From Class Struggle to Conservative Revolution: Andrzej Wajda Censors Tadeusz Junak’s The Palace

Introduction

In The National and the Revolutionary, Marcin Kula links the Solidarity movement with other nationally motivated revolutions, especially those taking place in Third World countries. Of particular importance seems to be the comparison between the conservative Polish revolution of 1980 and the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Both revolts turned to national ideology and religious values to seek the opportunity for social change. The revolution in Iran was preceded by a period of rapid modernizing social reforms by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and economic acceleration. ¹ Likewise, Poland of the 1970s saw an economic upturn and an uplift in the public mood: rising living standards, arousal of consumer aspirations, and the opening of the country to the West (in 1972, the border with the GDR was opened, and visas were lifted for travel between Poland and Austria). And simultaneously, it was a time when Marxist concepts, such as exploitation, class struggle, or relations of production, were replaced by an ethical discourse that called upon the society “enslaved” by communist power for moral opposition. The radical rejection of the Marxist tradition was anticipated by the events of March 1968 when the country had to deal with student protests and political gamesmanship in the leadership of the Communist Party, which led to the repression of Jewish citizens. The people sided with the authorities in the conflict with the students and the opposition-oriented intelligentsia and participated in the anti-Semitic rallies organized by the party. March’68 made the leftist intelligentsia realize that further oppositional practices could not be founded on the Marxist notions that aroused resistance in Polish society, but on a national discourse capable of effectively uniting society. It was through the use of national rhetoric, the reactivation of the same vs other dichotomy, and the amplification of nationalist sentiments in society that the authorities gained social legitimacy for their actions in March. The people during the “March events” proved that it was the nation, not the working class, that was the decisive social subject in the Polish context. ² It was these events that contributed to the project, prepared by the political opposition, of a civil society founded on national and religious values which would unite Polish society under the banner of Solidarity in 1980. The rise of Solidarity (or rather the first pilgrimage of John Paul II to Poland) and the Islamic Revolution are also linked in Christian Caryl’s book Strange Rebels, revealing the wider global potential of these phenomena. He notes that the counter-revolutionary forces unleashed in 1979—religious (the Pope’s pilgrimage to Poland or the Islamic Revolution) and economic (the launch of economic reforms in China, Thatcher’s victory)—anticipated the end of the great socialist utopias that dominated the twentieth century. At the same time, these strange counter-revolutionaries, Wojtyła, Khomeini, and Thatcher, did not intend to restore the old order but, having learned the lessons of past revolutions, proposed their own conservative program, capturing and absorbing some Marxist ideas (e.g., the Pope’s interest in working-class politics or the concepts of nationalization adopted by Khomeini). ³ The powerful conservative turn then set in motion fundamentally transformed the world picture economically, politically, religiously, and socially.

A local testimony to this global shift is Andrzej Wajda’s 1980 censorial attack on Tadeusz Junak’s Pałac (The Palace), which expresses a Marxist vision of history. In this film, Junak creates a genealogy of peasant liberation. The film tells the story of a poor peasant, Jakub, who, at the end of World War Two, enters a palace abandoned by its inhabitants and imagines himself in the role of the master. In this article, I discuss Junak’s film to argue that the local history of Polish serfs forms part of the same global political, economic, and cultural processes that led to the establishment of slavery. In other words, the history of Polish internal colonization, the story of how the Polish nobility turned the poorest portion of its own society into serfs, can be no longer separated from the global geopolitical processes related to the development of colonial imperialism and Atlantic slavery. I therefore set the analysis of The Palace in the context of postcolonial and decolonial studies. Postcolonial studies in Poland did not provide a basis for critical reflection on the noble and Sarmatian tradition but served to renew and reinforce that tradition. Poland appeared in these studies merely as a victim of the partitioners: In the late eighteenth century, three imperial powers (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) divided its territory between themselves, wiping the country off the map of Europe for over a hundred years. After World War Two, the country found itself within the Soviet sphere of influence. ⁴ My focus in this article will not be Poland’s dependence on Russian (and later Soviet) or German imperial domination, but Poland’s place in the context of a colonial regime. The case of The Palace demonstrates clearly that such notions as “slavery,” “racism,” and “blackness” do not describe only the relationship between the “First” and the “Third” Worlds but also that between the global center and local spaces such as Poland where these phenomena took less-obvious and more covert—and thus more easily overlooked—forms, those of internal colonization and “racism without color.” Junak does not limit himself to showing the poverty and torment of the serfs but projects the different forms of peasant revolt: mimicry and violence. First, when the people take power, the protagonist performs an alien social class, plays the role of the lord, but he cannot erase his own peasant identity. Second, the peasants’ violence against their masters is associated with the force of refusal, which is the first moment of the political. The attempts to block this emancipatory potential before it could emerge into the public space occurred because Junak’s vision of history based on class struggle (Marxism) ran counter to the conservative revolution then happening in Poland.

A decisive role in the attempt to prevent the film from being distributed was played by Wajda, which may seem paradoxical insofar as he was an adherent of Marxist ideas from the beginning of his directorial career until the mid-1970s. Particularly between 1968 and 1976, he developed a Marxist project of social emancipation. In films from that period, on the one hand, he revealed censored and repressed areas of the Polish collective experience, for example, the Holocaust in Krajobraz po bitwie (Landscape After the Battle, 1970), class conflict in Wesele (The Wedding, 1972) and Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land, 1974), or Stalinism in Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble, 1976), and on the other hand, he tried to capture the new structures of feeling emerging in society and marked by countercultural energy (Wszystko na sprzedaż, Everything for Sale, 1968; Piłat i inni, Pilate and Others, 1971; The Promised Land). At the end of the 1970s, however, he unexpectedly became an advocate of the conservative revolution; in Człowiek z żelaza (Man of Iron, 1981), he abandons the vision of left-wing resistance contained in Man of Marble in favor of the national and Catholic values on which the Solidarity movement was founded. Meanwhile, Tadeusz Junak consistently thought of art in Marxist terms, ostentatiously rejecting the national Catholic narratives. He originated from the avant-garde Warsztat Formy Filmowej (Film Form Studio), a group that had been active since 1970 as a section of the academic circle at the Łódź Film School. The workshop members criticized Wajda for manipulating cinematic meanings so as to absolve Polish society of its wartime and post-war guilt. They fought for a different cinema: one that would be experimental, founded on alternative formal concepts, and generative of different—open, inquisitive, and critical—reception communities. “This film is a misunderstanding [. . .] It is an unacceptable film,” Andrzej Wajda said during the approval screening of Junak’s The Palace. ⁵ His censorial attack on Junak’s film is evidence of how, in the Solidarity period, at a time when national unity was being built under the banner of Catholic values, artists linked to the democratic opposition suppressed all emancipatory impulses and potential in Polish cinema. Junak emphasized conflict, dispute, and dissension as a strategy of political resistance while Wajda offered audiences a contract based on social unity under the banner of national and religious values. Wajda’s hostility shows how difficult it was for Solidarity’s elites to accept the film’s radical project that equated serfdom with slavery and expressed a peasant rebellion excluded from dominant narratives.

In this article, I reveal the political nature of the processes behind the establishment of the hegemony of national Catholic values at the very core of contemporary Polish national culture. The dispute around The Palace lends itself to grasping the fundamental change that took place in the collective imagination of late communist Poland, that is, the shift from apprehending social reality in a relational, processual, and conflictual way (social classes based on power relations) to thinking in an essentialist and static way (nations based on religious values). In part one, I will analyze the reasons for Wajda’s attack on Junak’s film, those related to the professional community (retaliation against the filmmakers of the Film Form Studio who criticized him), to film production (The Palace posed a threat to the cinema of moral anxiety pushed by Wajda), and those that were political (the Marxist vision of history as proposed by Junak contradicted the Solidarity project founded on national and religious values). ⁶ In the second part, I analyze in detail the critical potential present in The Palace. In this film, Junak exposes the violence concealed by legitimating narratives and destabilizes the national ideology, which in Poland was created by the noble elite subjugating the people. The director of The Palace approaches social conflict in line with the pattern of racial conflict, which is why I refer in my analysis to the tools developed by postcolonial and decolonial studies. In the last part of the article, I use the example of Wajda’s The Wedding, based on a drama by Stanisław Wyspiański, to argue that Wajda’s early work was founded on the same Marxist notions and formulas of visual and affective excess which provide the basis for The Palace, that is, the film that he attacks. The dispute around The Palace helps to grasp the transformation of Wajda and, more broadly, of Polish culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that is, the abandonment of subversively energized emancipatory narratives in favor of a conservative model of national cinema.

“Unacceptable”

Andrzej Wajda wanted to block the release of The Palace at all costs. Everything about this film irritated Wajda: Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel on which it was based, the director’s stylistic concept, the actors, and the debutant director’s technique. Wajda’s interlocutors were dismayed by his attack. Not just because they liked the film, but primarily due to Wajda’s censorial attitude. The young director was defended by Janusz Morgenstern, whose Zespół Filmowy (film unit) produced the picture, Wiesław Myśliwski, and even the director Czesław Petelski, closely associated with the Communist regime. The former observed that Wajda’s position was “very intolerant” and “absolutely [. . .] false”; Myśliwski—embarrassed that he had to defend a film based on his novel—said that the film was difficult because so was the book, but it was impossible to resist the power of flowing images; Petelski emphasized that it was an “excellent debut,” and Wajda was “too severe, unfair” and “completely unobjective.” ⁷ The film approval committee instructed Wajda to compare Junak’s first picture with other debuts seen during the approval screenings, which, incidentally, did not match The Palace in terms of artistic quality, and regarded his idea of shelving the film as absurd. But Wajda was adamant. The more he insisted that Junak was a failed filmmaker, that he had no grasp of form and technique, the more his arguments became illogical.

I never persuaded anyone, he said, not to accept the film, but I did say that for me, this film was unacceptable. I say this because I don’t mean the film’s poetics [. . .], but I can’t accept the way this poetics is expressed, because I think it is of poor artistic quality. [. . .] I didn’t find The Palace to be original; on the contrary, I believe it is unoriginal in execution, [. . .] since there is only the semblance of originality, overblown imagery, overblown cinema that is seemingly artistic. ⁸

Although he kept talking about the debutant’s lack of originality and alleged technical errors, it is evident that the film’s artistic quality was not the real point at issue. First, Wajda’s attack on Junak’s film seems to have been an act of revenge on the artists of the Film Form Studio who had criticized him for years as the epitome of a cinema that manipulated audiences’ feelings and ideas about national community; second, Wajda saw The Palace as a threat to the model of cinema based on realism and ethical values (a cinema of moral anxiety); and third, Junak’s vision of history based on class struggle ran counter to the concurrent conservative revolution of which Wajda unexpectedly became the chief cinematic architect (Man of Iron). Wajda’s attack on Junak’s film demonstrates that the tools of censorship during the period of Solidarity, which is presented as one of broad artistic freedom, were used not only by the communist authorities but also by filmmakers associated with the political opposition.

“Don’t watch Wajda’s films!” was the appeal that opened Wojciech Bruszewski’s short film made in 1973 as part of the “Kinolaboratorium” project. Bruszewski, along with Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Paweł Kwiek, Andrzej Różycki, and Junak, founded the Film Form Studio. ⁹ This affiliation afforded the group’s members independence and considerable artistic freedom: On the one hand, the school did not interfere with their artistic program and protected them from political pressure; on the other, it allowed them to use its technical infrastructure and shoot their radical projects on 35-mm film with professional equipment. They drew inspiration from modern art rather than the latest films; from Minimalism, conceptual art, Neo-Constructivism, and Neo-Dadaism. The studio furiously boycotted Polish film as being slavishly subordinate to literature. They believed that its focus on linear narrative, plot, and anecdote made this cinema archaic and provincial. They deliberately dissociated themselves from state-run film production companies and television, thus rejecting the path taken at that time by the creators of the cinema of moral anxiety (from short television films to full-length films). They rejected the perception of the director as a master who claims the right to assign the only correct meaning to images. Moreover, they criticized the conservative and ossified film community, which made them the target of attacks both by directors associated with nationalist-communist circles (e.g., Bohdan Poręba) and those who kept their distance from the authorities (Andrzej Wajda). ¹⁰

They believed that the renewal of Polish cinema would only be possible if filmmakers and audiences realized that film is not a transparent medium. Failure to see the boundaries of the screen makes audiences susceptible to ideological manipulation, persuasion, and political propaganda. Through their films and activities, the studio’s artists wanted the audience to see these boundaries and thus the way cinema creates meaning while supporting and strengthening dominant ideologies (socialist and national, but not patriarchal because the group’s members were probably not aware of the latter). The opposition to narrative cinema as a machine for producing and stabilizing dominant fictions was brilliantly captured by Junak in his 1973 found footage film Epizod (Episode). The director used the final portion of Richard Brooks’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) to expose the mechanisms by which mainstream cinema affects the viewers’ senses and emotions, and thus their understanding of the film. The choice of Sweet Bird of Youth does not seem accidental. Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, the picture is a rather perverse emanation of the Hollywood cinema of visual pleasure, since the spectacular body to admire is not a fetishized female body, but—as is often the case with Williams—a male one, that of Paul Newman who prostitutes himself on the screen. However, little is left of the cinematic pleasure offered by Brooks’s work because Junak re-edited the film’s final scenes so that the viewer could not identify with any of the characters. The reversal of the narrative made the film unintelligible, and its magic—the magic of classic Hollywood (because Brooks’s film belongs formally to the 1950s)—was dispelled. The disintegration of the filmic illusion and the destruction of the narrative codes of mainstream cinema and cinematic pleasure put distance between us and what we see on the screen. It then becomes obvious how easily cinema can manipulate the viewer’s reception habits, in support of community narratives. Meanwhile, the creators of the cinema of moral anxiety made films as if they were unaware that the form of a film carried a specific ideological message. And in their films, this was an extremely conservative one, especially in the moral layer. If the makers of the cinema of moral anxiety wanted to reveal the truth about the reality of the time, that is, the evil communist system and the corrupt or merely naïve society, through their realistic stories, then Junak’s analytical and critical Episode provides us with the tools to ask whose truth the makers of the cinema of moral anxiety wanted to reveal and for what purposes they needed this truth. Because their truth was certainly not the truth of the studio artists, who openly opposed the cinema of moral anxiety, its anachronistic aesthetics, and its conservative perception of social issues.

Wajda and the former studio members—who, three years after the disbanding of the group, founded the Ruch Odnowy Uczelni (Movement for the Renewal of the School) in 1980—clashed openly during the carnival of Solidarity. The renewers demanded reforms in the Łódź Film School and cinema, advocating a move towards experimental filmmaking, a rejection of the perception of cinema as a craft, an embrace of modern art, and the contextualization of cinema within a broader audiovisual and multimedia environment. ¹¹ This gave the school’s authorities and the Polish Filmmakers Association cause for concern that the school might be taken over by artists with backgrounds in other visual media. In a letter of 2 December 1980, Andrzej Wajda, then President of the Polish Filmmakers Association, wrote the following to students of the Film School:

You have assumed a very important function as a group for the Renewal of the School. It requires you, first and foremost, to be modest, because you can build something permanent only if you rely on authorities; you must recognize them too. [. . .] You must not look for the authorities so badly needed by this School outside the community of people who make films and try to make them well and honestly. ¹²

These words were spoken by the same Wajda who had quickly emancipated himself from the influence of his master, Aleksander Ford – the same Wajda who had looked for authorities outside the film community (to mention just Andrzej Wróblewski, a painter he admired), and the same one whose first films had boldly followed the Surrealists although the dominant discourses of the era advocated taking a cue from the Social Realists (and then possibly from the Neo-Realists). Now, as an authority figure, he gave orders and admonished. He called for modesty and forbade others to seek renewal outside the film community. He told them which authorities they could recognize and which they must not. And the renewers said “no” to Wajda, to the blind cult of authority and to the cinema of moral anxiety. They championed a change of social and cultural discourse, a new cinema, and a critical look at community narratives.

Tadeusz Junak, a director who critically examined film form as an instrument of ideological manipulation, was accused by Wajda of “technical incompetence,” pretentiousness, and lack of originality. “If we have a lot of films like that [like The Palace], they will do all the more harm to our cinema,” ¹³ Wajda said. Why would The Palace harm Polish cinema? Why did Wajda believe that the film foreshadowed the fall of Polish cinema? Wajda favored a different cinema and other “young filmmakers” at that time, those who made the cinema of moral anxiety at the Zespół Filmowy “X” under his watchful eye. So he may have feared the entry into cinema of the radical artists of the Film Form Studio who had opposed his style of filmmaking for years. Wajda knew that Robakowski, Kwiek, Junak, and Rybczyński, as well as Grzegorz Królikiewicz who was associated with the studio, were strong personalities, and what is more, they were critical of mainstream Polish cinema, which meant that he might have feared that their next step could be to take over Polish cinema. He said “yes” to the generational change in cinema, but only if he controlled that change. First-time directors of the cinema of moral anxiety, such as Agnieszka Holland, Janusz Kijowski, and Ryszard Bugajski, differed from the Studio’s artists in almost every respect. The former steered clear of narrative experiments and innovative stylistic or mise-en-scène solutions, since, as Dobrochna Dabert wrote, “the program of ascetic restraint and raw poetics of the cinema of moral anxiety harmonized with the canon of ethical values revealed in these films.” ¹⁴ During the approval process of The Palace, Morgenstern quickly realized that Wajda’s attack on Junak’s film was in fact an attempt to impose the conventions of the cinema of moral anxiety on Polish cinema as a whole. Provoked by Wajda’s words that films like The Palace “would not work” with the general public, he argued that the films of moral anxiety shown at the 1979 Gdańsk Film Festival had not been particularly popular with the audience. ¹⁵ Morgenstern was not surprised by the audience’s indifference since he believed these films were merely photographed journalism. ¹⁶ He illustrated his argument with the example of Janusz Kijowski’s Kung-fu (1979): “Although the film deals with moral issues, it advocates nothing other than the creation of another clique. Is this supposed to be the great morality?” ¹⁷ Morgenstern stated firmly that the cinema of moral anxiety was rejected by spectators because “it was not [. . .] an expression of true cinema,” and true cinema, in his view, is always associated with filmic qualities, aesthetics, and vividness. ¹⁸ He added that this way of understanding and practicing cinema had been completely lost in Polish film. Indeed, the works of the cinema of moral anxiety shown at the 1979 Gdańsk Film Festival—like most of the movement’s films—did not find favor with the audience, even though they flattered and absolved it. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Amator (Cinema Buff, 1979) was 38th in the annual ranking (it was seen by nearly 450,000 spectators), Kung-fu took 34th place in 1980 with almost 400,000 viewers, and even Wajda’s Dyrygent (The Orchestra Conductor, 1979) had an audience of less than 440,000. Moreover, Mieczysław Gałuszka’s 1981 study of the reception of the cinema of moral anxiety among workers and university-educated people confirms that these films were seen almost exclusively by the intelligentsia. ¹⁹ The majority of the working class had never heard the term “cinema of moral anxiety” and could not name the major films of the movement, but that task was easily completed by intellectuals. It should be noted, however, that even they did not cite films by Kieślowski or Holland, but those by Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, works by recognized directors with high cinema attendance rates: Man of Iron was seen by over five million, Man of Marble by over two million, and Zanussi’s Barwy ochronne (Camouflage, 1976) by more than one million people (of course, if the authorities had not controlled the distribution and reception of the two latter films, they would have had much higher attendance). On the other hand, the cinema of moral anxiety was well represented in the West, especially in France. Films by Wajda (Bez znieczulenia, Rough Treatment, 1978; Man of Iron) and Zanussi (Spirala, Spiral, 1978; Constans, The Constant Factor, 1980) were shown and received awards at the Cannes Film Festival, but—as Anna Szczepańska writes—they “won audiences over just because they opposed the system.” ²⁰

As Łucja Iwanczewska wrote, the members of the Film Form Studio rejected the idea of “saving” audiences, an ambition evident in many Polish films of the era, including Wajda’s. According to the movement’s artists, the absolution granted to audiences consisted in “obscuring difficult, dangerous and traumatic places to free the majority of Polish society from wartime and post-war guilt by providing the images that they wanted.” ²¹ Since the studio’s members called for a boycott of Wajda’s films, they probably did not know them either. After all, in many of his films, especially those made during the group’s most active period, the director did not obscure dangerous places or absolve Polish society but used stylistic, carnal, and affective excess to force that society to deal—albeit indirectly—with repressed traumatic experiences (Landscape After Battle, Pilate and Others, The Promised Land, and Man of Marble). A particular case in point is Man of Marble, which Polish sociologist Jan Sowa argues anticipates Solidarity. “Solidarity,” the scholar wrote, “is like a movement of ten million men of marble, Mateusz Birkuts from Andrzej Wajda’s film, who were disappointed with the people’s government, but not the ideals it promoted.” ²² The author does not see Solidarity as a movement opposed to values characteristic of the workers’ communist movement, but as a “communist event par excellence,” ²³ since Solidarity’s strategies of fighting exploitation and alienation were, in his opinion, consistent with communist ideas. According to Grzegorz Niziołek, however, Man of Marble is largely contrary to the political opposition’s project of civil society based on national and religious codes which Sowa ignores. Niziołek writes that even though Birkut ultimately opposes the violence of the Stalinist state, he does not identify with the traditional, national Catholic forms of Polish communality or question his sense of uprootedness. In fact, the act of severing connections with his place of origin proves “the source of not only his dilemma, but also of his strength and nonconformity.” ²⁴ Niziołek’s claim that Man of Marble does not fulfil Solidarity’s agenda (the workers’ revolt under the sign of the cross), instead trying to establish a new symbolic field—but one that is a consequence of the social revolution of 1939–1956 (World War Two and the Stalinist period)—is further supported by the continuation of the story of Man of Marble’s Agnieszka and Maciek Tomczyk in Man of Iron, which is completely opposite to the vision presented in the former film.

The striking shipyard workers, whom Wajda visited in late August, allegedly requested him to make the film. Surprisingly, what remained of Man of Marble in Man of Iron was only the actors, Jerzy Radziwiłowicz and Krystyna Janda, since their characters—Agnieszka in particular—had undergone an incredible transformation. Agnieszka turned from a modern, independent, and domineering superwoman into an indomitable Polish Mother. Wajda constructs a vision of national unity by means of separation and permanence in the film: the Communist elites are corrupt, immoral, cynical, and always drunk, while the oppositionists are righteous, impeccable, and noble. The communist body is disgustingly sweaty and swollen (e.g., the characters played by Franciszek Trzeciak and Janusz Gajos), while the body of the political opposition—for example, that of Tomczyk or Agnieszka—is a body that inspires trust, dignified, and always erect. These oppositions—“us” and “them”—are permanent and unquestionable. The healthy body of the nation is workers, but, importantly, deeply religious workers. One cannot help feeling that Wajda turned into images the words spoken by John Paul II at a mass on Victory Square which marked the beginning of his pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979. ²⁵ The Pope explicitly linked the history of the Polish nation to Christianity. He said that Poles could not understand themselves without Christ, and Wajda fills the frames of Man of Iron with religious symbols: Workers carry a huge wooden cross into the Gdańsk Shipyard and fasten a figure of Jesus to it while the shipyard’s gates are hung with portraits of John Paul II and images of Our Lady of Częstochowa. The entire public space is dominated by prayers and church festivities: When Winkel, a radio journalist who has the task of making a program disgracing Tomczyk, arrives in Gdańsk and opens a window in his hotel room, he hears the sounds of religious rituals taking place in front of the shipyard gate. It is no surprise, then, that contact with the fervently religious and morally impeccable workers leads the cowardly and conformist character to convert and join the strikers. The Poles, the director seems to suggest, should follow in his footsteps. Wajda could not present his arguments more clearly: The Catholic Church is the guarantor of the nation’s integrity, and liberation is only possible through an alliance of the intelligentsia and the working class under the sign of the cross. The previous protests of 1968, 1970, ²⁶ and 1976 ²⁷ were doomed to fail because they were not based on interclass, intergenerational, and national Catholic unity: The workers did not join the students’ revolt, then the students did not support the workers, and all of them were nowhere near Christ. The change came to be symbolized by the scene in Man of Iron in which Lech Wałęsa, wearing a rosary around his neck, signs the August Agreements with a red and white ballpoint pen bearing an image of the Pope. The carnival of Solidarity really was filled with religious symbols and ceremonies: Solidarity’s leaders conducted official talks with Church hierarchs, masses were celebrated in factories, and Solidarity banners were consecrated. Therefore it is difficult to agree with Jan Sowa who claimed that religious symbols and rituals were used in the daily operations of Solidarity in an instrumental fashion: Religious pictures on the factory gates were to serve only as a protective shield (it was hoped that soldiers would not dare shoot at the images of Our Lady), and masses were intended to relieve stress. ²⁸ “The world that Solidarity fought for in the early 1980s was not based on the principles of a religious state at all and drew mostly from the ideas of an autonomous workers’ movement,” Sowa argued. ²⁹ Religious symbols and celebrations were, in his opinion, part of the syncretic character of Solidarity. However, according to Sergiusz Kowalski, that syncretism consisted in the taking over of Socialist discourse by Church discourse, the preparation of themes in such a way as to fuse them with the traditionalist national-Catholic heritage. Kowalski’s book cites the following words of a union author quoting Roman Dmowski: although “the Solidarity union is an organization for workers regardless of their worldview and their political beliefs, to attempt to separate Catholicism from Polishness, to sever the nation from religion and the Church is to destroy the very essence of the nation.” ³⁰

In Man of Iron, Wajda resurrects a mythical—national and Christian—narrative. Preparing for Man of Marble, he knew that he wanted to make a “bright” film, while its continuation is, despite the final victory of Solidarity, not so much a “dark” film as—to use Agata Bielik-Robson’s phrase—a “Polish triumph of Thanatos.” ³¹ It is a film from the crypt. The point here is not only martyrological memory but also self-castration: In making Man of Iron, Wajda renounced his cinema and his poetics because it had no place in the national Catholic narrative. The dynamic movement, sensual energy, and transgressive bodies that filled his earlier films were replaced with a gloomy effect of the tomb. But that affective stagnation and atmosphere of death may have helped to record—against the director’s intentions—something that was impossible to confront in the early 1980s. First, the idealistic picture of the carnival of Solidarity, of an enthusiastic society filled with a sense of community, strength, and dignity, hides the real public sentiment, influenced by anarchy in political life (the radicalization of Solidarity leaders on the one hand, and the Communists’ reluctance to surrender power on the other) and the severe economic crisis (ration coupons for nearly all foodstuffs had been introduced then, from cold meats to flour and eggs, and people had to queue for hours to buy these goods). In the quality-of-life polls conducted by the OBOP from the mid-1970s to the 1989, the year 1981 ranked as the worst (as many as 86 percent regarded it as bad, and only 2 percent as good).^32,33 Second, the call for national unity under the sign of the cross conceals the subordination and exclusion of others. The call proves to be a force that blocks and annihilates differences, opening the way for an expansion of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and religious fundamentalism. As early as 1981, Sergiusz Kowalski wrote in Tygodnik Solidarność: “Let’s defend ourselves and others against a new ideological totalitarianism, against another relentless synthesis of ‘God’ and ‘Fatherland’ which shuts off all intellectual horizons.” ³⁴

The history of the People’s Poland begins in Man of Iron in 1968, when the workers did not join the students in their fight against the Communist regime. Wajda’s film is silent on where those workers—aware of their rights—came from. What Wajda deleted from his film was explicitly shown by Junak in The Palace. It was indeed tactless to remind society that the unity of the people was founded on the enslavement of the striking workers’ ancestors (serfs), on violence and exploitation, for which the landowners and priests were responsible. In Man of Iron, Wajda obscured traumatic places, proposing safe binary oppositions (“us”—the opposition—and “them”—the Communists), whereas Junak provocatively made them rankle. No wonder, then, that Wajda was concerned: The Palace “is the wrong way for Polish film because we really have much more to say in contemporary Polish cinema, and this takes us to a dead end.” ³⁵ And during the carnival of Solidarity, Wajda no longer wanted to drive viewers to a dead end; he wanted to save and absolve them.

“They Want to Take Our Place”

In the initial scene of The Palace, the camera zooms slowly in on Jakub grazing sheep. One thatched house after another bursts into flames. The lord and the lady leave their property in a hurry. The front of World War Two approaches: The villagers look at the apocalypse with fear and excitement. Then Jakub enters the abandoned palace. He looks fearfully at the portraits of noblemen adorning the halls of the castle. He looks at them as if expecting to be scolded or humiliated. At last, he sprawls in one of the mansion’s armchairs. He is shaken out of this blissful state by the sound of a chiming clock. The terrified Jakub breaks off the pendulum, and time is suddenly suspended: From now on, scenes set in the present (the end of World War Two) will be intertwined with afterimages of the serf’s fate and a peasant’s fantasy that he has taken his lord’s place. Junak moves easily and competently about the past. The nobility’s costumes tell the audience that the action takes place in the sixteenth century or has shifted to the nineteenth or twentieth century. The noblemen wear Sarmatist kontuszes (sing. kontusz, an outer garment worn by Polish noblemen), or tailcoats and top hats characteristic of the nineteenth century. The lady wears either a gown with a geometric silhouette, puffed sleeves, and a fan-shaped Medici collar typical of the sixteenth century or a Belle Époque dress with a long train an elaborate veiled hat. Only the peasants’ attire never changes. Regardless of the period, they wear the same shabby, torn, and dirty clothes, for their time is a permanent rural time. Junak highlights the stagnation and poverty of peasant life: We see small dark rooms shared with animals; large hot stoves on and in which children sleep; walls hung with religious pictures. Importantly, the director does not evade the question of who was responsible for the indigence of more than 70 percent of Poland’s population. ³⁶ This is well illustrated by a scene in which Jakub the squire listens to the lofty singing of a nightingale. But he wonders how he can have lofty feelings when the peasants lament outside the palace windows. They ask the squire for mercy because their children are starving, all their belongings have been burned to the ground, and so on. The lord complains to the bishop that they stay like that outside the palace day and night, to which the latter replies that they are quieter on his estate. From the library, they watch Jakub the peasant’s father scythe roses outside and then cut his own throat. Junak combines Jakub’s imagination with retrospection: A palace servant informs the hero’s family that their father lies dead outside and that the body has to be taken away before the lord wakes up so as to spare him the unpleasant sight. A cortège with the lord and the lady marches solemnly outside the palace, but it quickly turns out that they are mourning a dead nightingale, not the peasant’s dead body. Junak points directly to the alliance between the nobility and the Catholic Church, which imposed on peasants the status of an exploited group.

Jakub’s father dreamed for his son to become a footman, since only then would he become a person. As a peasant, he was a subhuman, a slave, an animal. The history of the nobility and the people is a story of domination and exploitation, hierarchy and captivity, violence and shame, suffering and poverty. The serf system existed in Poland from the thirteenth century and continued, with various modifications, until the nineteenth century. With the passage of the Statutes of Piotrków in 1496, the peasant became permanently tied to the lord’s land and could not leave it without permission. But serfdom was not made equal to slavery until the sixteenth century. ³⁷ As subordinate others, peasants had no political or economic power. Having no legal personality—although they were conscripted into the army and paid taxes to the state and tithes to the Church—they became someone’s property. The lord now had unlimited power over them: He determined the frequency of labor service (in the eighteenth century, a peasant was sometimes required to work seven or more days a week, which in practice meant that other family members had to help him perform the duty); he could abuse his serfs physically almost without restriction (until 1768, killing a peasant by a nobleman on his land was punishable only by a fine); he controlled the fate of peasant children, gave permission to marry, and forced widows to remarry to increase the farm’s productivity and even traded his subjects. From the sixteenth century, the nobility sold peasants not only when they disposed of the land to which the latter were bound but also literally (through so-called donations). Either individual peasants (usually those who knew a trade, brewers or blacksmiths) or entire villages were sold (around 1,731, a male peasant cost 120 grzywnas [sing. grzywna, a currency unit] and a female peasant cost 60 grzywnas). ³⁸ The situation of Polish serfs in the sixteenth century did not depend on the internal rules of the feudal system (making corvée conditional on the ability to sell crops domestically) but on the external logic of the capitalist market (an increase in grain production went hand in hand with an increase in sales income). ³⁹

Junak does not limit himself to showing the poverty and torment of the serfs but projects the different forms of peasant revolt: mimicry and violence. Both involve pleasure, although they are pursued through contradictory intentions: the former by means of gratification and fulfilment, and the latter by means of revenge and destruction. Jakub wants to become the lord’s double and take his place. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that every colonized man wants to take the colonizer’s place. The former “dreams of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, ‘They want to take our place.’” ⁴⁰ This is also the case with The Palace, but it is not just about possession, about sleeping in the lord’s bed, sitting at his table, and having sex with the lady. For Jakub, the most important thing is not to be himself but to be able to escape himself and a predetermined fate. By refusing to be identified with his own social class, he looks for his reflection in the image of an alien one. This is shown clearly by a scene that refers to Lacan’s mirror stage. This is the stage in an infant’s life from 8 to 16 months of age when the child begins to recognize its own body—fragmented until then—as a unity. So Jakub looks at his class-marked peasant body reflected in a mirror. His gaze is fearful at first, but this changes when he sees himself in a white tailcoat and top hat instead of torn trousers and a frayed sheepskin coat. He is then overcome with joy. He falls in love with his idealized reflection, like a child who identifies its body seen in the mirror as an entity separate from the mother. The hero writes the words “I Jakub” on a dusty piano because it is only now that he has acquired subjecthood. It happened the moment he became someone else. This is made clear by the scene where he looks at the portraits of noblemen in the palace. In one of them, he sees his father as a nobleman, which suggests that the only path for subject people—who do not have their own history—is to take over the history of the oppressor. Jakub orders the palace painter to create his portrait. But a portrait of him as a lord, not a peasant. He wants to be like the noblemen in the paintings. In short, since he does not have his own—peasant—history, he believes he must appropriate the lord’s history. He can tell his story only in the lord’s language because the peasants’ story has never been told, and even if its remnants or fragments exist, they are expressed in the language and often from the perspective of the oppressor. So Jakub performs an alien social class, but he cannot erase his own peasant identity. The two roles constantly interpenetrate and overlap. If, as Achille Mbembe argues, “the division between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is one of the conditions of reproduction on a molecular scale of colonial- and racist-type violence,” the inability to embody perfectly the role of the lord obliterates that boundary. ⁴¹ Lying in his huge bed, Jakub asks the prince in a letter if the mare has foaled. He discusses the harvest and sheep with the count. In another scene, he talks about hunger, how he fed on his own saliva. He tells a servant to bring him a plate of pasta, but, accustomed to eating with a wooden spoon, he has a hard time using a fork. During a banquet, everyone uses cutlery, but Jakub—to the embarrassment of his fellow diners—eats with his hands. Poorly educated, unfamiliar with aristocratic etiquette and manners, Jakub will never be authentic as a squire. But this awkward imitation, the incorrect assimilation of noble codes and forms, and the mingling of rural and lordly life carry political potential. Homi K. Bhabha argued that “the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence.” ⁴² Consequently, the ambivalence of mimicry based on excess and inadequate imitation (“slippage”) poses the biggest threat to colonial power. Imitation is never innocent because it is impossible to reproduce the forms of someone else’s identity. Imitation of an alien class—an act of translation, repetition rather than representation—contaminates and appropriates the original, taking it in unexpected directions, which not only destabilizes the nobles’ discourse but also offers an opportunity to create new, anti-colonial forms of knowledge and power.

Bhabha wrote that colonial discourse develops two strategies towards external reality: “one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates ‘reality’ as mimicry.” ⁴³ In The Palace, that desire for an authentic (and thus all the more excessive and theatrical) repetition of the role of the lord is founded on shame and social humiliation. And shame, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick pointed out, generates identity and calls it into question. In her opinion, the transformational energy of shame manifests itself in theatrical performance. Performance is both a product of shame and an opportunity to enact and even work through it. ⁴⁴ It is shame that drives Jakub to enact the performative identification with his lord, to perform an alien social class (in order to escape his own), and to act out his suffering and humiliation in front of others. This is shown in the scene when Jakub plays himself on the palace stage: a shepherd enjoying the fate of a peasant who grazes sheep. He declares his love to a shepherdess played by the lady. But the idyll is interrupted by the arrival of the lord. He delivers a long monologue on the peasant’s fixed place in the social order:

It’s laughable to think that someone like that—smelling like sheep, rancid milk, rams’ semen, sheepskin coat—could have his own fate. That would be an insult to fate, a mockery of fate. Today even a farmhand dreams of having a fate. It’s no longer enough for him that he has food to put in his stomach, he wants a fate. He should pray and thank God. No, he wants a fate, and this is getting dangerous, ladies and gentlemen. This sounds sinister.

The lord throws Jakub onto the boards, and the audience—the aristocrats, bishop, and footmen—applauds enthusiastically. The protagonist performs his own shame on the stage, but it is this humiliation that gives him the strength to rebel.

Peasants rush into the palace with pitchforks and scythes. They destroy the symbols of aristocratic culture, such as portraits and sculptures, but also the manifestations of wealth—chandeliers and mirrors. They feast their eyes on the humiliated lord: They tie Jakub the squire to an armchair, take the valuable rings off his fingers, mock him, and spit in his face. A peasant copulates in front of him with a portrait of the lady, which is an expression of contempt for him, but above all, a symbolic castration intended to deprive him of power (potency). The attack culminates in a scene of bloody revenge for the years of suffering and exploitation: The peasants hold a big hunt for the nobles, who are dressed in kontuszes, emblematic of serfdom past, butchering them under the leadership of Jakub the squire, reminiscent of the peasant rebel Jakub Szela. The assault on the palace seems to be an allegorical variation on the theme of the Galician slaughter of 1846. ⁴⁵ Back then, peasants, armed with pitchforks, flails, scythes, and sabers, also attacked manor houses (and, less frequently, churches and parsonages). They plundered the nobles’ estates, stole their possessions, destroyed property, and finally often murdered their oppressors (between 1,200 and 3,000 nobles and landowners were killed). ⁴⁶ An important factor in the introduction of reforms in all three partitions, and consequently the abolition of serfdom and the granting of personal freedom to peasants, the revolt proved that the peasant masses were not only passive and inert but capable of resistance and struggle. ⁴⁷

According to Fanon, “The peasants alone are revolutionary [. . .] The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. [. . .] The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and that of force first and foremost.” ⁴⁸ In The Wretched of the Earth, one of the manifestoes of postcolonial criticism, Fanon formulates a project of “radical decolonization.” It is associated with the force of refusal which, according to Achille Mbembe’s reading of Fanon, is the first moment of the political: “In fact, the subject of the political [. . .] is born to the world and to itself through this inaugural gesture, namely the capacity to say no.” ⁴⁹ That liberating “no” involves violence. In other words, the colonized can only free themselves through the use of force, since, Fanon argues, “colonialism [. . .] is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” ⁵⁰ So it was the colonizer who suggested to the colonized how they would be able to change the world order. In Fanon’s view, violence is necessary: It integrates the colonized, gives them form, and allows them to build a new future on the colonizers’ corpses. Situating radical decolonization between the principle of destruction and the principle of life, Fanon emphasizes the “regenerative violence of decolonization,” which not only makes it possible to question the oppressive order but also to free the colonized from his inferiority complex or persecutory delusions. According to Mbembe, “By rendering the colonial order null and void—ineffective—violence acted as an instrument of resurrection” and made it possible to “create another formation of sovereignty.” ⁵¹ It facilitated the development of other forms of life—not based on slavery or the colonizer’s absolute power—on the ruins of the colonial world.

Junak follows the regenerative violence of internal decolonization in The Palace but disrupts it, trying for a revision of history. The film shows the ambivalence associated with colonial dependence, which has been internalized by the protagonist making it impossible for the process of decolonization to be completed. In the film’s final scenes, we return to 1944. Jakub becomes a peasant shepherd again. He ends up at a big ball held at the palace for the people. The people have taken over the space where they were not allowed before. It is now the peasants who are strong and vigorous, and the aristocracy seems tired, passive, and burnt out. Fanon knew that decolonization can only begin if the colonized overcomes his or her immobility. ⁵² The Palace thus reverses the traditional belief that only the elites had agency and the popular classes were apathetic. In the ball scene, the aristocrats become Jakub’s hostages: They cannot leave the room and have to dance with the others. Relived suffering drives this peasant “smelling like sheep” to revenge, giving him agency, which—as an exploited subject—he has not had. At the same time, he believes that the impending catastrophe will turn everyone—not just the nobles but also the peasants—into corpses. On the one hand, he says that the old world “can’t end with us”; on the other, that it “can’t begin again with us.” The palace as a symbol of the old world burns in the film’s finale, and the flames also engulf Jakub the peasant. He keeps saying that it is his palace that is on fire. Roch Sulima’s review said that “the film tells of a great change, namely the clash of two great social forces, symbolized by the contrast between the lordly and the peasant.” ⁵³ But nothing is more consistently emphasized in The Palace than the interplay of those social forces. Although these worlds are spatially and affectively separate, they are deeply invested in each other: What is lordly turns out to be the object of desire of the popular classes (the desire to be a lord, but also the desire to be with the lord, as in the case of the tubercular woman who fantasizes about being pregnant by him, but delays giving birth for fear that she will be separated from the lord once the child is born ⁵⁴ ), and the liberated peasant bodies become an object of desire and violence for the aristocrats (the lady has an orgasm dreaming of the shepherd, and Jakub the squire exercises his droit du seigneur, deflowering the newlywed wife of his subject). But why does the end of serfdom mean the end of his world to Jakub? Why does he hide in the duchess’s arms rather than look for his place among his own class? Why is the new beginning to turn the peasants into corpses? Subjection, Judith Butler argues in The Psychic Life of Power, is how the subject is formed for subordination to power as well as the process of becoming a subject. In other words, power is at first an external force that subordinates the subject and then, as a psychic form, contributes to the constitution of its self-identity. ⁵⁵ In this sense, subordination is necessary for the subject to form. If, as Butler holds, the promise of survival involves the necessity of existing in subordination, then the collapse of the social class that has subordinated (and formed) the subject gives rise to the fear of one’s own disintegration. Jakub burns with the palace, the symbol of his subjection. But the world of feudal relations did not disappear with the advent of the new world and the removal of barons, countesses, and footmen from society. On the contrary, it has survived in altered form in the constantly repeated and reconstructed acts of subjection.

Trance as Resistance

During the Junak’s film approval process, Wajda vehemently attacked the model of cinema he had faithfully followed before he became an advocate of nationalist tales and moralizing messages (Man of Iron). In fact, The Palace relies on the same Marxist concepts and formulas of visual excess which served as the foundation of his cinema from the period of the Polish Film School to Man of Marble. When working on The Wedding, he compared Polish peasants to black slaves and drew inspiration from the culture of Third World countries. The fact was quickly noted abroad. After his return from the Cannes Film Festival, the critic Aleksander Ledóchowski recalled in the magazine Film his meeting with an African American who was delighted with The Wedding. The African American reportedly said that Wajda

is a somebody, almost a black man, because The Wedding has important cultural features of “black art”: the movement from reality to trance, melodiousness and a vibrant rhythm [. . .] Then he added that Wajda must have got stuck or moved the ending to another film, since what was obviously missing was an act of liberation, a crime, revolt or conflagration which marks an end rather than a beginning. ⁵⁶

It is interesting to examine the functioning of “blackness” in Wajda’s identity-focused cinema. Niziołek, who recently discussed The Wedding as an emancipatory rather than a community narrative, quoted Wajda’s words from 1971 (when work on the film was well under way) about the class distinction between nobles and peasants. To illustrate the abyss that divided the two social classes, one should “dress some black men in sukmanas [sing. sukmana, a traditional coat worn by peasants], and then those blacks would receive white visitors, gentlemen from the city.” ⁵⁷ Niziołek insists that this image should not be seen as a metaphor because Wajda shows the social conflict in the film in the same way as a racial conflict, which, incidentally, is exactly how Junak depicted class tensions in The Palace. ⁵⁸ The theatrologist argues that Wajda provocatively contextualized Polish history—in Popioły (The Ashes, 1965), Landscape After Battle, The Promised Land, and Smuga cienia (The Shadow Line, 1976)—within the worldwide processes of colonization rather than the local—Sarmatist or Romantic—framework. Wyspiański’s drama received a similar treatment: the director set the local, Young Poland contexts aside and worked the story of a wedding in a peasant cottage into the history of European colonialism. As early as 1967, he said he wanted The Wedding to be intelligible not only within the Polish context but also to foreign audiences, which of course was not easy, since Wyspiański’s work draws on an “extremely provincial” mythology. ⁵⁹ Wajda was thus aware that he could only reach international audiences if he placed Wyspiański’s drama within the context of universal history. He intended to replace figures from Polish culture (Wernyhora, Szela) with famous historical personages (Columbus, Robespierre). He was also aided by the contemporary triumphs of the art of “other cultures” at international film festivals. It became clear to him that he could easily bring The Wedding into line with the aesthetics of the new Brazilian or Cuban cinema. ⁶⁰ So he juxtaposed inspirations from Latin American cinema with the shocking excess characteristic of Ken Russell’s films.

The “blackness” of The Wedding would thus result from Wajda’s interest in colonialism and the new aesthetics developed by Latin American cinema. But what would the cultural “blackness” of The Wedding consist of? The African American met by Ledóchowski pointed out the trance, melodiousness, and vibrant rhythm, all of them associated with visual and sonic intensity. The camera enters the colorful whirl of crowded bodies. It records their ecstatic sounds, feverish faces, and the impulses of a stimulated libido. The viewer is absorbed by this frantic energy. But when the camera moves out of the trance and looks at the vibrations from the side, it turns out that only the peasants are dancing. The whirling body proves to be a class-marked body. The nobles only watch: more often with aversion (like the journalist) and detachment (like Madam Councilor) than envy (like the girls, Zosia and Haneczka, or the aroused Maryna, who clearly feels like having sex but with Czepiec rather than the Poet). The bodies of the intellectuals are separated from the bodies of the peasants. The circulation of energy between them is blocked. Although they share the same space—a rural cottage—they do not generate a common intensity. They do not form an affective community in the dance. Thus, the uncontrollable excess of energy that explodes in the frantic dance is produced only by the people. Fanon wrote that “the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent,” and therefore, it seeks outlet in ecstatic dancing (or eroticism). ⁶¹ Dancing (and eroticism) turns out to be, for the subordinate other, an effective means of relieving pent-up aggression, accumulated energy, or repressed drives. Moreover, as Gilles Deleuze writes, trance also allows one to invent a people. “It is the trance which makes the speech-act possible, through the ideology of the colonizer, the myths of the colonized and the discourse of the intellectual.” ⁶² In other words, the author puts everyone—the people, the colonizers, and the camera itself—into a trance to contribute to the creation of the people. According to Deleuze, this is what political art is all about. Wajda came close to that. But in the film’s finale, all of The Wedding’s popular, trancelike, revolutionary energy is absorbed by the ever-insatiable national discourse.

Ledóchowski’s interlocutor was right: The Wedding’s finale should have been different. The dancing whirl, trance, and pulsating rhythm should logically have been followed by an explosion or rebellion. Yet the film abandons the subject of class and racial contradictions and moves towards a community narrative. The ending should have been different and—more importantly—was supposed to be different. In his biography of Wajda, Tadeusz Lubelski included a still of a scene that was shot but did not make it into the final cut of the film, showing the Poet with his throat pierced with a scythe. ⁶³ Years later, the director regretted that he did not go with an ending where a crowd of peasants slaughters the nobles, gutting them with scythes. He discarded the scene that, as he said in 1967, would make Wyspiański’s drama worth filming. ⁶³ The only trace of that peasant massacre is a scene which takes place at dawn. All we can see is the peasants holding scythes to the throats of the defenseless nobles lying on the tables. Niziołek, looking in the deleted scene of carnage for a variant of emancipatory narrative, observes that the eruption of revolutionary peasant violence is—contrary to the literary original—consistent with the film’s plot and its visual and affective logic: the repeated references to the Galician Slaughter (the Groom, a member of the intelligentsia, remarks that his grandfather “was hacked with a saw” by peasants, and the host says that his father was beaten to death with hoes), the recurring motif of scythes, and the intensification of excess that demands release. But, unlike Junak who showed a peasant slaughter in The Palace, Wajda’s courage failed him. ⁶⁵ The revolutionary and postcolonial potential was ultimately wasted in The Wedding. The film’s class conflict and emancipatory discourse was hidden by the unifying community narrative, and the eruption of the peasants’ transformative energy was obscured by the Straw-man’s dance, soporific and serving to absolve the audience. But Junak went through with what Wajda refrained from. During the carnival of Solidarity, at a time when unity was being built under the banner of national and religious values, he radically probed the “blackness” of the Polish experience of internal colonization.

Conclusion

At least since the publication of Walter Benjamin’s essay On the Concept of History, we have known that history is written by the victors. We also know that the history of Polish cinema will tell us nothing about The Palace and the Film Form Studio. Those who urged audiences “not to watch Wajda’s films” never achieved anything in mainstream cinema: Robakowski and Kwiek, who were relegated from the Film School after the imposition of martial law, made names for themselves as artists; Rybczyński won an Oscar for Tango (1980) in 1983 (one year after Man of Iron was nominated for best foreign language film) and chose emigration; Junak’s next film, Gry i zabawy (Games and Sports, 1982), never premiered. The Palace played briefly in cinemas and disappeared without a trace. As one critic wrote, “The film came at a wrong time. [. . .] It is [. . .] out of touch with the present time. [. . .] Incapable of moving the audience of 1980.” ⁶⁶ Everyone noted that the picture enacts a familiar fantasy of “the peasant king,” but nobody saw its political aspect, the fact that it deals with the exploitation of serfs and the dominance of the nobility on the one hand, and the revolt and revolutionary anger of the subjects on the other. Reviewers described The Palace in such a way as to omit its radically political dimension. As though there was no language to think the film through because the adequate one (i.e., Marxism) was identified with oppressive Communist rule. This local case illustrates a wider, global trend—the impending catastrophe of the entire left-wing culture. Utopian visions of an emancipated future were replaced by a conservative discourse of victimhood, and the communist system itself henceforth came to be seen solely in its totalitarian dimension. It is impossible to reduce the past to a dualistic narrative, according to which the executioners are placed opposite the victims. As a matter of fact, the past is complex, especially if it is filled with utopias that have gone bankrupt. ⁶⁷