The genre came late to Poland. Although the communist party members who came after Anatolij Łunaczarski, the People’s Commissar for Education, repeated his refrain of cinema’s superiority to other artworks (a phrase incorrectly attributed to Lenin), socialist realism came to theatre, music and visual art first.
In November 1949, during the Zjazd w Wiśle art symposium, new rules for socialist realism were announced – in which ‘truth and historical accuracy must artistically uncover and link with the larger ideological challenge of educating the working class in the social realist spirit’.
Politically motivated curators carefully defined their requirements and called for state-sponsored cinema to create works in the socialist realism tradition, but with the spirit of Soviet classics – from the Vasilyev brothers’ Chapaev (1934) and Mikhail Romm’s dialogues with Lenin (1937-1939) to Fridrikh Ermler’s The Great Citizen (1938-1939).
In the films created under the newly required doctrine, work was celebrated, while the petite bourgeoisie, cosmopolitanism and imperialism were denigrated. Cinema was a space for viewers to find images of hard workers and evil landowners, proletariats and enemies of the people, brave udarniks (strike workers) and reactionary intelligentsia.
But the birth of Polish socialist realism created new problems. When Film Polski was liquidated in 1951, it was replaced by the Centralny Urząd Kinematografii (Centralised Bureau of Cinematography) or CUK. Polish cinema became the purview of bureaucrats.
At the CUK, screenplays would circulate from desk to desk for months, while greenlit productions were rarely completed. Suffice it to say that from 1950 to 1954, a total of 23 feature films were made. With workers paralysed from the fear of toeing over the line of political obsequiousness, the production process was drawn out infinitely.
Clash of worlds