Fourteen - Performing Polishness Abroad: (Non-)Polish Actors and the Construction of (Trans)National Identities in European Cinema

Summary

Introduction

Claiming that the experience of emigration has been crucial in shaping Polish national identity is little more than stating the obvious. As Izabela Kalinowska has noted, “Exile, a banishment from one's place of origin, presents one of the central problems around which modern Polishness was built.” This statement holds true not only because various forms of expatriation—from partitions-era exile over wartime displacement to economy-driven migration—have affected the lives of millions of Poles throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also because many of these expatriates—in particular the country's political and cultural elites—actively engaged in discussions about what it means to be a Pole (at home and abroad). While the roots of these emigre discourses on national identity can be traced back to the writings of Adam Mickiewicz in the early years of his Parisian exile—especially Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (The books of the Polish nation and of the Polish pilgrimage) (1832) and Pan Tadeusz (Mr. Thaddeus) (1834)—the rapid revival and adaptation of this quintessentially romantic paradigm within the changing geopolitical parameters of post–World War II Europe ultimately came to a close with the downfall of the communist regime in 1989 and the subsequent disappearance of exilic institutions and networks.

Taking the historically rooted connection between emigration and Polish national identity as a point of departure, this chapter turns its focus to filmmaking as a field of cultural production that has attracted relatively little attention in discussions of expatriate Polishness—especially when compared to the longstanding and continued academic interest in Polish exile literature and migrant writing. Only recently, efforts have been made to explore and examine the interconnectedness between the national and the transnational in the artistic output of Polish and Polish-born film professionals, including the work of internationally mobile filmmakers such as Jerzy Skolimowski, Roman Polański, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Paweł Pawlikowski. Meanwhile, however, as Ewa Mazierska has rightly observed, “A much less explored phenomenon is the presence of Polish actors and actresses in international cinema.” In this chapter, I intend to extend this line of inquiry by concentrating on the contribution of Polish (and non-Polish) performers to constructions of expatriate Polishness in foreign (European) feature film.