Poland’s turbulent history in the 20th century has been the most significant factor affecting the development of vernacular cinema. Until 1918, when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of partitions, Polish cinema did not exist as a separate national entity and thus one can only talk about cinematic practices occurring in Polish territories. Between 1918 and 1939 Polish cinema primarily developed popular forms, ranging from nationalistic melodramas to Yiddish musicals. The outbreak of World War II and the following occupation of Poland meant a cessation of Polish national cinema for six years. In 1945 a new model of state-supported and state-controlled cinema emerged. Responding to constantly changing political circumstances, Polish postwar cinema negotiated the potential of the space between utter ideological complicity and the desire to subvert the communist regime. Limited by political censorship, it often communicated with its audience in Aesopian language. Simultaneously, the authorities of the state-funded film industry occasionally supported certain cinematic experiments mainly to demonstrate the superiority of communist art over the bourgeois. They also enabled a popular cinema as long as it conveyed an ideological message supportive of the political system. The most significant achievements of Polish postwar cinema are, according to most film criticism, in a politically engaged art cinema represented at its best by Andrzej Wajda, Andrzej Munk, Agnieszka Holland, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. In consequence, other cinematic phenomena more closely linked with cinematic modernism as, for example, films by Wojciech Has, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Tadeusz Konwicki, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Walerian Borowczyk, have been significantly marginalized within critical discourses both in Poland and abroad. The collapse of communism in 1989 caused a radical change in the whole system of film production, distribution, and exhibition. Instead of political censorship, filmmakers have since been subjected to the demands of the domestic film market now entirely open to Hollywood production. They responded to these changes in a twofold manner: the younger generation attempted to establish a vernacular model of popular cinema, whereas the elder wanted to use their newfound political freedom to address the previously repressed parts of national memory. As well as its historical and aesthetic specificity Polish cinema can also be located within the broader conceptual frameworks of central eastern European cinema or now postcommunist cinema.
Penny Powers, Covert Hero of the Twentieth Century