The Turning Point
1989 in Polish Film
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The overcoming of Communism brought cinema a previously unknown artistic freedom. But expectations that film was the art form that could best depict the break with the past went unfulfilled. The evolutionary character of the “refolution” prevented that. The Round Table in 1989 was not a suitable pendant to the storming of the Bastille in 1789 or the stuff of which films are made. However, if one applies to Polish society the anthropological approach that stages of human life are marked by rituals of transition, then it is seen that Polish film has expressed the experiences of the break with Communism in all its facets and complexities.
(Osteuropa 2-3/2009, pp. 283–290)