Polish National Trauma and Conflicting Identities

Pawlikowski himself rejects an exclusively historical analysis of his movies, claiming that the characters portrayed in Ida are “in conflict, delicate, they are not made to advocate a cause,”Footnote ⁴ while during an interview he gave at the release of Cold War, he stated that “the cinema is not a good place to explain History.”Footnote ⁵ However, the director is often asked in interviews to comment on the reception of his films in Poland as well as on the memory and history work done in his native country. Polish public television first canceled the screening of his film Ida, then eventually broadcast it but introduced the film with a panel of right-wing historians and commentators claiming that the film represented the “Jewish point of view” and alleging that this was why Ida had been awarded an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.Footnote ⁶ What, then, is the vision of Polish history conveyed in Pawlikowski's cinema, and why is it so controversial in his home country?

Both Ida and Cold War present a more complex vision of the communist past than as either condemnation or blissful nostalgia. In the former film, Ida Lubenstein—the real, Jewish name of a young aspiring nun—and her aunt, attorney Wanda Gruz, nicknamed “the Red,” travel through the Polish countryside in the 1960s, only to discover that their family had been murdered and robbed during the war by the peasants who initially hid them, while baby Ida was sent to a Catholic convent. The plot in itself epitomizes the recent shift in Polish historiography and memory related to Polish-Jewish relations, which has focused on the issue of Polish attitudes toward their Jewish neighbors during the war.Footnote ⁷ The film balances themes of greed and antisemitism with the emphasis on rescue by Christians, however ambiguous, since Ida associates rescue with the conversion of the rescued.

Polish society's postwar trauma, guilt, and difficulties in dealing with this past are themes that Pawlikowski does not resolve. On the one hand, he portrays the communist Wanda seeking (legitimate?) revenge through the justice system, yet embodying the myth of supposedly Jewish-Bolshevik domination of postwar Poland, which could serve as an alibi for anti-Jewish attitudes. Wanda's character has inspired criticism precisely because it conveys this antisemitic stereotype.Footnote ⁸ Yet I would argue that this character is actually quite sympathetic and motivated by personal grief rather than ideological hatred.

On the other hand, Pawlikowski underscores the shift to a monoethnic and monoreligious postwar Poland, where diversity is not welcome, as shown when a brunette singer is rejected by the folklore band formed at the beginning of Cold War because she supposedly does not look enough like an ethnic Pole. This scene reveals the ambiguities of the new regime promoting popular folklore in order to gain legitimacy and thus helping to promote a new elite, yet also politicizing these issues and depriving the official image of Poland of the remnants of the ethnic diversity lost in the war.Footnote ⁹

Both films show Catholicism as a major part of postwar Polish life and identity, despite communism's attitude to organized religion. At the end of the film, the Jewish Ida embraces the religion of her saviors, while the romantic and unconventional couple made by the bourgeois pianist Wiktor and the peasant singer Zula in Cold War end up in an abandoned church, where their double suicide symbolizes their religious wedding. Dedication and sacrifice seem to be a leitmotif for the main—female—characters of Pawlikowski's films. As he himself stated in an interview: “In Poland, history influences people's lives and underscores their identity. The heroes of my films—Ida and her aunt Wanda, Wiktor and Zula—are also marked by it. And in a very dramatic way.”Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, although Pawlikowski's films never explain historical facts, they are charged by a meaningful context—not only a Polish context but also a European one.

Europe Divided or Reunited?

Pawlikowski's cinema arguably embodies a Polish vision of East-West relations, especially in his film Cold War. In it, the characters escape from the East to the West, only to find disillusionment and being limited to their eastern, “folkloric” identity. Zula is made to understand that she needs to sing in French in order to gain success and is compelled to perform the expected stereotypes of the Slavic lady—sexy, but too prone to drink. If the East represents imprisonment and ultimately the sacrifice of their own lives for the central couple, the West fails to bring them freedom and deprives them of the creative impulse they had in Poland. There is no clear-cut division between these two worlds, between which the characters move much more than one might expect due to the Cold War context. Yet they have no possible way of feeling at home anywhere.

In this sense, Cold War very much resembles Kieslowski's earlier, pessimistic view of the impossibility of a reunified Europe, expressed in his film The Double Life of Véronique, shot shortly after the end of the Cold War. As demonstrated by Agnieszka Morstin,Footnote ¹¹ the two directors, although moving in opposite directions—Kieslowski shooting his last films in the West, while Pawlikowski went back to Poland to make his latest movies—have quite similar visions of East-West relations. In both films, travel from a politically restrictive East to a comfortable but dull West turns out to be deceptive. In Kieslowski's film, the Polish Weronika, whose world is vanishing, as shown early in the film as she stands in front of a crowd demonstrating against Soviet troops, merely makes eye contact with her French counterpart, Véronique, who is watching the crowd from her tourist bus visiting Krakow. Then Weronika dies. She can only live on through the soul of Véronique in a quite pessimistic reunion of the two worlds.

Puzzled and disoriented to live through the fall of the world in which he was born and managed to create, Kieslowski articulated his scepticism toward the new situation: “We're allowed to say everything now, but people have stopped caring about what we're allowed to say. Censorship bound authors to the same extent that it did the public . . .We were together, us and the public, in the aversion we had for a system we didn't accept. Today, this basic reason for being together doesn't exist. We're lacking an enemy.”Footnote ¹² Mental and emotional categories of “East” and “West,” which were at the core of Kieslowski's creativity, are still advocated a generation later by Pawlikowski. Indeed, the Cold War itself as well as the day-to-day reality of socialist Poland in the 1960s in Ida, are strongly aestheticized, using black-and-white images as a clear reference to old Polish films and bringing back some nostalgia for a vanished world, at times intentionally overflowing with clichés. When Wiktor and Zula find themselves back in Poland, the country is depicted through Western eyes—cold, dull, and gray, oppressive and containing only corruption, censorship, imprisonment, and death. Although very aesthetic and attractive, these images of the East are bound to embody otherness. In the same way, images of the West—such as the Parisian landscape and its bohemian cliché lifestyle—are ostentatiously shaped by an Eastern gaze and thus become caricatures.

Yet if Pawlikowski's films do express a certain vision of East-West relations, this goes beyond a simple binary structure, especially as Ida and Cold War remain primarily movies that confront their characters with issues of intimacy and individual, complex choices, with historical events remaining in the background.

Music and Intimacy as Characters in Pawlikowski's Films

In a way, the real hero and color of both Ida and Cold War, which were shot in black and white, is the music. In Ida, the jazzy soundtrack features prominently in the young woman's hesitations between a lay life and the convent. Music embodied the few glimpses of freedom in Gomulka's Poland. This is even more the case in Cold War, where the folkloric song “Two Hearts” serves as the film's musical leitmotif. The song, music, and lyrics get adapted and recur throughout the film, from initial performances in the Polish countryside to the Parisian cabaret, then are translated into French. Yet for Zula, the song's meaning and authenticity are lost in translation. The song illustrates the possibilities of cultural transfers but also their impossibility because it works best in Polish reality rather than as a jazzy adaptation. For Pawlikowski's characters, music appears to be the path potentially leading to a better life and a better world. In this respect, he follows a quite similar pattern to Kieslowski's doubled main—also female—characters: Véronique and Weronika are both singers, and the sudden death of the latter, while singing, paradoxically enables the former to survive.

Music is not only a major feature in Pawlikowski's films; it paves the way for a specific “aesthetic of the intimate.”Footnote ¹³ Although this expression was coined to describe Kieslowski's films, which highlighted and unraveled their characters’ emotions, it also quite accurately describes the protagonists of both Ida and Cold War. What interests Pawlikowski the most are human relations and dilemmas: Will Ida remain in the monastery or choose a life in the world, deceitful as the former choice may be? Will Zula follow her beloved in a joint escape to the East, not knowing what would become of her in that unknown world? Intimacy thus emerges as a fully fledged character, in a pattern reminiscent of several important Polish film directors, such as Andrzej Żuławski, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Jerzy Skolimowski.

Because music and intimacy are central to Pawlikowski's films, it would be too restrictive and simplistic to call them romantic movies, as a Western approach to a Polish movie might be inclined to do. Although the Polish director presents the Western eye with a certain vision of “Polishness” by putting forward romantic tropes—a joint suicide, various life dilemmas—the double suicide in Cold War as well as Ida's final choice lack the element of sacrifice or death for a noble cause.

In conclusion, Pawlikowski's latest films offer an Eastern, if not Polish, vision of recent European history and its divisions, but they focus on identity shifts and collective and individual trauma rather than the traditional politics, Polish heroism, or martyrdom. In this respect, his films are not political—at times, they have been met with hostility by nationalist Polish politiciansFootnote ¹⁴—even if their settings have a lot to say about postwar Polish history. Yet they let us perceive how, more than thirty years after the reunification of Europe, emotional categories of East and West continue to loom large. As both a continuation and an echo of Kieslowski's last films, Ida and Cold War wonderfully embody the evolutions of representations of East-West relations and mentalities. By not presenting straightforward narratives but rather allowing space for ellipses in time, these films invite spectators to think for themselves about how unique experiences—a couple in divided Europe in the 1950s or a young woman discovering a taboo identity—might be perceived and understood, and to reflect upon the place of history and memory in today's Europe.