Cinema was a central means of cultural expression in post-war Poland. Dr Matilda Mroz is asking how and why.
Cinema was a central means of cultural expression in post-war Poland. Dr Matilda Mroz is asking how and why.
In Poland, unable to communicate resistance to the Socialist regime through open political channels, oppositionists often chose to express themselves through culturally symbolic actions.
Dr Matilda Mroz
‘Watch them closely, for these are the last hours of their lives…,’ commands the narrator at the beginning of the Polish film Kanal (1956), directed by Andrzej Wajda. And watching closely, frame by frame, is precisely what Dr Matilda Mroz is doing, as she examines post-war Polish films for the nuances that escaped Socialist censorship and gave cinema of the time a unique political resonance.
‘Cinema is the most important art form to emerge in the 20th century,’ explains Dr Mroz, from the Department of Slavonic Studies. ‘In Poland, unable to communicate resistance to the Socialist regime through open political channels, oppositionists often chose to express themselves through culturally symbolic actions. Cinema became their most powerful tool, slipping subversive notions past the censors through subtle cinematic direction.’
Funded through a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr Mroz has been tracing this trend in Polish film-making, a trend that is beautifully exemplified by Kanal. Set among the ruins of wartime Warsaw, Kanal depicts the last days of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and the attempt of the insurgents to reach another part of the city through the sewers, in which they get lost and perish.
‘It was the first film that addressed the previously taboo subject of the non-Communist resistance movement, and it traumatised many viewers because it showed the soldiers escaping and then dying in the filth of the sewers rather than fighting heroically,’ explains Dr Mroz. ‘Even the cinematography was such that viewers often spoke of feeling as lost and claustrophobic as the characters – a marked departure from the rigorously framed films beloved of the Socialist movement.’
Understanding how cinema-goers reacted to the films is an important aspect of the research, since it affords a unique opportunity to examine the intersection between cinematic experience, historical climate and Polish culture. Dr Mroz’s funding enabled her to travel to Warsaw to the National Film Archives last year, where she made a lucky discovery: ‘Sixty years ago, someone had diligently cut out every article and mention of the very films that I was interested in and pasted them into scrapbooks. There’s something very exciting about opening these yellowing, crinkled books and thinking about the archivists determined to preserve for posterity both the ‘official’ and the controversial responses to important films.’ Now, decades later, Dr Mroz is rediscovering these invaluable records and their testimony to the enduring power of cinema for the Polish people.
For more information, please contact Dr Matilda Mroz (mm570@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Slavonic Studies (www.mml.cam.ac.uk/slavonic/).
British Academy
The UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences seeks to recognise and support leading-edge research within these fields, championing their importance and the vital role they play in raising and answering fundamental questions facing society today.
The British Academy receives £22 million in Government grant to support UK-based research and international collaboration in the humanities and social sciences. From this, over 1,000 awards are made each year, benefiting individuals based in more than 120 universities and research institutions across the UK.
Supporting research
One of the most popular British Academy funding programmes is the Postdoctoral Fellowship. These provide three-year career development opportunities to scholars such as Dr Matilda Mroz (see above) and Dr Zoltán Tiba to develop research, teaching and publications at an early career stage. Around 45 new awards are made annually under this exceptionally competitive flagship scheme, including seven to Cambridge this year.
British Academy Research Development Awards (BARDAs) support established scholars wishing to develop a significant collaborative or individual research project. About 35 awards are made each year under this comparatively new scheme, which replaces large research fellowships and research leave. In Cambridge, BARDA-funded scholars include Dr Mandeep Dhami, who is evaluating apology in the context of restorative justice, Dr Claire Preston, who is studying 17th-century English literature and scientific investigation, and Dr Anna Williams, who is researching the architecture of theology.
The Academy also offers Small Research Grants (up to £7,500) to stimulate interdisciplinary work, collaborations or pilot studies, and several schemes focus on encouraging international collaboration, promoting capacity development and engagement. For instance, the three-year UK-Africa Academic Partnership award encourages institutional links and promotes new understandings and interchange between participating countries. In Cambridge, Dr Devon Curtis is using this award to collaborate with scholars in Uganda and Botswana on a study of rebel movements and post-conflict peace building in Africa.
The British Academy is the counterpart to the Royal Society, which supports the natural sciences. The Academy partners with the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering for the esteemed Newton International Fellowships scheme, which aims to build a global pool of research leaders and encourage long-term international collaboration.
Championing humanities and social sciences
Each year, the Academy elects 38 outstanding UK-based scholars to be Fellows of the British Academy in recognition of their research achievements. Today, there are over 900 Fellows who take a lead in representing the humanities and social sciences, and who contribute to public policy and debate. Seven Cambridge academics were among the recently elected Fellows: Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor Philip Ford, Professor Jonathan Haslam, Professor Mary Jacobus, Dr John Marenbon, Professor Susan Rankin and Professor John Duncan.
Through investing in ideas, individuals and intellectual resources, the Academy aims to enhance the scholarly and cultural resources of the UK, contributing to quality of life, economic prosperity, public policy, understanding of other societies and cultural enrichment.
For more information about the British Academy, please visit www.britac.ac.uk/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.
