by Pyzik, Agata
Even the characteristic transubstantiation of matter from one film to another – from Marble, symbolizing the Stalinist past, to Iron, symbolizing the iron will and boldness of the Gdańsk shipyard resistance, no doubt - rings ironic, given who used “Man of Steel” as his pseudonym. Man of Iron represented the optimism of Solidarity’s first years, completed during the euphoria of Gdansk in summer 1980, only partly predicting that what will happen will be another facadism of behind-closed-doors decisions, and yet another betrayal of the workers. It also glossed over the ideological discrepancies and disagreements within Solidarity itself. It’s an incredibly idealistic image of the time, the way Wajda would have liked things to happen: people getting together, a peaceful revolution and a more just world for all. Today we know, too bitterly, how wrong he was, yet it’s intriguing that when given an opportunity to finally show Polish society in its most ideal form, he chose an idealized realism – the very style he was supposed to reject.
And what about Agnieszka, our absent Woman of Marble? There’s another aspect to the film, which became clear with the next leading role of Krystyna Janda, only year later in 1981, in Ryszard Bugajski’s Interrogation, where Stalinist repressions were shown from another angle, in the most shocking depiction of that period ever committed to the screen. After playing her contemporary, obsessed with the Stalinist past and doing their victims justice, Janda took the part of one of them. In Interrogation (finished just a few days before Martial Law was declared that December) she’s playing Tonia, a revue-cabaret singer and dancer, touring with a troupe and performing for soldiers and peasants across the miserable landscape of the ruined post-war country. Living the life of a gypsy, careless, constantly under the influence of alcohol, she doesn’t even notice when one day she’s captured by two hangers-on and taken to the secret police commissariat. There she is brutally groped as part of a “forensic examination” while she’s still unconscious from alcohol.
This symbolic “rape” of her body is done repeatedly by other means, when she’s thrown like a sack of potatoes to the overcrowded cell and then wakes up to gradually realise what has happened to her. She’s accused of collaboration with “the enemies of the people”, and her reaction suggests she didn’t even realise these Stalinist processes and purges were going on behind the closed doors. Despite her initial fragility and erratic, unreliable character, the more atrocities, humiliation, violence, terror and abuse she experiences from her secret police perpetrators (the terrifying Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, Security Police), mostly psychotic sadists, to “break” her, the more defiant and stronger she grows. Fascinatingly, Bugajski shows Stalinism as indeed the nightmare of patriarchy as such: from the female victim’s perspective and with men as their ruthless abusers, predominantly as a specific abuse done to women’s bodies. Feminine Tonia is, in the course of the tortures (she’s near-drowned, beaten, isolated, refused food, kept awake, used sexually, denied contacts with her family and finally betrayed by her husband) turned into a pale ghost of herself, with her charms erased, as a special kind of humiliation – to leave a permanent sign. But she grows something else instead: courage, strong will and fearlessness in the face of the state repression apparatus. She’s repressed as a woman: her interrogations are to prove her fault on the basis of her promiscuity and humiliate her chiefly as a “whore” without dignity who sleeps around, so that she’s in a way punished for her sluttiness, not for real treason against the state.
The “treason” is typically Kafkaesque, and the punishment is for something she hasn’t done but she’s supposed to realise as her guilt. In the course of the film also her “fault” becomes meaningless: her oppressors don’t really care what she’s done, the only thing that matters is her self-criticism, admitting the crimes she hasn’t committed (because the socialist state “never makes mistakes”), written and signed, and this is exactly the thing Tonia repeatedly denies them. It’s also a story of solidarity growing in most uninviting conditions: the brutalized women in the cells, apart from the expected brutality to one another, express also solidarity and mutual support. Janda opposed the initial script with her character as a victim and rebelled against her role as somebody broken, creating a rare if not unique feminine perspective on the atrocities of the worst period of Stalinism with a woman as an individual, free subject. In this way she widened the historical construction to incorporate also the woman - the other of history, absent from the pages of books and largely absent from cinematography, where only the heroic male perspective was favored. She was reclaiming the Women of Marble, the Unknown Heroines, how different and yet similar in their naïve heroism to Mateusz Birkut, both even after the damage is done still believing that justice will prevail. Yet Interrogation is the underbelly of Man of Marble, where all the sotsrealist decorum is stripped away for the sake of the naked horror of torture away from the officiality and the public, where it’s the women, who pay the political price. Also, in Interrogation, the divides in social class and background between the women inmates were becoming invisible, they became equals – and in this way Tonia, as a female heroine, stands for all the forgotten women of socialism, of all social classes whose work and contribution has been neglected.
Soap operas about late capitalism
What is the contemporary socialist realism? One could definitely think here of today’s Russia, with all its comeback of the bombastic Tsarist aesthetic and the great-master tastes of its business aristocracy – oligarchy as a sad façade of its undemocratic political processes. Recently Vladimir Putin brought back the Stalinist award ‘Hero of Labor’, among whose previous recipients are Stalin, Khrushchev and Sakharov. Some people could instantly think of this as an act of completion of the restalinization of Russia. But let this not mislead us. If anything, the massive Soviet nostalgia of contemporary Russia is another façade: a façade designed to hide the degree of neoliberalism in the Putin era. As many Russians, whose lives got worse after 1991, yearn for the ‘comeback’ of the old times, Putin cynically tunes in to those moods by creating a façade of a strong, resilient country, with election candies such as the reinstatement of the Prize. Yet this action should pass as nothing more than cynical play at the masses, aimed also at winding up all the liberal intellectuals, who much in the style of the nineteenth-century “pro-Westerners” sigh at it with disgust. Their main medium is a magazine called Snob, after all. One facadism is replaced with another. It inscribes itself within the whole presidency of Putin, whose main feature seems to be in combining the lure of the old times with a ruthless, galloping oligarchical theocracy.
What then, in a time of self-marginalization of arts as a “mirror to reality”, still plays the role attributed to socialist realism, depicting totality while retaining a mass appeal and on a mass scale? What are most discussed as a new form of depicting the current late capitalist reality are TV serials. The Wire, but also The Sopranos (the earliest, which started the whole trend) and recently, the Danish The Killing are all multifaceted, mosaic, complicated portrayals of the world-system; and its history is depicted in Mad Men, whose creator, Matthew Weiner says he’d ideally lead his characters until the present. What Mad Men does with the 60s, The Wire does with the contemporary neoliberal world. It is, by far, the most complete, dense and complex rendition of how the contemporary world, or the contemporary neoliberal city, in this case, is functioning. It also has a very nineteenth-century development, unfolding characters and plots like in a classic novel. Many interpreters of The Wire have recalled Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping”, dating from his Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Initially, Jameson’s concept was purely metaphorical, taken from spatial methods of analyzing culture. What Jameson meant was art that cognitively “maps” the reality that has seemingly become unrepresentable. What he writes about is an art that instils class-consciousness towards capitalist reality, which, as an American academic, he couldn’t just explicitly use as a concept.
Jameson, influenced by the Lacan
ian distinction between reality/realism and the “real”, takes up once again the problem of representation, in which he observes among other things, in a search for some kind of new totality, how “a certain unifying and totalizing force is presupposed here, although it is not the Hegelian Absolute Spirit, nor the party, nor Stalin, but simply capital itself”. He took up the concept of totality again, after Lukács, posing a question of totality vs. partiality against the growing unpopularity of ‘totality’ as a concept, which came largely after the 1968 generation “discovered” Stalinist crimes and started identifying every attempt at totality as a straight path to the gulag. Totality as a concept was passé. Another question is that of representation. Postmodernist art’s role was, via means like dispersion of form, to make the world unintelligible, convincing the viewer/reader that he cannot grasp the total view of reality. It is not enough just to “come back” to the old ideas of the avant-garde, even if such an operation was possible. Jameson brings back instead the idea of critical realism. The more ‘realistic’ ideas of the iconoclastic, critical avant-garde could also be part of this, to mention only the sachlichkeit of Brecht or John Heartfield, which came up with an augmented, sharpened realism, creating the Verfremdungseffekt, alienation effect, while still using a ‘realistic’ method of representation.
Lukács wrote that ‘socialist realism is in a position both to portray the totality of a society in its immediacy and reveal its pattern of development’, a form of art that had ‘the ambition to portray a social whole’. Is it then that the success of The Wire or Mad Men lies in precisely their focus on the totality, that links every form of our being, every possibility – capital? One of the main features of The Wire is it’s classical narrative – the show operates within the present, develops linearly in time, and also quite slowly, never really using any devices like flashbacks - it stubbornly stays in a dead end, just like the lives of its characters. The serial takes its form from a novel, furthermore, a novel, as it was in its golden era, the nineteenth century: a “low” form, printed in a newspaper, in episodes. Many of the greatest novels of all time were published in episodes: Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Dickens. The novel was “low” in comparison to the metaphorical language of the heroic epic literature, instead talking about everyday life. One of the milestones in the modern novel was Don Quixote, a satire on heroic romances detached from the world. The novel was always a tool for social critique and satire, it was fictionalized but realistic. Even extreme examples, like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, have an experimental form, which use the idea of the world that is impossible to tell to a positive, constructive effect, enabling one to see the production of clichés and stupidities within the process of storytelling. We can argue that representation of reality is always different from fiction, a failure of someone who tries to tell their life story as fiction. That’s why Tristram Shandy was loved by Russian formalists, as a work that is about constructing, about technique, about devices.
Modern works of art always strive to cognitively map the world, says Jameson, to explain it. The Wire’s apparent ability to depict totality more successfully than experimental cinema or engaged art can help us in explaining the relation of socialist realism to the avant-garde, and effectively explain the current weakness of art as a tool in cognitive mapping. The televisual form (all-available, democratic) makes it popular. Each of the serials I mentioned is produced in specific conditions: by a private channel, with a big budget. Can you really compare it to art that is made in different conditions? But you can compare it to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a former underground director who produced several works for television in 1970s West Germany. Most of his films concern the left movement, Germany’s Nazi past and its repercussions on the present. Fassbinder never questioned ‘repre-sentation’ as such, as did the more radical part of the New German Cinema, and never produced a ‘film-essay’, but instead always created realistic narratives.
Situations and performances from Fassbinder’s movies often seem nearly comically overwrought, over the top, where the grotesquely exaggerated dialogue and acting serves as a running locomotive of stereotypes, even if the behaviors of his characters are often non-conformist and non-normative. Fassbinder often took his situations from pornographic movies: but here sexuality is rather a way of driving certain attitudes present in the society to their radical end. In his films relationships between men and women, but also between men (not always, but mostly, homosexual) and men, full of sadism, masochism and hatred, are depictions of the real power relations within society. Despite actors who are often compelled to act out in the most hysterical way the schizophrenic relation within society, Fassbinder remains genuinely sympathetic to his characters. This director emerges today as one of the most acute critics of the post war capitalist Germany, as a residuum of un-dead fascism, racism, greediness, which expresses itself in radical violence and cruelty.
In the novel, Peter Weiss attempted a similar radicalized realism. Weiss was one of the most sensitive and complex artists to comment on the Cold War reality of a split Germany. His monumental 1980s trilogy The Aesthetics of Resistance is a retrospective look at the German past, to create possible scenarios for the German future. In the novel he follows a fictitious anti-Nazi resistance group, who spend their time in intellectual disputes, and meet up in galleries and museums, to link their ideas of radicalism with the past ideas of art and ethics. The author does resist the bourgeois individualism often evoked by such discussions (as we know from the modernist novel, from Mann to Proust) by replacing a singular individual character with a collective political mind of the resistance group. In doing so, Weiss was looking at the aesthetic premises of sotsrealism: heroism, grand scale, nineteenth-century realism. Yet his novel is not simply a repetition of the previous realism, with its academism and conservatism, but instead manipulated consciousness by using devices and provoking specific emotions. It is a rare example of a historical novel, which for Lukacs was the pinnacle of realism.
So, at least in my language, the call for new kinds of representation is not meant to imply merely a return to Balzac or Brecht. Realism and the avant-garde are historical concepts, rooted in their time and place, and it’d be impossible to bring them back as they were without falling into quite obvious forms of kitsch, as it is clear from so many post-Soviet artists, who were, especially in the 90s, making “liberation art”, endlessly recalling the years of the regime. A new realism will include the new ways we live our lives today, unknown to the previous generations; the ways neoliberalism is perverting the spaces of our work and privacy; a new precarious aesthetic. The reason we exclaim often while watching The Wire or The Sopranos at the aptness and intelligence is that in fact they are syncretic. The Wire shows the full spectrum of the changing social classes, the personal is always attached to some wider impersonal structures: politics, union, police, financial. The world of Sopranos often uses oneiric, retrospective elements and unrealistic devices, but always in the end to enrich and nuances of the portrayal of the reality of its inhabitants. But what politics is produced by these serials? Might it only produce the protests like those against ACTA, when the thing that finally spurred young people was the ban on endless free downloads of their favorite serial? The availability of TV online, especially in this really refined latest form, only deepened the already existing retreat into the private zone. In the end, in the current climate, even the most intelligent television may transform your politics, but it won’t make you act.
German artist Hito Steyerl, in her essay Is the Museum a Factory? asks a question about the growing harmlessness of political art today, which is closed in the safe space of the museum. She even quotes Godard himself, who said recently that “video artists shouldn’t be afraid of reality” which suggests that they obviously are. This made me think about Wajda again, as Man of Marble and Man of Iron interestingly compare to Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory as oppositional “archaeologies of (non) representation of labour”, as Steyerl
describes Farocki’s film. Wajda wilfully fabricates the images of workers at work: in the factory, laying bricks or even starving and being beaten - and confronts that with the facadism of work shot “as newsreels”. Farocki doesn’t strictly shoot anything, putting together footage from eleven different decades depicting workers all over the world after they finish their day. Yet nobody in their right mind would call Farocki’s film ‘realistic’, just as Wajda’s film is realistic in an obvious way, shot in a “traditional”, historical movie manner.
Both depict the life of a worker living in the time of a manipulated world-image. Farocki’s work uses documentary and absolutely realistic parts, it uses unrealistic devices, and it’s neither a documentary nor a fiction film, but an installation, created in a way similar to the avant-garde – via editing, defamiliarization, the old avant-garde techniques. Maybe there are two kinds of realisms at play: while the traditional realism of Wajda or The Wire continues the old Story, the Great Narrative, the artist, whoever it is, will try to engage the viewer on a more intimate way. “Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor”, Steyerl quotes Frantz Fanon, postulating greater political closeness instead of spectatorship. The cinema which will embrace such intimacy, must be secondary, not primary, to the political space that emerges.