ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to discuss how the remnants of socialism are represented in Polish postcommunist cinema. I am interested in the position taken by filmmakers in the debate about what should be preserved from the socialist past, why and how. Such a debate has taken place in virtually every country, which made the transition from state socialism to postcommunism. Where the next two chapters also focus on place and space, Pedersen’s on landscape and Dakovic’s on cityscape, my chapter primarily concerns material objects, such as buildings and monuments, because much is at stake in saving or destroying them, often including the livelihoods of millions of people. 1 Monuments and buildings, however, also have symbolic meanings: they stand for specific traditions, lifestyles and values. More often than not, these traditions, lifestyles and values are contested, for example Berlin’s Palace of the Republic or Warsaw’s Palace of Culture. For some sections of society these buildings (the first one no longer exists) stand for totalitarianism and the subjugation of the citizens of Eastern Europe to Soviet rule. For others, they symbolize the service of the socialist state to the people, and its subsidized access to culture. Whether these and other buildings are saved or not often depends not only on the state of their material structure or even their usefulness to their current and future users, but also on their ideological superstructure; namely, whose memory proves stronger in contests of postcommunist memory. Films, of course, and their interpretation, provide arguments for preserving or destroying the material and figurative (narrative and symbolic) monuments, remnants or ruins of the communist past.
