ABSTRACT
Benedict Anderson has described ‘the nation’ as an ‘imagined community’ forged through a visualisation of like-minded others in a process allegedly linked to the dissemination of print vernaculars from the sixteenth century onwards. This national selfconceptualisation involves the generation of rhetorics of nationhood by small would-be (bourgeois) (Anderson 1983:74) elites seeking to persuade both themselves and others of their power, inspire self-confident action and intimidate prospective opposition. The concept of nation, so often the phantasmal power-base of the bourgeois intelligentsia’s contestation of aristocratic establishments, becomes in the Polish case an opposition to institutions imposed by foreign powers. This early-modern imaginary visual selfdefinition may be piquantly juxtaposed with the actually visual, latemodern one permitted by a new technology as revolutionary as printing had been: that of cinema. Socialism’s claim to speak for ‘the people’, and post-war Poland’s status as a soi-disant socialist society, raise the question of whether the use of actual, rather than mental, images renders the process any more genuinely ‘popular’, or whether the struggle for the means of image-transmission remains one between elites. In the end the socialist’s dream of a unity of populace and elite materialises ironically, if briefly, in their ‘anti-socialist’ nemesis, the Solidarity movement (and, in cinema, in Andrzej Wajda’s Człowiek z żelaza [Man of Iron], 1981).
