Partia na srebrnym ekranie
Party on the Silver Screen

Summary/Abstract: This article reviews a monograph in the field of visual history by Piotr Zwierzchowski on the cin- ematic representations of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Its author treated cinema as a source of knowledge about history and culture. Focusing on film representations of the Polish United Workers’ Party allows us to look at the history of Polish cinema differently. The scale of the issue reveals the everyday life of cinematography, which, after all, is not limited to films generally regarded as out- standing. A large proportion of the films discussed in the monograph belong to such productions. Few among them were works that went down in the history of Polish cinema. The author focuses primarily on the relationship between cinema, politics, ideology and rhetoric. He draws attention to the relations between different discourses and uses a variety of sources and cultural texts. Con- sidering newsreels, documentaries, feature films, series and television plays, he goes beyond the existing canon by considering films by lesser-known filmmakers. He also makes use of the press of the time and archival material, thanks to which he has been able to reconstruct the fate of individual films, the processes of negotiating meanings, the interpretative strategies of the time, the relation- ship with other cultural texts and, finally, the details of the political contexts.

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