Anna Krakus's cinematic study traces a theme of “aesthetic unfinalizability”—loosely connected to its Bakhtinian precedent—in late communist Poland, with the thesis that filmic resistance to resolution expressed a certain skepticism about the advent of communism. As she conducted research in Andrzej Wajda's archives, her analysis of his films, especially the series Człowiek z marmuru (Man of Marble, 1976), Człowiek z żelaza (Man of Iron, 1981), and Wałęsa: Człowiek z nadziei (Wałęsa: Man of Hope, 2013), is a particular strength of the monograph as she traces the director's career from a period of creative self-censorship owing to political constraints to his representation of a post-Soviet era dominated by a fear of repercussions arising from former collaborations with the secret police. Krakus also engages directors’ struggle with the depiction of moral values and psychological malaise in communist Poland in the 1970s, which reflect the Cinema of Moral Anxiety, a topic central to the monograph, as evidenced by its discussions of the cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Zanussi. Throughout the study she adopts a mimetic director-centered approach to cinema focused mostly on Polish cultural contributions, but with a few references to the French New Wave Movement, in order to demonstrate that omissions, breaks in films, unfinished construction projects, aimless movement, lack of temporal progression, open endings, and “unanswerable metaphysical concerns” signify an unfinalizability critical of Soviet teleological progression (42).
Linking the immortality of communism to nineteenth-century liberationist Polish messianism, Krakus situates her discussion of cinema within major twentieth-century historical movements in Poland with precise references to Iosif Stalin's impact on the arts, the rebuilding of Warsaw after the Second World War, the political struggle between Władysław Gomułka and Edward Gierek, the 1975 constitutional revisions supportive of a Soviet-influenced socialism, the Solidarity movement, and post-communist lustration. Henri Bergson's juxtaposition of memory and a clock time characteristic of industrialized societies as well as Gilles Deleuze's intersection of past, present, and future are foundational in Krakus's understanding of the diegetic flow of time, its tempo, and timelessness in Wojciech Has's adaptation of Bruno Schulz's stories, Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (The Hourglass Sanatorium, 1973), which collapses the differentiation between virtual and actual, and in Zanussi's Iluminacja (Illumination, 1972), embodying a Bergsonian subjectivity in its temporal duration.
In spite of official immortality as well as a sense of cinematic eternity, images attesting to the fragility of human life fill both page and screen from the ruins of Tadeusz Konwicki's Mała apokalipsa (A Minor Apocalypse, 1979) to the exploration of suicides in Pętla (The Noose, 1958) and Hourglass Sanatorium or murder in Kieślowski's Dekalog (Decalogue, 1989). Still, Krakus convincingly concludes that death–being portrayed as incompetent (Wisława Szymborska) or pervasive, yet innocuous (Konwicki)–pales by comparison to life, to the exercise of free will, to artists’ challenging of “crumbling” monuments, and to the exposure of the vulnerabilities of a “promised utopia” (148). Despite the averred focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Krakus concludes No End in Sight with a cyclical process of return in Kieślowski's La double vie de Véronique (1991) and trilogy Trois couleurs (1993–94) against the backdrop of the nostalgic documentary by Robin Hessman, My Perestroika (2010), and Wolfgang Becker's satirical staging of the communist past in Goodbye Lenin! (2003). Yet, her discussion of “fear of the files” could have invoked the critically acclaimed Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, while Krakus's theses on the circularity of time and the fusion of present and past would have benefited from additional discussion of the celebrated televised series Decalogue (199).
Because the monograph does not account in a detailed fashion for diegetic elements (the composition of a shot, film editing, and ambient sound) shaping Polish film within a succession of technological developments (the hand-held camera or the digital revolution) affecting cinema in east and west, it is not recommended for specialists in media studies. All the same, Krakus's analyses of Szymborska's poetry, the prose of Stanisław Lem and Konwicki, and major Polish resistance movements situate this study within broader Polish cultural and artistic movements. Since this monograph broadly surveys cinema from the last two decades of communist Poland, it would be a valuable addition to a European or Polish film studies course.
