Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  What is most interesting is when the directors, especially towards the Thaw, were trying to “cheat” the strict rules by nuancing the compulsory black and white characters, and not necessarily serving as unilateral praise of the Party. Cinema in the Eastern Bloc didn’t fall under the necessity of sotsrealism immediately. The first few years still left this door open. In East Germany you had films like The Murderers Are Among Us by Wolfgang Staudte (1947) on the difficulties of denazification in the still Nazi-ridden DDR society or, a year later, Rotation, about a socialist father forgiving his son, who had become a Nazi during the war and denounced his parents. In these, the first post-war German films, Staudte retained the ideas of the Brechtian epic theatre (even quoting his songs), experimental editing, and in general, the style of the pre-Hitler avant-garde. The Weimar provenance of those years was strong, and The Murderers Are Among Us gained considerable success in the USA, where its female star Hildegard Kneff briefly became a household name. Those who came back after the war, amongst other places from Moscow, wanted to organize a new film industry and thus DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) was founded as a German joint-stock company, with blessing from more liberal Soviet representatives.

  Only later the ruling SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei) seized a controlling influence on DEFA, when it was put under the Propaganda Division of the Central Committee of the Party. At this point the Wall still hadn’t gone up, and for several years they produced anti-fascist films, which tried to balance a socialist message with artistic accomplishment, tried to address the idea of how to live in Germany after all that had happened.

  Socialist film and literature is today often described as “kitsch”, this eternal, it seems, problem of dissident intellectuals. This is how Milan Kundera defines it in his Unbearable Lightness of Being, where Sabina, a free artist, leaves Czechoslovakia because she can’t take the kitsch of living under Soviet rule anymore. Films of the actual sotsrealist era both in Poland and in Germany are difficult to watch without a certain ambivalence. Artistically they’re often awful, and we watch them only as documents of an era. One of the essentials was to “reject the Western way of life”, “To learn from the Soviet Union means to learn how to win” was the leading slogan. There was a great need after the war for a new, necessarily positive Kulturwelt, especially in the East, whose future suddenly drastically narrowed. Iconic East German writer Christa Wolf describes this in her memoirs, how building the new, idealized future/reality of socialism was an urgent alternative to the catastrophic past.

  The production of agit-prop films started running from the late 1940s on, and the aesthetic that was prescribed was a seemingly naïve realism. Films describe the construction sites all over the Wild east in a heroic tone not different from the 30s in the USSR. The films that endured until today and have been released on DVDs are usually the artistic crème de la crème of those productions: Staudte, Konrad Wolf, Kurt Maetzig or Frank Beyer. The best and most renowned films of East Germany were made during the Khrushchev Thaw, though they still retain some Stalinist rigidness. Often brave ideologically, the best of them were subsequently banned, when artistic freedoms were curbed again in the mid-1960s. Yet they provide an interesting counterpoint to the ritual accusation that these were ideologized and thus poor artworks.

  The first wave were antifascist films, that had to react towards the reality of a post-war sense of shame. With what the West was making looking colorful and sexy, the East was making up by ideol- ogization. The characterization of personages, the situations in which they were involved, always seemed a tad artificially constructed, focusing on the social problems, including the shortages in industry. Yet, in this way they deconstructed other, traditional clichés of cinema. What in capitalist conditions would’ve become a couple-only focused melodrama, with all the kitsch that entailed, in DEFA couldn’t be just that. Characters couldn’t just be slackers devoted to sweet love, as any kind of defeatism and slackness was severely punished. In Thaw films like Born in ’45 or Divided Heaven, or the later Solo Sunny, we see the dissolution of the couple, where it’s usually the woman who retains ‘dignity’ and searches deeper into things.

  Directors like Konrad Wolf wanted to come to terms with the hardest period of Stalinism. Hence films like Sunseekers, an astonishing mixture of Soviet avant-garde and harsh, workerist content, with such a realistic presentation of the post-war conditions in East Germany (it takes place in a uranium-mining town) it had to be banned. Filmmakers tried to negotiate the conditions of the DDR, but because of the closeness of the West, the censorship was some of the hardest in the Bloc. Even a small critique of the shortcomings of industry, like in the film Trace of Stones, which would have passed uncommented in Poland, could be banned. The building of the Wall in 1961 was the final blow. The abrupt turnaround of the DDR economy in the mid-60s led Erich Honecker, then number two in the Party, to blame the artists for the economic disaster of the new economic policy. After the infamous 11th Plenum several films/cause célèbres were banned until 1990, including such outstanding examples of DEFA cinema as Trace of Stones, The Rabbit Is Me or Divided Heaven.

  From today’s perspective these films often seem slightly naïve, very righteous and with laughably idealized characters, with pure hearts devoted to the party, even in the artistically most accomplished of them. What is left for the contemporary viewer is the way the films looked. They were Marxist in every sense, yet trying to combine artistry with the depictions of workers struggles. Konrad Wolf’s films (Sunseekers, Divided Heaven, I was Nineteen) didn’t pretend there were no problems affecting the socialist life in the DDR, and his films escape idealization. In Sunseekers everybody is dirty, hungry and frustrated by living in this middle of nowhere mining town, sick of their jobs - but with the implication this is the best they can have for a while. Especially in comparison to the official TV, these DEFA films were very brave indeed.

  4.9 The New Woman vs Men of Marble. The fearless feminist director Agnieszka in quest for truth about the communist past, also prophetic of the later obliteration of women’s role in Solidarity.

  The main difference between the Eastern and Western film culture may actually be their approaches to sex. Just assuming that the Eastern Bloc cinema was more prudish would be a simplification. In the sotsrealist years, of course there couldn’t be any mention or show of a single body part or action related to the sexual act. Work and healthy life meant at the same time a complete desexualization of its objects, decent socialist citizens, concerned with work and the serenity of socialist life rather than dark desires. The sanitized iconosphere/iconography, especially up to the mid-50s is full of awkward moments. In the words of many Polish authors, even those who remained subjugated to the rules of the new style, workers, especially women, assume strange desexualized forms, for which they’re later mocked or patronized. The physicality of those who worked was often described as asexual, disgusting and dehumanized – suggesting that it’s only a bourgeois woman who can be truly feminine. Yet sex comes back through the back door in DEFA’s Thaw films, to suggest either the general repression and despondency of the young (Born in ’45) or of the repression of women in particular, as in The Rabbit Is Me, where the openness and honesty of a story about a young woman having an affair with a married man well connected in the Party was considered a threat to socialism and banned. Critical films were getting made, yet then deemed not socialist enough. Censorship was much more liberal in Poland in this respect, where from the late 50s, in our version of New Wave and in our comedies sex scenes, though still tastefully arranged, often didn’t leave things only to the imagination and didn’t get banned. They were no more or less sexually explicit than what you could see in your average Antonioni or Angry Young Men film.

  The socialist body within the Bloc was purified and asexual. Also, it is the women who were supposed to carry the burden of chastity. In most DEFA films it is the women who are trying to be good socialists, and the men who are weaker, and who drop out or defect to th
e West. Socialism is identified with woman’s personal strength and virtues. Christa Wolf presented this in Moskauer Novelle, where a member of a delegation to the Soviet Union has to deal with a Nazi trauma which is identified with eroticism. She was in love with a Nazi, and only via a repression of sexuality she can become a viable, real socialist. Only after dealing with it, is she now carrying something Slavoj Žižek describes as a “sublime communist body”, where the body of communism is marked by redoubling.

  Any idea of the original, sexually open communism is suspi-cious: in the banned films, heroines have a mostly uninhibited, healthy relation to their bodies. Stalinism was repressive, moralistic and authoritarian towards sexuality, especially female. How different the relation to the body and the past is in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1961). There, you also had a woman who was punished for her past passion for a Nazi, but it is only via uninhibited eroticism that she can overcome the trauma and stand on the side of the living. Yet a sexual revolution happened on both sides of the Curtain. In fact, initially we had similar levels of sexual freedom, but we parted our ways only later: over the years a pornographic film industry developed in the capitalist West, which for obvious reasons didn’t happen in the East. Young people from my mother’s generation stormed cinemas when they were screening Milos Forman’s Loves Of a Blonde in 1965: for those two minutes of male ass and female half-breast, just as they no doubt did in the West about the scarce nudity in Blow-up in 1966.

  It is similar in Divided Heaven, another of Christa Wolf’s novels, adapted for the screen by Konrad Wolf, where similarly the female character’s sexuality (in this case an infatuation with a man who turns out to be a weak defector to the West) must be given up in the name of remaining ‘faithful to the socialist motherland’. When we meet her, she’s just trying to be a good communist: she’s a member of the youth branch of the party at school and remains in the DDR even after the wall starts to be erected and there’s still time to escape. Perhaps this fatalism was what contributed to banning of the film. Many of Wolf’s films shared a similar mood and destiny. The most artistically accomplished DDR director, he is remarkable for showing all the contradictions of socialist commitment, with, yet, the commitment winning out over other, less patriotic feelings, which retain a bitter taste.

  Perhaps the most shocking film of all the East German productions I saw was Hot Summer, a terrifying, relentlessly silly, pushy and propagandistic “youth film” set against Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday in the cultural war with the West, with sing-alongs and a plotless structure with unfunny gags – and all this in 1968! What a move backwards in comparison to the post-Thaw cinema. Yet, the Eastern Bloc didn’t simply return to pre-modern forms of art. And if the workers were screwed over by the authorities, there were artists aware of it and capable of honestly depicting it on the screen.

  We were men of marble

  The conception of women as the carrier-filter of past socialist ideas continually returns, as if it was the notion of female purity and a lack of fixed identity that allowed them to be a good medium for directors to talk about history. This is what happens in Andrzej Wajda’s film diptych Man of Marble and Man of Iron, astonishing films made in the rare but brief little thaw in the 1970s, which share a main female heroine, despite talking about the man-made history. Man of Marble was made in 1976, its counterpart, Man of Iron, in 1980. The first was affected by the Polish 70s, an era of relative relaxation, after Edward Gierek became the First Party Secretary. The 1970s were a time of seeming ‘prosperity’ in Poland, when the government wanted to stifle dissent (after the student protests of March ’68 and the brutally repressed workers strikes of 1970), via massive international loans that later pushed Poland into great public debt and financial and political crisis. This was the time Wajda, an internationally successful director, could come back to certain traumatic themes from the Polish past, now available again. This sudden relaxation lasted very briefly though, and ended in political crisis which then led to the rise of Solidarity and the crisis which ended in Martial Law in 1981.

  Wajda’s films frame that period. A young, go-ahead, charmingly self-assured film student, Agnieszka (known only by her first name) is determined to make her graduate film on a forgotten Stakhanovite from the 1950s, Mateusz Birkut, whose rise was as quick as his demise. She’s subsequently discouraged by practically everyone she talks to: state television producers, collaborators, people from Birkut’s life who she’s trying to make speak about him. For everybody it seems an unwanted topic – a trauma, which is not only identical with the trauma of Stalinism, but also with the failure of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which, though promised by the authorities, never really occurred. The films Agnieszka watches in secrecy from her superiors are the verboten images of socialism: the first, made during the early post-war years of acute poverty and devastation, shows state violence against workers, among them Birkut, who is beaten by a functionary while queuing for a plate of soup. Those forbidden fragments are mixed with the “official” ones, where Birkut is recognised in his role as a socialist hero and worshipped by the party officials and the masses. Two images, which couldn’t be more different, now equally stranded in forgetfulness.

  Agnieszka goes through the museum magazines full of the now-hidden, scorned and despised monumental art. Gigantic heads, torsos and flags, with bombastic declarations, now empty and meaningless. Yet, it also means the workers principles become meaningless too: Birkut, a complete ingénue, a Polish Yuri Gagarin with an innocent, charming smile, a true believer in socialism, which gave him literacy and transferred him to the city – is first given the highest applause by the authorities. Delighted that he can now do something for his country apart from bricklaying, he starts heralding demands for the better existence of workers, which would be nothing but the logical consequence of a true proletarian dictatorship, if such existed. He doesn’t realize the facadism of the system, he becomes a liability to it, which, in the person of the terrified party officials, then does everything it can to silence him. Finally, an accident at the construction site is arranged, leaving Birkut handicapped and unable to continue physical work – and quickly his monumental portraits are taken down from the 1st May march decorations and other propagandistic spaces as he slips into oblivion.

  Yet the way the film posits questions about the aesthetic and political quality of the forbidden Sotsrealist materials is surprising in its subtlety and intelligence. Wajda didn’t use a single second of ‘real’ archive materials, and every black-and-white newsreel or old propagandistic fragment we watch is utterly fabricated by the director. Through the eyes of Agnieszka, as she slowly discovers the mystery of Birkut, embodying the time of the title’s Great Heroes made by the state, we are also ravished and gradually seduced by the aesthetics that accompanied them. Wajda, obviously on Birkut’s side, finds himself unable to simply mock sotsrealism. And in the end, he unconsciously adopts some of its principles - heroism, monumentalism, pathos, characters so positive that they’re rendered incredible - to make the second part of his film, Man of Iron, situated in the Solidarity strikes in the Gdansk shipyards in summer 1980.

  Agnieszka doubly represents her generation here – the same who abroad sang ‘we could be heroes” or “no more heroes”, where heroes disappeared, because either their time has passed or they got discredited. Way ahead of the later Hollywood use of fabricated old newsreels (as in the dreadful Forrest Gump and Woody Allen’s superior Zelig), Wajda posits the question of the authenticity of history as historical material and also as a style, which, now forgotten and denounced, is at every step being recontextualized in his film by the sheer stylization of what “has been”. The episodes from Birkut’s life are constantly flirting with socialist realism, the then-compulsory style, using its strictly monumental features to the utmost filmic effect. Is Wajda endorsing sotsrealism or ridiculing it? Is he in favor, fascinated or just coldly looking at it? Is he just quoting Eisenstein, or playing with
old cinema, a style that in the West, was already then known as “postmodernism”? He’s doing all of those things at once. Through the use of the wonderful, mimetic/illusionist powers of the cinema, we at the same time watch the illusion AND the forbidden archive material which was supposed to rot away from the public eye in the cellars forever.

  The film is the first proper reassessment of socialist realism not only in Polish cinema, but also in visual arts. Agnieszka, this new, dynamic woman symbolizing her own time in the best sense, is suddenly confronted with a past she has no grasp of. Her film on Birkut is pulled, she’s hopeless, she blames herself for opening too many wounds from Birkut’s life – but that brings her to his estranged son, a former student, who, in a typical idealistic romantic gesture drops education and starts working in a factory, as a belated homage to the killed father, to his memory and to affirm his working-class background.

  4.10 Men as Giants. Wajda repeats the Sotsrealist Gesture in Man of Marble

  Krystyna Janda, playing Agnieszka, embodied a new woman – a bit imaginary, with a bit of wishful thinking, being bold, forthright and jeans-clad, fearless and self-assured. She was a feminist without even realizing it. She looks exactly as if she came from a Second Wave demo or a women’s lib Agnes Varda feminist film. She was a feminist, in a patriarchal socialist Poland full of open sexism, and what’s more, men recognized her as their equal and respected her. To this day I think Agnieszka was a phantom. She never really existed, she was the projection of a director who wanted a real opposite gender partner whom he respected, although she may be partly based on Agnieszka Holland, prominent director of the Cinema of Moral Concern, who also later became famous in Hollywood. In this sense Agnieszka’s fate was prophetic of many Polish women involved in conspiratory politics, the Solidarity movement – and there was no shortage of women in the democratic opposition – who never really reached any significant positions first within the union, and then within the party system or government in “free” Poland. Their often-crucial role was never properly acknowledged. This is predicted in the film, by the sudden change Agnieszka undergoes, when she becomes the companion and wife of Birkut Jr, and later a mother of his child in Man of Iron. Her decisiveness disappears, she is interned in prison, from which she’s beatified in her role as a suffering mother, subjugated both to ‘the cause’ and her husband, a Gdansk shipyard worker.