President Andrzej Duda at the premier of Historia Roja, shaking hands with the director
(author Stach Leszczyński, PAP)
Sometimes the story of a film's production can be more valuable then its content. This I believe is the case with Historia Roja (2016), a fast-paced and plot-hole ridden depiction of the desperate and ultimately fatal struggle of the Polish partisan soldier Mieczysław "Rój" Dziemieszkiewicz, who decided to fight the Soviets and their Polish allies after the War had ended. Personnel changes in Telewizja Polska (Polish Television), the film's co-producer, caused funding to be cut and the project was abandoned. This gained the attention of various right to far-right organisations and subsequently a crowdfunding campaign was launched and advertised on social media with rhetoric such as 'The ones in power want to shut down a film about a Polish patriot' and 'Let's honour a real hero'. The relatively small sum of 400 000 PLN and volunteer work allowed the finalisation of the post-production and musical score composition and the film was finally premiered. It was received very critically or without comment by cultural elites while what is called the 'anti-system right' celebrated their victory. Political stances aside, the film is objectively very poor, with exaggerated fight-scenes, amateur acting, rampant pathos and little to no coherence, yet the premiere was graced by the president Andrzej Duda and the then minister of defence, Antoni Macierewicz.
The case of Historia Roja is very telling of the complex relationship of nostalgia and official memory. While the creative process was triggered by a state organ, it was only popular engagement that made its completion possible, since the election of a new president triggered a purge in the state television and that made the political climate unfavourable for the project. Subsequently, six years later an objectively awful film has its premier graced by the head of state from the party that had 'its people' purged from state television. Finally, the sole overreaching message of the film is the glorification of opposition to communist reality, a polemic with a non-existent nostalgia for Stalinism and a nostalgia for a past when 'real Poles did not leave the woods' while in reality these 'real Poles' constituted negligible exceptions. Historia Roja is an interesting film to study as a certain extreme case of nostalgia – a gory yet idealised depiction of a fragment of the past that cannot be made into a relatable myth for a significant portion of society, yet represents a yearning for a clear-cut narrative of the post-war times in Poland. While Zulu successfully addressed the need for commenting on the past and coming to terms with it, Historia Roja fails to do so, yet should be understood as an attempt at a similar outcome.
I have provided various examples of the relationship of official memory and nostalgia: Zulu– when nostalgia is addressed before an official narrative can be formed, Brideshead Revisited– when official memory is based on an organic nostalgia, Człowiek z Marmuru– when nostalgia attaches itself to a film independently from the criticism of official memory present in it and finally Historia Roja– a case of an anti-nostalgia that is to an extent organic, yet remains an active political battleground. All presented examples clearly demonstrate that understanding nostalgia merely as a reaction to official memory does not exhaust the possible relationships that the two might have.
Patrick Wright has it that the national past does not fully account for the personal experience of history and consequently that nostalgia has a strong subversive potential. [1] This view is correct only when viewing nostalgia from the point of view of a state trying to create an official narrative and viewing nostalgia as a competitor in explanation. The state is not the only entity suspicious of nostalgia, the other are historians. Robert Hewison even calls nostalgia a a cult of pastiche and parody (…) which deliberately falsifies authentic memory. [2] Nostalgia threatens the oligopoly that historians have for explaining the past. In the above quote authentic memory stands for historically correct recollection or state narrative of the past approved by historians: the fact that nostalgia may well be honest and authentic does not bother Hewison. If nostalgia is, among other things, a reaction to uncertainty and a glance back at an epoch when what we lack at present is perceived to have existed, then Chase and Shaw are correct to state that nostalgia informs us about the present threw a falsification of the past. [3] Although I remain sceptical as to whether nostalgia must be deemed a falsification and not simply an aspect of perspective.
The films presented reveal the process of two societies reflecting on history and reacting to contemporary times. Both societies were faced with the problems of class relations and political domination, except England was the metropolis and Poland a dependency, though since they were part of different empires, a clearer comparison can be made as there was no polemic between Polish and English culture on those issues. Class relations in Brideshead Revisited may be compared to proletariat – bureaucracy relations in Człowiek z Marmuru. Problems of dominating other peoples in Zulu with problems of being dominated in Historia Roja. The analysed British films look back with a nuanced nostalgia, engaging with the ambiguities of greatness, while the Polish films deal with the misery of Stalinism and the blunt lack of ambiguities that it created. No film however conforms that nostalgia is formed in simple opposition to the 'official' narrative, whatever that may be.
[1] - Patrick Wright, On living in an old country: the national past in contemporary Britain, (Oxford, 2009), p. 26
[2] - Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline,
(London, 1987), p. 145-6
[3] - Malcolm Chase, Christopher Shaw, 'The dimensions of nostalgia',
in: The imagined past: history and nostalgia, iidem (eds.), (Manchester, 1989), p. 1;
see also: David Loventhal, 'Nostalgia tells it like it wasn't', in: The imagined past..., p. 21