Ewa Mazierska's recent book, Poland Daily: Economy, Work, Consumption and Social Class in Polish Cinema, is an attempt to read almost a century of Polish film history in terms of the representations of class, political economy, and everyday life. Key concepts that underlie Mazierska's study, which are explained in the Introduction, are inspired by Karl Marx's work and its interpretations; one of the book's goal is “to demonstrate that these [Marxist] categories can be used productively in the study of Polish cinema and Polish history at large” (3).

Treating films as historical documents and political works, Mazierska chooses films that supposedly reflect mainstream views. She focuses on popular cinema and full-length films dedicated to cinematic distribution, however, some examples of documentary films are also included, due to the genre's status in Polish cinema. In eight chapters, grouped in three parts devoted to three periods in the political history of Poland: interwar, state socialism, and neoliberalism after 1989, Mazierska describes the most characteristic ideas of a particular decade. In 1920s, it was the problem of social promotion at any cost, the cult of the body and crimes of passion; at that time, the directors avoided any signs of class conflicts. In 1930s, the tone changed: romantic comedies and melodramas exposed obstacles connected with crossing class boundaries.

The end of the Second World War brought to Poland a new political and economic system: state socialism. The cinema of the 1950s, marked by socialist realism, enthusiastically depicted the efforts of ordinary, often young people who eagerly rebuilt their country; only in few works can one find any traces of criticism. The 1960s introduced relative liberalization and “small stabilization.” Polish New Wave presented the figure of an outsider, a drifter as “a metaphor of this decade” (150); popular comedies captured both achievements and failures of socialist reality. The importance of the working class started to slowly fade away.

The critical stance increased in the next decade, both in the Cinema of Moral Concern and its forerunner, “experimental popular cinema.” With its focus on individuals, Cinema of Moral Concern “refrained from advocating an overthrow of the system” (196), placing emphasis on people's morality, and not on the political system. Mazierska demonstrates also early signs of the shift toward capitalism. This process became more visible in the last decade of state socialism, which began with a series of strikes and protests resulting from the worsening of economic conditions. The author examines the transformation from pro-workers to pro-capitalist attitude in the films.

The transformation of 1989 is characterized as a shift toward neoliberalism: anti-worker and a non-egalitarian system. In the 1990s, the reaction to the new system was often affirmative. Comedies and gangster films depicted new social and economic possibilities and documentaries presented a more pessimistic view of the transformation. The voices revealing sinister features of a new political order has been more often raised only after 2000. As Mazierska duly states, however, even if the dark side of capitalism is exposed, the very nature of the system is not questioned.

A short summary does not exhaust all the threads of Mazierska's study. The chronological structure of the book allowed the author to convincingly sketch the transformations of the representations of class and work in Polish cinema as accompanying social and political processes, and to explain the reasons behind them. Brief introductions into complicated Polish history certainly make the analyses easier to understand for international audiences. Although the division into decades is not a precise one (it is visible especially in the third part), it helps to highlight the main tendencies set in the historical context. The important aspect of Mazierska's book is the inclusion of categories such as gender and age, analyzed as interrelated with categories derived from political economy, as in her accounts of the representations of women's situation. The author unpacks new ways of portraying women's issues in interwar cinema, discusses the motif of women's emancipation, treated superficially and short-termed in socialist realist cinema, and shows how anti-workers and pro-capitalist trends later coexisted with a growing tendency toward retraditionalization, strongly affecting women in personal and professional spheres.

Poland Daily is a comprehensive and inspiring book that proves the productivity of an approach underrated in the history of Polish film, and that invites the readers to a discussion not limited to the area of film studies.