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Dreaming of a Kingdom Not of This World: Film Dissent in the USSR and the Soviet Bloc
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14095 |
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THE ARTS
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1 / 1988 |
2,651 Words |
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Paul Coates
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One of the most exciting phenomena in the cinema of the late seventies and early eighties was the emergence of richly varied opposition filmmakers in the Soviet bloc, particularly in Poland and Hungary. Wajda's Man of Marble, Zanussi's Camouflage, Pal Gabor's Angi Vera, and Karoly Makk's Another Way spearheaded a movement that radically revised state sponsored pieties concerning the postwar history of Eastern Europe, and--in Poland, at least--bridged that gulf between art cinema and the commercial industry, the intelligentsia and the mass audience, often encountered in Western cinema.
One may wonder about the state of these movements now that glasnost is being so acclaimed in the USSR. How has it affected the Polish and Hungarian cinemas, given the relative autonomy Eastern bloc countries enjoy in the choice of methods for enforcing orthodoxy? And exactly how critical is a film like the USSR's much-lauded Repentance of official versions of recent history compared with, say, Poland's Man of Marble?
Signs of Cracks
A viewing of the Polish and Hungarian films screened at the 1987 Montreal Film Festival confirms one's impression that the Polish and Hungarian movements have passed their heyday. Martial law dispersed the opposition Polish directors. Agnieszka Holland and Bugajski left Poland, and only the most established directors (such as Wajda and Zanussi) were able to retain sufficient independence to work abroad to make it worth their while staying. Yet even they had to settle for a depoliticization of their work, since there is no international film market for local Polish problems. Polish authorities are hardly likely to fund probes into the psychopathology of their own everyday life. If there are recent signs of cracks in the ice--Feliks Falk's 1986 Hero of the Year and the belated release of Kieslowski's masterpiece No End (of which more later)--they do not seem to presage any larger thaw. Soviet response to the proclamation of glasnost has resulted in the release of works of a freshness commensurate with the length and intensity of earlier oppression, but the Polish reaction seems almost dispirited.
Thus Falk's Hero of the Year--which won prizes at the Moscow Film Festival--is clearly soured by the knowledge that criticism no longer can change anything in Poland, as once it helped to do in the late seventies. In the film Jerzy Stuhr plays a charismatic MC traveling round the country with a man chosen to be "hero of the year" because he had alerted people to an impending gas explosion. The road show is selling civic responsibility as part of Jaruzelski's token dialogue with the people. The film's attitude toward the media man--the careerist star of Falk's own 1978 Top Dog, whose fate after martial law is chronicled here--is one of impotent Schadensfreude. The audience is meant to relish the careerist's discomfiture, but his lowly status in the hierarchy leads to a somewhat distasteful kicking of a top dog who has been downed. Falk could never have presented a prominent party official in the same humiliating light; and so the real top dogs go untouched.
More typical of recent Polish cinema, however, was the official entry at the Montreal festival, A Train to Hollywood. Its, appallingly cute, buck-toothed heroine dreams of becoming a new Monroe. The director clearly shares her wish to break into the dollar market. And here his priorities are Jaruzelski's: What is needed is not criticism, but hard currency.
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