RETURN TO homepageThe Process

I first went to the National Film Archive on Chełmska Street in Warsaw to browse through their collection of documentary films in the autumn of 2015. Having received a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, I intended to research the images of everyday life as registered by factual filmmakers who’d worked at the Documentary Film Studio in the same city between the end of World War Two and 1989. At that time, my project was titled Life under Communism.

motivation for research

Between 1945 and 1989 Polish documentarians produced a substantial body of work that exhibits the lifestyles of citizens of the country along with their social and cultural contexts...

FROM 'LIFE' TO 'WOMEN'

Having spent almost half a year in the archive in Warsaw, mostly in a dark room watching the documentaries, I came to a conclusion that many historical accounts still glossed over some filmmakers, or never approached them in a system...

A COUNTER FILM HISTORY: FROM THE PERIPHERY TO THE CENTER

Amending what’s already globally known about the female film practice, this site takes a stand against the tendency to marginalise the significance of female documentarians in the grand history of cinema...

motivation for research

Between 1945 and 1989 Polish documentarians produced a substantial body of work that exhibits the lifestyles of citizens of the country along with their social and cultural contexts.

Unlike Communist newsreels—collectively known as the Polish Film Chronicle (Polska Kronika Filmowa)—that often served propaganda purposes, documentary films frequently managed to steer clear of overt political involvement. With some exceptions from the 1970s and 1980s, if any political commentary appeared in them, it was in showing how social and economic policies conditioned life in Poland.

Although in the late 1940s the Communist government attempted to subjugate narrative and documentary cinema to the political system, after the death of Stalin that strict content control relaxed and documentary filmmakers started to enjoy more thematic freedom. To avoid conflicts with censorship, many soon turned to representing micro-worlds, or slices from the social life of average people, attempting to find ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary’.

Whereas in the past, several English language sociologists and social historians analysed everyday experiences of selected social groups in Poland during the Communist era with the use of written and visual archival evidence, there have been no consistent attempts to employ documentary films in such scholarly investigations. I was aware that this resulted from the limited access to Polish documentaries, which with a few exceptions are only available for viewing in archive collections in the country.

By mapping out the largely overlooked territory of Polish documentary films, my study was to bridge the gap in the English-language history of Eastern European cinemas that conventionally concentrated on narrative films. But marginalisation of Polish documentary film history has been by no means only symptomatic of Western academia.

Until very recently, studies of documentaries also looked fragmented in Poland. This shortage has been since addressed by two-part publication titled Historia polskiego filmu dokumentalnego (2015). In the second volume, its editor, Małgorzata Hendrykowska collected essays chronologically covering the development of documentary film in the country after World War Two.

Although there is no shortage of specialist academic discussions on the subject, Polish studies routinely address ‘from-to’ stages of documentary history that are orientated towards linear periodization. They often focus on individual directors, specific titles, artistic tendencies and schools, or the relationship between the government policies and the content of documentary productions.
Overall, little attention has been paid to the potential of such films as historical resources that represent social identities or portions of everyday human experience. This is was my inspiration to start this archival trip, one that turned out to be so full of adventures, I needed to step back and take a narrower path.

FROM 'LIFE' TO 'WOMEN'

Having spent almost half a year in the archive in Warsaw, mostly in a dark room watching the documentaries, I came to a conclusion that many historical accounts still glossed over some filmmakers, or never approached them in a systematic way.

What stood out among such cases was the output of female documentary film directors— women whose creative work offers an insightful perspective on the society functioning under the imposed regime. Although theirs isn’t always a consistent vision, their standpoints are equally, if not more, interesting than those in the more discussed documentaries made by men.

At the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw male film directors by far outnumbered the female ones, who could be counted using the fingers of two hands. Their work, however, evidences a comparable creative effort and success as that of their male counterparts. With multiple festival awards to their names, the women exhibited at least corresponding productivity, matched by aesthetic and thematic innovation.

The cameras of female documentarians captured huge amounts of individual everyday experiences, sometimes those that were missed by male directors. Their stories dwelled into lifestyles and mindsets of their screen subjects with focus on diverse mechanisms of survival, developed to pursue individual goals in restrictive political conditions.

Therefore, the audiovisual history of everyday life under Communism in their documentaries appears as fascinating as that in films made by men. It is this particular part of my research that I present here.

Focusing on selected films made by the Polish female documentarians, this site intends to promote their work and to encourage further research. It shows their output in cultural, professional and political contexts, adding to the English-language history of Polish cinema by turning attention to its overlooked part.

Whereas the subject of women in Polish narrative films has been analysed in English-language books such as Women in Polish Cinema (2006), female documentarians from the country haven’t yet had one dedicated resource.

Since 2000, some Polish academics and critics have published a few profiles of female documentarians, as well as chapters on their work. But these are scattered and always difficult to find. Recently, Urszula Tes wrote a book on Irena Kamieńska (1928-2016), but there are no other such publications on the remaining filmmakers. This site is an attempt to at least partly address this gap in research.

Although what you see here is only a fragment of my Life under Communism project, this may be its most meaningful contribution to the history of cinema.

A COUNTER FILM HISTORY: FROM THE PERIPHERY TO THE CENTER

Amending what’s already globally known about the female film practice, this site takes a stand against the tendency to marginalise the significance of female documentarians in the grand history of cinema.

When they stood behind the camera, these women didn’t exclusively focus on their own gender. Though their efforts to chronicle the reality in the country often formed a powerful commentary on the situation of the female under Communism, even if the political discourse of equality had erased the need for Western-style feminism.

In many cases, although a straightforward feminist discourse appears to be almost absent from their body of work, glimpses of both subscription to social expectations of what it meant to be a woman and oppositional discourses shined through several of these director’s films.

Regardless, whether some of these women grew more aware of the need for reflection on gender politics as they progressed with their careers, or never felt that such commentary was necessary for their films, historians still favoured male documentary directors. For example, Jerzy Bossak (1910-1989), Andrzej Munk (1921-1961), Kazimierz Karabasz (1930- ), Marcel Łoziński (1940- ), and Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1946) are at the forefront of Polish documentary film studies, both at home and abroad.

Here, for the first time, female documentary film directors steal all the historical headlines, not taking a peripheral, but truly central position. Even if their films were not intended as counter-cinema, this site is an attempt at producing a counter film history.