Ku Polsce, czyli obrazy powstań śląskich i plebiscytu w polskim filmie
Towards Poland, or Images of the Silesian Uprisings and the Plebiscite in Polish Films

Summary/Abstract: The author follows the traces of the Silesian uprisings and the plebiscite in post-war Polish cinema. The main thread of the article is preceded by an exploration of the pre-war manifestations of the screen life of these motifs. Apart from the two films from the 1960s: "Rodzina Milcarków" ("The Milcarek Family", 1962) by Józef Wyszomirski and the myth-making folk-ballad "Sól ziemi czarnej" ("Salt of the Black Earth", 1969) by Kazimierz Kutz, only a few episodes of Zbigniew Chmielewski’s television series "Blisko, coraz bliżej" ("Close, Getting Closer", 1982; broadcast on television in 1983-1986) were devoted to this topic. This modest corpus is complemented by "Bracia" ("Brothers", 2006) by Józef Kłyk, an amateur filmmaker. The uprisings were often represented on screen in documentaries, instrumentalized in the ideological spirit of the People’s Republic of Poland, shown in educational contexts or those presenting cinema as a machinery of memory. However, the repertoire of “landscapes of memory” about the uprisings and the plebiscite from a hundred years ago is yet to be completed.

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