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RETURN TO Natalia Brzozowska Palaces

Narrated by Andrzej Łapicki (1924-2012), who will later become the identifiable voice-over of the Polish Film Chronicle, this film subscribes to the routine 1940s propaganda discourse. It compares the extravagant lifestyles of the pre-war bourgeoisie with the post-war distribution of their capital to serve the common good.

Palaces

  • Pałace
  • 1946
  • dir. Natalia Brzozowska
  • 7 min

Narrated by Andrzej Łapicki (1924-2012), who will later become the identifiable voice-over of the Polish Film Chronicle, this film subscribes to the routine 1940s propaganda discourse. It compares the extravagant lifestyles of the pre-war bourgeoisie with the post-war distribution of their capital to serve the common good.

Following a title sequence of stylised baroque-like letters, Brzozowska opens to long shots of the industrial landscape in Łódź and quickly cuts to the opulent mansion of a former factory owner. The narrator doesn’t miss this opportunity to comment on the emptiness of the presented space, as a lady-like figure strolls under her parasol along a pond in the garden.

The next edit reveals children running up the stairs in yet another palace. We see them playing in the courtyard and in an adjacent park. These observational shots illustrate the narrator’s remark that the palace ‘has turned into a noisy kingdom of kids’.

The rest of the film consists of brief snapshots from other previous bourgeois homes, which the Communist government kindly converted into workers’ clubs, orphanages, nurseries and kindergartens. The youthful energy of the new generation fills the lavishly decorated spaces for a few minutes until the film concludes with smiling figures of dancing and singing children.

The score by Kazimierz Serocki (1922-1981), with whom Brzozowska will collaborate the following year on The Coal Mine/Kopalnia, intensifies the shift between the pre-war ennui from the start of the film and the bouncing vitality of the ending.

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