized women in the cells, apart from the expected brutality to one another, express also solidarity and mutual support. Janda opposed the initial script with her character as a victim and rebelled against her role as somebody broken, creating a rare if not unique feminine perspective on the atrocities of the worst period of Stalinism with a woman as an individual, free subject. In this way she widened the historical construction to incorporate also the woman - the
other
of history, absent from the pages of books and largely absent from cinematography, where only the heroic male perspective was favored. She was reclaiming the Women of Marble, the Unknown Heroines, how different and yet similar in their naïve heroism to Mateusz Birkut, both even after the damage is done still believing that justice will prevail. Yet
Interrogation
is the underbelly of
Man of Marble
, where all the sotsrealist decorum is stripped away for the sake of the naked horror of torture away from the officiality and the public, where it’s the women, who pay the political price. Also, in
Interrogation
, the divides in social class and background between the women inmates were becoming invisible, they became equals – and in this way Tonia, as a female heroine, stands for all the forgotten women of socialism, of all social classes whose work and contribution has been neglected.

What is the contemporary socialist realism? One could definitely think here of today’s Russia, with all its comeback of the bombastic Tsarist aesthetic and the great-master tastes of its business aristocracy – oligarchy as a sad façade of its undemocratic political processes. Recently Vladimir Putin brought back the Stalinist award ‘Hero of Labor’, among whose previous recipients are Stalin, Khrushchev and Sakharov. Some people could instantly think of
this as an act of completion of the restalinization of Russia. But let this not mislead us. If anything, the massive Soviet nostalgia of contemporary Russia is another façade: a façade designed to hide the degree of neoliberalism in the Putin era. As many Russians, whose lives got worse after 1991, yearn for the ‘comeback’ of the old times, Putin cynically tunes in to those moods by creating a façade of a strong, resilient country, with election candies such as the reinstatement of the Prize. Yet this action should pass as nothing more than cynical play at the masses, aimed also at winding up all the liberal intellectuals, who much in the style of the nineteenth-century “pro-Westerners” sigh at it with disgust. Their main medium is a magazine called
Snob
, after all. One facadism is replaced with another. It inscribes itself within the whole presidency of Putin, whose main feature seems to be in combining the lure of the old times with a ruthless, galloping oligarchical theocracy.

What then, in a time of self-marginalization of arts as a “mirror to reality”, still plays the role attributed to socialist realism, depicting totality while retaining a mass appeal and on a mass scale? What are most discussed as a new form of depicting the current late capitalist reality are TV serials.
The Wire
, but also
The Sopranos
(the earliest, which started the whole trend) and recently, the Danish
The Killing
are all multifaceted, mosaic, complicated portrayals of the world-system; and its history is depicted in
Mad Men
, whose creator, Matthew Weiner says he’d ideally lead his characters until the present. What
Mad Men
does with the 60s,
The Wire
does with the contemporary neoliberal world. It is, by far, the most complete, dense and complex rendition of how the contemporary world, or the contemporary neoliberal city, in this case, is functioning. It also has a very nineteenth-century development, unfolding characters and plots like in a classic novel. Many interpreters of
The Wire
have recalled Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping”, dating from his
Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism.
Initially, Jameson’s concept was purely
metaphorical, taken from spatial methods of analyzing culture. What Jameson meant was art that cognitively “maps” the reality that has seemingly become unrepresentable. What he writes about is an art that instils class-consciousness towards capitalist reality, which, as an American academic, he couldn’t just explicitly use as a concept.

Jameson, influenced by the Lacanian distinction between reality/realism and the “real”, takes up once again the problem of representation, in which he observes among other things, in a search for some kind of new totality, how “a certain unifying and totalizing force is presupposed here, although it is not the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, nor the party, nor Stalin, but simply capital itself”. He took up the concept of totality again, after Lukács, posing a question of totality vs. partiality against the growing unpopularity of ‘totality’ as a concept, which came largely after the 1968 generation “discovered” Stalinist crimes and started identifying every attempt at totality as a straight path to the gulag. Totality as a concept was passé. Another question is that of representation. Postmodernist art’s role was, via means like dispersion of form, to make the world unintelligible, convincing the viewer/reader that he cannot grasp the total view of reality. It is not enough just to “come back” to the old ideas of the avant-garde, even if such an operation was possible. Jameson brings back instead the idea of critical realism. The more ‘realistic’ ideas of the iconoclastic, critical avant-garde could also be part of this, to mention only the
sachlichkeit
of Brecht or John Heartfield, which came up with an augmented, sharpened realism, creating the
Verfremdungseffekt
, alienation effect, while still using a ‘realistic’ method of representation.