People Have the Word: Experiments with Voice in Polish Documentary, 1960 – 1984

This dissertation proposes a direct relationship between specific formal and ideological developments in Polish documentary films made between the 1960s and the 1980s, and the concomitant evolution of the country’s socio-historical context at the time. Over the two decades, Communist Poland was the scene of social and political transformations that lead to the mobilization of an opposition movement culminating with the legalization of the independent Polish trade union Solidarity. During the same time, the Polish documentary film underwent a remarkable development with a prolific production of original and unique works that came to be known as the Polish School of Documentary Film. An analysis of the socio-political context brings forward the predominantly social dimension of the growing opposition, as a movement based in the re-building of an independent civic society, and on the mobilization of various types of civic engagement. Coming of age against this background, the Polish documentarians understood their work as a form of communication through representation. The filmmakers’ formal explorations of the relationships between sound and image were creative manifestations of their stringency to contribute towards the recuperation of a civic sense through the affirmation of a political consciousness.In the second decade after the war, documentary film in Poland reemerges as a medium of observation of, and commentary on, everyday events that make up the social realm. Gradually, as an evolving technology brings the camera and microphone closer to the filmed subjects, the degree of the social actors’ engagement in representation increases. The filmmakers replace the expository voice-over with the talking interventions of the filmic participants, as they explore novel forms of address allowed by the use of interview. I argue that the three filmmakers at the center of this dissertation develop distinct interview approaches that mirror respective stages in the mobilization of people’s socio-political consciousness. As such, Kazimierz Karabasz’s observational approach enacts the attitude of coming into awareness through a concerted attention to one’s surroundings, in films that represent everyday activities of the social actors against their voice-off account of important experiences in their lives. Krzysztof Kieślowski interacts with his interviewees across camera, in filmic representations driven by the urgency to reveal an image of reality censored from the sanctioned socio-political imaginary. Kieślowski’s approach embodies the gradual mastery of an interactive attitude of communication through direct engagement. Marcel Łoziński places the social actors within somehow provoked interview situations that he frames as reflexive commentaries on the practice and effects of representation. While the protagonists acknowledge and affirm their stand within their social milieu as prompted, Łoziński’s removed look at their interactions enacts a similarly self-referential intervention aimed at a fundamental questioning of the system. I will follow the trajectory of each filmmaker’s exploration of interview techniques through close readings of films that are relevant for this evolution. I will situate the effective function of the films as platforms of communication in relation to the directors’ theoretical writings in the margin of their filmmaking practice. The filmed interviews are forms of mediated communications as embedded in filmic representations located at the intersection of sociology, ethnography and documentary. My analysis of formal filmic innovations will be in dialogue with research on sociological interview, with works of theoretical reassessment of the meaning of ethnographic representation, and with writings that challenge epistemological expectations of documentary film’s access to, and delivery of, particular types of knowledge. This dissertation will contribute to the ongoing discussion on the significance of voice in non-fiction film by proposing a reassessment of the mediation of voice through the use of image. While these films stand as expressions of their makers’ contributions to a historical process of social and political awakening, they rely on interview explorations that suggest the authors’ preoccupation with the risks and dangers posed by representation. I suggest that these documentaries prevent the flattening of human subjects into unidimensional audio-visual portraits by keeping the sound and image within a tension that opens an interval ripe with virtual meanings. At the same time, the filmmakers are experimenting with reflexive markers that bracket the viewers’ unmediated access to knowledge and safeguard the distance between representation and its subject. The films become the territory of a continuous shaping of contrasting relationships that results in a triangulated space where the making of meaning requires the consistent participation of both filmic and viewing subject. As such, these documentary works enable a form of communication through representation that transcends the socio-historical determination of the profilmic world, and that stands as an actual and relevant model of achieving social mobilization and political engagement through artistic expression.

Advisor: Skoller, Jeffrey