COURAGE

Підключення Колекцій

“Interrogation” is one of the most renowed films directed in Poland after World War II. It is a bold, politically engaged settlement with the Stalinist period in contemporary Polish history. The story is about a young actress (character played by Krystyna Janda) who is arrested by the Security Service and held captive in prison in order to force her to testify about her colleagues. “Interrogation” shows the methods used by Stalinist repression apparatus in order to break ordinary citizens, as well as prisoners’ efforts to preserve dignity and humanity.

The pre-release committee took place in April 1982, in the midst of Martial Law in Poland. As one can see from the committee’s meeting protocols, film critics and representatives of authorities deplored Bugajski’s oeuvre as hateful, false, antisocialist propaganda without any value. By the central decision, the copy of “Interrogation” was sealed and put on the archive’s shelf (this way “Interrogation” became one of the most famous “półkowniki” – the films laying on shelves, without possibility to be shown publicly). Bugajski managed to preserve one copy of his film, which was later screened privately within opposition circles of the "second circuit" (“drugi obieg”).  The official premiere of “Interrogation” took place on 13^th December 1981 – eight years after introduction of the Martial Law and eight years after the film had been produced. The film was Bugajski’s debut – repressions put on him by authorities, forced him to emigrate from Poland in 1985.

Dutch author of documentaries comes across the punk underground of communist Poland. He observes a group of teenagers who recently started a band playing a blend of punk and reggae music The band is called Izrael and it will leave its mark on the history of Polish alternative music. Among the young musicians there are Robert Brylewski and Paweł “Kelner” (Waiter) Rozwadowski. The camera follows them wandering across the streets of Warsaw shortly after the lifting of martial law. They visit the Różycki Bazaar in the Praga district, the Jewish Cemetery, and the Palace of Culture. The axis of the film is the interview recorded in a dark rehearsal studio, full of anarchistic slogans and absurd sense of humour. Young musicians use their broken English to talk about their lives, making music, and communist Poland. The film also features interludes containing fragments of one of Izrael’s first concerts.
The film made it to Filmoteka thanks to the research preceding the exhibition “Down with pimps of art!” dedicated to Polish punk, provocatively organised in the building of Warsaw stock exchange.

The last issue of IBOR dealing with the topic of total institutions or comprehensive institutions, with special emphasis on psychiatric institutions, came out in September 1979. Using the deductive approach, starting with the profiling of totalitarian institutions, focusing on psychiatric institutions and their patients, the editorial draws conclusions, referring to eminent historical personalities from the fields of philosophy, historiography and culture, that an artist can only be a person who is either on the border of madness or has already passed that boundary. This is backed up by a series of texts and poems, the most provocative among them being "Please Master" by American poet Allen Ginsberg. The poem deals about a paedophiliac-homosexual relationship between a pupil and a teacher and is accompanied by a photo of a child named after the poem.

The poem aroused great controversy in Pula's Party and youth circles, and in republic, local and youth publications, and it was the formal reason for abolishing the journal’s funding. Speaking of topics that were considered undesirable in conservative Pula, but also about the social circumstances in Yugoslavia that bothered the state-party leadership, the IBOR editorial board’s notable cultural-opposition activity was what ultimately led to the cessation of its funding.

The "Iconospheres" series of photographs is divided into three parts which present details of a female body and the artist`s nearest surroundings. In the first two installations, Dłubak intentionally uses the interior of a gallery. For the third installation he gave up arranging the photographic environment, showing the woman`s back against a flat wall. Dłubak arranged pairs of identical prints into vertical strips, which gave the impression of a mirror reflection. The viewer of this exhibition "Iconosphere II" (shown in Cracow in 1968) was forced to engage in physical contact with the photographic print - the setting of the exhibition created the situation in which he/she had to touch the blow-ups of the female body with his/her own silhouette. 

The artist presented a fragment of "Iconosphere III" (one vertical strip) during his monographic exhibition in the Warsaw-based Klub Międzynarodowej Prasy i Książki in 1970. The full version of the work was shown a year later.
Just like the other photographic series by Dłubak, "Iconoshpere" undermined the prevailing idea of photography as a pure representation of reality. Contrary to the official currents of journalist, realist and mimetic photography in socialist Poland, Dłubak's work appraised the novel forms of reflection as present in the Western philosophical and art thought, namely, the symbolism, structutralism, and constructivism. Dłubak incited his viewers to rethink and deconstruct the meaning of the female body, not as an object of sexual desire, but as an element of ambigous reality where the body, the space and the light mingle in one photograph. This view of photography confronted the official narrative of photographic agencies and newspapers' editors in socialist Poland.

Since its publication in 1981, Virgil Ierunca’s book Pitești has been a key work for those interested in studying the extreme forms of repression implemented by the Romanian communist regime during its first years of rule. The book examines the implementation of an “experience of a grim originality” called ‘“re-education” that took place in Pitești prison between December 1949 and August 1952. The idea of re-education was inspired by the theories of the Soviet educator Anton Makarenko (1888–1939). He was a specialist in juvenile delinquency and a partisan of the re-education of young detainees with the help of other detainees of the same age who were already re-educated. The Romanian communist authorities took Makarenko’s ideas onto the next level by making permanent torture the main instrument for the re-education of younger students guilty for having other political sympathies than communist ones.

In his book, Virgil Ierunca describes how the re-education experiment began in Pitești prison at the end of 1949 with the blessing of the then head of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, Nikolski, and who were the main persons among prisoners involved in implementing the experiment. The book contains a detailed account of the many types of tortures that young detainees had to endure to be become re-educated and describes the last days of those who died because of torture in Pitești prison, based on the accounts of former prisoners who emigrated from Romania. From Ierunca’s point of view, the main purpose of the experiment was the destruction of the personality of the individuals who at the end of their re-education lost their moral values and standards and became “new men.” Consequently, they were not only forced to renounce their families, friends, and religion, but also to became the torturers of their friends or other inmates.

Virgil Ierunca also shows how the re-education was transferred from Pitești to other Romanian jails, such as Târgu-Ocna, Ocnele Mari, and Gherla and how it ended in 1952 when the Romanian authorities blamed their ideological enemy, the Iron Guard and its followers, for the atrocities that had happened in Pitești prison. Commenting on the issue of responsibility, the author mentions that the Romanian authorities and the first prisoners who tortured without being previously tortured were the only ones to blame for the deaths and the destroyed lives in Pitești prison.