Małomiasteczkowe pejzaże w kinie polskim lat 50.
Small-town landscapes in Polish cinema of the 1950s

Summary/Abstract: The heroine of The Bus Leaves at 6:20 (1954) by Jan Rybkowski leaves behind the stuffy space of a small town: small houses, courtyards, cobbled streets and a small market square where a carousel has just set up. The beginning of Rybkowski’s film brings one of the first neorealist images of every day life, which, however, has to give way to socialist realist landscapes: the smoking chimneys of factories and steelworks in Silesia will provide the heroine with dignity and freedom. Small towns were included in this and similar dichotomies: freedom – enslavement, persistence – change, and even political – private, also in subsequent films of this decade, although these categories, depending on the author’s strategy or the dominant social mood, were assigned different values and given different meanings. In Winter Twilight by Stanisław Lenartowicz, The Small Town (both 1956) by Jerzy Ziarnik, The Small Town (1958/1960) by Romuald Drobaczyński, Julian Dziedzina and Janusz Łęski, the third novella of Cross of Valour (1958) and Nobody’s Calling (1960) by Kazimierz Kutz, the space of the town and its material reality influenced the way of life of the protagonists, became evidence of the fall, a closed circle from which one cannot escape, but also contributed to the in validation of the political perspective and allowed for a different passage of time and way of life.

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