Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West

by Pyzik, Agata

  Yet Tyrmand remains interesting because he embodied certain aspirations just as naïve as those of his opponents. Dressed famously in colorful socks, listening to jazz, reading and writing Western-style literature, he became an idol of the nascent class of youth, born before the war, who only knew socialism, and who came of age around the Thaw. These people were the closest we had to the Americanized Western youth culture. There was the emergence of the student theatres like STS and Bim Bom, linking the traditions of surrealist avant-garde and poetry, a repressed memory of the war time illegal art and literature with the new spirit of jazz and new wave film - the spleen and the glamor of the beautiful actors in Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (1961). Their literature was Marek Hlasko and Tyrmand himself, their cinema was Wajda, Skolimowski and Polanski, their music was the highly original, Polonized jazz of Krzysztof Komeda, Tomasz Stanko and Zbigniew Namysłowski, published in the famous vinyl series Polish Jazz.

  However, like many other pro-Western bourgeois intellectuals before and after him, Tyrmand’s love of the West came from the fact that the West he knew was the cultivated and sophisticated world of Parisian museums. An author on the other side of political spectrum to Tyrmand, was the reporter Ryszard Kapuściński, who, elevated and educated by the communist system, becoming its flagship journalist, actually travelled to those less known territories subject to Western influence or domination. In his recent biography of Kapuściński, Artur Domosławski notes the incomprehension of the journalist’s contemporaries, who can’t really believe in these stories about ruthless French or American murderers.

  For the twenty-somethings at journalism school and Kultura, socialism is rather absurd, nothing but empty rituals and boredom. They dream of a comfortable life and the outside world: the West is where it’s at! Someone is going on a scholarship to the States, someone else is off on holiday to Western Europe. In the West these young people get a large dose of new impressions, experiences and ideas. Yet Kapuściński comes back from that outside world and speaks of the West as having enslaved the poor countries of the Third World, and of the curse of ‘American Imperialism’. For the young people, the stories of their colleague and master sound like sheer cant, while for Kapuściński ‘American imperialism’ is not a platitude but an accurate description, something he has touched, sniffed and seen.

  Domoslawski quotes one asking him ‘You don’t like America, but why do you carp at the French, too?’ ‘You know the French from Paris – cultured, educated people’, responds Kapuściński, ‘but I know the ones from the colonies. They are barbarians! If you get in their way or frustrate their business interests, they’ll kill you’. As in the frequently quoted saying from the transition – ‘they were lying to us when they told us about communism, but they were telling the truth about capitalism’.

  Were all the youth of Eastern Europe all eager westernizers? Polish-Jewish Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher saw the Russian youth movement otherwise, writing in the 1963 essay ‘The Soviet Union enters the second decade after Stalin’:

  Western observers of the Soviet scene are often struck by what they describe as the gradual Americanization of the Soviet way of life. They notice a general preoccupation with material comfort, a weariness with ideology and a craving for entertainment, widespread profiteering and blackmarketing, cynicism and pessimism among the young, especially among the Soviet beatniks, who look sometimes like real cousins of their Western counterparts. These observers conclude that Soviet society, or at least its upper strata, are undergoing a process of embourgeoisment…This view seems to me erroneous. The general preoccupation with material comfort is real enough; and so (after half a century of wars, revolutions, and Stalinist terror) is the longing for a relaxed, easy-going life. Yet, the so-called Americanization is rather superficial and transient (although it is connected to some extent with the Soviet ambition to catch up with the USA industrially).

  ‘The little profiteer’ – continues Deutscher – ‘the beatnik, the stilyaga, and the enthusiastic admirer of the latest Western pop song and dance, who so quickly catch the eye of the Western visitor – all of these are marginal characters.’ To Deutscher, the appearance of the westernized youth, stilyagi or bikiniarze, didn’t change the natural course of the society’s structure. The 1950s were the era when the workers could re-embrace the equality from the times preceding Stalinism, regardless of the other social classes inertia. Thaw generation poets like Yevtushenko, reaching for the ‘values of the 20s’, were hugely popular and it was them, for Deutscher, who were really the avant-garde and the rebels of that era, not the stilyagi. The ‘resurgent egalitarianism’ was the word of the day. It was very different to Tyrmand’s simple equivalence between consumerism and subversion. Both Polish Jews, divided by a generation, Tyrmand and Deutscher could not have had more different ideas about young people under socialism and their desires.

  5.11 War fashion. A photoshoot in the ruins of Warsaw in Ty i Ja, 1960s.

  You and Me and Things: Socialist Objects of Desire

  As capitalism grew and reached its heights via textile production in nineteenth-century England, textiles and capitalism, textiles and production seem to be a perfect way of discussing the meanders of both production and social reality under communism. Its most obvious consequence, fashion, is erratic, passing, unstable and speculative – precisely what socialist production didn’t want to be. In this way fashion behaves like a modernist, avant-garde movement, which has to erase everything solid, in a permanent revolution of dress. Yet Soviet man was supposed to be focused on something not only stable, but something eternal, something monumental.

  As Dick Hebdige puts it his Cartography of Taste, in the UK ‘although during the Cold War the prospect of Soviet territorial ambitions could provoke similar indignation and dread, American cultural imperialism demanded a more immediate interpretative response…America was seen by many as an immediate embodiment of the future taken from Huxley’s Brave New World, Fyvel’s Subtopia, Spengler’s megalopolis, or Hoggart’s Kosy Holiday Kamp. Since 1930 the US served as an image of industrial barbarism…A country without a past and therefore no real culture, ruled by competition’. Yet it had its extremely appealing popular culture and fashion. Fashion was an obsession and real factor during the Cold War, enforcing the easy qualifications that everything exciting comes from the West. So if fashion, as a thing that relies on a changeability that is erratic, uncontrollable, unstable, is like a metaphor for capitalism itself, what then of fashion under a planned economy, that couldn’t and wouldn’t be subjugated to the terror of supply and demand?

  Fashion was in the post-45 Poland a matter of negotiating between what was available, what was smuggled and what could be self-produced. Women had to become at once fashion designers, illegal fair-hunters and queuing masters, trying to guide themselves to what was fashionable. Creativity, DIY and also a desire for Western goods was mediated by Przekroj and Ty i Ja, with their “moral mission” of showing post-war society a way through the perils of censorship. Fashion definitely existed in real socialism, but it wasn’t really ‘fashion’ in the capitalist sense, fast-moving and fast changing. DIY, practiced by everybody in Soviet Bloc, was closer to anti-fashion, made against the industrial dialectics of supply and demand. Because of the unavailability of goods or the poor quality of the local production, DIY magazines and TV programmes flourished across the Bloc, counselling its citizens in areas as different as fashion and science, furniture and electric inventions, at the same time trying to trivialize the shortages and cover for the poor quality of goods by promoting the popular wisdom and the terrific skills lying dormant in every Mr and Mrs Smith.

  According to Marshal Tito, socialism was an ‘essentially consumerist society’, and Yugoslavia, as a part of the non-aligned movement, definitely belonged to the most liberalized in this matter in the whole of Eastern Europe. Yet it differed in this to the official version in the Bloc, where magazines promoted goods that were completely unachievable for any settled citizen,
and unless smuggled, could only exist as the dark objects of consumerist desires.

  Yet there were counter-strategies against the grayness, which from today’s perspective can be seen as an attempt at extending the high-minded pre-war status of upper classes rather than the mere imitation of America. But the goods craved by the youth were not only cultural, they wanted good alcohol, cigarettes, pants and silk stockings (the crucial commodity through which Maria Braun makes her spectacular post-war career, in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun). In socialism, one is not supposed to desire something as low as mere things and in any film from the early 50s material goods barely existed. One was supposed to withdraw the craving of things and work hard for the sake of the future and an always-postponed prosperity. This strangely enough corresponded with the pre-war ideology of the nobleman cultural intelligentsia of Poland. There, you were not supposed to be materialistic or admit you want things, which you were giving up in the name of higher, immaterial ideals. Ironically enough then, in this sense the new, post-war socialist ideal was adopted from the former upper classes.

  How else could it have ended up apart from an even greater craving for the goods one was deprived of? In the Bloc, the mystery surrounding Western goods added to their metaphysical mystique, much in the Benjaminian sense of the “aura”, yet augmented by the fact that even with money you still wouldn’t be able to have them! Unless you had some amazing contacts within the Politburo, knew someone or were yourself involved with the smuggling of foreign goods to the black market (the essence of Warsaw described by Tyrmand), all you had was the fantasy. In later years, our freedom to buy was extended via the special foreign currency chain Pewex, where many sighed-about Western goods were available, including blue American jeans, but only with Western hard currency. It seems that we’re still seen via this prism of fantasy-power by our Western counterparts. Some films from the time took this easy dichotomy and pushed it to the point of absurdity and destruction.

  5.12a Everyday surrealism. Ty i Ja (You and I) luxury magazine, designed by Roman Cieslewicz.

  Does it matter? It doesn’t matter! An invitation to destruction

  In Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) two young women do nothing for the entire film, apart from: eating; lying on their bed in flamboyant costumes; rolling in a meadow; chatting up men and making them pay for them in exclusive restaurants; catching flies; sitting/lying down, neglige, in stupefaction, like mechanical dolls; awkwardly trying to attract men to then run away from; and throwing and wasting enormous amounts of hard won and fought for socialist food, in an obvious act of disdain for Czechoslovakian men and women workers’ toil and socialist values. If anything, Daisies is driven by a sense of play, so rare in cinema, with an open-ended structure, which at best works as a series of episodes. If the stabilized socialist society (as we can call the 1960s) could be characterized by the rigidity of norms, conformity, lack of spontaneity, oppression, stiff rules directing every moment of life, then everything the two Marias do is aimed exactly as disclosing the organism’s diseased bones, as if even the slightest blow of unruliness could easily overthrow this carefully constructed mediocrity. In fact, the state’s power wasn’t exactly that frail at all, as the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion and the end of the Prague Spring made most clear. But to maintain the ideology – similarly in Poland or USSR – the conformity of others was essential.

  Made two years before the Prague Spring, Daisies was the product of a deep socialism, with all its sleepiness, sheepishness, closure of perspectives and with a return to private, family life. Daisies goes precisely against all this. Shot in radical, strong, ‘hippie’ tie-dyed colors, it also went against the greyness of socialism, creating an anarchic alternative. Daisies remains one of the rarest and strongest satires and subversive fantasies of a life under socialism, which never really took place. Maria and Maria from Chytilová’s film remind me of the ‘theory of form’ developed by the Polish modernist writer Witold Gombrowicz. In his view, form is something negative: a pervading power of conformity, turning us into pitiful members of mass society, an opposition to which would be a romantic aristocrat of the old type. Yet Gombrowicz was rather up for the un-made man, a man without qualities, without feelings, without dependencies. No wonder he never came back to communist Poland, but before he became canonized as a writer in France, he preferred the life of an sexual outcast in Buenos Aires, much in the Jean Genet lowlife/whore-affirmative way.

  The two Maries are on a mission to unmake the socialist stereotypes of womanhood: mother, wife, worker, nice girl from youth organisation, homemaker. They want to live on the margins of this society, still manipulatively using their girlishness to obtain their goals: a free dinner, adoration and lots of fun at men’s expense. At the same time Maria and Maria’s excesses visibly bring them little jouissance. Whenever they’re up to something fiendish, they have their little dialogue: Does it matter? It doesn’t matter! Precisely: whatever they do, it doesn’t matter. The fun derived from breaking the rules, from constant line-crossing lasts perhaps two minutes, only to make room for the usual dullness and boredom (even hopelessness) once again. The more they try, the more they go to an excess, the more pointless it is. They’re on a quest for form. They are women – which means within the society they don’t have an inherent form just by themselves. What for Gombrowicz was a blessing and a liberation – escaping the overpowering form, becoming a dandy of the spirit, a ready product to be admired - for them becomes the reason they fall. “We will be hard working and everything will be clean” they promise. “And then we’ll be happy”.

  People who have fallen out of form is a frequent topic in socialist era Czech film, because not working was the highest form of subversion in countries where it would straight away qualify you as a ‘loafer’. In Of the Party and the Guests, Jan Němec’s 1967 film, a group of upper echelon system beneficiaries lose their form. In turn, they are left adrift – without the system that made them feel important, they’re nothing. Planning a nice picnic with their wives, they suddenly are taken over by a mysterious group of people – apparatchiks? Government officials? Best not to ask too many questions. Again, there’s an obsession with food which can never be consumed, just like in Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

  Are the Daisies’ Marias bored, or empty or simply stupid? Their waste of time, labor, food, and the pointlessness of their own ways suggest they are outcasts of society – and they suffer because of that. Is this film really a praise of anarchy? The girls are rather dejected and depressed by all of the increasingly scandalous pranks they perform, so joyless. They exist between automated dolls from horror movies and eccentrics from a Beckett play. Self-reflection makes them unhappy. The two Marias are also women reclaiming their time, which normally is supposed to be spent on work, nursing men and children. They try (and fail) to realize their dreams: of a pure virgin, parading on a meadow with a wreath on her head. They plant flowers and vegetables on their bed, their room is a laboratory of fantasy. They seem constantly hungry. The motif of food and femininity in Daisies is strictly surrealist and had great traditions in Czech art, which produced some of the most interesting art in that spirit. Food as fetish, as sexual object was often a factor in Czech surrealist art and film, from the 1930s paintings of Toyen to the animations of Jan Švankmajer.

  In Švankmajer’s work food becomes basically “existential” and stands for the general hopelessness of human existence; the hopeless mundanity, the routine and repeatability of everyday activities, such as eating three meals a day. This is also deeply felt in the short film ‘Meat Love’, and is a motif that he repeats in his late film Lunacy, which was partly inspired by Marquis de Sade, a huge influence present also, in a sardonic way, in his Conspirators of Pleasure. The world of Švankmajer is always impossibly twisted and distorted to the degree that we barely recognize the familiar elements, stripped down to the libidinal rudiments of id, all-consuming, violent and unpredictable.

  5.13 Not for human con
sumption. Food anarchy in Daisies.

  The screenplay for Daisies was developed together with Pavel Juráček and Ester Krumbachová, two artists in their own right - especially Krumbachová, a strikingly original costume designer, writer and director, and a somehow tragic, unfulfilled figure, who collaborated with Chytilová also on the oneiric Fruits of Paradise, and co-wrote several exuberant surrealist Czech classics, like On the Party And The Guests by Jan Němec, Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear, and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders by Jaromir Jires, but then, as a self-reliant director she didn’t have similar success. Watching her only film, The Murder of Mister Devil (1970) we see that despite being possessed by an extraordinary visual imagination, on her own Krumbachová couldn’t go beyond a combination of visual gags, without a principle organizing it. In Mister Devil, the visual means overshadow the actual content. We see a perfect bourgeois woman in a perfect flat preparing a real feast for her rather unimpressive functionary partner/husband. The feast is completely disproportionate to the small scale of the evening, yet the dishes just keep coming and coming, more and more breathtaking, and the whole film reminds me rather of Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe or a similar transgressive anti-capitalist 70s fantasy. Yet given the title, and the superb poster, in which the screaming man is drowned and eaten in a ice-cream sundae by a smiling Medusa-woman - designed by Eva Galová-Vodrázková, in the best traditions of the Czech and Polish school of poster, with excessive irony and surreal/dada spirit, from where Linder Sterling must’ve learned some of her technique too - it was a strongly feminist statement playing with anti-feminist sentiments, about a woman who’s using one of her only ‘weapons’ - food, as a way to make everything in the world implode.