Labor in Late Socialism: The Cinema of Polish Workers' Unrest 1968–1981.

9798607311018

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019

1 online resource (296 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

The history of postwar communism in Poland is a history of workers’ struggles against a government which claimed to rule in their name. In 1956, 1970, 1976, and 1980 Polish workers took to the streets time and again. What started in 1956 as a protest against hikes in food prices culminated in the 1980 formation of the Solidarity trade union—the only movement in all of the Soviet bloc to successfully challenge the political hegemony of the communist party. Cinema played a crucial role in this struggle, serving as a privileged site of social and political critique, helping to forge counterpublics, and strengthening newly emergent structures of civil society. Following the 1970 protests, in which government forces had opened fire on demonstrators, both established filmmakers such as Andrzej Wajda and promising young documentarians began to turn their cameras onto the everyday struggles of factory workers, forcing the regime to contend with a reality it resolutely refused to see. Labor in Late Socialism explores the ways in which Polish cinema engaged in the workers’ struggles and helped forge the worker-intellectual alliance that eventually gave birth to Solidarity. It begins with the demise of revisionist Marxism as a viable ideology in 1968 and ends with the imposition of Martial Law in December 1981. This was a period of unprecedented ebullience in Polish cinema and cultural life, more broadly. Drawing on extensive archival research, Labor in Late Socialism outlines the strategies adopted by these fiction, documentary, and experimental films as they sought to evade censorship and garner popular support for the workers’ cause. It does so within a comparative framework that places the films in relation to the literature and visual arts of the period. In particular, it explores how filmmakers were able to use the affordances of specific genres and modes to document appalling conditions in the factories, draw attention to the double burden placed on women, and narrate successive waves of strikes.Studies of Solidarity have traditionally focused on the political and historical development of the movement. Labor in Late Socialism demonstrates ways in which this development was both fueled by, and reflected in, the cultural sphere. Additionally, a central ambition of the project is to reclaim short documentary and experimental films that have all too long been obscured by celebrated fiction features like Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (1981). Often more formally innovative and ideologically radical, these short form works exerted a strong influence on both the national cinema and conversation. In attending to the convergence and divergence of fiction, documentary, and experimental film aesthetics during this period, the dissertation provides Film & Media scholars with a critical case study of the way different modes of filmmaking responded on the one hand, to the rise of television and, on the other, to the post-1968 political crisis.While this project focuses on Poland, it contributes to a clearer understanding of the dynamics of late socialism throughout the Soviet bloc and expands the fields of labor history and cultural studies. It considers how representations of the worker—the central figure of socialist realist aesthetics—shifted in the late socialist period. The detailed account it provides serves as the first step to understanding the broader dynamics of the way labor was represented and conceptualized across Europe in this period of industrial decline and illuminating a number of unexpected intersections between East and West.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 15, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. Comparative Literature / Film and Media Studies.