From cinematic *metteur en scène* to
television *auteur*?

In one of her interviews, Holland commented on her collaboration with television:

Occasionally I deliver guest lectures in various film schools [. . . ]. In both the States and Europe, the young people who see their future in film directing are often more impressed with the fact that I made several episodes of *The Wire* than with my several Oscar nominations. For the students, this is a cult series, while Oscars are the symbol of the old and archaic world. (Pasternak 2022, 362)

On another occasion, she admitted that working for television was instrumental
for her professional development: ‘The great American television series *The*
*Wire, Treme* and *The Killing*, in which I participated, were for me a school in
fictional storytelling. They enhanced my craft and gave me more confidence’
(Bittencourt and Holland 2014, 46). Contemporary TV series – which offer the
psychological complexity and narrative innovativeness customarily associated
with cinema and literature – have, in the new millennium, been attracting
many esteemed filmmakers such as David Fincher (*House of Cards*), Steven
Soderbergh (*House of Cards*) and Todd Haynes (tv mini-series *Mildred Pierce*,
2011).¹ Holland, as discussed in Chapter Two, began her collaboration with
television much earlier, under state socialism in Poland. She may have used
this experience while working for the global television stations and streaming
platforms like HBO and Netflix in that she was familiar with the small screen
format and participating in collaborative projects. As her authorial debut, *An*
*Evening at Abdon*, demonstrated, television provided her with space for formal
experimentation in terms of both narrative structure and visual qualities. In her
subsequent Polish works made for both television and cinema, she consistently employed the mode of realism combined with the conventions of art cinema, a merger which was typical of the most acclaimed products of ‘quality television’ like *The Sopranos*, *The Wire*, *Six Feet Under*, and many more (see Feuer 2007, 157).² Furthermore, Holland’s American television works can also be linked with the Cinema of Moral Concern; as explained in Chapter Two, the main aim of this movement was to represent the aspects of corrupted Polish socialist reality that were absent from the propagandistic cultural production. A similar representational gap characterised Hollywood cinema of the 1990s which was dominated by action blockbusters and romantic comedies (see Chapter Four). In contrast to the New Hollywood cinema represented by such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Arthur Penn, the cinema of the last decade of the twentieth century turned away from American socio-political realities. Once *Star Wars* and *Indiana Jones* took control over the big screens, the small screens of television opened up for explorations of the everyday experience of a diversified and divided American society.

In this chapter, I examine Holland’s television work as an integral part of her oeuvre that reveals her authorship, albeit often in a dormant form. First, I discuss *Red Wind* (1995), an episode of the TV series *Fallen Angels* (1993–6, Showtime), and two feature films made for American television stations: *Shot in the Heart* (HBO, 2001), and *A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story* (Lifetime Movie Network, 2006). These three television projects examine urgent socio-political issues pertinent to then contemporary American society and as such they contrast with Holland’s feature films that she made during this period that were either costume or metaphysical dramas (see Chapter Four). Then I examine Holland’s selected works made for the global streaming platforms (episodes of *Cold Case*, *The Wire* and *Treme*), demonstrating how these developed her storytelling skills, while also continuing certain themes of her earlier work. Finally, the chapter presents Holland’s collaboration with Polish post-communist private television and Eastern European divisions of the global streaming platforms. These projects can be seen as her eventual ‘return home’, however, they belong as much to national/regional as to transnational cultural production in terms of financing, the participation of international creative personnel, and intertextual embedding within global genres.

## SMALL SCREEN, BIG THEMES

‘That was my best experience of working with producers in America’ commented Holland on her work on *Red Wind* (1995) (Zamysłowska and Kuźmicki 2013, 160), an episode in the neo-noir anthology television series entitled *Fallen Angels* (1993–5). The series was produced by Propaganda Films
for the Showtime cable television network with Sydney Pollack as its executive producer. The first season was aired in 1993, and the second in 1995. Among the directors of the first season were Steven Soderbergh, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise and Alfonso Cuarón. Holland joined the directorial crew of the second season, along with Kiefer Sutherland, Peter Bogdanovich and others. She chose a short story by Raymond Chandler, *Red Wind*, featuring the iconic protagonist, Philip Marlow. The cultural tradition of film noir, with its staple characters of hardboiled detective and *femme fatale* as well as highly stylised iconography, can be approached as an American variant of heritage cinema that Holland had been working within at that time. Not unlike in her cinematic projects, in *Red Wind* she also contravened one of the most solid ideological pillars of hardboiled fiction:

> I did a thing which an American director would not do. I made Chandler's main character Philip Marlow, a private detective previously played by famous American actors like Mitchum and Bogart, black. It was very interesting. It also explains many things which are in the novel and which are today not very understandable. Marlow is always beaten up by the police, is always in love with this rich white client but he cannot fuck her; all these are more understandable if he is black. (Crnković and Holland 1998–9, 4)

Holland's brave decision to cast the Afro-American actor Danny Glover as Marlow,³ whose character is the epitome of troubled white Anglo-Saxon masculinity, can be seen as a colour-blind casting and as such open to critique on the ground that the film erased the racial conflict that existed in the States of the 1940s when the action of the film takes place. Contrary to Todd Haynes's *Far From Heaven* — made in 2002 — in which the mixed-race heterosexual romance between a Caucasian woman and an Afro-American man was the main dramatic conflict, *Red Wind* acknowledges only the racism of the policemen towards black Marlow, while presenting his romantic involvement with a white woman as controversial not because of its potential miscegenation threat but on the grounds of her being married (see Fig. 5.1). Unintentionally, Holland — who admitted that at that time she was not fully aware of the cultural taboos around sexual relationships between Caucasians and Afro-Americans (Holland and Kornatowska 2012, 321) — participated in the post-racial discourse that is frequently criticised for its 'inability to represent characters' lives amid social realities, structural imbalances, and injustices' (Aymar 2018, 112). In *Red Wind*, visual stylisation, especially theatrical mise-en-scène and highly saturated colours, isolates its fictional reality from the social and cultural tensions and the conflicts inherent to the depicted era.

However, Holland's casting decision relates also to the revisionist approach to the tradition of film noir emerging in neo-noir film production in the 1990s.
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.1 *Red Wind* (1995)</figcaption></figure>

*Red Wind* re-reads Chandler’s original foregrounding of the latent ethnic/ racial diversification of the characters. Black Marlow evokes the genre’s hidden ‘sense of the intimate proximity of racial Others to American national identity’ (Lott 1997, 562). While *The Secret Garden* coalesced whiteness with Britishness, as denounced by Máire Messenger Davis (2001), *Red Wind* implied the ‘Blackness’ of American identity or rather racial conflict as its core. Danny Glover’s Marlow was not the only black detective in American cinema of the 1990s. In her article ‘Black Faces, White Spaces’ examining the presence of black actors in film noirs, Angelica Jade Bastién discussed two neo-noirs, *Deep Cover* (1992) and *Devil in a Blue Dress* (1995), featuring black protagonists and directed by black directors, respectively Bill Duke and Carl Franklin. *Devil* provides an especially interesting point of comparison for *Red Wind* as its action takes place in 1948 in Los Angeles, which approximates to the time and place of the action of the episode directed by Holland. Bastién emphasised – as did the Polish director in the statement quoted earlier – the importance of casting a black actor in the role of the staple detective character: ‘It’s a classic *noir* world, but instead of Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart we find Denzel Washington – a star with more than enough charisma, skill and internal complications to authentically
inhabit the role of *noir's* most enduring archetype: the detective' (Bastién 2016, 44).

In *Red Wind*, besides Marlowe, the secondary character of a bartender is also played by an Afro-American actor, Tyrin Turner. Importantly, in the first scene, they both are passive witnesses to the murder involving Caucasian men being both perpetrator and victim, which connects violence with white masculinity. The most violent character in the film is detective Copernic (Dan Hedaya), who is blatantly racist towards his partner, Ybarra (Miguel Sandoval), who is of Spanish origin, and Marlowe. Towards the end of the opening scene, Copernic uses a racial slur to his partner, saying he is in a company of 'spic and nigs', the line being added to Chandler's original. The short story presented ethnic diversification in neutral terms, while its adaptation transposes it onto the brutal discrimination that is associated with while masculinity and by the same token with hegemonic American society.

According to Bastién, the character of the black detective reveals these dis-
criminatory social structures, yet without making any significant intervention
into them:

> Black detectives [...] feel like they are traversing the line between two
> Americas – the one white people experience, and a second that only people
> of colour know. They’re asked to move between both worlds, an experience
> that isolates them from everyone. (Bastién 2016, 45)

Danny Glover's Marlow corroborates Bastién's conclusion. His involvement in
'white people's business' is only temporary, and eventually he needs to suppress
his desire for a white woman. His emotional withdrawal and denial of his
affection expedite a reconciliation between the white middle-class heterosexual
couple which is presented in the iconic shot of their affectionate embrace.
Yet Holland follows this clichéd Hollywood image with a coda that shows
Marlowe going towards darkness while pondering in his voiceover narration
whether to pay a visit to Eugenia Kolchenko (played by Italian actor Valeria
Golino), who he thinks is as lonely as him. In the last line of dialogue, he asks:
'What name is it, Kolchenko, Russian, or maybe Polish?', which may well be
Holland's self-reflexive joke to be spotted only by those viewers who are aware
of the director's Polish origins. Likewise, only Polish viewers would catch its
latent sarcasm concerning the customary 'throwing' of Poles and Russians into
the same 'Slavic pot' to which the former respond with an almost irrational
irritation. Finally, this closing line can be seen as Holland's peculiar authorial
signature stamped on the standard product of American television. It may also
be a self-referential gesture indicating her alienation within Hollywood cinema
not dissimilar to the one experienced by Marlow and Kolchenko within the
symbolic structure of film noir.⁴
Unlike the highly stylised world of *Red Wind*, Holland's two next television productions examined vital social issues in a more direct fashion: *Shot in the Heart* (2001, HBO) pertains to the heated debate around the death penalty and domestic violence, while *A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story* (2006, Lifetime) explores the subject of transgender people and ethnic minorities. Both films were based on real stories and as such they can be linked with Holland's explorations of the biopic genre. When she first read the script for *Shot in the Heart*, written by Frank Pugliese (who also wrote a couple of scripts for the TV series *Fallen Angels* to which Holland contributed with *Red Wind*) and based on the book by Mikal Gilmore (1994), she did not know it was based on a true story. The autobiographical novel portrayed the author's dysfunctional family terrorised by the criminal father whose violence passed on his older brother, Gary, who killed two innocent men. For the crime, he was sentenced to capital punishment, which was not carried out due to its suspension by the Supreme Court in 1967 as too cruel and thus unconstitutional. In 1977, the death penalty was reinstated, and Gary Gilmore demanded it be carried out, which had been widely publicised. According to the American law, Mikal, as Gary's brother, had the right to stop the execution. However, he accepted his brother's decision as his only option to exercise his free will and escape the vicious circle of violence.

*Shot in the Heart* records Mikal's (Giovanni Ribisi) meetings with Gary (Elias Koteas) in prison, during which he gradually comes to terms with the family history that he has been repressing for a long time. Accordingly, the film's narrative mixes scenes of the present and the past: the in-prison conversations are punctured with flashbacks recovering various memories, such as the father (Sam Shepard) violently destroying the Thanksgiving dinner, or their Mormon mother's (Amy Madigan) oneiric visions of a white horse that she saw as the nemesis of her family. In these images of the past, the camera's long shots mark the remoteness of the family situations or ambiguous visions, while close-ups are used for the brief moments of emotional shock experienced by little Mikal witnessing the violence and cruelty of his father. The present scenes of his meetings and conversations with his older brother initially employ long and medium long shots to convey the distance between the siblings who practically have not known each other due to the age gap and their subsequent escapes from the family. Gradually, the camera distance shrinks to mostly close-ups that are edited at a slow pace into prolonged shot-reverse-shot sequences to transmit the emerging intimacy and mutual understanding. At some point there is a two-shot of the brothers while one of them is shown through his mirror reflection in a glass pane and thus they are both seen within one shot as they talk to each other.⁵ This visual effect and others used in *Shot in the Heart* are results of Holland's collaboration with the director of cinematography, Jacek Petrycki, who worked on many of her Polish films such
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.2 *Shot in the Heart* (2001)</figcaption></figure>

as *Something for Something, Provincial Actors* and *Fever* (see Chapter Two). His lighting design used for portraying the grim reality of socialist Poland in the 1970s, with its preference for subtle underlighting and unsaturated colours that made the small apartments of socialist housing projects look even tinier and more depressing than they were, proved instrumental for depicting the claustrophobic space of the American prison that was gradually, and somehow unexpectedly, transforming into a space of intimacy between the two initially estranged brothers (see Fig. 5.2).

Produced by HBO, *Shot in the Heart* was praised by many critics for its sensitivity in telling the personal story relevant to the important political issue of capital punishment. For example, Tim Goodman started his review in *San Francisco Chronicle* with this preamble:

> Only the brother of a killer about to be executed could take the death penalty as a topic and have it be a movie not so much about the death penalty as about life. Only a writer as talented as Mikal Gilmore could tell a story that punches you in the gut about every five seconds and yet leaves you hoping for more. And only HBO could make 'Shot in the Heart' one of the least sensationalistic, least obvious, least formulaic movies about a hot-button issue.⁶

Later in his review, Goodman praised the producers of the film: ‘Executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana⁷ have crafted what amounts to a subtle, sad punch in the nose. No wasted movement. No need to spice up
the story'.⁸ Implicitly, the critic ascribed authorial agency to the producing company, HBO, and the executive producers of the film, while not even mentioning its director.⁹ By contrast, Polish film critics all addressed Holland as author of the film. Although made for the small screen format, in Poland, *Shot in the Heart* was screened at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2001 as its opening event. On this occasion, the respected daily *Gazeta Wyborcza* published a set of relevant materials: the review by a renowned Polish critic Tadeusz Sobolewski,¹⁰ excerpts from Mikal Gilmore’s book, an interview with him¹¹ and an interview with Holland.¹² In his review, Sobolewski contextualised *Shot in the Heart* within Holland’s earlier work that, as he claimed, explored the evil aspect of human nature, while also acknowledging the contribution of the cinematographer Jacek Petrycki. Furthermore, the critic compared the film to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s *A Short Film about Killing* (Krótki film o zabijaniu, 1988) and *Dead Man Walking* (Tim Robbins, 1995), while also suggesting an affinity between cinematic Gilmore siblings and the Karamazov brothers which is a symbolic gesture recognising the film’s cultural significance.¹³ Finally, a public debate on the film held at the Faculty of Law at the University of Warsaw with participation of three scholars, a politician, and Holland herself added to the film’s reputation.¹⁴

The special screening of *Shot in the Heart* at the Warsaw Film Festival in a regular movie theatre is worth mentioning, not only because it reveals how specific distribution strategies contribute to aesthetic classifications and hierarchies, but also because it exemplifies the ambiguity of the distinction between cinema and television and their respective genres. The Warsaw screening of Holland’s film can be seen as an almost perfect realisation of the HBO slogan ‘It’s Not TV, It’s HBO’ and their exemplary strategy of ‘distancing the channel from what television “is”, moving closer to a style regularly dubbed by critics as “cinematic”’ (Gray and Johnson 2021, 100). Screened in movie theatres, *Shot in the Heart*, with its aesthetic excess – criticised by some of the American critics while appreciated by their Polish colleagues – questions the difference between the cinematic and the televisual. Holland is well aware of the process:

> My approach to television is that it’s not such a big difference from making movies. Sometimes you have more freedom because you don’t have to worry about ticket sales. Today you can find material on television more courageous and with more edgy content than on the big screen. (Tibbetts and Holland 2008, 140)

Holland’s next television work, made for the Lifetime television channel *A Girl Like Me*, about a transgender woman (see Fig. 5.3), is a stellar example of such courageous content. Like *Shot in the Heart* it is based on a true story
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.3 *A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story* (2006)</figcaption></figure>

that is also presented in a non-chronological order. It centres on the trial of the four men who murdered the transgender woman Gwen Amber Rose Araujo in 2002 in Newark, California. Prior to the murder, they were partying with her for several days and allegedly making sexual advances towards her. The young men committed the murder after forcibly exposing her genitals and discovering she was a trans person. After torturing her to death over several hours, they wrapped the body in a blanket and disposed of it in a shallow grave in a field. The body was discovered after three weeks because of the help of one of the perpetrators (he later accepted a lesser charge from the Almeda County district attorney). The defence lawyers attempted to justify the criminal deed on the grounds of ‘trans-panic’, however it was deemed second degree murder. The trials were extensively covered by the media and later used in social campaigns against transphobia. As Francisco J. Galarte reported:

Araujo's murder sparked activism for transgender rights in the San Francisco Bay Area. The activism took various forms, including attendance at Araujo's memorial service, documentation of the murder retrial through the court-watch blog *Justice for Gwen Araujo*, and the beginnings of what would become the San Francisco Trans March, an annual event that takes
place on the Friday night of San Francisco Pride Week [...] Araujo's death [was] a pivotal moment in trans Latina/o/x history and politics. (Galarte 2021, 24–7)

*A Girl Like Me* was aired at 8.00 p.m. on 19 June 2006, on Lifetime television. Its executive co-producer was the famed attorney Gloria Allred – who represented the Guerrero family at the trial and brought the movie to Lifetime (Davis 2006).¹⁵ It attracted a large audience of five million people. As Galarte noted, ‘The premiere was scheduled during Pride Month and aired continually over the next few months as California state lawmakers prepared to vote on the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act’ (Galarte 2021, 28). The film proved instrumental in the galvanising of activism for the rights of transgender people (Franklin and Lyons 2016). The film was also significant because of the expanding media space for Chicano actors. Galarte recognised the importance of casting an Oscar winner, Mercedes Ruehl, as Gwen’s mother, a well-known Hollywood actor, Lupe Ontiveros, as her grandmother, and less popular Chicano actors in secondary roles as family member who played an important role in the whole story (Galarte 2021, 28). They were typical members of the traditional Latino family practising strictly defined gender roles who gradually accepted Gwen’s transition. However, according to Galarte, the film perpetuated negative stereotypes of Latino families as patriarchal, dysfunctional structures that served as an oppressive ideological framework within which transgender identity was presented as deviancy that could either be accepted or rejected.

In the film, transsexuality and Chicano culture become limitations to overcome, and the lack that is associated with the two is only resolvable through Araujo’s death [...] The film effectively allows most spectators to maintain a distance from the violence Araujo and other trans women of color endure and to ignore how these women are marginalized socially, culturally, and politically. Representing Araujo and her mother as culpable for her death reassures a white cisgender American spectator of the truth of the tropes about Chicano/Latino culture they have been exposed to in film and television. (Galarte 2021, 44)

While Galarte’s criticism concerning the film’s ethnic bias is valid, the statement concerning Araujo and her mother’s guilt is one-sided as their behaviour and decisions were conditioned by the socio-cultural norms they were subjected to.

Furthermore, the film’s politics of representation need to be related to the profile of the television station which produced it. In 1993, Lifetime was announced as a ‘Television for Women’, and accordingly it aired material pertinent to women’s issues such as, for example, breast cancer awareness,
but also entertaining programmes such as talk-shows and television series. For the creators and producers of *A Girl Like Me*, rising political awareness was a priority which explains the decision to make the extended family the pivotal point in its narrative as it was potentially the emotive structure within which a wide range of viewers representing various genders, social classes and ethnicities could find something to identify with. In 2006, *A Girl Like Me* was awarded the GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) award for outstanding television film, which testifies to its socio-political impact. As the GLAAD awards website reads:

> The GLAAD Media Awards honor media for fair, accurate, and inclusive representations of LGBTQ people and issues. Since its inception in 1990, the GLAAD Media Awards have grown to be the most visible annual LGBTQ awards show in the world, sending powerful messages of acceptance to audiences globally.¹⁶

Directing *A Girl Like Me* exposed Holland to the activist potential of audiovisual media that she then capitalised on in the future (see Chapter Seven).

Although the topic of transgender identities may seem very distant from Holland's earlier works, it is worth noting that these also featured non-hegemonic sexualities, albeit always locating these on the margins of fictional realities. In *Provincial Actors*, the gay character evokes the ambiguity between homoerotic desire and homosocial bonds.¹⁷ *To Kill a Priest* features a gay secret service officer whose sexual orientation is not narratively significant yet is made visible. *Europa, Europa* examines totalitarian oppressiveness towards racial minorities and gay people. Finally, *Total Eclipse* foregrounds a gay relationship while presenting it as being at odds with the then dominant gay discourse. While indicating Holland's attempts to include in her films non-normative sexual identities and behaviours, it is worth mentioning that in her two Polish films, *Screen Tests* and *Provincial Actors*, there are episodes of female masturbation – a manifest recognition of (frustrated) female sexual desire – the representation of which in cinema was taboo for a long time in contrast to male masturbation, frequently presented on screen in more or less explicit fashion. *A Girl Like Me*, directed for the American family television channel, provided Holland with an opportunity for a more radical exploration of the issues of gender and sexual identities to which she has always been sensitive.

To conclude, Holland's television productions, *Red Wind*, *A Shot in the Heart* and *A Girl Like Me*, examined sensitive social issues pertinent to American society, concerning racial diversification, the death penalty and transgender identities. Despite all the differences between her Polish and American television works, they are similar in that they explored vital social and political issues. Although made in different geopolitical locations, ideological systems
and television production cultures, Holland’s television projects investigated marginal areas of social realities often overlooked in mainstream cinema.

FROM ‘MORAL CONCERN’ TO ‘MORAL MIDGETRY’ — OR
VICE VERSA?

Holland often proudly talked about her contribution to *The Wire*: 'I made three episodes of this cult serial which you watch as if you're reading a classic twentieth-century American novel. There's a huge social spectrum – police and criminal dealers, unions, the school and politics. The Polish community is also shown' (Zamysłowska and Kuźmicki 2013, 188). While working for 'quality television', Holland revisited, albeit in a radically different format, the model of socially and politically engaged cinema that she practised in her films belonging to the Cinema of Moral Concern (see Chapter Two). Unexpectedly, she was also able to mark her authorial agency in these collective television projects, albeit in a tacit and non-conspicuous fashion.

Holland directed her first episode for *The Wire* in 2004 (S3 E8),¹⁸ when she also started contributing to the TV series *Cold Case* (2004–9, CBS). As she explained, the latter provided her with opportunities to develop her narrative skills and visual strategies (Holland 2008, 156). As its title indicates, the series is centred around ‘cold cases’ (a separate one for each episode) that are reinvestigated by the detective teams in which the female character of Lilly Rush (Kathryn Morris) plays the most prominent role. Accordingly, a significant part of the narrative is presented in flashbacks that need to be visually differentiated from the present action. The first episode Holland directed for *Cold Case*, ‘Hubris’ (S1 E11), tells a story of a once respected academic teacher whose career was ruined when he was suspected of the murder of a student with whom he had had an affair. The episode employs two distinct visual designs for the past and the present parts of the narrative: the former uses warm and well-saturated colours and soft lighting, and the latter, cold hues of blue and grey as well as low-key lighting that obscures certain elements of reality, keeping them beyond visual exploration. In effect, the past looks transparent and appealing, while the present is hostile and impenetrable. The flashbacks often begin with chaotic camera movements, as if replicating the disorientation of entering the past, which is gradually replaced with more stabilised set ups to convey increasing control over it.

Prior to directing the episodes for *Cold Case*, Holland did not have much experience with non-chronological narratives; there was only a brief flashback used towards the ending of *Olivier, Olivier* to explain the circumstances of the murder of the eponymous character, while *Shot in the Heart* used the flashback structure to resurface the family traumatic past. Working on ‘Hubris’ and other
episodes of *Cold Case* provided Holland with a training ground for excelling in visual codes used for marking various temporalities and relevant affective structures. These experiences were useful in working on *A Girl Like Me*: the scenes of the trial are greyish and not well illuminated, whereas the scenes from the past, especially those in which Gwen was joyfully experiencing her female identity, used vibrant colours and high-key lighting. The past scenes of Gwen's mother struggling with her child's transgender identity and her family's hostile response to it are also low-key lighted and darkish in mise-en-scène. Throughout her work for American television stations and global streaming platforms, Holland was refining her cinematic abilities and gradually solidified her position as a highly skilled professional filmmaker-for-hire.

Other episodes Holland directed for *Cold Case*, 'The Plan' (S1 E22), 'Justice' (S5 E10) and 'Lotto Fever' (S6 E12), are aesthetically consistent with 'Hubris' in that they also employed a different lighting design and colour palette for the present and the past parts of the narrative, yet the most significant formal devices are editing and cinematography, which are used to blur the difference between these two different temporalities. Often, in the scenes of conversations or interrogations, like, for example, in 'Justice', the shot-reverse-shot sequences present a character simultaneously in the past and in the present (two different actors play the same role); sometimes such a change occurs within one shot by means of panning movement. The editing transitions between the past and the present rarely use straight cuts; instead, fade in and outs or special effects are employed to obscure the distinction between these two temporalities. These formal devices are especially suitable for the first three episodes directed by Holland, 'Hubris', 'The Plan' and 'Justice', as they concern traumatic experiences of sexual violence and abuse. As trauma always functions in both the past and the present, the cinematic devices aimed at creating a peculiar amalgam of various temporalities added to the meanings conveyed by the narrative. These three episodes are consistent in terms of formal devices and narrative content, while the latter gains a special significance in the context of Holland's recent disclosure that she was sexually molested as a teenager (Pasternak 2022, 155–6). Furthermore, 'The Plan', which focuses on a paedophile's victims, can be related to *Olivier, Olivier*. Thus, rather unexpectedly, the thematic and stylistic consistency that is customarily associated with *auteur* cinema, resurfaced, in the case of Holland, in the television work she made as a reputed filmmaker-for-hire. This 'inconspicuous' authorship can be seen as parallel to the masquerade strategy she had developed in Poland in the 1970s when she adopted a masculine idiom as the only viable option to function in the film industry. In the episodes directed for TV series, she also hides herself behind the story arc and general formal design.

Despite its inconspicuousness, Holland's televisual authorship was recognised by critics in relation to her work for *The Wire*, which she considers
her most important television experience. The acclaimed series, the action of
which takes place in Baltimore, depicts a wide spectrum of crime permeating
life in all social milieus of contemporary American society, presenting it from
the dual perspective of the drug dealers' organisations and the police forces
attempting to reveal the criminal networks. Gradually, the difference between
those who break the law and those who protect it diminishes to the point of
chaos. Holland's first episode directed for the series, 'Moral Midgetry' (S3 E8),
denounces the moral debasement of all social relationships that are reduced
to monetary gain. The lord of the drug empire, Russell 'Stringer' Bell (Idris
Elba), ruthlessly sentences to death all those who are obstacles on his way to
fortune, even if they are from his closest circle of friends and extended fam-
ily. In the collection volume devoted to the series, there is an essay authored
by Kevin McNeilly 'Dislocating America: Agnieszka Holland Directs "Moral
Midgetry"' (2009).¹⁹ The title explicitly recognises her authorial agency in the
collective HBO project,²⁰ while the author suggests that Holland's experience
of being an expatriate Pole living in the States could be related to the main
themes of *The Wire*. As he notes:

> As a non-American helming a television program that is, as its creator David Simon puts it, ‘rooted in the logic and ethos of a second-tier city, of a forgotten rust-belt America’ [...], Holland is admittedly out of place, a foreigner. But this sense of unresolved displacement closely informs her directorial approach to the fraught American content of *The Wire*. (McNeilly 2009, 203)

Although the characters featured in 'Moral Midgetry' are connected in complex
networks of crime or legal structures, they all are alienated from their social
habitats. That also concerns 'Stringer' Bell, whom his friend and collaborator
confronts in the following line: 'I look at you these days, String, you know
what I see? I see a man without a country. Not hard enough for this right here
and maybe, just maybe, not smart enough for them out there ...'. Although
scripted by David Simon, the character of Stringer is akin to many of Holland's
protagonists, whose in-between position alienates them from mainstream
society, and perhaps he is somehow similar to Holland, who, at that time, could
be described as a woman without a cinematic country, as evidenced in the
stylistic and narrative diversity of her works. McNeilly noted that the theme of
alienation is present throughout Holland's work made for both television and
cinema, while also comparing the characters from *The Wire* to the protagonists
of *Olivier, Olivier, Europa, Europa* and *Washington Square*. Due to theme of
dislocation and displacement the episodes of *The Wire* can be linked with her
exilic films made in Europe.

Contextualising ‘Moral Midgetry’ within Holland’s biography and her
works is a critical strategy customarily used for *auteur* cinema; McNeilly
dislocates it into the field of quality television where the authorial agency is
usually attributed to the persona of the series creators, such as David Simon in
the case of *The Wire*:

If her work studies situations of moral or existential compromise, Holland rarely compromises her own hard-eyed vision, and never turns her lens away from those troubling moments of selling oneself short; it is toward such moments, in fact, that Holland's interest as a filmmaker is most forcefully directed. Her approach, she says, is to 'try to capture an original, sensual, visual truth that works for each story.' Because her subject matter often intensifies the loss of various cultural, social, or moral bases upon which any claims to truth can be made by her characters, the nature of that 'visual truth' needs to be carefully understood as predominantly a kind of critical scrutiny: an objectification of the crumbling of various objective grounds of knowing. (McNeilly 2009, 205)

Most importantly, McNeilly recognises ‘Holland’s visual style’ that he iden-
tifies with the ‘incommensurability of perspectives’; as he further explains
‘[h]er visual practice concentrates small points of revelation, when we have
our way of seeing instrumentally reoriented’ (2009, 209, 211). Holland’s usual
avoidance of providing a stable point of spectatorial identification proved an
especially well-suited strategy for *The Wire*, the narrative of which reveals
a multilayered social structure that resists moral diversification due to the
all-encompassing corruption and struggles for power. In his analysis of
‘Moral Midgetry’, which is one episode in the five-season TV series, McNeilly
recognises Holland’s authorial agency, which was mostly obscured in the
critical reception of her films made in Hollywood (see Chapter Four).

Holland’s televisual authorship was implicitly confirmed when she was
offered the chance to direct a pilot episode for *Treme* — a series that was also
the brainchild of David Simon — which was both a prestigious and responsible
task as the television station uses the pilot to test the potential popularity of
the planned series with audiences. As Holland recollected, while on the set,
her daughter Kasia asked the consultant on New Orleans culture whether
Spike Lee — who was also considered for directing the pilot episode — would
not be a better choice as he had made a famous documentary about post-
Katrina New Orleans and was very familiar with the Afro-American culture
depicted in the script. The consultant responded, ‘What does Spike know
about suffering? Agnieszka knows much more’ (Holland and Kornatowska
2012, 402). As Holland explained, she was constructing the story as if
she were making a film about Poland after the end of the Second World
War: ‘The world here was also destroyed and the people [. . .] were betrayed
by the federal government’.²¹ She conceived the collective trauma inflicted
by disastrous events as an affective link between the Polish and the New
Orleans' experiences.

*Treme* can also be contextualised within Holland's Polish films due to their social engagement. Martha P. Nochimson claimed that *Treme* was built on David Simon and Eric Overmyer's pre-Katrina idea of juxtaposing a unique arts culture with a severely wanting civic structure (Nochimson 2019, 126). Similarly, the Cinema of Moral Concern was a cultural formation connected to the civic structure of Polish society desperately fighting the communist oppression from which the Solidarity movement emerged. Holland's personal and professional experiences from the 1970s matched the authorial vision of Simon and Overmyer. Analogously to her script collaboration with Andrzej Wajda which remains hidden behind his well-established *auteur* persona, in her episodes directed for *The Wire* and *Treme*, Holland performed a kind of authorial ventriloquism, expressing her own agenda through the more powerful and widely recognised authorial voices of Simon and Overmyer. Nochimson discusses the collective authorship of *Treme*: 'Simon rejects the notion that he is an *auteur* [...] saying that he depended on many of his co-workers as much as he depended on himself for creative decisions'. She later identifies Simon and Overmyer's collaboration on the teleplay for *Treme* as 'a strong and vital Creole partnership' (Nochimson 2019, 127). However, the 'Creole authorship' contains not only work of the two creators and writers but also contributions from the large personnel who are not always easily discernible as they are integrated in the general concept of the series.

The term 'Creole authorship' can be used to describe Holland's works made since leaving Poland in 1981 as she had to adjust to various models of screen cultures and collaborative networks which facilitated or suppressed authorial agency. From the perspective of the *Cahiers du Cinéma* circle, Holland is a (mere) *metteur en scène*, 'a competent, even highly competent, film-maker, but lacking the consistency which betrayed the profound involvement of personality' (Caughie 1981, 9–10); however, from a contemporary perspective, this concept appears obsolete. For personality, or identity if you wish, is not a solid and static set of components, but rather a liquid – to use Zygmunt Bauman's favourite metaphor for modernity (Bauman 2000) – constellation of dispositions and currents, with some being hidden below for a prolonged period of time. By the same token, Holland has developed a 'liquid authorship' that emerges as series of thematic and stylistic adjustments to the constantly changing screen formats and modes of production. She epitomises the experience of global (female) filmmaker-for-hire who needs to adjust and adapt to sundry circumstances in order to remain professionally active. Nevertheless, while working in these everchanging circumstances and collective projects, Holland finds a small and often hardly noticeable space for her own personal voice.
Directed by Holland, the pilot episode of *Treme* presents a vast panorama of the New Orleans inhabitants as they deal with the disaster caused by the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. As if to reflect on the general theme of displacement and hybrid culture, the pilot episode was conceived in the teleplay as a mosaic of many characters from a variety of backgrounds who all struggle with the traumatic experience. Everyone feels displaced: in a physical sense (as many people lost their houses or apartments), emotional (many lost their relatives and friends) and existential (they suddenly acquired an awareness of the fragility of life, in both its material and spiritual aspect). In a way, everyone in post-Katrina New Orleans had to find a new place for themselves, as did Holland during her personal and professional journeys. Being of mixed Polish-Jewish origins, while living in the American melting pot, she had a strong personal disposition to create a portrayal of 'a city that fuses European and African cultures and also the newly integrated Latino culture'. She also expertly implemented 'a narrative structure that fuses the multiplicity of personal heritages and contextual influences with a rapidity that embodies the vitality of the feeling of fusion' (Nochimson 2019, 133).

The episodic narrative structure and non-continuity editing are confusing for the viewers—most likely expecting standard television storytelling—who may feel as displaced as the fictional characters themselves. Instead of a protagonist whose aims and deeds would establish a continuous storyline, the first episode of *Treme*, and all the others for that matter, offers a fragmented narrative presented as a free flow of rhythmic images.²² Nochimson acknowledges that the first episode establishes the stylistic mode of the whole series: 'The opening of the first episode embodies the rhythms of narrative and visuals to follow. We move quickly among a collage of images, often at the expense of the kind of narrative clarity that is obligatory in formulaic entertainment' (Nochimson 2019, 133). The viewer is not provided with the important narrative information about what Second Line is or who the Indians represented by the character of Albert Lambreaux (Clarke Peters) are, the 'Big Chief', whose appearance in his spectacular costume is as shocking as it is astonishing (see Fig. 5.4). The excessive stylisation of the 'Big Chief's performance on the level of both mise-en-scène and cinematography breaks up the realistic mode established in the previous sequences. In her close analysis of the scene, Stefanie Hofer directly connects it to Holland's *auteurism*: 'The Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland directed the series' first episode. Because I was quite familiar with the director [...] I expected high aesthetic quality. Like a sponge I soaked up these aesthetics of which the mentioned scene was a stellar example' (Hofer 2017, 57–8). Although Nochimson does not mention Holland's name as the director of the first episode, she examines the cinematic devices employed in the pilot episode as establishing a specific aesthetic pattern which implies the creative (authorial) contribution of the director.²³
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.4 *Treme*, episode 1, ‘Do You Know What It Means’ (2010)</figcaption></figure>

In 2014, Holland was offered the chance to direct a four-hour mini-series, *Rosemary's Baby*, for NBC. The mini-series format has proved attractive for many recognised filmmakers such as Lisa Cholodenko who, in the same year, directed *Olivia Kitteridge* for HBO featuring Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins. The cast of *Rosemary's Baby* was equally impressive: Zoe Saldaña — who was then a well-established star due to her role in James Cameron's *Avatar* (2009) — played the eponymous character of Rosemary; Jason Isaacs — who gained popularity in the *Harry Potter* franchise — played Roman Castevet; Carol Bouquet — who made an appearance in Luis Buñuel's *That Obscure Object of Desire* (1977) and was also one of the Bond girls in *For your Eyes Only* (1981) — played Margaux Castevet; and Patrick J. Adams — who was known mostly due to his roles in TV series such as *Cold Case* (2003–10), and *Pretty Little Liars* (2010–17) — played Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary's treacherous husband. In a secondary role, the Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak, whom Holland had cast earlier in *Angry Harvest*, also appeared. There were also French actors who played secondary characters and extras. Thus, the cast was truly international, representing the tradition of art as well as popular cinema. Finally, Saldaña's Dominican-Puerto Rican origins expanded the ethnic spectrum of casting that was reflected also in the content in that the previous victim of the Castevets, Nena, was of Egyptian origins (she was played by a French actor, Victoire Bélézy). Another alteration to Ira Levin's novel and Roman Polanski's famous adaptation was locating the action in Paris instead of New York and changing Guy's profession from actor to a writer experiencing writer's block.²⁴ The change of the place of action displaces the couple not only socially and
economically, as presented in the literary original, but also culturally and linguistically. Importantly, the Castevets and their social circle speak English, while Rosemary and Guy do not possess a sufficient command of French, which alienates them in many situations. As in Roman Polanski's *Frantic* (1988) and Pawel Pawlikowski's *The Woman in the Fifth* (2011), Holland's *Rosemary's Baby* reverses the joyful stereotype of 'the American in Paris' as created by Vincente Minelli in his famous musical (*American in Paris*, 1951).

The most significant change to the literary original and Polanski's adapta-
tion concerns the eponymous character of Rosemary, specifically her recent
miscarriage from which she hopes to heal in Paris. We also learn about her
professional achievements as a ballet dancer and being the breadwinner in
their marriage for a long time. She is introduced as both a vulnerable and an
independent woman, which seems to resonate with the experiences of many
contemporary young women. A quintessentially female traumatic experience
of miscarriage makes her potentially prone to the predatory intrigue of the
Castevets, yet she is also capable of resisting the exploitation of her (maternal)
body. As Holland explained, her aim was to show:

how complex and complicated motherhood is, and pregnancy, and how
difficult it is for women to accept this growing thing inside her body [...] The notion of postnatal and prenatal depression, and the feeling that you don't own yourself anymore, that you're not yourself anymore, it's a quite important subject of 'Rosemary's Baby'.²⁵

With *Rosemary's Baby* Holland revisited the subject matter of pregnancy and motherhood that she has explored throughout her career since her diploma film made at FAMU, *Jesus Christ's Sin* (1969). Unlike her Polish films on the subject which explored it in the context of socialist realities, the TV series offered a 'post-feminist meditation'²⁶ on it. In both socio-cultural environments, women are not in control of their bodies and are subjected to various ideologies constructed around motherhood. In the ending of the last episode of *Rosemary's Baby*, the protagonist is pushing the pram with her baby who is attracting admiring looks from passers-by (see Fig. 5.5). To one of them, she replies, 'Yes, he is perfect'. As we saw the child in the previous scene, we know he is anything but perfect, hence her delight is puzzling to say the least. Has she accepted the child despite its monstrosity, or has she internalised the perspective of the Satanist sect on becoming its member? Is it a rational and as such desirable pragmatism or a surrender to the will and perspective of others? With the ambivalent ending, *Rosemary's Baby* continues Holland's exploration of the pregnancy and motherhood theme present in her earlier works.²⁷

Holland's work for American television networks and streaming platforms
has continued certain strands of her earlier output, while also engaging with
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.5 *Rosemary’s Baby* (2014)</figcaption></figure>

new themes and genres. First and foremost, she started working within classical cinematic genres that were accommodated for the needs of TV series and as such provided space for various modifications and experiments. In *Red Wind*, she tested the conventions of film noir with the non-orthodox casting of an Afro-American actor as Philip Marlow, the epitome of troubled white masculinity; in *A Girl Like Me*, she mixed family melodrama and court drama to interrogate the social oppression of transgender people; in the episodes she directed for *The Wire*, she worked within a crime drama deprived of the customary (moral) genre’s logic; in *Rosemary’s Baby*, the horror genre is used to explore the issues of pregnancy and motherhood in the era of post-feminism; finally, in the episodes she directed for *The First* (2018, S1 E1, S1 E2, Hulu), the genre of science fiction emerges as a narrative promise rather than the actual organisation of the plot which focuses on preparation for the mission to Mars that never happens. While exploring classical genres, Holland’s television works expanded on the themes of racial/ethnic difference (*Red Wind*, *A Girl Like Me*, *Treme*, *The Killing*), sexual exploitation (*A Girl Like Me*, *Cold Case*, *The Killing*), displacement (*A Girl Like Me*, *The Wire*, *Treme*), and the pathologies of societal life (*A Shot in the Heart*, *A Girl Like Me*, *The Wire*). In *The Wire* and *Treme* she excelled in cinematic realism; both series provide subtle psychological characterisation and sharp analysis of the local communities as diversified due to race, ethnicity and social class. The TV series format and collage narratives facilitated the exploration of multiracial and multiethnic communities featured in both series.²⁸ The theme of displacement and trauma permeates all the above works but is also examined in the episodes of *Cold*
*Case and Shot in the Heart*. Finally, *The Wire*, *The First* and *House of Cards* (to which Holland contributed by directing four episodes) explore the moral decay of American society where the political elites and criminal aristocracy blend together to secure their political and economic power. All these themes were examined in Holland's earlier works, yet it was only in her American television works that they emerged with the clarity and affective intensity typical of generic forms developed within popular culture.

## POST-SOCIALIST TV AND ‘PROFESSIONAL INTIMACIES’

After eighteen years of working as an exilic and travelling filmmaker, Holland decided to reconnect with the Polish screen industries. In 1999, she directed for the Television Theatre (see Chapter Two) *The Dybbuk*, a play by S. Ansky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), which was her first work on a Jewish theme made in her native country. She presented it as her personal project: ‘It was no accident that I reached out to Ansky’s play. A half of my family was Jewish.’²⁹ She also admitted that living abroad had changed her perspective on her partly Jewish identity. Initially, she approached it exclusively through the Holocaust experience, yet her later contacts with the Jewish communities in the States significantly expanded and deepened her attitude to it.³⁰ Due to its mysticism, *The Dybbuk* also links with her American films made at that time such as *The Third Miracle* (1999) and *Julie Walking Home* (2002) (see Chapter Four).

In contrast to *The Dybbuk* – that was Holland’s return to the format of television theatre and Eastern European cultural tradition – her next television project, the political fiction TV series *The Crew* (Ekipa, Polsat, 2007), originated from American television culture, which she had been contributing to for some time (by then she had directed *Red Wind*, two episodes of *The Wire* and three episodes of *Cold Case*). As she reported: ‘We drew our inspiration [the series was directed by Agnieszka Holland, her sister, Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, and her daughter, Kasia Adamik] from the American serial *West Wing* [1999–2006], whose authors proved that it was possible to portray political processes in an interesting way’. She also explained that they decided to embark on the project in response to the political apathy of Polish society as demonstrated in the very low turnout (40.57 percent) in the 2005 Polish parliamentary election (Zamysłowska and Kuźmicki 2013, 202). Łazarkiewicz and Adamik also saw it as a kind of civic duty: ‘The motivation for filming *The Crew* was in some sense patriotic and pro-citizen’ (Łazarkiewicz quoted in Zamysłowska and Kuźmicki 2013, 205); and ‘*The Crew* was born out of a sense of responsibility as citizens of the country’ (Adamik quoted in Zamysłowska and Kuźmicki 2013, 205). Although inspired by the American TV series, *The Crew* revived the idea of cultural production as mobilising political awareness
and creating a desire for change, as practised years earlier in the films of the Cinema of Moral Concern.

Initially, public television accepted the project for financing, yet when the right-wing Law and Justice party came to power in 2005, it withdrew from it. Instead, the commercial free-to-air Polsat Television funded its production. It was aired weekly between September and November 2007, while its DVD edition was released two weeks after the premiere of the first episode, which most likely negatively affected audience ratings but was also a pioneering strategy in terms of distribution: 'Holland and Adamik along with the Polsat network had been precursors of immediate content availability without the need to wait for a scheduled broadcast' (Majer 2021, 272). The series was moderately popular with the viewers,³¹ while receiving positive critical assessments from the prominent media critics that were published in esteemed magazines and newspapers. Some journalists compared *The Crew* to the Cinema of Moral Concern, indicating that the series also explored the theme of civic responsibility for political life.³² The first episode of the series was screened in the movie theatre 'Muranów', owned by Gutek Film³³ that had organised earlier screenings of Holland's *To Kill a Priest* and *Europa, Europa*. The DVD edition was released by the Agora consortium that owned *Gazeta Wyborcza* of which Adam Michnik was the chief editor. *The Crew* was contextualised within the national cultural tradition that by then was gradually merging with liberal ideology, while incorporating strategies and forms of cultural production typical of global neoliberalism. In a sense, *The Crew* participated in the complex and prolonged process of political, economic and cultural transformations occurring in post-1989 Poland.

*The Crew* is Holland's first family project realised together with her daughter, Kasia Adamik, and her sister, Magdalena Łazarkiewicz. Kasia has been working with her mother since *The Secret Garden*, first as her assistant, then as a storyboard artist, and finally as a second director. As for Holland's sister, it was their first and only collaboration to date. The family collaborative authorship was widely publicised as an element of the promotional campaign. In one interview concerning *The Crew*, Holland jokingly referenced Wajda's definition of a film director as being a combination of a soldier and poet, and identified herself as the former and her sister Magda as the latter.³⁴ When the renowned Polish journalist Teresa Torańska asked Holland whether they argued on the set, she admitted it happened two or three times, which she attributed to their profession-related need to rule and control. As she confessed:

> I have a nasty personality and try to be the loudest. Nothing dramatic happened though. The girls stood against me, and I corrected myself. I wish our politicians collaborated in such a way. It does not need to be a hierarchical structure.³⁵
In contrast to Holland's collaboration with her sister that proved a one-off enterprise, her professional bonds with Kasia have become even stronger. The 2018 TV series *1983*, made for Netflix, was an intergenerational family project that brought together the mother (two episodes), the daughter (five episodes), the daughter's partner Olga Chajdas (two episodes), and a friend, Agnieszka Smoczyńska (one episode). The four women have also collaborated in various configurations on other projects, creating an (in)formal network, the dynamic of which has been constantly changing and has been adjusted to the specificities of any given project. Frequently, Holland has taken the most prominent position; for example, she was an executive producer of *The Offsiders* (*Boisko bezdomnych*, 2008, directed by her daughter, with Chajdas working as Adamik's assistant), an artistic supervisor of Smoczyńska's *Lure* (*Córki dancingu*, 2015) and Chajdas's *Nina* (2018). Holland has also collaborated extensively with her nephew, Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz, who composed the music for several of her films. Recently, her niece Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko has joined the 'family team' as a co-author of the script *The Green Border* (*Zielona granica*, 2023) about the immigration crisis on the Polish-Belorussian border in 2019. Throughout the years of her professional activity, Holland has created an extended cinematic family, including many regulars, as noted throughout this volume such as Jacek Petrycki, Zbigniew Preisner, Jan A. P. Kaczmarek, Tomasz Naumiuk, to name only a few. It can be argued that this relatively stable team of collaborators counterbalanced the accidental and temporary professional relationships Holland has had as a filmmaker-for-hire working within various screen cultures and modes of production. With her family, friends and regulars she created a kind of cinematic *Heimat*.

Holland's professional circle of family and friends can be considered within several frameworks, with the concepts of collaborative and collective (or multiple) authorships being the most relevant here. However, it can also be approached from the perspective of nepotism that is commonly deemed anti-democratic and discriminatory, while being more widespread than it is commonly thought. In their study 'Indirect Nepotism: Network Sponsorship, Social Capital and Career Performance in Show Business Families', Yasaman Gorij, Michael Carney and Rajshree Prakash have examined data provided by the International Movie Database (IMDB) and analysed 150 showbusiness families and 3,500 relationships among their members as developed between 1970 and 2015. The research confirmed 'the influence of show-business family social capital on relatives' career performance in the hypercompetitive Hollywood movie industry'. As the authors claimed, the 'show business families' can be beneficially transferred to succeeding generations and with temporally increasing effects' (Gorji, Carney and Prakash 2020). In their analysis, they distinguished between direct and indirect meritocratic nepotism; the former refers to family preferment in granting positions and employment, while the latter to positing competence as a condition to attain a valued occupation. As the authors argue, indirect nepotism
involves ‘dynastic strategies’ that are aimed at transferring of social and cultural capital to facilitate the descendants to succeed in highly competitive markets of cultural production (Gorji, Carney and Prakash 2020). Indirect nepotism occurs frequently in the cultural and creative industries where there is no consistent and objective system of evaluation, while taking up the form of ‘sponsorship, suggesting that individuals must develop competence and skills before they can benefit from their family’s social capital’ (Gorji, Carney and Prakash 2020). From the perspective of the described research, Holland’s family professional network is nothing unusual in the entertainment business. It has developed its own forms of collaboration with fluctuating horizontal and/or hierarchical structures depending on whether she works with them (as a co-director of the episodes of TV series) or monitors them (as an executive producer and artistic supervisor). Her supervision can be seen as both controlling and caring. On the one hand, with her reputation she is able to secure sources for implementing film or television projects and as such she acts as ‘the archetypal neoliberal subject [that] is the entrepreneurial individual whose only relationship to other people is competitive self-enhancement’ (Chatzidakis et al. 2020, 13), while on the other hand her monetary value allows her to care for her extended family and to help them to flourish and thrive in their professional fields.

Holland's family team consisting mostly of women can be seen as responding to Claire Johnston's call for a collective work of women in cinema as an efficient way to overcome male hegemony:

> The development of collective work is obviously a major step forward; as a means of acquiring and sharing skills it constitutes a formidable challenge to male privilege in the film industry as an expression of sisterhood, it suggests a viable alternative to the rigid hierarchical structures of male-dominated cinema and offers real opportunities for a dialogue about the nature of women's cinema within it. (Johnston [1973] 1985, 217)

Although the multiauthor collaborative television and film projects made by Holland's female circles (with participation of male creative and technical professionals) do not necessarily implement counter-cinema strategies as envisioned by Johnston, they efficiently undermine male hegemony in the Polish screen industries. Most importantly, they have enhanced the visibility of female filmmakers in the public space.

GLOBAL NETWORKS AND LOCAL HISTORIES

Once global streaming platforms expanded their operations to Eastern Europe, Holland became one of the most suitable filmmakers to be assigned to the
local projects. On the one hand, she had experience of working on the most acclaimed American TV series, on the other hand she was expertly familiar with the political nuances and cultural specificities of the region. She directed episodes for three Eastern European productions for global platforms: *Without Secrets* (*Bez tajemnic*, HBO, Poland, 2013, four episodes), the mini-series *Burning Bush* (*Hořící keř*, HBO, Czech Republic, 2013, three episodes), and 1983 (Netflix, Poland, two episodes). I will focus on *Burning Bush* as it is an exemplary collaborative work ‘that ultimately enhances not diminishes, the primary author’ (Carringer 2001, 377) and an instrumental project in HBO Europe’s strategic plans of acquiring new markets.

In his comprehensive essay on HBO Europe, Petr Szczepanik³⁶ writes that the so-called Visegrad countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia) were the first strategic region in HBO's plans for expansion into Europe. In 2004, HBO opened four original programming departments in Budapest, Prague, Warsaw and Bucharest which were responsible for providing local content for streaming and on demand services. As Szczepanik claims, special credit for boosting production of the local content is to be given to Ondřej Zach, who in 2008–12 was the vice-president of programming for HBO Central Europe. He realised that limiting streaming to Hollywood-produced content at the time when piracy was a common practice in the former Eastern Bloc was not a viable option; instead, he saw original programming as a useful alternative. '[U]nder Zach's management, HBO Europe stopped communicating primarily Hollywood movies and instead geared the focus of marketing campaigns and public relations towards original productions' (Szczepanik 2021a, 246). While HBO Europe still had access to the HBO US production, it focused 'on a handful of original programmes per year which were carefully selected, meticulously developed and well financed' (Szczepanik 2021a, 247). Another person who contributed to boosting HBO Europe original production was Marc Lorber, who was hired in 2009 as the first senior vice-president of original programming and production. One of his first strategic decisions was 'to test local markets with new versions of well-proven fiction formats' (Szczepanik 2021a, 248). The first project was an Israeli drama, *Be' Tipul*, the episodes of which were structured around psychotherapeutic sessions run by the protagonist. As demonstrated by its American version *In Treatment* (2007), the series proved easily transferable to other localities and consequently Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Romanian versions were made. All Eastern European adaptations were directed by prominent directors and featured respected actors.³⁷ Holland (as well as her daughter, Kasia Adamik) contributed to the third season of the Polish version, titled *Without Secrets* (*Bez tajemnic*, 2011–13), that brought a somehow unexpected turn of action as the leading character of the psychotherapist, Andrzej Wolski (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz), is shifted to the position of a patient
analysed by his younger and talented colleague, Tomasz (Maciej Stuhr). Holland's first collaboration with HBO Europe was soon to be followed by the larger and more prestigious project, *Burning Bush*, a perfect implementation of the strategies of development envisioned by the creative personnel of the platform.

*Burning Bush* is a flagship product of the HBO Europe strategy of local programming and its first 'event mini-series', as termed by Szczepanik (2021a, 249). Its production was facilitated by the strategy envisioned by Anthony Root – in 2011, he replaced Lorber in the position of senior vice-president of original programming and production – who implemented the politics of protecting the local professional capital, especially in helping the directors 'realize their true authorial vision' (Szczepanik 2021a, 254). The aim of HBO Europe was to create 'US-style muscular storytelling in television form married with auteur cinema' (Steve Matthews quoted in Szczepanik 2021a, 254). In its supporting of local resources, HBO Europe developed an alternative trajectory of development than Netflix (at least initially) or Amazon in that it gave away financially motivated international co-productions and runaway productions, while investing in local labour resources and shooting local stories in local languages. 'In HBO Europe's original programming, local appeal still comes first, while transnational appeal plays second fiddle. [...] "problematic" aspects of national history, politics, and culture [...] are mined to create nationally specific spectacles' (Szczepanik 2021a, 256). Anikó Imre calls the local programming strategy of HBO Europe (after Zala Volčič and Mark Andrejevic) 'commercial nationalism', claiming that 'HBO Europe has very successfully incorporated small nations' preexisting brand loyalties into its own brand, creating a uniquely European quality' (Imre 2018, 62). According to Szczepanik, using global narrative formulas for local content is characteristic of post-global corporations that exploit the recent upsurge of national sentiments, especially in the post-socialist countries (Szczepanik 2021a, 256).

HBO Europe decided to produce *Burning Bush* after its screenplay was rejected by the Czech public television (Szczepanik 2016, 98). It was written by the then-unknown Czech screenwriter Štěpán Hulík (b. 1984), a graduate of FAMU, who in 2011 published a book *Kinematografie zapomnění* on Czechoslovak cinema of the 'normalisation' period. The project of the three-part mini-series *Burning Bush* was initiated in 2010 and was co-produced by an independent film company Nutprodukce and by newcomer Tomáš Hrubý. *Burning Bush* – that had also its theatrical release³⁸ – demonstrates a successful merger between the accessible model of entertainment practised by the medium of television and the psychological subtleties of art cinema.³⁹ Accordingly, in his essay, Tadeusz Lubelski consistently addresses the mini-series as a film (Lubelski 2017) and his intuitive classification is convergent
with the more general process of diminishing the difference between cinema
and television.⁴⁰

*Burning Bush* revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in post-Second World War Czech history, the self-immolation of the young student, Jan Palach, committed in 1969 as a protest against the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring. The series reconstructs only briefly the historical event of Palach's immolation, while focusing on the young female lawyer, Dagmar Burešová (Tatiana Pauhofová) (see Fig. 5.6), who agreed to represent Palach's mother (Jaroslava Pokorná) and his brother (Petr Stach) in the trial against the communist politician Vilém Nový (Martin Huba) whom they accused of defaming Jan.

As explained in Chapter One, Holland witnessed the events of the Prague Spring and then the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the military forces of the Warsaw Pact, so directing the mini-series was for her a return to her youthful past. As she recalled:

> The Czech time was very important for me – I felt very close to this country and to its culture. My work on *Burning Bush* allowed me to return to those times and was for me one of the best professional and personal experiences I’ve had in recent years. I am the only well-known director who experienced the events of those times in Czechoslovakia directly and who additionally, has a dissident past. Thus, my personal experience adds credibility to the project. (Zamysłowska and Kuźmicki 2013, 236) ⁴¹

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.6 *Burning Bush* (2013)</figcaption></figure>
In Chapter One, I argued that, while studying at FAMU, Holland was somehow distanced from both the Polish and the Czechoslovak generational experiences of, respectively, March '68 and the Prague Spring. Paradoxically, this position of simultaneous closeness to and distance from the historical experience of the Prague Spring had made her, in the opinion of her young Czech collaborators, the writer and the young producers, the perfect director for their project. As Holland reported:

> I was the only person who could do it because I experienced it.⁴² And at the same time I was an outsider and so I could look at the history without a sort of Czech complex. And by Czech complex they meant the aversion to talking seriously about the country's problems. You know, 'Let's make it funny.' And the young people behind this film had grown tired of a culture that was turning everything into some kind of joke. They saw that in some ways their parents and themselves were the victims of this silence. So they wanted to reconstruct or express their roots more seriously – and re-discover their roots for themselves.⁴³

For Holland, making *Burning Bush* was a work of memory, while for Hulík it was a work of post-memory, or a symbolic act of recovering the collective memory. The visual design employed in the series structures the narrative as a work of memory; the colour palette ranges from the minimalist black-and-white photography used in the documentary footage, through monochromatic images that serve as a transition to the fictional reconstructions of the historical events, up to the saturated colours used generously in the family scenes in Burešová's home. Throughout the series, colour connotes the private life as a retreat from the oppressive and grim reality of the period of 'normalisation'.⁴⁴ Veronika Pehe identifies 'a muted colour palette in grays and browns [as] the main authenticating mechanism of *Burning Bush* [...] the fashions and styles of the film are not packaged to be consumed by a contemporary viewer, but to be enjoyed at a distance' (Pehe 2015, 249). The visual design emerged as an effect of creative collaboration with the cinematographer Martin Štrba, with whom Holland worked at *Janosik*. His 'transparent' cinematography respected reality, which was evoked by his predilection for natural lighting (if it was necessary to use additional sources of lighting, he would locate it close to the natural sources).⁴⁵

*Burning Bush*'s realism and visual design prompted Lubelski to discuss the similarity of the series with the Cinema of Moral Concern (Lubelski 2013, 70).⁴⁶ However, unlike the protagonists of the Polish films from the 1970s, the people who are depicted in the Czech series are heroic and determined in their struggle for truth. Palach's mother first despairs in an almost operatic fashion, yet after recovering from the first shock, she accepts her son's decision, and
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5.7 *Burning Bush* (2013)</figcaption></figure>

in a way, she continues his mission in that she demands punishment for the
communist apparatchik who defamed her son's memory. She is almost a perfect
incarnation of the mythical figure of the heroic Polish Mother (see Fig. 5.7)
that Holland had been consistently distancing herself from in her Polish films
from the 1970s (see E. Ostrowska 1998). The mother is supported by Palach's
brother, whose character is introduced in his domestic space along with his
wife as she is comforting their baby. Apparently, he is living his life far away
from politics as if embodying the passivity and withdrawal of the Czechoslovak
society during the period of 'normalisation'. However, he soon stands next to
his mother and they both fight for historical justice for Jan. Likewise, Burešová
is not introduced right away as a heroic figure. Although her first appearance
demonstrates her professional efficiency, it is instantly juxtaposed with her
image at home, where she is a caring mother and tender wife. A few scenes later,
she joins her colleague in his search for his daughter who did not return home
the previous night. In all of these roles of a lawyer, mother, wife and friend,
she appears as a person who cares, and this care and sense of responsibility
seem to be at the very core of her heroic yet doomed-to-fail battle against the
communist legal system. This faithfulness to the 'lost cause' approximates
Burešová to the model of the Polish patriot developed in Polish Romanticism
but also to Agnieszka from Andrzej Wajda's film *Man of Marble* (see Chapter
Two), who was allegedly modelled on Holland.

*Burning Bush* was an unquestionable success among Czech audience and
the critics. It was intended as the Czech submission for the Oscar competition,
yet it was not eligible due to its broadcasting on television prior to its theatrical
release. However, it was nominated for fourteen awards from the Czech Film Academy and received four awards from the Czech film critics. One of them, Jan Gregor, wrote: 'If the Czechs didn't have Agnieszka Holland, they would have to invent her. Actually, it is quite significant that the first comprehensive film account of our communist past was made by a Polish woman who has personal experience of the period in Prague'. The critic also compared *Burning Bush* to the Cinema of Moral Concern to which Holland significantly contributed.⁴⁷ In turn, Mirka Spáčilová referred to the director's transnational experience: 'director Agnieszka Holland combines the experience of European totalitarianism with compelling American-style storytelling [...] From the sets to the music to the tricks, *The Burning Bush* maintains a professional level that is rarely seen here'.⁴⁸ Both reviews emphasise Holland's transnational authorship.⁴⁹ Szczepanik commented on *Burning Bush's* success in the Czech Republic and abroad:

> the series proved to be an immense national success, being sold to dozens of foreign markets, including the US. What is more, its global reach made people outside the CEE region recognize the existence of HBO Europe for the first time. If *In Treatment* placed HBO Europe on the map of regional television culture, *The Burning Bush* did the same on the global TV series scene, playing at international festivals, being represented by the renowned German sales agency Beta Film, and finally making its way into the HBO US catalogue. (Szczepanik 2021a, 250)

While Holland was working on *Burning Bush*, Jacek Petrycki, her regular collaborator, and Krystyna Krauze made a documentary, *The Return of Agnieszka H. (Powrót Agnieszki H.*, 2013), recording the director revisiting the places from her youth in Prague. Polish film scholar, Mariusz Guzek suggested *Burning Bush* and *The Return of Agnieszka H.* can be seen as a kind of biographical study (Guzek 2019, 45). Lubelski entitled his essay on *Burning Bush* 'Defense against Homelessness', suggesting that the Czech Republic is as much her spiritual home as is Poland (Lubelski 2017, 287-99). Paradoxically, her return home – whether it is to Poland or to the Czech Republic – was facilitated by the global streaming platform HBO Europe.

While *Burning Bush* was a flagship of HBO Europe, 1983 (2018) was the first original Polish Netflix TV series also exploring the political past, yet in the formula of a dystopian science-fiction drama. The story was based on a hypothetical assumption that martial law in Poland did not end two years after its imposition in 1981 but lasted for another twenty years until 2003 when the action takes place. The series depicts a futuristic world controlled by a communist totalitarian regime, while some citizens organise in an underground movement. Two protagonists, a policeman Janów (Robert Więckiewicz) and a
law student, Kajetan (Maciej Musiał) act together to discover the nation's past. Unlike *Burning Bush* that employed the mode of realism, 1983 uses a visual stylisation typical of neo-noir. Dark and enclosed spaces, low-key lighting and a dark-colour palette are visual codes used to present the 'never-ending' reality of communism that might be read as a metaphor of current political situation in Poland (see Borowski 2023). Both global streaming platforms, HBO Europe and Netflix, provided space for Holland for an exploration of local histories, while also operating within 'commercial nationalism' as saleable products.

In conclusion, Holland's television works that were made in the States, Poland and the Czech Republic can be seen as mobilising various transfers between cinema and television, global and local cultural productions, *auteur* and genre cinema, and individual and collective authorship. With their focus on socio-political issues, these projects can be related to her works made for Polish socialist television in the 1970s, while developing on the themes related to gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Under closer scrutiny, Holland's television output reveals thematic threads and stylistic preferences, with a non-singular perceptual perspective being the most significant, that can be attributed to authorial subjectivity. Most importantly, working for television and streaming platforms allowed her to further explore the possibilities of collective, often female, authorship that she had practised at the beginning of her professional career in Poland. Holland's television works are not insignificant margins of her oeuvre but an integral part of it, expanding and reconsidering traditional concepts of authorship. Not unlike in socialist Poland, global television networks provided Holland with an alternative creative space within which the cinematic myth of the individual (male) *auteur* who controls is replaced with a (collective) female author who *cares*.

NOTES

1. Andrew Stubbs discusses collaboration of indie *auteurs* such as David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh with global streaming platforms (Stubbs 2020).

2. As Jane Feuer explains ‘HBO drama merges series or serialised TV with postmodern theatre or art cinema [...] there is nothing “new” or “original” generically between HBO drama and the television tradition of quality drama that cannot be ascribed to an equally generic tradition of art cinema’ (Feuer 2007, 157). For discussion of the concept of ‘quality television’, see McCabe and Akas 2007.

3. Holland's casting decision can be contextualised within the racial motifs of Chandler's prose. As James Naremore reported: 'one of Raymond Chandler's earliest stories, "Noon Street Nemesis," originally published in *Detective Fiction Weekly* in May 1936, is set almost entirely in a black section of Los Angeles. When the story first appeared, the editors of the journal deleted all references to the race of the characters, but Chandler made sure that the deletions were restored for the reprinted version, "Pickup on Noon Street," in *The Simple Art of Murder* (Naremore 2008, 233–4).
4. Holland herself suggested a kind of affinity between herself and black Americans. As she recollected, her visit to Glover's house reminded her of her own home in Poland in the 1960s: 'A crowd of young people, an old father, the wife cooking a lot of food for everyone, and everybody laughs, hugs, and shouts. Then I understood that Afro-Americans are my American homeland' (Holland and Kornatowska 2012, 321).

5. In his review, Steven Oxman criticised this device as exemplifying the film's aesthetic self-indulgence: 'The film tries, in a sense, to make the story poetically meaningful rather than powerfully honest, and that gives it an occasionally pretentious feeling [...] Holland, however, tends to latch onto the obvious image and force it almost to the point of corniness. When Mikal and Gary meet for the last time, the use of reflection to signal their deep connection is severely overdone, belaboring the very obvious' (Steven Oxman, 'Shot in the Heart. Review.' *Variety*, 11 October 2001. https://variety.com/2001/tv/reviews/shot-in-the-heart-1200553402/ (accessed 27 December 2022).

6. Tim Goodman, 'Brother's Sad Tale / Gary Gilmore Focus of HBO's Fine "Shot"', *San Francisco Chronicle*, 12 October 2001. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Brother-s-sad-tale-Gary-Gilmore-focus-of-HBO-s-2868907.php (accessed 27 December 2022).

7. Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana produced the TV series *Oz* for HBO.

8. Goodman, 'Brother's Sad Tale'.

9. However, some of the reviewers identified her as an experienced director yet not necessarily an *auteur*, for example, Nathan Rabin introduces *Shot in the Heart* as '[d]irected by veteran Agnieszka Holland' (Nathan Rabin, 'Shot in the Heart', review, *The Onion A. V. Club*, 3 April 2002. https://www.avclub.com/shot-in-the-heart-1798196284 (accessed 27 December 2022).

10. Tadeusz Sobolewski, 'Przerwany łancuch', *Gazeta Wyborcza*, no. 232, 2001, II.

11. Mikal Gilmore, 'Strzał w serce'. Translated by Jacek Łaszcz, *Gazeta Wyborcza*, 10 January 2002, 4–5.

12. Agnieszka Holland, 'Człowiek za kratami', interview by Tadeusz Sobolewski, *Gazeta Wyborcza*, no. 232, 2001, II.

13. In some promotional material for *Shot in the Heart* published in a Polish daily *Rzeczpospolita*, there is a quote from Holland who compared the Gilmore brothers' story to Dostoyevsky's *Crime and Punishment* and the biblical parable of Cain and Abel (anon. 'Początek z Agnieszką Holland', *Rzeczpospolita*, no. 233, 2001, 6).

14. 'Czy należy zabijać w majestacie prawa?' *Tele Świat*, no. 5, 2002, 42.

15. Andrew Davis, 'Gloria Allred: Talking about a Girl Like Gwen', *Windy City Times*, 21 June 2006. http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Gloria-Allred-Talking-About-a-Girl-Like-Gwen/11861.html

16. GLAAD website: https://www.glaad.org/mediaawards/32

17. As Holland admitted in one of her interviews, the motif was introduced by her gay friend Witold Zatorski with whom she co-wrote the script for the film (Holland 2021, 138).

18. She also directed 'Corner Boys' (2006, S4 E8) and 'React Quotes' (2008, S5 E5).

19. Holland's name was quite often mentioned by critics; in his essay on *The Wire*, Fredric Jameson also singles out Holland: 'There could also be an artistic bonus, owing to the fact that each of the episodes is written and/or directed by different people, some of them distinguished visitors (George Pelecanos, Agnieszka Holland)' (Jameson 2010, 360). Likewise, J. M. Tyree wrote in his review: 'The directors used in the series have included the Polish New Wave director Agnieszka Holland' ('The Wire: The Complete Fourth Season', *Film Quarterly*, 61, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 32–8).

20. While in Poland television production has been treated as an integral part of filmmakers' oeuvre since the late 1960s (see Chapter Two) and as such it was included in 'authorisation'
discourses, in the States this cultural 'uplift' happened much later, in the 1990s. In her book, *Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series* (2019), Martha Nochimson discusses the cultural elevation of television as exemplified by, among others, *The Wire* and *Treme*, while locating the authorial agency solely in the person of David Simon, the creator of both series and the author of the teleplay. She consequently omits the names of the directors, which testifies to the relocating of authorial agency from directors to the creators of the TV series.

21. Agnieszka Holland, 'Nasz kolega Jan Palach', interview by Tadeusz Sobolewski, *Gazeta Wyborcza*, no. 52, 2013, 34–5.

22. J. M. Tyree prises the opening sequence of the first episode: 'season 1 of *Treme* begins with a raucous “second line” street procession, filmed in a wonderfully confused riot of celebration by Agnieszka Holland', '*Treme* vs. *The Bad Lieutenant*, *Film Quarterly*, 64, no. 1, Fall 2010, 23–8.

23. As Holland claimed, while directing the pilot episode, she was allowed to introduce many 'authorial' ideas, which was no longer possible when she did the last episode (Holland and Kornatowska 2012, 403).

24. In that, he is similar to the protagonist of Paweł Pawlikowski's *The Woman in the Fifth* (2011) who is also an American writer arriving to Paris in the hope of reviving his family life and writing career.

25. Rachel Donadio, 'Bedeviled Anew by a Pregnancy', *The New York Times*, 8 May 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/arts/television/agnieszka-hollands-post-feminist-rosemarys-baby-on-nbc.html (accessed 5 April 2023).

26. Donadio, 'Bedeviled Anew by a Pregnancy'.

27. American film critics have not linked *Rosemary's Baby* with Holland's other films concerning motherhood and as such contributing to her *auteur* work. It was located within genre cinema and approached as a (not so successful) remake of Polanski's film. In contrast, Jane Campion's BBC mini-series *Top of the Lake* (2013; she scripted and directed it), which was her first work since *Bright Star* (2009), was instantly incorporated by the critics to her *auteur* oeuvre and women's cinema.

28. Nochimson notes the parallel collage-like narrative structure of *The Wire* and its acute exploration of ethnic and racial tensions: 'The narratives of *The Wire* are a bubbling, steaming stew flavored by many races and ethnicities [...] a live mosaic of perspectives emanating from the essentially white middle/upper-class community and from the essentially black poor/lower class community. These multiple perspectives flow through the city, frequently at cross-purposes, often cancelling each other out, sometimes making some small inroads on the problems of Baltimore' (Nochimson 2019, 95–6).

29. Agnieszka Holland, 'Bez katharsis', interview by Feliks Platowski, *Teatr*, no. 11, 2020, 25–6.

30. Holland, 'Bez katharsis', 25.

31. The serial attracted an audience of 1.5 million viewers, and these represented mostly the well-educated middle-class (Karolina Pasternak, 'Dobry premier, choć fikcyjny', *Przekrój*, no. 43/44, 2007, 88).

32. See Helena Kowalik, 'Co wynika z rzecznika?' *Film*, no. 3, 2008, 74–7; Tomasz Plata, 'Political fiction bez popkulturowego luzu', *Dziennik. Polska-Europa-Świat*, no. 257, 2007, 18–19; Tadeusz Sobolewski, 'Odtrutka na Mordasy', *Gazeta Wyborcza*, no. 214, 2007, 14–15.

33. See 'Ekipa w Muranowie. Premiera serialu o polskiej polityce', *Gazeta Wyborcza*, no. 207, 2007, 1.

34. Agnieszka Holland, Kasia Adamik and Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, 'Polska nas wkurzyła', interview by Aleksandra Krzyżaniak-Gumowska and Piotr Pacewicz, *Gazeta Wyborcza-Wysokie Obcasy*, no. 8, 2007, 38–41.

35. Agnieszka Holland, 'Ekipa jak marzenie', interview by Teresa Torańska, *Gazeta Wyborcza*, no. 214, 2007, 14.
36. All information concerning HBO Europe's enterprises in Eastern Europe come from Szczepanik (2021a).

37. Anikó Imre commented on HBO Europe's collaboration with renowned filmmakers and actors as an important strategy of maintaining its reputation for 'quality television': 'One important way in which HBO has legitimized its productions locally has been by recruiting for the small screen actors and directors who previously gained a reputation in feature films. [...] Having Agnieszka Holland direct the Czech HBO original series *Burning Bush*, Oscar-nominated Ildikó Enyedi direct the Hungarian adaptation of *In Treatment*, or Bogdan Mirica, winner of the 2016 Cannes Fipresci Award for his feature *Dogs*, direct the Romanian serial *Shadows* instantly distinguishes these productions from ordinary television' (Imre 2018, 57).

38. In Poland, the first screening took place on 25 February 2013 in the Warsaw Opera.

39. Imre noticed, 'HBO's quality dramas and documentaries issue a broader popular appeal – a kind of entertaining quality aesthetic and ordinary language that had not existed before due to the value gap assumed to separate art film and television' (Imre 2019, 176).

40. Imre commented on this convergence in relation to Eastern Europe: 'Paradoxically, "quality TV" enters the post-socialist milieu at a time when the media are so globalised, interconnected and convergent that some have questioned the very need for distinguishing between film and television any more' (Imre 2019, 179).

41. At the press conference preceding the first screening of the film in Prague, Holland said that the Prague Spring was a formative experience in that it shaped her understanding of the world (Aneta Kyziol, 'Serial moralnego niepokoju', *Polityka*, no. 9, 2013, 76–7).

42. In fact, Holland was not in Prague when Palach committed his self-immolation, yet she was informed by a friend of what was happening in Prague (Barbara Hollender, 'Pochodnia numer jeden', *Rzeczpospolita*, no. 50, 2013, A12).

43. Agnieszka Holland and Joshua Sperling, 'In Conversation: Agnieszka Holland with Joshua Sperling', *The Brooklyn Rail*, 18 December 2013. https://brooklynrail.org/2013/12/film/agnieszka-holland-with-joshua-sperling (accessed 6 April 2023).

44. Agnieszka Holland, 'Normalizacja w kadrze', interview by Jolanta Tokarczyk, *Film & TV Kamera*, no. 1, 2014, 34–9.

45. Holland, 'Normalizacja w kadrze'.

46. Tadeusz Lubelski, 'Czeska gorączka', *Ekrany*, no. 2, 2013, 70.

47. Jan Gregor, 'Recenze: Hořící keř přináší patos bez sentimentu', *Magazin Aktualne*, 24 January 2013. Translated by Marek Čermák, https://magazin.aktualne.cz/kultura/film/recenze-horici-ker-prinasi-patos-bez-sentimentu/r~i:article:769355/ (accessed 22 July 2023).

48. Mirka Spáčilová, 'RECENZE: Hořící keř předvádí, jak točit vlastní dějiny bez plakatu', iDNES.cz, 28 January 2013. Translated by Marek Čermák, https://www.idnes.cz/kultura/film-televize/televizni-film-o-palachovi.A130127_172415_filmvideo_spm (accessed 23 July 2023).

49. Jan Čulík, a Czech journalist and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, published a very negative review of *Burning Bush*, accusing it of being historically inaccurate, psychologically shallow and boring. His opinion was not shared by other critics whether working in Czech Republic or abroad (*Hořící keř je neuvěřitelně slabý film*, Britské listy, 29 January 2014, https://blisty.cz/art/71956-i-horici-ker-i-je-neuveritelne-slaby-film.html (accessed 22 July 2014).