Dare to be Critical: Making Films in Poland Under Communism Control

Misiak, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7153-944X (2011) Dare to be Critical: Making Films in Poland Under Communism Control. In: Screen Industries in East Central Europe, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.

Abstract / Summary

Anna Misiak painted a portrait of Polish censorship – with emphasis placed on the 1970s. While introducing the formal structure of the system (from pre-production to distribution license), she demonstrated its intrinsically flexible character as well as the negotiable and cyclical nature of control; the same point was also well demonstrated by Daniel Bird’s detailed case study of the troubled production history of Andrzej Żuławski’s NA SREBRNYM GLOBIE / ON THE SILVER GLOBE. Misiak’s paper showed convincingly that Polish censorship cannot be described in terms of a linear model of progress, i.e. in terms of change over decades from a rigid and strict structure to comparatively lenient forms of control.
Rather, argued Misiak, the situation is best perceived as a push-and-pull system characterized by cyclic change. What was particularly striking about this description was that similar claims could also have been made about the dynamics of Hungarian censorship, which to-date have been considered quite unique to Hungary – hence the image of the “happiest barrack in the Soviet bloc”.

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