The clearest proof of the great power of the 10th Muse as the one that builds the social image of a given region or place is, of course, Kazimierz Kutz’s oeuvre. It was he who built the great mythology of his little homeland in Polish cinema. After watching Kutz’s film when Salt of the Black Earth [Sól Ziemi Czarnej] hit the screens, Krzysztof Zanussi said that everyone wanted to be a Silesian. Following this story about the brothers-insurgents, it was time for other Silesian stories: a story about a strike in Pearl in the Crown [Perła w Koronie] turned into a story of dignity and self-determination, and The Beads of One Rosary [Paciorki Jednego Różańca], the story of a retired miner moving out of the familoki (typical Silesian miners’ residential buildings, originally built in the late 19th and early 20th century by mine owners for their workers, and, though initially considered comfortable and ahead-of-its-time urban housing for the working class, had by Kutz’s time already fallen into both disrepair and disrepute, as the living conditions were not keeping up with the pace of modernization and improving standards of living), was a symbolic image of uprooting and the dying of tradition.
With these films, Kutz built the mythology of Silesia as a place where people are ready to work hard, and the working-class ethos is one of the elements defining their identity. Kutz’s Silesia is a place where family matters, men can be strict, women are strong and wield power over the family, and poverty does not deprive people of dignity. It was thanks to Kutz’s films that for decades Silesia was to be associated with miners, a strike ethos, but also with poverty, hard work and illegal coal exploitation (what in Polish was called biedaszyby, literally meaning ‘[mine] shafts of the poor’).
Although Silesians loved Kutz for showing their culture to the world, immortalizing it and paying homage to it in films, over time the stereotype reinforced by him started to be the source of their discomfort. At the beginning of the 21st century, people responsible for the cultural policy of the region put more and more emphasis on showing other, more modern faces of Silesia, which in the meantime underwent a transformation: from a region of a mining monoculture, it turned into a region vibrant with life, basing its economy on new technologies and associated with dynamic development. And although elements of the Silesian landscape from Kutz’s films kept returning in films such as Żelazny Most [The Iron Bridge] by Monika Jordan-Młodzianowska from 2019, we can also find its more modern face in the new images of Silesia, as evidenced by Love in the City of Gardens [Miłość w Mieście Ogrodów] 2017 by Adam Sikora and Ingmar Vilquist, Close-Ups [Zbliżenia] 2014 by Magdalena Piekorz or the moving Shreds [Strzępy] 2022 by Beata Dzianowicz.
Places unknown
While Silesia, thanks to Kutz, became one of the best-described regions of Poland, and the 10th Muse strongly perpetuated its social stereotype, other Polish regions – although large and significant for the native culture – rarely appeared on cinema screens. One of the least seen ones was for a long time Kashubia. Film crews have certainly visited the Tri-City and its vicinity more than once, to shoot both films and TV series (one of the seasons of Maciej Migas’s Prawo Agaty [Agata’s Law] was shot in Gdańsk, as was Ryszard Bugajski’s Closed System [Układ Zamknięty] and Jacek Bromski’s Solid Goldi), but while using local characteristic venues and objects, the filmmakers said nothing or almost nothing about Kashubian culture and identity.