Border Trouble: Ethnopolitics and Cosmopolitan Memory in Recent Polish Cinema

Border Trouble: Politics and Ambivalence

I propose the term “border trouble” to capture the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War, and whose ramifications have intensified since the fall of communism. By “border trouble” I do not mean collective trauma at the loss of the Kresy, what postcolonial theorist Dariusz Skórczewski calls “identity paralysis”: a form of “melancholia . . . that should be understood using categories of individual and collective trauma after cultural disinheritance.” ²³ Whereas Skórczewski’s term deprives present-day individuals of memory agency (people are “paralyzed” by the past whether they like it or not), the idea of border trouble seeks to interpret the imagined space of Polish nationhood as a dynamic arena of disagreements over memory, collective historical responsibility, and the openness or closedness of national identity. In this understanding of Poland’s wars of symbols, borderlands act as crucial zones of contention. As Paweł Cywiński argues, understandings of the word Kresy “converge around two unusually well-formed paradigms: the nationalist and the postcolonial”; ²⁴ historian Robert Traba notes a similar division between “sacralization and demythologization” of the Kresy. ²⁵ These two warring perspectives are engaged in a zero-sum game of identity politics, the “national” camp pursuing a discourse of ethnonational nostalgia that is now being tapped into by the ruling party, and postcolonial criticism debunking those myths with an anti-nationalist counter-discourse. ²⁶ “Border trouble” therefore seeks both to account for Poland’s double status as colonizer as well as colonized ²⁷ and to point to the broader context of the Nachträglichkeit of wartime violence and post-war re-bordering. Its point of departure is that Polish identity is not paralyzed, but contested: between critics and proponents of Kresy mythology; between self-reflexive remembrance that allows the possibility of guilt, and hegemonic martyrdom that places collective suffering at its core; between outward-looking cosmopolitan and introspective ethnonational versions of nationhood.

Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. The ambivalent peripheries of the so-called Kresy Wschodnie and Ziemie Odzyskane pose a particularly potent challenge to mnemonic storytelling due to their complex, entangled legacies of mutual injury (including genocide), political domination, and personal loss. For instance, Polish memories of “repatriation” from now-western Ukraine to formerly German Silesia may be directly connected both with the trauma of one’s own victimhood—say, in Volhynia in 1943 and during the resettlement process—and also with the material and cultural heritage left by deported Germans, such as the house one moved into in the new place of residence. Reflective treatments may also take into consideration the historical effects of Polish hegemony in the east, as well as the fate of the Jewish communities that coexisted with others before the war and Holocaust. The many threads of experience and interaction make for a variegated and combustible canvas of meanings.

The cultural manifestations of border trouble have, of course, evolved over time. In early representations, for example in Thaw-era cinema, it surfaced as uncanny residues and oblique metaphors. In Andrzej Wajda’s Popiół i diament (“Ashes and Diamonds,” 1958), the city of Wrocław provides the topographical background to a story about an anti-communist conspiracy in the aftermath of the war. Like in Jerzy Andrzejewski’s eponymous novel on which the screenplay is based, the plot purportedly takes place in the fictional and generic town of Ostrowiec; however, the unspoken but overt embedding of the action in the western city adds a layer of mystery. The symbolic disjuncture of place suggests an incompleteness of reference, perhaps mirroring the displacement of the re-bordered country itself. Silesian filmmaker Kazimierz Kutz’s cinematic response to Wajda, Nikt nie woła (“Nobody’s Calling,” 1960), raises issues related to resettlement and post-war adaptation more directly. Set in a fictional western town and shot in a real one, Bystrzyca Kłodzka (formerly Habelschwerdt), the film depicts a young Polish former soldier who has resettled in the new lands to escape his wartime past. The young man’s involvement with two different women displaced from the east metaphorizes the split trajectories of the post-war Polish situation. The film begins and ends with movement, with the protagonist arriving on a train in the opening sequence and leaving at the story’s conclusion, having been unsuccessful in finding respite from his anxieties; he continues to be haunted and displaced. Thus, Poland’s new territories were simultaneously inspiring and troubling, their ruptured histories demanding to be explored in relation to the equally uncertain present. Other auteurs, also including Tadeusz Konwicki (Ostatni dzień lata / “The Last Day of Summer,” 1958), Roman Polański (Nóżw wodzie / “Knife in the Water,” 1962), and Aleksander Ford (Pierwszy dzień wolności / “The First Day of Freedom,” 1964) shot films in the so-called Ziemie Odzyskane that exploded the monochrome myths of official propaganda and challenged the frontiers of the expressible. As Andrzej Gwóźdź argues, “the undiscovered Polish provinces fascinated filmmakers as an attractive multicultural sediment, as a natural setting for youth and adventure.” ²⁸ The wealth of artistic possibilities was a direct consequence of the areas’ difficult pasts.

Border trouble is inherently political. It is a consequence of macropolitical transformations and its effects are inevitably bound up with the exercise of power and censorship. Whereas the Thaw-era films of Wajda, Kutz and others were non-confrontational and figurative in their representation of the peripheral spaces, the comedy Sami swoi (“All Friends Here,” dir. by Sylwester Chęciński, 1967) is generally credited with being the first production that “allowed at least a partial unblocking of narratives” about resettlement, with important consequences for the availability of memory models in the articulation of identity. ²⁹ In Sami swoi and its two follow-ups that eventually formed a trilogy, the quirks of two families of migrants “repatriated” to Lower Silesia from the east are showcased in detail, with numerous social stereotypes played out in comic form. Politically harmless but culturally valuable, the films served to normalize the status of post-war resettlers whilst leaving untouched the thornier legacies of past violence. It was thus only after 1989, once ideological restrictions were lifted, that explicit literary and cinematic treatments of the borderlands and their difficult histories flourished in Poland, for example in the writings of Gdańsk-based authors Stefan Chwin and Pawel Huelle, ³⁰ screen adaptations such as Jerzy Hoffman’s Ogniem i mieczem (“With Fire and Sword,” 1999, based on the 1884 novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz) and Robert Gliński’s Wróżby kumaka (“The Call of the Toad,” 2005, based on the 1992 novel Unkenrufe by Günter Grass), popular fiction such as the detective novels of Wrocław-based Marek Krajewski, ³¹ or in the aforementioned boom in Kresy literature.

Adapting Victor Turner’s scheme of social dramas, whereby symbols of structure and communitas are in a dynamic interrelationship, ³² to the legacy of border trouble prompts us to question the conceptual limits of Turner’s theory. On the one hand, the cycle of structure and anti-structure possesses significant explanatory power: in the era of post-war ethnonational consolidation under the socialist regime, the symbols of place were given unequivocally ethnic meanings by the structures of authority (the myth of Ziemie Odzyskane, the silence around the Kresy), and the symbolic manifestations of anti-structure challenged the petrification of meaning. Turner indeed argues that anti-structure has an inherent affinity with “root metaphors” and “creative imagination”—“the ability to create concepts and conceptual systems that may correspond to nothing in the senses (even though they may correspond to something in reality) and . . . [to give] rise to unconventional ideas” ³³ ; the role of auteur cinema and imaginative literature in disrupting the hegemony of symbols therefore dovetails closely with his ideas. Thus, as issues related to border trouble became more readily articulated in the mainstream in Poland, that is, gradually transitioned from communitas to structure, they have most recently been absorbed (or arguably, appropriated) by political power; the question now is what symbolic forms of anti-structure have arisen in turn.

On the other hand, this schematic outline may be overly binary and simplistic. What is the relationship between structure and communitas in a complex historical context of physical and symbolic displacement, as well as cross-border entanglement? Are the symbolic confrontations of border trouble reducible to two opposing forms? And to what extent can cinema, a cultural medium that is imbricated in the structures of the state more than any other, be properly called anti-structural? The remainder of this article attempts to address these and related questions by analyzing four recent mainstream films that carry out visual-narrative “border work.” Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011) and Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016), also directed by Holland and Smarzowski, respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945 as a result of the Potsdam Agreements. It is intriguing that two of Poland’s most prominent filmmakers have confronted the country’s ambivalent peripheries, both eastern and western, at approximately the same time—this fact once again confirms, albeit circumstantially, that border trouble remains an important phenomenon. Indeed, Holland and Smarzowski’s works potentially put the border-related issues of post-war memory on the public agenda on an unprecedented scale; as Alison Landsberg writes, “filmic depictions of the past have the potential to reach and influence an enormous audience. The cinema’s populist character is the grounds for its political efficacy.” ³⁴ All four films grapple with border trouble in a new way, employing critical narratives of transnationalism and ambivalence that disrupt the “empty homogenous time” of Polish identity. ³⁵ They revisit difficult episodes from the past and attempt to find a grammar of visual commemoration that softens borders and enables dialogue. At the same time, none of them—and least of all Wołyń—can be seen as moralistic tales of conciliation, or what German journalist Klaus Bachmann called Versöhnungskitsch (“reconciliation kitsch”). ³⁶ Their cosmopolitan memory depicts the traumas of the past in ways that contextualize mutual injury whilst decentering the (Polish) nation as the principal site of mnemonic reflection. ³⁷

Negative Cosmopolitanism: Smarzowski’s Deathly Poetics of Difference

Wojciech Smarzowski embodies something of a contradiction. He has been called “the most important director of our times” who, in the mold of Andrzej Wajda, “acts as a quintessentially Polish filmmaker whose cinema reflects on Poland’s past and present from new and unorthodox perspectives.” ³⁸ Indeed, his films have been mostly locally funded and enjoyed success primarily in the domestic market, whilst they tend to be thematically inward-looking, raising issues that are of concern to Poles. Yet unlike Wajda, the director himself categorically rejects the romantic notion that he is a “national filmmaker.” ³⁹ In his two historical films about the borderlands, this combination of nation-centered cinematography and critical detachment from the nation emerges as an aesthetic of negative cosmopolitanism. Róża and Wołyń narrativize the breakdown of community that can result from the excesses of nationalism; they articulate cosmopolitan identity as an absence, as a memorial trace, and as unfulfilled potential.

Róża was the first Polish feature film to raise the specter of ethnic violence, deportations, and migrations after 1945; it thus introduced issues that had been long discussed by specialists and local interest groups to a nationwide audience. ⁴⁰ Wołyń, likewise, claimed to break new ground in the memorialization of the Volhynia massacre, although this event had a much greater presence in the public imagination. As portraits of multi-ethnic borderlands at the point of their destruction, the films share a commemorative commitment to cultural difference. In Homi Bhabha’s distinction, the normative notion of cultural diversity involves “containment,” whereby “a transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that ‘these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid.’” ⁴¹ The articulation of difference, on the other hand, is subversive in its affirmation of a decentered subject position and its rupture of the symbolic unity of nationhood. As films that depict the violent suppression of difference, Róża and Wołyń lament what Bhabha calls “the homogenizing effects of cultural symbols and icons [and] the authority of cultural synthesis in general.” ⁴² They thereby espouse, through negation, what Bhabha calls “vernacular cosmopolitanism”: a universalist yet demotic and non-hierarchical commitment to a “right to difference-in-equality.” ⁴³

Set in the region of Masuria (formerly part of Ostpreußen, East Prussia) in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Róża follows the developing relationship between Róża Kwiatkowska, a Masurian widow (played by Agata Kulesza), and Tadeusz, a former Home Army insurgent from Central Poland who arrives in her borderland village after losing his wife in the Warsaw Uprising (Marcin Dorociński). Whilst Tadeusz is also multilingual (unusually for a Warsaw insurgent in Polish cinema, he speaks German and shows solidarity with the deceased German who sent him to Masuria), it is the title character who most clearly embodies the linguistic and cultural ambivalence that the film showcases and ultimately mourns. In Smarzowskis’s words, Róża is “a Masurian, German, Polish perhaps. The term is relative and depends on political manipulation, which was particularly severe at that time.” ⁴⁴ The director’s comment resembles Bhabha’s argument that “cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation to self and other.” ⁴⁵ Róża is fully bilingual and is a member of a threatened ethnic minority community that is classically in-between; as the Protestant pastor explains to Tadeusz, the Masurians “have never considered themselves to be Poles, and 80 years ago, they didn’t consider themselves German either. But we Germans destroyed their identity, their ethnic particularity, and now the Poles will finish the job.” Indeed, the Masurians are forced to undergo verification, and at the end of the film are pictured boarding a train for expulsion as a Polish official gleefully exclaims, “the Germans are returning to the Reich!” The Masurians disappear, both physically from Poland and discursively through their re-categorization as Germans; this fate mirrors their disappearance from public memory throughout the communist era. ⁴⁶

And yet Róża herself is more than just a poster child for Masurian victimhood. Her character displays subtler nuances of difference that enable the film to avoid any straightforward essentialism as a story implicating, say, “us” Poles in any moral obligation towards “them” Masurians. Róża’s amorphous identity even sets her apart from her “own” people, the Masurians, some of whom are hostile toward her because she was active in supposedly “pro-Polish” circles before the war. Indeed, the vagaries of war have reduced Róża to a form of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life, a “zone of indistinction” that is not merely cultural but biopolitical. ⁴⁷ In Smarzowski’s film, bare life can be seen to have two degrees, whereby people are classified and bestialized to varying extents. On the one hand, the nascent Polish state is rebuilding boundaries along ethnolinguistic lines that delineate bios, “a qualified form of life,” that is, political life that imparts participation in the community, and zoē, “natural reproductive life.” ⁴⁸ An officer tells the Masurians in no uncertain terms that “you will have to write an application, in Polish; then you will have an interview, also in Polish; those who receive a certificate that they belong to the Polish nation, we will help as our own citizens.” ⁴⁹ Denied political life because of a perceived lack of Polishness, they are sent off in cattle carts beyond the confines of the Polish state, not quite killed but dehumanized for the purposes of the national community and expelled. Róża, on the other hand, endures a harsher, more complete, and more corporeal form of bare life. First, she is effectively banished from all political community, living in total isolation at some distance from the town. She relies on Tadeusz to de-mine the adjacent field in order to obtain potatoes on which to subsist, and to undertake errands on her behalf. More importantly, her “entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill [her] without committing homicide.” ⁵⁰ In her case, the threat of killing comes in the form of the repeated rapes by marauding Soviet soldiers who go unpunished, which are in fact the direct cause of her death: fetal residues stuck in her body have turned cancerous and result in her slow and painful demise. Whereas Agamben’s concept of homo sacer is masculine and emphasizes the agency of the administrative machinery of the state, Róża’s zone of indistinction is located in her female body and is imposed from all sides: ⁵¹ the Soviet violence that looms as a threatening force throughout the film; the Soviet-backed Polish state that attempts to classify and deport her; the German state that ostracized her before the war; and the Masurians who continue not to accept her.

Difference is thus inscribed into Róża’s being as a curse that is forced upon her. Not only is she culturally polymorphous, she is physically fragmented, bearing and being killed by the biological products of the violations of her body. The splitting of her subjectivity is visualized in the film by camera shots that linger on broken images of her body, such as a fractured mirror that doubly reproduces her reflection (Figure 1). Her name is also a doubling, “Róża Kwiatkowska” (Rose of the Flowers) suggesting a twofold imagery of blossoming that is at once semantically repetitive, reinforcing her uncanny sense of self, and symbolically tragic, in that the metaphorically linked notions of the fertility of the (local) soil and her biological fertility are darkly intertwined. Ambivalence is also what kills her: bodies that are simultaneously self and rapacious other destroy her from within.

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Figure 1.

Róża.

At the same time, the depiction of Róża’s life and relationships contain a more optimistic transcultural vision. With Tadeusz she builds up a trust and loving friendship, celebrated in occasional dreamlike scenes in which they and Róża’s teenage daughter Jadwiga are seen to be happy, for instance, cycling and running about in the farmyard. The Pole, the “pro-Polish” Masurian mother, and the half-German daughter are scarred by irreversible loss but also symbolically united, despite and through those losses. Not only has Tadeusz lost his wife, he witnessed her rape and murder by German soldiers in the ruins of the Warsaw Uprising. There is therefore a partial symmetry of experience that propels his motivation to protect Róża from further rapes. The impending death of Róża also strengthens the bonds between the three of them; their togetherness is acknowledged from the outside when the pastor makes a promise to Tadeusz to protect “your family” should anything happen to him. Moreover, the adoption of familial ties entails cultural exchange. In a moment of casual and peaceful conversation before she knows she is dying, Róża explains to Tadeusz some peculiarities of Masurian mourning rites. At her funeral, he observes these customs, performing his own assimilation to Masurian cultural codes as he grieves. The film’s open ending is another image of cosmopolitan defiance. After marrying Jadwiga to legally protect her from deportation (as the wife of a recognized Pole), Tadeusz is arrested by the communist security service, tortured and beaten, and imprisoned. He returns some years later, physically deformed, to find Jadwiga still living on the farm. The homestead has however been taken over by their neighbors, settlers from eastern Poland (i.e., they have also been displaced, in their case from the Kresy). Tadeusz silently leads Jadwiga away from the site of her dispossession, and the camera zooms out as the pair walk away into the countryside. The final image combines instability and unity: their destination is unknown, but the pair are together. They remain in flux, their subjectivities intact, their futures undetermined.

Róża’s portrayal of the formation of a “family” disrupts the narrative coherence of nationality—what Bhabha, critiquing Benedict Anderson, calls “the homogeneous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s imagined community.” ⁵² Róża, Tadeusz, and Jadwiga resist the imperative to conform to a given set of cultural norms, mutually reinforcing each other’s individuality. Their sympathetic portrayal against the background of historical forces of ethnic purification foregrounds the idea that ambivalence and difference characterize the unstable periphery between national significations. This does not mean that the film rejects collective identity outright: Tadeusz refers to himself as a Pole and Róża subscribes to the label of a Masurian. Rather, their identities are porous and reflexive, cosmopolitan but also rooted; ⁵³ Róża in particular embodies a cultural difference that, at the historical moment she lives in, is disparaged by all sides and diminishes her to a withering state of bare life. As her story, Róża is a cinematic narrative that bears witness to the crushing of ambivalence in the post-war settlement and reengages with the temporal structure of identity in the present day. Smarzowski even describes the character as “a human wreck, a ghost.” ⁵⁴ She haunts the taken-for-granted finitude of nationhood, conjuring the victims of that unstable moment of border violence that is omitted from contemporary European master narratives of transnational reconciliation. That historical moment is itself temporally ambivalent: between war and peace, a state of hybrid uncertainty. Masuria emerges from the film as a site of hybrid polyphony, the vast open space of the final sequence signaling the multiple possibilities of latent meanings that can be filled in. The film’s othering of the dichotomies of self/other and war/peace therefore blurs the boundary between present and past and presents the borderland as a still-troubled space. It is an act of memory that challenges nation-based thought at its core; that is, at its borders.

Wołyń traces a reverse trajectory, from the convergence of family to its destruction. The opening scenes depict a Polish-Ukrainian wedding in the summer of 1939, in which a second interethnic romance also blossoms: as her sister Helena celebrates her marriage to Vasyl, the principal protagonist Zosia Głowacka (played by Michalina Łabacz) falls in love with a Ukrainian named Petro (Vasili Vasylyk). The film’s extended beginning shows the villagewide celebration from a range of perspectives and introduces a large cast of characters, ⁵⁵ and thereby gradually builds up tensions that explode later in the narrative. On the surface, the happy occasion with two intertwined love stories conveys a multicultural harmony, which is audially reinforced by the choral singing, in both languages, of the village women in the background. In the detail, however, inter-group tensions are rife. Ukrainian nationalists complain about land allocation and access to education under Polish rule and plot the establishment of a future Ukrainian state. Polish-speakers reveal their prejudices in phrases such as “better to marry a Ukrainian than a Jew” (lepiej za Chachla niż za Żyda). As the celebrations continue into the night, alcohol flows freely, events become frenzied, and community bonds appear increasingly threatened. At the same time that Zosia and Petro consummate their love, her father negotiates her marriage to the village sołtys, ⁵⁶ Maciej Skiba (Arkadiusz Jakubik). While the young couple mourn this irreversible decision, fighting breaks out sporadically among drunken guests, Poles and Ukrainians confront each other, and traditional games involving burning logs foreshadow later violence, in which Ukrainian militias murder Poles and burn down entire villages.

Cultural difference, therefore, is seen here as a vanishing presence. It is the young generation of Zosia, Helena, Petro and Vasyl who embody a hybrid, transnational and ultimately idealistic sensitivity that sees no borders between religious denominations and ethnolinguistic groups. They inhabit an anachronistic, apolitical bubble, and each of them suffers as a consequence. In the wedding scenes, Vasyl and Petro are seen somewhat reluctantly drinking with Ukrainian friends, one of whom has become radicalized. Vasyl outwardly takes a stance of neutrality, while Petro avoids confrontation altogether. Later, after war breaks out and the region is occupied first by the Soviets and then the Germans, both men pay heavy prices for their unwillingness to choose a single national allegiance. Petro is shot by a Soviet military policeman as Zosia gives birth to their son, for saving her and her now-husband Skiba from deportation. Vasyl and Helena leave for another region after their wedding, but are revisited at the end of the film when radical Ukrainian militias have embarked on mass killings of Poles. Vasyl is ordered by his brother to kill Helena because of her nationality, but instead he murders the brother in defiance. However, that same night, a Polish armed unit raids their hut and murders Vasyl, Helena, and both their children for their alleged allegiance to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsiya Ukrayins’kykh Natsionalistiv, OUN). In this way, the film visualizes the uncompromising imposition, both symbolic and physical, that nationalism exerts on individual subjects.

Wołyń does not present an idealized, nostalgic version of pre-war cosmopolitanism, a utopian vision of a lost “Arcadia” that was the staple of post-war Polish “literature of the mythic homeland,” as Przemysław Czapliński calls it. ⁵⁷ Importantly, the film does not rely on a binary moral gradient of Polish national indignation against Ukrainian crimes—even though it is partly based on a book whose author explicitly condemns a perceived Ukrainian ignorance and lack of contrition. Stanisław Srokowski’s Nienawiść (“Hatred,” 2006), ⁵⁸ a collection of short stories about the Volhynia massacres, monochromatically pits Polish victimhood (“the gehenna of millions of Poles who were expelled from the Polish Kresy, murdered and transported to Siberia”) ⁵⁹ against widespread ignorance (including among Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians), and somewhat sanctimoniously purports to express “the truth” so that “we can hold our heads up high.” ⁶⁰ Rather than Srokowski’s “Polish Kresy,” ⁶¹ the film depicts the borderlands as a colorful canvas of mixed and hybrid ethnicities—with a notable presence of Jews as well as Orthodox Ukrainian-speakers and Catholic Polish-speakers—but also lays bare the tensions and uneven distributions of cosmopolitan sensitivity that make “Arcadian” nostalgia a futile fantasy. Violence, crucially, comes from all sides in different forms: the Polish state’s discrimination against Ukrainians, Polish cultural prejudice, Ukrainian hatred and atrocities, Soviet and German occupation. Smarzowski states in an interview that “the biggest difficulty in making this film . . . was to get the proportions right.” ⁶² Whether he does get them right is subject to debate, but the commemorative calculus in Wołyń is certainly complex: contemplative rather than vindictive, dialogic rather than authoritative.

The film’s conclusion, which is remarkably similar to that of Róża, reinforces the message of the indeterminacy of memory. Following a crescendo of atrocities by Ukrainians and the revenge killing of Helena and Ivan by Poles, Zosia and her toddler son emerge as sole survivors. Escaping with child in her arms through the burning night, she finds refuge in the forest. Daylight comes, Zosia lies unconscious, and the boy is picked up by a man in a horse-drawn carriage; the blurred background figure is recognizable as Petro, the boy’s dead father. Petro lifts the boy onto the cart and looks towards the still-unconscious Zosia. The camera cuts to a moving image of Zosia lying on the cart, then to a parallel sequence in which Zosia, with the boy struggling to keep pace behind her, is seen walking past a military checkpoint. In an allegory of her death, she crosses two borders: a bridge traversing a river, and the row of soldiers who let her pass with their heads bowed in silence. The final shot reverts to the horse-drawn cart, with the boy sitting up front with Petro, who smiles at him, as Zosia lies still behind them (Figure 2). The image settles on the young family-that-wasn’t as they ride into the distance, accompanied by a brooding instrumental soundtrack. Like Róża, therefore, Wołyń ends in movement and empty space, binding generations and ethnicities and defying binarisms of meaning.

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Figure 2.

Wołyń, closing sequence.

A significant difference is that Wołyń explicitly references ghostliness as a trope, with the open ending suggesting not only the possibility of multinational togetherness, but also the haunting of the present in the light of the past. By rendering its main characters as lingering specters, Wołyń appears to follow Jacques Derrida’s imperative that we “learn to live with ghosts” in order to make the future viable. ⁶³ Wołyń’s ghosts, importantly, are hybrid in their nationality, and they cross multiple borders as they move away from the viewer during the closing credits. The ending’s long horizons, narrative indeterminacy, and emotional detachment visualize what Derrida calls “mourning by fact and by right interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit.” ⁶⁴ The film grieves the horrors of the past and problematizes their continuing resonance: “the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.” ⁶⁵ Smarzowski acknowledges border trouble as a crucial part of Polish being’s inheritance and conjures its eastern ghosts.

Smarzowski’s films, and Wołyń in particular, have been overwhelmingly interpreted using a nation-based lens, with the cosmopolitan ethic tending to go unnoticed. Wołyń was criticized by the liberal press in Poland for relying on “good Pole, bad Ukrainian” dynamic that was diplomatically unproductive, aesthetically simplistic, and ethically irresponsible. Positive reviews found it important because of its portrayal of a deep-lying national “truth” about Polish victimhood that could somehow heal collective wounds. Both of these readings, however, ignore the transnational spectrology at play, even if in some aspects, their arguments do carry weight. ⁶⁶ The female protagonists of both films break with received stereotypes of gendered nationalism (on which see Agnieszka Graff’s article in this issue): Róża more obviously so with her ethnic ambivalence, Zosia more subtly through her suffering that is rendered meaningless in regard to the Polish nation. If the (post-)romantic metanarrative of Polish femininity demands patriotic sacrifice, Zosia’s death remains indeterminate in its symbolism. Not only is her body carried away by the Ukrainian Petro, we also learn in a minor detail that she has been teaching her son Ukrainian; the only words the boy utters in the film are in the language of his father. Thus, both films are set in the borderlands and narrate a disjuncture of the national. Dorota Kołodziejczyk has argued in relation to recent Polish writing: “opening up the local as an inherently transnational space enabled a new and radical intervention into historical traumas on all sides of historical divides.” ⁶⁷ Smarzowski likewise presents a troublesome dynamic between the local and the transnational, de-nationalizing the borders to open them up as potential spaces of shared remembrance.

Positive Cosmopolitanism: Holland’s Multiple Border-Crossings

To state that Agnieszka Holland is a cosmopolitan director is to engage in banal truisms. Not only has Holland had a highly international career; as Gordana Crnković demonstrates, she also “creates her own cinematic homeland which traverses national borders” through intertextual interaction with global cinema auteurs. ⁶⁸ Therefore, the question at hand concerns not the director’s affinity with nationality or transnationalism in cinema but the ways in which her two most recent feature films engage with narratives of Polish nationhood. W ciemności and Pokot are Holland’s first “Polish” films in over two decades (although both are international co-productions and had their world premieres abroad), and their poetics of identity are highly charged. Pokot in particular was embroiled in a political spat, its feminist and environmentalist credentials putting it at odds with the worldview of the Law and Justice government. ⁶⁹ Thus, if Smarzowski’s cinematic cosmopolitanism is negative, Holland’s is positive. It appears not on the underside of nationalist exclusion but as a narrative polyphony that is central to the films’ grammar of representation. W ciemności and Pokot are very different works—the former a contemplative Holocaust drama and the latter a comical present-day murder mystery—but both carry out significant memory work on Poland’s border trouble, de-centering and dialogizing Polish nationhood.

W ciemności is the story of Leopold Socha (played by Robert Więckiewicz), a petty thief and sewer inspector who helps a group of Jews to survive for fourteen months in the sewers under Lviv in 1943 and 1944. A retelling of true historical events, the film connects the local and the international in multiple ways, but it is the international dimension that has tended to draw the attention of commentators. Based on a book by a British writer and documentary filmmaker (Robert Marshall’s The Sewers of Lvov), ⁷⁰ who conducted interviews with survivors living in the UK and USA, the script was provided by a Canadian screenwriter and filming took place in Germany and Poland. The film also engages with global Holocaust discourses (being frequently compared, e.g., to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Holland’s earlier Europa, Europa) and has been analyzed predominantly in the context of transnational Holocaust cinema. Film scholar Elżbieta Ostrowska, for example, shows convincingly that W ciemności “produce[s] a double—Polish and Jewish—perspective on the Holocaust without privileging either.” ⁷¹ Uilleam Blacker’s critique of the film divides its message into “the simple, effective ‘European,’ [and] the difficult, obscure ‘local.’” ⁷² What disappears from view in such interpretations is that the film is also a portrait of Lviv/Lwów. The primary city (alongside Vilnius/Wilno) of the Kresy symbolic canon, Lwów is inextricably connected to notions of Polishness, whether one memorializes the city through prisms of nationalizing nostalgia or reflexive reconstruction. ⁷³ In W ciemności, however, the city is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it hardly features, at least in terms of architectural symbols—indeed, the film cannot visually index Lviv/Lwów because it was not shot there. It thus downplays the iconography of the city, effectively reversing Wajda’s logic in relocating the topography in Popiół i diament; unlike the unexpected presence of Wrocław, the absence of Lwów from W ciemności deemphasizes the mythologized city as a site of symbolic significance. On the other hand, the cultural and linguistic hybridity of the city is in full view. Seen through a prism of Polish cultural critique rather than global or European Holocaust memory, the film presents a vernacular cosmopolitanism, to once again adopt Bhabha’s term, in a very literal sense: its mix of languages and dialects makes Lviv/Lwów hardly recognizable as a Polish city at all.

The three principal Polish characters, Socha, his wife Wanda (Kinga Preis), and his assistant (in crime, sewage maintenance, and the concealing of Jews) Szczepko (Krzysztof Skonieczny), speak the basilectal, “street” version of the pre-war Lwów dialect, bałak. As Jan Fellerer argues, “L’viv urban dialect [was] a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than . . . a linguistic variant of a titular nation.” ⁷⁴ Agnieszka Holland also suggests that bałak was a separate language to standard Polish, placing it alongside other European tongues:

the actors had to come to terms with languages with which they had never previously had any contact. Marcin Bosak and Julia Kijowska learned to speak Yiddish. Michał Żurawski learned Ukrainian. The German actors—Maria Schrader and Benno Fürmann—learned Polish. And Robert Więckiewicz, Krzysztof Skonieczny and Kinga Preis perfectly mastered the Lwów dialect of bałak. ⁷⁵

In the Polish release of the film, subtitles were provided for dialogue in this hybrid tongue not easily understandable to many contemporary Poles. ⁷⁶ In this way, even the “Polish” characters are linguistically marked as hybrid. Their Polishness is peripheral and easily overlaps, for example, with Ukrainian identity: Socha has a personal history with Bortnik, a Ukrainian auxiliary policeman during the German occupation but previously a fellow inmate in the infamous Lontsky (Polish: Łącki) Street prison, ⁷⁷ and the two men can communicate effortlessly in a mix of tongues.

In W ciemności, nationalities are trumped by individuality—the arguable exception being Bortnik, a relatively one-dimensional Ukrainian nationalist-turned Nazi collaborator. As Holland’s description of the range of languages learned by the multinational cast indicates, the variety of codes makes the world of W ciemności an extremely polyphonic one, something that is much less a feature of Marshall’s book. According to Fellerer, multilingualism in Lviv/Lwów “was autochthonous, rather than the result of recent external migration.” ⁷⁸ This local diversity is on display throughout the film, especially in the Jewish characters who speak German, Polish, and/or Yiddish. The complex differentiation of identities within the Jewish population shows that their unity as Jews is conditioned above all by the external circumstance of German occupation. Tensions come to the fore in moments of crisis, such as when Socha forces the Jews who have escaped to the sewer to choose a smaller group to receive his assistance. The effective leader, Ignacy Chiger, a former professor and German-speaker, snaps at a Yiddish-speaker that he “would not have sat in the same room” with him before the war. Yet here and in other scenes, Jewish characters state repeatedly that they do not trust “those Poles,” although the Poles are no more monolithic (Figure 3). Trust and loyalty, therefore, are subject to a complex gradation: Boundaries within groups form one level of interaction and tension, but may not be visible to outsiders.

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Figure 3.

W ciemności.

Philosopher Max Pensky locates cosmopolitan memory in “the productive instability [that results] as particular, national frames of memory and transnational, putatively universal norms begin to interact dialectically with one another.” ⁷⁹ The visual poetics of W ciemności place such interactions at its very core. Ostrowska calculates that “Jewish” and “Polish” perspectives are given roughly equal screen time, about forty minutes each, “whereas the remaining sixty minutes or so are devoted to the time they spend together”; she also observes a dynamic whereby “together” scenes grow in length as the film goes on. ⁸⁰ In addition to evidence that “the relationship between the two is becoming more intense,” ⁸¹ the meticulous parallelism at work in the film can be read as a means of narrative de-particularization. The characters are less of interest as Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, etc., and more as human beings. The film’s use of eroticism, on both sides of the ghetto walls, is also part of this attention to universal features of being; indeed, the film’s dedication to Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, is a tribute to his book I była miłość w getcie (“And there was Love, too, in the Ghetto,” 2009). Like Edelman, Holland attempted to show that “our characters, even in the ghettos or sewers, still are people in the fullest sense.” ⁸² Ethnicities do matter, not least to the Germans; but they are subordinated to wider concerns of humanity. Thus, Socha’s act of rescuing is historically conditional on the differing experiences of the occupation by Poles and Jews (Pensky’s “national frames of memory”), but is narrativized in terms of “universal norms” that are not contingent on religion, nation, or language.

Memory in W ciemności is thus cosmopolitan at the point of articulation: multilingual, multi-perspectival, and universalistic but also situated in the locality of Lviv/Lwów. The city’s divisions are neither trivialized nor subsumed under a polonocentric rhetoric of multiculturalism, but instead are portrayed as complex and productive. Chris Rumford points out that cosmopolitanism is not the absence of division, but “the ability of individuals to cross and re-cross borders.” ⁸³ Such an ability may be seen as the leitmotif of the film: for example, Socha and Szczepko can traverse from street level to the sewers and vice versa; the Jew Mundek Margulies willingly infiltrates a concentration camp to look for his girlfriend’s sister; and above all, the camera can seamlessly transfer from ground-level to the sewers (visually “cutting through” the paving stones) and offer a panoramic, omniscient gaze on events. The film itself also travels across a border by depicting now-Ukrainian Lviv. It is therefore an unstated but crucial assumption of W ciemności that Lviv is deterritorialized from the national imaginary. It was a place where Poles lived and died, alongside a multitude of others including Jews and Ukrainians; and to remember the city is to remember all of those population groups equally and differentially.

The film’s very final words, in the form of a textual inscription, bring the commemorative message back to the realm of the national: The film dedicates itself to “the more than 6000 Poles who are honored by Israel as Righteous Among the Nations.” The film’s Polishness emerges at the end as an explicit concern, but this is a vision of nationhood that is unapologetically extroverted: it looks beyond the ambivalent peripheries and Lviv/Lwów to seek recognition from further afield, from Israel. In this way, nation-ness itself becomes a cosmopolitan stance. W ciemności dissolves the borders of Polish memory, rendering them porous and transversible. Lviv/Lwów is unburdened of its ethnocentric symbolism; as part of a shared memoryscape, the city and the Kresy in general become less troublesome.

Whereas Smarzowski accents the novelty of his cinematic commemoration by (purportedly) challenging previous silences, Holland engages much more in conversation with existing narratives. If W ciemności reconfigures the mythologization of Lwów/Lviv, Pokot sets up a spatialized dialogue with the aforementioned earlier borderland films Nikt nie woła (Kutz, 1960) and Pierwszy dzień wolności (Ford, 1964)—its urban scenes are similarly shot in Bystrzyca Kłodzka. Pokot, however, is set in the present, in which the Kłodzko Land (Ziemia Kłodzka in Polish, Glatzer Land in German, Hrabství kladské in Czech) ⁸⁴ is monoethnically Polish and majority Catholic; the ambivalent ethnoscapes of Nikt nie Woła (which features Poles who have migrated from multiple distinct regions) and Pierwszy dzień wolności (which focuses on a German family) are long vanished. A film about femininity, nature, and power, Pokot also embodies a cosmopolitan ethic that links the past and present and reimagines the Polonized borderland as a space of multiple interlinked heritages.

The film is based on the novel Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (“Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead,” 2009) by Olga Tokarczuk, ⁸⁵ who also co-scripted the screenplay. Tokarczuk is one of the pre-eminent Polish writers engaged in the literary reconfiguration of borderland space, ⁸⁶ and her collaboration with Holland translates many of her literary sensitivities onto the screen. In both the film’s characterization and visual effects, border-crossing worldliness is directly opposed to national introspection and emerges as a principal theme of the film. From the opening credits, stills and slow panning shots extol the scenery of the Kłodzko Land. Nature is colorful, expansive, and borderless, in contrast to the short-sighted parochialism of national culture, espoused by the corrupt and male-dominated hunting culture of the local community. Wild animals are pictured frequently, wandering in the forest and meadows, crossing roads and other artificial demarcation lines, such as inter-state borders. Moreover, here and in other encounters with wildlife, the camera appears to take on the perspective of the animals, switching angles to look back on the humans. Nature therefore has its own subjectivity, and respecting this subjectivity—the recognition of a soft, penetrable border between humankind and nature—combines with a conventional social cosmopolitanism as the film’s moral imperative. The heroine Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat; Figure 4) embodies this ethic as a former expat engineer who, perhaps symbolically, built bridges in Syria and Libya; in her retirement she teaches English in a local primary school. In addition to this worldliness, she is also a committed vegetarian who, above all defends the wildlife against the violence of the hunters—standing up to them personally, writing letters of complaint to the police, and, once she discovers that the hunters have shot her dogs, murdering them in revenge.

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Figure 4.

Pokot.

The Kłodzko Land is not only pregnant with the possibility of border-crossing in the present, it is also haunted by its past re-bordering. In one scene, Duszejko is told of a local myth, “from German times,” about the “Night Hunter” who roamed this area riding a black stork, accompanied by a pack of dogs, and hunted “evil people.” According to the legend, a boy once called into his fireplace for the Night Hunter to bring him something, and in the course of the of next four nights, received one piece per night of a quartered human corpse. This story resonates in the film’s present in two ways. First, the woman who recounts it complains of her husband, the mayor, bringing whole pieces of quartered deer to the dinner table. She is traumatized by the regular thought of “a quartered body” lying in her fridge, and her husband’s actions remind her of the Night Hunter myth. Thus, the legend travels across time and between national communities to trouble people’s sense of morality. Second, it is effectively reenacted by Duszejko, who ends up killing four “evil people” herself, including the mayor; in her case, however, she acts as an avenger to those who kill and quarter animal bodies. She deals not in quarters, but fours, and adopts the persona of the Night Hunter while taking revenge on those who hunt. In the story as told by the mayor’s wife, the Night Hunter disappears after his gruesome response to the boy, becoming a legend (within the legend) that is passed on from the pre-war Germans to the post-war Poles; Duszejko also disappears after her fourth murder, in two ways. First, she escapes from Kłodzko after it emerges that she is the killer, helped by her allies who concoct an elaborate flight. Second, a dream narrative concludes the film, in which Duszejko and her friends inhabit a rural paradise, complete with the two dogs that were killed. In the final frame, the bodies of Duszejko and the dogs fade out in the middle of the picture. Visual allegory replaces mimetic representation, and the ghost of the Night Hunter is seemingly put to rest.

Border trouble also features in the form of explicit reference to the expelled German population and the post-war confrontations in the so-called Ziemie Odzyskane. In one scene, Duszejko’s neighbor and friend Matoga (Wiktor Zborowski) ⁸⁷ explains why his father gave him the unusual name Świętopełk: this was his father’s ploy for spiting his wife, a German who remained in the area after the war because her father’s labor expertise was needed by the Polish authorities. Matoga’s father had been a concentration camp prisoner during the war, and he married the young German woman “out of hatred.” He drove his wife to suicide and spent the rest of his days holed up in the basement, “ignoring” his son. This confession, however, is made through tears of laughter, fueled by a marijuana-smoking session. The difficult history of the borderland, as embodied by Matoga, slips out as if by accident when his guard is momentarily down. This is both a call for introspection and reassessment of the mutual violence that was exerted between Germans and Poles in the past (not dissimilar to that of Róża), and a novel way (at least in a Polish context) of remembering the difficult past through intoxicated laughter. This scene can thus be read as a symbolic encapsulation of the cosmopolitan poetics of Pokot as a whole: The critique of the boundedness of nationality combines solemnity and comedy. The film calls for both engagement—for example, in its straightforward denunciation of the narrow-mindedness of state power (especially the police and the clergy)—and detachment—such as in its overriding sympathy for a serial murderer in Duszejko.

Border trouble thus comes to the forefront of memory in Pokot, as a legacy that continues to affect present-day individuals. If Róża, Wołyń, and W ciemności return to the past to reevaluate the symbolic burden of Poland’s border trouble, Pokot places troubled memory, both individual and collective, on the frontlines of an ongoing culture war. For Matoga, to remember the mixed, transnational past is to strive for personal healing: after breaking his silence, Matoga, who has also endured various family problems with his wife and son, becomes close to Duszejko and ultimately joins her surrogate “family” in the final, idyllic dream sequence. Understanding his suppressed German lineage is therefore a step towards redemption. From Duszejko’s perspective, taking up the role of the Night Hunter is also a way to gain equilibrium, metaphorically laying multiple ghosts to rest: her dogs “return,” she reenacts the “ending” of the myth by disappearing, and nature appears to gain some form of harmony in the final, light-filled scene. The originally German legend thus becomes a symbolic device linking the individual (Duszejko), locality (the multicultural Kłodzko Land), and an ethic of cosmopolitan solidarity. The German trace in borderland memory is made a vital component of Polish cultural identity.