ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the shifting meanings of Chopin’s music in Polish biopics, documentaries, and experimental films. Chopin’s historical status was reinvented repeatedly by Polish filmmakers during periods of political instability in Poland: by the end of Second World War (1944–45), at the height of the Stalinist period (1949–52), and after the transition to democracy (1990–91). Chopin served different cultural ends in these films: as an emblem of societal trauma, as an epitome of social progress, and later, as a symptom of collective melancholia. Each reconfiguration, this chapter argues, was rooted in nostalgia of a nation struggling to rebuild itself after the war and communism. With these evolutionary threads, a largely unexplored cultural history of Chopin’s music during the German occupation, the Stalinist period, and the early 1990s, Poland can be traced.
