Visual narrative of a post-communist estate: transgression of memory and the ruins of community

Introduction

The question that preoccupies this article is: why is capitalism not working in one small town in Poland? And in a wider philosophical context: can the memory of communism be a site of political contestation? I am interested in the politics of memory and the limitations of textual readings of memory as narrative. As shown by Eric Berlatsky (2003: 102) in his analysis of the work of Milan Kundera and Art Spiegelman from a postmodernist textual perspective, memory (both individual and collective) is inextricable from textuality and can itself be a mode of political oppression. In Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1996[1980]) and Spiegelman’s Maus (2003[1996]), Berlatsky investigates the adhesion of memory and a postmodern aesthetic which together reveal ‘how postmodernism can be not only productive in its destabilization of power, but also problematic in its difficulties in offering concrete and stable counterdiscourses that do not themselves participate in oppression’. Through his analysis, Berlatsky shows that oppressed peoples may contribute to their own oppression when trying to constitute their identity through memory, especially if memory is placed in binary opposition to history. I believe that a critique of the remembering of communist history is needed, which would enable people to politicize the memory of that time in their struggle with the inequalities they experience today. Although Kundera appealed to the politics of memory as a tool in a struggle with the power of communism, the same tool can also be considered in struggles with any official power that defines history, including that of capitalist dominance in the post-communist bloc today.

I realize that the phrase ‘the right to remember’ has a longstanding position in trauma studies and Holocaust studies and implies all the negative force of violently oppressive systems, while communism has not received the same level of moral indictment. Although it has its roots in the same humanist project – the supremacy of reason – on which modern tyrannical systems were grounded in Europe, epistemologically communism presents itself as an alternative modernism opposing the ascendancy of individualist liberalism, and as such today it has regained its avant-garde currency as a tool to counter the unifying force of a capitalist project that encompasses the globe. Officially in post-communist countries that utopian vision of communism should not be remembered, and should be discarded before it reaches political expression. From the perspective of the current politics dominant in Poland, anyone who lived under communism without trying to resist it should feel guilty, or else should prove their ‘innocence’. A proposition to annul all higher degrees issued during the five decades of communism reflects the desire of official historians to erase not only the symbolic evidence of the past but, even more importantly, any growth in its structural power in the future. Yet people who lived through communism have the right to remember and use the narrative of their memories, whether dramatic and or positive, in the process of identity-making beyond the personal, such that individual memories can compete with official narratives.

As I have observed during my research, that right has been obliterated from the narrative of the community and relegated to the sphere of personal mythology, where it lives its own life outside history. Although the memory of the small town is split between the communist past and the capitalist present, only the latter has historical weight. Communism, or rather socialism, has been sentenced to oblivion before it has acquired its own historical critique. The newly elected democratic government in 1989, with its dictum that communism must be forgotten and the nation needs to move on, authoritatively announced the end of the socialist era. When the Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, defined the role of the ‘thick line’, it was to demarcate the two opposite ontologies of past and present, with the past being eradicated from memory for the good of the future (see Slay, 1994). Through that sentence, communism was marked as an enemy of political history. The official ideology in post-communist countries must be oriented towards capitalism; this is taken for granted by authorities on all levels and by the majority of citizens.

I do not argue that a restoration (in Svetlana Boym’s [2001] sense) of the memory of the communist past is needed as a solution to the process of transition from communism as such a proposition would only feed into the binary understanding of past and present, thereby reinforcing the power of official history as it is. Besides, the word ‘solution’ comes from a discourse of power which memory sabotages. My proposition, grounded in the non-traditional phenomenological theories of ‘narrative function’ of Paul Ricoeur (1991) and ‘embodied experience’ of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968; 1994), encompasses the refiguring of memory and creative signification as a form of performative nostalgia with political potential. In this article I will apply a textual approach combined with the phenomenology of perception and film-making as a method of research into possible counter-discourses of memory of one post-communist estate, called Cementownia, located on the outskirts of the post-mining region of the Upper Silesia. The Cementownia estate has been enveloped in the communist past and transplanted into a capitalist present which the local people experience as intimidating and distant. The local community cannot connect with reforms involving private investment and immediate profit. They feel detached from the current transformations of the place that are being driven by entrepreneurial initiatives. Their approach to the present is based on distrust and indifference. The capitalist conversions of communist landmarks – the nursery school, the cultural centre, the surgery, the post office, the swimming pool, the lake and, most of all, the cement factory – are perceived in terms of degradation and decay. The perception of these sites implies something that is missing, delayed and unfinished, yet uniting this community in a cloud of nostalgia.

To understand the political role of the all-pervasive ‘cloud of nostalgia’ I choose phenomenology of perception (Merleau-Ponty 1964b and 1968), which also constitutes my reflective interpretative method. I apply visual methodology (film-making) in order to produce data and to engage with my own experience of perception of the object of my research. I perceive Cementownia – the object of my research – as a partner in the process of filming: we are active links affecting each other so we have to be acknowledged on all levels of this project. When applied to film practice, this methodological approach will lead me to a conception of visual hermeneutic anthropology (as a method of interpretation and collecting data) and the reflection on the political role of performative nostalgia.

I follow Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur to understand what happens when the horizon of the community of which I am a part meets the horizon of the camera, which is regarded here as the third, openly inviting the staging and acting. Conceptualizing the presence of the camera and myself as a director allows me to see the relations between what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘the given’ – the world out there – and ‘the giving’ – our active response to it – through the split that the camera has created in our merged reality. Such a method invites me to see my own perception as a separate act, and draws attention to the performative use of the ‘body of the camera’ in the processes of remembering and creating the memories of others. The correspondence between the story and the material surroundings – in which I see ontological connections – constitutes the identity of the community, which I try to capture on film. I am the reader of the narrative unfolding in front of me, but while I am making the film, I am also the creator of a narrative which actively reorganizes the being-in-the-world of those who respond to my invitation to be part of the project. While videoing the place and conducting interviews with the local people, I let my own memories unfurl in relation to those of the local residents captured on tape. Having been one of the community’s residents for half of my life, I share the experience of the past with them. However, I also acknowledge that the text of their memory as expressed in interviews and my own memory do not always overlap. As Maurice Halbwachs (1980) states, we create our own identities in relation to, no less than in separation from, each other. This separation-in-connection was specifically what I was trying to capture while directing the film. I have come back to this community after a period of two decades, but it feels as if I never left the place. I am assisted by a cameraman, who films my interviews with the local people as well as the surroundings that we explore together every day for a month. As a member of our small crew, the cameraman becomes involved personally very quickly and we negotiate together what we film and how. His main task is to enable me to see through the relations between the camera, his own situated position and my stage directions. In that sense, he becomes directly engaged with both: my own memories and the representation of the community on film for which we feel equally responsible in the aesthetic and ethical sense. The visual narrative arises from the action unfolding in front of me during this project, including my own presence on location.

Mise-En-Scène of Memory

The characters in the film are real people: my old neighbours, my old friends, my parents’ networks, who transfer their own memories to the identity that emerges as the film develops. I approach them randomly when I walk around the Cementownia estate, with the cameraman, Matthew, who films what I see – who films my perception. This embodied position that I take on conceptually and practically responds to the situated position of my body when I am directing the film. By being on location with the camera and trying to create an effect through my remembering the place in relation to the memories of others, I build a connection between my body, narrative and creative practice. The method of film-making is both a metaphor and a metonym for the visual fictionalization of the narrative of this community. Together with the cameraman, I am building its narrative from the narratives of others, which I perceive (given) and which are performed for me (giving) in front of the camera (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a). Some of those narratives are performed randomly when we film the surroundings, and some are taken to another stage of arranged home interviews, where I have the opportunity to spend more time with my informants and ask them more questions about their life and about our community. At both stages, I consider the element of performance in our interlocution, which I involve in the film narrative, especially when it comes to the materiality of the objects that ‘play’ and are played by us on location.

An image of an elderly married couple (a retired school janitor and a retired cinema projectionist) (Figure 1), who offered us an in-depth interview in their flat, indicates how the arrangement of objects and people provides an extra level of representation which participates actively in data production and interpretation. An intricate layout of coffee cups, spoons, napkins, sugar bowl, tea saucers, cake plates on the small table relates geometrically and aesthetically to the position the couple chooses to take on the sofa. Together they create a picture of a self-righteous, settled couple rooted in their daily environment – the look in the style of Dutch painting of the 17th century, bringing to mind Brekelenkam’s The Spinner (1653) or Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine (1658–1660). I know that my cameraman thinks the same when he sees them seated like that, yet all the bric-a-bracs and crocheted tea towels in our scene come from the era of communism and as such they produce specific meanings in the narrative being produced in front of us. Our personal and cultural memories overlap in our perception and interpretation of this scene. The whole flat has not changed since I visited it as a child for the first time in 1970, and it seems the couple have not changed their habits and routines since then. They serve us coffee and cake in the way they always do when guests are around, on the best plates and tablecloth. The way they move around and the way they serve us coffee and cake on their best china speaks its own language. It represents the same routine I remember from special occasion gatherings in my family. We are asked to take off our shoes first and introduced to the living room where we are offered cake, which will be brought from the kitchen where it was already sliced and arranged on a big plate. We will have sweet cherry liqueur in between the endless rounds of coffee and sweets, while we are shown the photographs of their family members and common friends. The lady of the house admits that she cleaned the flat for us and she had her hair done for the camera only a day before. I react to this situation and to the nostalgic character of the decor by giving new directions to Matthew: we have to capture the dignity and endurance of this couple. We do not want to over-aestheticise their genuine pose for the sake of a beautiful shot from the Flemish school, although we cannot completely resist this intertextual influence. Our task is to represent their figures and surrounding in such a way that would reflect their connection with the world of the past but would itself stand for their proud present. Their remembering for the camera, although inundated with the universal complaint against the current system, does reflect joy drawn from the act of remembering per se. They do not feel like victims, and do not want to be perceived (or recorded) as such, and this is signalised to us on the structural and semantic levels of the production of the scene.

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Figure 1.

A retired ex-cinema projectionist and his wife, a retired school janitor, in their flat.

To provide a confident solution for the conversationalist model, they sit in front of me whereas the camera is situated behind me. By taking this position they feel securely anchored in the relaxing recess of the familiar piece of furniture, while they allocate a special place for me in the comfy armchair on the opposite side of the table. After discussing the choice of light and sound with the cameraman, I happily accept this arrangement as it guarantees that the couple can effortlessly look at me when they speak without being bothered by the presence of the camera. Neither of us pretends that the camera is not there, as there is obviously a certain sense of awkwardness in this situation. It is not just the presence of the equipment and a stranger filming in their house, but the frame of an interview encounter between myself and themselves after two decades of not seeing each other. Our lives overlapped during the period of communism when I was a student in the local school where they both worked, and they were friends of my parents for more than 50 years. They still offer cake to both of us in the middle of the interview, and we have to stop for a break for sipping coffee and browsing through the photograph album containing pictures of the couple, myself as a child, my parents and friends from the past, all captured at different formal and social events between the 1960s and 1990s. The way the coffee and cake are served, how the new serviettes are ordered on the table, our positions in relation to each other – form part of the performance initiated for myself and for the film. We, as the crew, have to respond to them visually by adjusting the camera angle, the light, the shot size, and also conceptually by interpreting what is being ‘played’ in front of us while we are videoing it.

The habitual or customary layer of the bodies (and objects) during this interview includes the skills and habits learned in the past, while the present layer is the body at this moment; the present body uses the habitual body to articulate itself. As Merleau-Ponty states in Phenomenology of Perception (1994), the present body always has a habitual body at its disposal, and together they can ‘push’ primary actions, such as walking or dancing, to a level of elaboration where such actions become arranged as constructed entities, like walking or dancing on stage. The couple in my interview apply their bodily routine in front of the camera in the same way they would do for any guests, but the camera interpolates them to act to be perceived. Franziska Schroeder and Pedro Rebelo (2009) argue that Merleau-Ponty did not focus enough on an extra layer in such performances of the habitual and present body which situates the body in a specific context. They call this conjunction ‘the performative layer’, and argue that it questions the connection between the habitual and the present. A walk on stage in the context of an audience and performance ‘is a walk that exudes “look at me walking on stage”’ (p. 137). In the act of filming we constitute this specific context that the couple fills up with their performance, yet it is very clear that their acting is not a re-acting of the past but staging of the present. That staged act exudes a picture of the memory in statu nascendi while our filming brings forward a visual representation of the connection to and disconnection from the past. In the live context of filming and memorising we aim to capture this ‘conjunction through rapture’ in which the habitual and the present confront each other. Consequently, as a shot from the interview with the couple shows (Figure 1), the aesthetic frame that we choose for filming represents the stagnation of the ritualisation of the evoked past and the creative energy of bringing its memory to life.

Externally, the material sites on the estate also ‘act’ when we film them, since they change under the influence of our perception and my film directions. As a result we stage them in a certain way, so they act for us according to the script of my own memory and the script emerging in contact with the people and place. The process of filming symbolizes the performance which is already embodied in the relationship between me, this community and the third, where the third is the disruption produced by the meta-text of the film crew. When I observe my own perception through the lens of the camera, I see the reality of fragmented memories meeting in the fracture between experience and expectation. Surrounded by the ruins of the past, which have been transformed into the ruins of the present, the community stays enclosed in the circle of compliance which affects its disadvantaged position in the process of transformation. On the surface (of representation) the community has preserved a pervasive and intractable sense of defeat and helplessness which exceeds the conjuncture of the historical and the political. If perceived directly through the viewfinder, before any creative shooting starts, the place looks suspended in an ahistorical moment of decline. The question that arises when we start shooting is: what is the relationship between the surface that we perceive and the ‘real’ place?

We know that our physical movement across the place breaks through the real and the material setting in its own historical moment, and evokes the memories of people who recognize me after many years:

Oh, it is you, what are you doing here … have you come back? How are you? How is your dad? Can you believe what they have done to us … what we are doing here? Now it’s so much worse than it was in our time … nothing is left … everything perished, and we are going to perish, this is what they want.

My request to film these reactions is rarely refused. The camera and my presence interpolate the residents into an articulation of their sorrows and disappointments. When I film the playground where I played as a child, the local people pass by and respond to my actions. My filming and their questions create the next level of signification in their story and my investigation. The camera becomes the third element between us that disrupts the empirical logic of this chance meeting between the locals and the returnee. In this disruption, which separates the historical time of the story from the empirical now, I can sense that a linguistic analysis of these utterances would not suffice and would even be misleading. Yet I keep on speaking, I say something in response, and I give a sign to the cameraman to keep rolling. My interviewees know they are being recorded, but they do not object, although their bodily movements change and they hastily correct their postures and hair. We both pretend that this is a chance meeting and that we are just chatting after ‘bumping into’ each other. For me, they are part of the text of this estate, which I am trying to read and understand; for them I am a sudden and immanent reminder of the past, to which they react in response. When they finally turn to a happy memory which they think I share with them, I am not sure how much of it is a cause and how much an effect of our meeting.

While turning the camera on the children’s playground where I used to spend my time after school, I meet a friend of my parents, a woman in her 60s, who approaches me spontaneously, with no introduction (see Figure 2):

Do you remember this playground? It was always full of fresh sand, here, where this dog is peeing now, this would never have happened under communism. It was the obligation of the Party and the factory governors to keep this place clean. Yes … they made us do those stupid cleaning days, do you remember, yes, we hated them, but we had so much fun doing that. We were together, we supported each other … it was our place then. And now? Nobody cares … nobody even remembers that there are people living here, they think that because we are old, we should die … and then everything will change for the better.

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Figure 2.

A friend of my parents in front of her flat.

Yet my own memories are not exactly the same. I remember the cleaning duty (called ‘a civic deed’, czyn społeczny), and our youthful joy at being freed from school on such days; but the playground was always dirty and always covered with dog excrement, and I am not from the same generation as my parents’ old friend, who fears that her time is marked by the national anticipation of a future that will have been cleansed of witnesses to the embarrassing past. The people are worried, but they also know what to say and how to say it to the camera. They act their part for me, but they also act it for themselves. In fact, we are standing in front of a very clean playground, with no pets’ excrement, and one of the ladies speaking to me is cleaning away the leaves that have been piling up in the corners of the sandpit. I can see the discrepancy between what is remembered and what is there before our eyes, but the point is that this woman remembers the site in her own way. Her memory connects the Party’s responsibility for the playground with the general civic responsibility of the authorities, which according to her, is missing today. The imposed duty to clean up the environment is idealized in her narrative as an example of the socializing of which she feels deprived, and of the sense of support and camaraderie she feels is missing in her own life and that of the community. Although most of the friends who might socialize with her have already died, she does not mention this. Obviously she feels lonely and abandoned, and she idealizes the past, as old people often do. Yet it is important to notice that it is the narrative of a communist utopia of togetherness and mutual responsibility which underpins her memory. She contrasts her lonely condition, and possibly her fear of death, with an identity from the past which was construed for her by the dominant discourse. The narrative produced in this statement reflects a constant, repetitive need to articulate disappointment with the present as measured against an ‘ideal’ past, which is usually corrected for the sake of the consistency of both the story and the presented identity. The drama of her final remark – which equates death with an enforced transgression, the responsibility for which she attributes to the current authorities, signified by the pronoun ‘they’ – is intensified in the moment of the woman’s departure from the scene and the frame. She articulates those last words with a sigh, which adds to the emplotment of the loss of her youth, her friends and her safety. Her decision to suddenly leave the frame echoes the way she entered it, and thus symbolizes the natural meeting of two interlocutors encountering each other in their neighbourhood. She directed this symbolization herself in response to the presence of the camera, but I prompted it by giving directions to the cameraman. Her act of complaint is ‘natural’ to her: this is what she does when she meets her neighbours.

An act of complaining about neglect by mythical current ‘others’, who narratively correspond to the authoritative ‘them’ that was personified in the past by the Party, recalls ‘the habitual’ reaction mentioned above. The woman who approached me as I was shooting the playground pushed her habitual body of complaint into its present actualization of performance. Not knowing what the film was about, she invited herself to be part of it, and she opened her story without asking about the camera, although consciously recognizing the context of the film crew. Her memory was triggered by my presence, which actualized her ‘present body’ but also engaged with her ‘habitual body’ of complaint. The performative layer enabled by the camera disrupted the constructed entity of the woman’s embodiment in that place, and gave it a new significance. As Schroeder and Rebelo (2009) would argue, this significance lay in a performance that was rehearsed and live at the same time. Thanks to the ontological disturbance that the camera created in the being of the place, the act of remembering communism revealed itself as a performative signification of the past. Considering the layer of nostalgia, which the narrative clearly enacted, I see this act of telling as having been based on a loss which could not be yet articulated beyond the habitual and the present body whose consciousness was anchored between the world of history and that of the self.

From this disparaging perspective, the question of whether the playground was clean or not under communism requires an answer that points to historical evidence (how true is the truth from a personal point of view?), while the role of interpretation in the creation of evidence (who claims the truth and for what purposes?) is disregarded. By responding to the call of the third, namely the meaning of the camera, the person as a fact belonging to the world becomes distinguished from a self that does not belong to the object of which it speaks. This gap, which Ricoeur (1984) wanted to emphasize in his phenomenological analysis of identity, is enabled through the context of the performative layer, thus highlighting ‘the reflexive nature of the utterance by which the subject of discourse designates himself or herself’ (p. 33). Having been rehearsed under communism, the woman’s disappointment with the authorities becomes ‘live’ as her present body enters the stage of my film. Her memory of the past belongs to the present, and the way it is articulated involves a connection to this moment, this place, and my own present body.

Although it is impossible to define exactly how an individual memory operates in the domain of collective memory, hostility towards capitalism can be identified on many levels in the narrative of the community. ‘My memories are not your memories’, Paul Ricoeur (1992) reminds us, but he also acknowledges the role of narrative, in which memories are articulated in all persons, singular and plural, regardless of the fundamentally private character of memory. The personal emplotment performed for the camera by the disappointed woman meets with the historical plot dominating the collective discourse, not only of this community but of the whole nation.

The myth of the ‘thick line’ which demarcates the past from the present is even stronger at this time of economic crisis, 20 years after the fall of communism – a period of austerity demanding sacrifice and a change of attitude. The attitude most heavily promoted by the government is that of ‘looking into the future’, which encapsulates the aim of ‘forgetting the past’. In line with that interpretation, a middle-aged local entrepreneur, who has successfully joined the project of capitalist transformation and built a small manufacturing plant near the ruined cement factory, admits in a private conversation that he refuses to allow me to video:

Only when all the people who remember communism die can we speak about a change in attitude, until then we have to deal with that fake servility, laziness, dependence and pride that those who come from those times have in their blood, that destroys any real transformation. They cannot adapt.

This statement designates a dialectical relationship between memory and politics. It also connects with what the woman at the playground said about ‘them’, who represent power. In a capitalist discourse, the destructive effect of the memory of communism – the communism that ‘they have in their blood’ – defines the ‘not-catching-up’ people as ‘others’. This political meaning, interpreted by official discourse as the connection between memory and the psychosomatic condition of the people, in fact relates to the politico-economic conditions of the place, which noticeably mark the narrative of this disadvantaged community. The inability to adapt to new circumstances has been acknowledged by the representatives of local institutions like the council and the local school – and frequently also by the local capitalists, whom the ‘others’ call with contempt ‘privatees’ (prywaciaże) or, more directly, ‘exploiters’ (see also Rabikowska, 2013).

The Difference in the Ruins

In the Cementownia estate, the split between those who have ‘made it’ and those who are ‘not catching up’ can be perceived in the material narrative of the environment and the stories of people on both sides, the exploiters and the exploited. The local hotel and the bowling alley situated in the old factory do not attract people from the estate, who claim that it is not for them and too expensive. The old nursery school that served the families under communism disappeared into a private mansion, restored to its pre-war Biedermeier glory by its current owner, who set up a tall fence around it. Although these sites have a palimpsest structure and contain more than two layers of history, some of them going back to the 18th century, what the community perceives is a clash between their own impoverishment, symbolized in the ruination of the Communist sites that served them in the past, and the threatening escalation of privatization projects, as evidenced in the attempts to eliminate what the community understands as its own history. The memories of the past are embedded not only in the material sites which undergo deterioration, but also in the habitual relations developed within them. Walking around the once public park beside the nursery school/mansion that today is guarded by a fence, socializing with people in front of shops which no longer exist, dating by the swimming pool that today is covered by forest – these activities affect the consciousness and movement of the present body. Between the habitual and the present body living in that place there is a gap, but that gap is only recognized in relation to a binary reading of the narrative, produced by the visual effects of decay on the one hand and material regeneration on the other.

Caught between such binary readings, identity articulates a sense of loss, of something missing, a desire for something which could ease the gap (Lahusen 2006). While living the evidence of the conflict between past and present every day, the embodied subject recognizes himself or herself as a victim of the polarized ontologies: capitalism thus is recognized pejoratively as the initiator of ruination, responsible for the loss, and communism is perceived as the victimized object of ruination. The visual narrative produced between decay and renovation acquires a new centre emerging from the ontology of the clash. The community does not have the split identity that the visual narrative might suggest. Indeed, it is the split itself which organizes the community’s identity and narrative into a unifying text. In his study of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs (1980) argues that inside such discourses, discontinuity (like that between the communist past and the capitalist present) is in fact desired, so as to justify the application of a homogenizing model that can reconcile diverse elements into a comprehensible story. The complaint about the loss of communist services, predictability, safety and camaraderie is inscribed in the same binary paradigm of seeing history as the Other which the dominant discourse of capitalism applies in its critique of communism. It is to this paradigm that Berlatsky (2003) refers as the traditional view of history in the west. The discourse of history in the west, as Berlatsky reminds us while referring to theoreticians of history such as Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault and Maurice Halbwachs, is one that attempts to create unity out of the past, and to define the present in opposition to it. Such history ‘always asserts its referentiality, insisting on the existence of certain events while simultaneously shaping them into an intelligible story that separates the present from the past’ (Berlatsky, 2003: 108). That vision of history connects with the statement from the local mayor, who explains to me that the impoverished condition of the estate is caused by lack of money, and that the financial deficit results from the lack of entrepreneurial spirit among the residents, who do not pay sufficient taxes. He regards this vicious circle as inherent to transitional processes in all post-Communist countries. His method of producing a coherent narrative lies in privatizing the remains of communism that might bring profit to the council, such as the old nursery school or the cement factory buildings. In this way, he proves the efficiency of the method of disqualifying the past. The ruins of the social sites, which do not attract investors, have to be eliminated from the picture. A subsequent effect of this strategy is a dialectical split between past and present embodied in the material narrative of the Cementownia estate, which echoes in the conflict between the narratives of the successful entrepreneurs and the ‘others’ who are lagging behind. ¹ If looked at as discursive manipulation, this conflict can become a source of disturbance, producing a rupture in the semantic narrative of the community.

The institutional reshuffling of the remaining evidence of the past produces the effect of its fake continuity: from the perspective of the current economy, the move from communism to capitalism is based on political logic which cannot be questioned. Any ideology which collides with this move must be disarmed from its antagonistic meaning. The example of the symbolic disarming of the historical meaning of a centrally located Soviet monument in the Cementownia estate demonstrates such manipulation at work. A monument commemorating the liberation of the local area from the Nazi occupation by the Soviet Army, with the name of the Russian soldier who was killed in 1945, still stands unblemished in the middle of the estate (see Figure 3). Indeed, recently the local school has re-adapted a Catholic ritual of leaving flowers there on All Saints Day, celebrated on cemeteries and graves on the first day of November. When I enquired about this paradox, the head teacher, who under communism used to appoint students and staff to guard the monument on Soviet commemoration days, explained that respect for the dead is more important than politics. Reflecting the council’s approach to history, this gesture of replacing the dead Soviet enemy with the Catholic ally annihilates the historical meaning of the monument and its communist associations. The dominant discourse creates a united front against the past.

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Figure 3.

Monument to a Soviet soldier. Inscription on the plaque reads: ‘To the Soldiers of the Soviet Army – the Liberators of this Land – The Local People’ (in Polish) and ‘Here, Lieutenant-Colonel, Maksim K.Dudzeckij, born in 1918, Lost his Life for the Soviet Motherland on 19.I.1945’ (in Russian) (author’s translations).

In Poland there is a very peculiar combination of neoliberal capitalism and Catholicism that shapes the politics of the country. In this small scenario, their synergized political power over the symbolism of communism is implemented tacitly: rather than being destroyed, the monument has acquired a new cultural meaning. There is no ontological difference between remembering and forgetting in such a conversion. Consequently, neither of them matters politically either. In an interview, the mayor tells me that the local people are not interested in politics. According to him, this is the reason why the community is failing to catch up with the process of transformation: ‘they do not know how to fight for their own rights’, he admits. The community does not respond to the entrepreneurial opportunities on its doorstep, ignores the bowling alley located in the old cement factory that fed the whole area for 55 years, detests the new owners of the old nursery school, does not engage with EU-funded participation projects, and finally does not notice the changing political colours of the remaining communist sites. This criticism emphasises the lack of political dynamism on the side of the local people. In fact, the monument can be perceived as evidence of their political indifference, but it is also the site of memory itself, which mediates a residual sense of continuity (Nora, 1989).

When I film the monument in the context of my own perception of the environment, I perceive a paradoxical clash between the embeddedness of the historical symbolism (the Soviet star and the original inscription in the Russian language next to the Polish plaque) and the indifferent approach of the local people. When I move my body in relation to this object, when I direct its position for the film, my own memories resurface. I was one of the students who used to guard the monument every year on the anniversary of Soviet Independence Day, and I was one of the girls who used to date in the surrounding park. This monument lives its own life now, which the council does not appreciate while trying to correct its political impact through the pro-Russian scheme of regeneration of memory. Yet, in its almost untarnished shape, the monument juxtaposes the past and the present in a strangely disturbing manner. What I see through the eye of the camera is the representation of the impossibility of the politicisation of the Soviet memory which is seemingly neutralised in this tranquil surrounding. The realistically inspired documentary shot (presented in Figure 3) reinforces the binary dialectics which the monument articulates. Nevertheless, my own movement and my physical perception of the site change that effect, and subsequently influence our editing. At the point of conjuncture between the disarmed signifiers of the past and the present we perceive the monument’s active symbolic force which resists political naturalisation. By being there today, the monument questions its own sense, and I want this disturbance in the binary dialectics to be articulated in the film. I cannot tell whether my experience of the monument now relates to my past, to the latest interview with the head teacher, the mayor, or to the moment of film-making.

Alexander Etkind (2004: 45) discusses an analogous confusion in the reception of Russian history grounded in multi-historicism. He states:

Because of the decentered nature of this construction [multi-historicism], deprived of consensual anchors or reference points, the public does not perceive the inconsistencies or logical conflicts between the different parts. Therefore, the whole construction is liable to be shaken by slight, random influences.

In becoming a site for remembering the dead, the monument of the Unknown Soviet Soldier has been deprived of its original referent. By converting it into a site of ‘new history’, official power has neutralized the voice of the local people, who were never asked what they wanted to do with the only original site of the Soviet past in their local community. When I stand in front of it, I wonder how it is possible that this monument has survived, why it was not destroyed after communism was abolished. Communist monuments across the post-Soviet bloc were being enthusiastically demolished in the first decade after the fall. A few years later, however, many communities reinstated some of those monuments with even more vigour, saturated with restorative nostalgia (Boym, 2001). The conversion of the sites into whatever the current official power advocates, from Catholicism to capitalism, is not experienced as difference. The difference lies in ruins deprived of their referents, and consequently the present is devoid of referential associations which could enable disruption or resistance.

Conclusions

On the surface of representation, the Cementownia community is detached and indifferent, marginalized socially and disadvantaged economically. Like the inhabitants of many similar places on the margins of industrialization, they are blamed for their own fate. However, as I argue above, the same discourse which produced the cause also inflicted the effect of otherness on the place and its people. The strategy of ‘replacing’ the past with the present, without considering the local people’s views, is a reflection of a winning political approach naturalising the power of agency in the process of transition from communism to capitalism. The official discourse blames the psyche of the local people for the underdevelopment of the place – not the individual but the collective psyche, constituted in the communist past and reverberating in the present. From such a perspective, if only this ‘fault’ of the community could be obliterated, then the vision of the future could unfold properly. However, my argument is that the ‘fault’ lies with the binary interpretation of institutional history, which deactivates individual memory and neutralizes its political potential. By staging a performance of people and sites for film, I hope, in the spirit of Kundera, to ‘foreground memory’s necessity in resisting power, while admitting its own tenuous ties to the real and its implication in the abuse of power’ (Berlatsky, 2003: 102).

To the outsider, the estate looks like a cinematic location, submerged in the melancholic gaze of communist history. Yet the local people simply live it. On the surface the attitude of the locals to the past is passive, and their attitude to the present indifferent. They are longing for the utopian reality promised by socialist realism, but they are not doing anything about their actual reality. In Olick and Robbins’s (1998: 129) classification, the persistence of their memory of communism is ‘inertial’, as it reproduces ‘a version of the past by sheer force of habit’, whereas their experience of the present forges the decay, atrophy and saturation of their mental and material environment. In Bellah et al.’s (1985) theory of community, the Cementownia estate would be a ‘community of memory’, since it is constituted by its past. Bellah emphasizes the importance of remembering in the process of the constitution of community identity: remembering is what qualifies ‘a real community’. From this perspective Cementownia estate is a community of memory, but it does not constitute a ‘real’ community, as it passively lives the past. If I did not apply a performative approach to this research, I would have to agree with this conclusion, as the spoken narratives from the local people and my own ‘raw’ observation of the place would simply reinstate it. In contrast to the representational approach, however, and in line with the findings from the hermeneutical film-making research, I argue that the process of ‘community remembering’ is more complex and involves the recipients and the receivers in the act of mediation, in this case literarily embodied in the presence of the camera on the site. In this research, the camera is ‘the third’ breaking through the binary relations within which post-communist identities are usually interpreted. By observing the work of perception and memory through the position of the camera I could identify the trajectories of the influence of institutional discourses which shape memory and the way of its articulation, including the performative influence of film-making. Without embracing the ontology of the camera in the act of staging memory for film, an object to be captured on video, Cementownia, would be perceived as a victim of its own passivity resulting from the processes of ruination triggered by the fall of communism.

Through the argument above, I tried to show that the difference between the real and the visual, between the story and the memory, between researcher and the object of research, lies in the political and ontological conjunction between them. As a result of my hermeneutic visual anthropology I can conclude that remembering is an active form of identity making that provides a core to a ‘real community’ of Cementownia. The phenomenology of perception applied to film-making and self-reflective performativity enabled me to ‘see’ how collective memory builds into the social and cultural identity of a post-communist estate. I argued that the perception of the ruins of the communist past – the ruins still cherished by the community – intensifies the material deterioration of the place, which in turn affects the memory and identity of the community. This process, however, is not one-directional, as the path dependency theories of the post-communist transition designate, but it relates to the thesis that perception affects our being in a multitude of ways: the found reality which surrounds us feeds into who we are, but we also influence our environment by being there and seeing it. In this sense, the material and mental condition of the community is not simply a symptom of a post-communist atrophy, but rather an active and even creative process of forming relationships which does not have an ultimate objective or cure.

The Cementownia estate, like many other post-communist estates still immersed in the past, does not achieve sufficient political support to realise people’s ‘right to remember’. The process of forgetting, as much as the process of remembering, should be in their hands, yet at this stage the community does not apply that power, and their memory is vulnerably subject to an official understanding of the communist past as the binary opposite of the capitalist present. It is hard to evaluate whether or not our filming changed anything in that respect. But the engagement of the community with the process of filming and the experience of active remembering for the camera has become part of our lives already.