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First published in 2002, Marek Haltof’s seminal volume was the first comprehensive English-language study of Polish cinema, providing a much-needed survey of one of Europe’s most distinguished—yet unjustly neglected—film cultures. Since then, seismic changes have reshaped Polish society, European politics, and the global film industry. This thoroughly revised and updated edition takes stock of these dramatic shifts to provide an essential account of Polish cinema from the nineteenth century to today, covering such renowned figures as Kieślowski, Skolimowski, and Wajda along with vastly expanded coverage of documentaries, animation, and television, all set against the backdrop of an ever-more transnational film culture.

Despite the established position of historical cinema and the huge social expectations revealed by the reception of the long delayed release of Historia Roja (2016, dir. Jerzy Zalewski), Polish cinema, especially feature films, has only slightly contributed to the creation and preservation of the cursed soldiers phenomenon. In the article I focus on the contemporary films on cursed soldiers, both feature ones and documentaries, from the perspective of Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory. I will analyze the former using the Amanda Ann Klein’s concept of film cycles. I will describe the latter in the context of historical documentary filmmaking after 1989, referring to Mirosław Przylipiak’s findings.

How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes. After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all over the region. These efforts tried both to explain the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape public opinion on their society’s shared post-war heritage...

First published in 2002, Marek Haltof's seminal volume was the first comprehensive English-language study of Polish cinema, providing a much-needed survey of one of Europe's most distinguished-yet unjustly neglected-film cultures. Since then, seismic changes have reshaped Polish society, European politics, and the global film industry. This thoroughly revised and updated edition takes stock of these dramatic shifts to provide an essential account of Polish cinema from the nineteenth century to today, covering such renowned figures as Kieślowski, Skolimowski, and Wajda along with vastly expanded coverage of documentaries, animation, and television, all set against the backdrop of an ever-more transnational film culture.

This article traces historical trends in film titling practicesin Poland, based on quantitative analysis of film metada-ta. The authors analyse a corpus of 2,519 films produced inPoland until 2023, looking at regularities in the naming ofPolish original films: the average length of titles, title du-plication, the most frequent content words typical of suc-cessive phases in the history of Polish cinematography,lexical diversity, and the presence of proper names and for-eignisms. Then they replicate some of the tests on the cor-pus of foreign films translated into Polish, which includes5,585 films distributed in Poland between 1945 and 1989 and33,794 films released in Poland after 1989. The authors com-pare the peculiarities of the original titles and those trans-lated into Polish in search of similarities and discrepancies,potentially symptomatic of translationese, or titlese.

Abstrakt: Prezentowane studium ma na celu opisanie plenerowego projektu filmowego \"Polska Światłoczuła\" w dwóch perspektywach - funkcjonalnej i interakcyjnej. W trakcie jakościowych badań terenowych autorka próbowała dociec, jakie motywacje kierują różnymi stronami projektu. Socjologiczne studium opiera się o źródła zastane: naukowe i statystyczne oraz o materiał zebrany w okresie 2012-2014 w trakcie sześciu tras kina objazdowego w Polsce w ramach projektu \"Polska Światłoczuła\". Cel szczegółowy stanowi próba ujęcia własnych obserwacji socjologicznych, czynionych w trakcie badań terenowych, w szerszym kontekście, jakim jest fenomen kina objazdowego. Zebrane materiały dały możliwość naszkicowania społeczno-kulturowej atmosfery spotkań widzów z dziełami i ich twórcami, w szczególności oczekiwań, motywacji twórców i odbiorców. W artykule odwołano się do własnych obserwacji zwykłych oraz uczestniczących (jawnych i ukrytych). Wykorzystanych zostało 50 obserwacji zwykłych z projekcji oraz ze spotkań z publicznością (rozmowy z publicznością po seansie oraz około stu krótkich, nagrywanych rozmów z widzami na temat wrażeń filmowych oraz motywacji do uczestnictwa w seansie), a także doświadczenia (insidera) z kilkudziesięciu dni w trasach z kinem objazdowym. Badania nie są reprezentatywne odnośnie do całościowej publiki seansów w trakcie sześciu tras. Autorka nie omawia rezultatów badań dotyczących recepcji współczesnych polskich filmów (dyskusje grupowe po projekcji), lecz skupia się na ujęciu instytucjonalnym i interakcyjnym kina ruchomego.

The article examines how Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) reworks the Jewish myth of a dybbuk in order to discuss how and to what extent a spectral haunting may disrupt acts of collective forgetting, which are in turn fueled by repression, repudiation, and ritualized violence. A part of a revisionist trend in Polish cinema, Demon upsets the contours of national affiliations, and in doing so comments on the problematic nature of memory work concerning pre- and postwar Polish–Jewish relations. Because the body possessed by a female dybbuk is foreign and male, the film also underlines gendered aspects of possession, silencing, and story-telling. The article draws on Gothic Studies and horror cinema studies as well as Polish–Jewish studies in order to show how by deploying typical possession horror tropes Wrona is able to reveal the true horror—an effective erasure of the Jewish community, an act that needs to be repeated in order for the state of historical oblivion to be maintained.

‘Optimism against all odds’: Polish National Identity in War Films of Jerzy Passendorfer Using archival sources, movie reviews, secondary sources and films, this article examines the cinema of Jerzy Passendorfer, the founding father of action movies genre in People’s Poland, but also the staunch supporter of Władysław Gomułka’s ‘Polish road to Socialism’ and General Mieczysław Moczar’s ultranationalist faction of the Partisans in the Polish United Workers’ Party. It demonstrates how Passendorfer’s blend of mainstream cinema and propaganda legitimized the party state and contributed to the construction of a new ethos, identity, and politics of history that enforced historical amnesia and syncretized past and present. It also argues that Passendorfer’s promotion of nationalist and authoritarian state ideology, militaristic patriotism and PolishSoviet alliance, commissioned by the regime, sat well with mass audiences, precisely because of the use of popular genres adopted from the West and the quench for optimistic visions of nationhood. Although Passendorfer’s patriotic actions flicks faded away with the fall of Gomułka’s regime, they constitute a model, which can be still emulated. “Trudny optymizm”: polska tożsamość narodowa w filmach wojennych Jerzego Passendorfera Opierając się na źródłach archiwalnych, publikacjach naukowych i analizie filmów, niniejszy artykuł bada twórczość filmową Jerzego Passendorfera, ojca chrzestnego filmu akcji w PRL, zwolennika ‘polskiej drogi do socjalizmu’ Władysława Gomułki oraz sympatyka nacjonalistycznej frakcji generała Mieczysława Moczara w Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej. Passendorfer łączył w swoich filmach popularne kino gatunkowe z propagandową legitymizacją władzy partii. Współtworzył nowy etos i świadomość narodową oraz uprawiał politykę historyczną, która zsynchronizowała przeszłość z teraźniejszością, doprowadzając do swoistego rodzaju amnezji. Artykuł stawia tezę, że zaproponowana przez Passendorfera synteza nacjonalizmu, autorytaryzmu i militaryzmu cieszyła się sporą popularnością wśród masowego widza z powodu zapożyczeń z zachodniego kina gatunkowego oraz potrzeby optymistycznej wizji wspólnoty narodowej. Patriotyczne filmy akcji Passendorfera uległy zapomnieniu po upadku Gomułki, jednak w dalszym ciągu stanowią kulturowy model, który może być wykorzystywany na potrzeby polityki historycznej.

Polish cinema in the late 1980s—a period marked in Poland by a transformation of social norms and a mounting pressure on the political authorities from the illegal opposition movement—underwent a significant evolution, part of which was opening up to erotic content reaching Poland from the West in various forms, including the “porno-chic” phenomenon, defined by Brian McNair as being “not porn… but the representation of porn in non-pornographic art and culture.” In my article, I look at some major examples of the porno-chic trend in Polish cinema of the late 1980s and draw on the archival records from the Film Pre-Screening Commission to demonstrate how the political and cultural authorities of the time attempted to co-opt the new “western” trend to improve their standing with an increasingly irate public and to deflate the rising discontent by a supply of an attractive cultural and erotic content.

There are two main issues here, i. e. how much did Polish filmmakers succumb to self-censorship practices (present in world cinema since its inception) and how effective was the consistent historical policy of the Law and Justice in terms of attendance figures or artistic success of Polish film. The 2010 Polish Cinema Now! monograph edited by Mateusz Werner and intended for the foreign reader presents a vibrant, multicolored picture of Polish cinema twenty years after the fall of communism, attempting to characterize the trends and directions representative of this dynamic time in Polish history8' The most recent interpretative perspective on contemporary Polish cinema is presented in the monograph entitled Polish Cinema Today: A Bold New Era in Film, in which Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren take a look at the latest cinema productions in terms of key themes, such as the image of national or gender identity, the confrontation with martyrdom, the image of the modern family, the problem of migration and the influ-ence of the Catholic Church on the lives of individuals.9' Nevertheless, the author is most interested in the area of so-called \"production culture,\" clearly adopted in the text and outlined in the introduction, which is being dynam-ically examined by Eastern European researchers such as Marcin Adamczak (Poland) and Petr Szczepanik (Czech Republic). An average of sixty feature films per year were produced with an average budget of €1,2,000,000 (2015-2016, budgets are now showing an upward trend), public funds accounted for half of the feature film budget on average, and films supported by central funds - usually from the auteur stream - accounted for about two-thirds of the annual production volume. 13)Although the existence of the PFI has stabilised the film market, the fact that a grant has been re-ceived or in what amount is not directly related to the reception of a film. Audiences' re-actions (as in Europe as a whole, preferring Hollywood films) depend on many factors bevond the Institute's control, such as the quality of advertising and the final artistic decisions made by authors and producers. Since 2005, the Polish Film Institute has pursued its public purpose by supporting difficult, national or international