Women’s lives, by no means spectacular, banal in fact, say as much about politics as no end of theoretical political analysis.
slavenka drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, 1991
On 10 February 1971, a strike over economic conditions broke out in the industrial city of Łódź, catching the communist authorities off-guard: it was
First, Ostrowska argues, Polish collective memory is structured around traumatic events that privilege loss over achievement. Second, this cultural memory script perpetuates traditional gender divisions in that men are represented as active historical agents, whereas women are consigned to the role of passive observers and, often, mourners of male sacrifice. The Łódź strike does not fit this scenario and, consequently, has been marginalized within the memory texts of Polish culture.3 Indeed, writing much later in the 2000s, both Polish historian Natalia Jarska and sociologist Grzegorz Matuszak termed it alternatively “the forgotten rebellion” or “the forgotten strike” (zapomniany bunt or zapomniany strajk).4
The Łódź women were driven by the same economic desperation as the workers who had been gunned down in the Baltic cities two months earlier. The trouble started on 12 December 1970, when the Polish government substantially raised prices on nearly all food items, creating hardship for the majority of Polish families. The cost of meat, in particular, doubled.5 The workers’
Gierek, however, insisted on going through with the hike in food prices after entering office, and the Łódź weavers—many of whom were single mothers—were left in a financially untenable situation. Since weaving was considered a “light industry,” they earned on average 20 percent less than their colleagues engaged in “heavy industry,” like shipbuilding on the Baltic Sea coast.6 Moreover, the machinery they used was extremely outdated, and health and safety measures were ineffective. Historian Krzysztof Lesiakowski estimates that 40 percent of the machines had been produced before World War Two, and 20 percent before the First. In addition to servicing obsolete equipment, Lesiakowski notes that the weavers inevitably worked in spaces characterized by extremely loud noise, poor ventilation, and high temperatures.7 The additional burden placed on women once they reached home was even acknowledged internally by the party. The March 1971 government report on the strikes noted “the firmness and persistence” of the workers in defending their right to a raise. It estimated that 70 to 80 percent of those striking were women, adding that “the sensitivity and emotional nature of the women, aggravated by difficult living conditions—carrying the load of work, responsibility for the home, and family duties, compounded by the underdeveloped state of numerous services in the city as well as poor housing—has led to the escalation of their demands and [their] increased determination.”8
On 10 February 1971 at noon, four hundred weavers stopped their machines at the Marchlewski Cotton Mill. Within a few hours, 180 workers at the Stomil Shoe and Rubber Factory did the same. Since there could be no strikes in a socialist state, the Polish press agency would only vaguely gesture to “interruptions of work in some factories.”9 More and more workers followed suit each day. By 15 February, a total of fifty-five thousand workers were on strike, and the government was forced to give in. That evening, the government announced
Nevertheless, the 1970–1971 strikes managed to instill a fear of the working class in the party leadership, and Gierek spent the rest of the decade procuring international loans to buoy the Polish economy. In their speeches, Gierek and other party officials spoke of “an economic miracle,” promoted “dynamic development,” and claimed that Poland was the “eighth largest economic power in the world.”10 The media were encouraged to spread this “propaganda of success.”11 As a result, popular comedies and television programs began to feature consumer goods more prominently. This was true not only in Poland but across the socialist bloc. As Susan Reid has demonstrated, the Soviet Union “staked its legitimacy at home, and its credibility abroad, on its ability to provide its population with consumer goods and a decent standard of living” starting as early as the 1950s.12 Anikó Imre has, in turn, powerfully argued that this general “shift from production to consumption and lifestyle in the competition with the West … moved the spotlight onto women as key agents of socialist citizenship.”13
Though cinema was initially tasked with flaunting the supposed material abundance of socialist countries, by the late socialist period, popular comedies were openly satirizing its lack. Nowhere was the critique of the state’s inability to provide for its citizens more biting, however, than in documentary. This was due in part to the cinéma vérité aesthetic that prevailed for much of this period, and in part to the fact that documentary, seen as a lesser cinematic form, was subjected to far less rigorous censorship. Documentary shorts would occasionally be screened before fiction films in theaters, but more often, they were shown exclusively in a small handful of art cinemas (kina studyjne), at festivals, and at special themed screening series. Consequently, it is hard to gauge the impact of these films, which were viewed mostly by a subsection of the country’s intelligentsia. It is quite likely that it was minimal at best. But this does not negate their activist charge. Many documentarians saw their films as a means of bringing different strata of society into conversation with each other, drawing attention to festering problems, advocating for those in
Film scholars generally concur that there were many more women to be found in documentary rather than fiction filmmaking due to entrenched gender discrimination in the industry. The job of the fiction film director was seen as requiring a distinctly masculine form of authority, and women were rarely trusted with budgets as big as those for fiction films. The roster of Polish women fiction film directors during this period was short: Agnieszka Holland, Barbara Sass, Ewa Kruk. Yet for many women, documentary was not “second best” but an affirmative choice: they saw it as a tool to investigate social realities and promote concrete change. This chapter examines work by two of these courageous figures—Krystyna Gryczełowska and Irena Kamieńska—both of whom produced searing critiques of the state’s treatment of women. In The 24 Hours of Jadwiga L. (24 godziny Jadwigi L., 1967), Gryczełowska identified the deep-seated frustration that would give birth to the 1971 strike. In Our Friends from Łódź (Nasze znajome z Łodzi, 1971), she consciously set out to analyze it. Ten years later, in Women Workers (Robotnice, 1980), Irena Kamieńska would follow in Gryczełowska’s footsteps, revealing just how little had changed in terms of the Łódź women’s wages and working conditions nearly a decade later. Together, their films provide a model of the ways in which film was uniquely capable of documenting the so-called “double burden” of a full shift at the factory followed by a full shift at home and communicating the fatigue it engendered to the viewer. They also demonstrate how officially sanctioned narrative tropes and discourse could be turned on their head—and against the state.
1 Reinscribing Women Documentarians into Polish Film History
Irena Kamieńska was born in 1928; Krystyna Gryczełowska in 1931. Both belong to the same generation as Kazimierz Karabasz, born in 1930 and often described as the “father” of Polish documentary film. A number of factors contributed to the cementing of Karabasz’s legacy. He assumed a directorial role immediately upon joining the Documentary Film Studio in Warsaw in the mid-1950s; taught at the Łódź Film School for countless years, where he was known as a kind and
Kamieńska and Gryczełowska, together with Danuta Halladin, are considered to be leading documentary filmmakers of the same period, but they toiled in relative obscurity until the Polish National Audiovisual Institute digitized some of their films and released them on a combined dvd in 2008. In a booklet accompanying the films, Mikołaj Jazdon, a leading Polish film historian, argued that “it is difficult to imagine Polish documentary cinema without their films,” though he was also quick to note that “they never created films together, neither were their achievements linked through a common denominator.”15 What the three did share, however, is an interest in working women’s everyday life. Now that they have died, it is hard to know the exact nature of the challenges they faced. Gender discrimination may have played a part, or it may have been the “double burden” that would become the subject of several of their films. The fact remains that the women took longer to find their way. Gryczełowska wrote commentary for others’ films before directing her first documentary in 1959. Kamieńska initially studied medicine and came to filmmaking late, enrolling at the Łódź Film School from 1958 to 1964 and graduating with her diploma in film in 1967. Though Danuta Halladin also made two short documentaries about women factory workers, she did so in the late 1980s, which places the films beyond the scope of this article.16
Regardless of when exactly they got their start, however, all were profoundly shaped by the so-called “Black Series”: a flurry of documentary films produced roughly between 1956 and 1960, when Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin generated a period of relative cultural liberalization. These short documentaries seized the opportunity to draw attention to previously unmentionable social problems such as alcoholism, prostitution, and dissolute youth. Intentionally didactic, the films saw themselves as critical interventions in social reality capable of effecting change in the world. The “Black Series” set the tone for much of Polish documentary to follow, establishing it as a mode of filmmaking deeply invested in probing—and ultimately improving—the social reality
In interviews, Gryczełowska credited Italian neorealism with showing her that “it was possible to make a beautiful film about people in bleak circumstances.”17 It is perhaps this willingness to embrace desolation that separates both women’s work most clearly from that of Karabasz, who in his own studies of factory workers, sought out moments of dignity and uplift. His most famous film, The Musicians (Muzykanci, 1960), for example, juxtaposed tramway car builders’ movements at work with their gestures once they come together to practice as a factory orchestra. Gryczełowska’s and Kamieńska’s films are much bleaker—and, consequently, more rebellious. Their aim is not to help the viewer find some element of redemption in the contemporary Polish reality but to revolt against it. Therefore, they are also more polemical than exploratory, and their films are structured to convey a clear message about something that needs to be urgently addressed. As Gryczełowska herself would later say, “our films paid attention to those who were in need and whose situation required intervention.”18 In 1967, she would turn her attention to working mothers worn down by the dual demands of work and home.
1.1 24 Hours in the Life of Jadwiga L. (1968)
Films about women’s labour were nothing new in the socialist bloc. Indeed, socialist realist ideological vehicles, from the Soviet The Radiant Path (Светлый путь, 1940) to its Polish equivalent Adventure at Mariensztadt (Przygoda na Mariensztacie, 1954), found it advantageous to depict the emergence of a socialist consciousness through the experience of women. Their protagonists—women engaged in reproductive labour in the countryside—would become open to the possibility of industrial labour through a chance encounter with an attractive, already socially conscious man. They would move to the city and begin working, proving their worth through sheer effort and willpower. Eventually, their success in official worker competitions would bring them both public acclaim and the love and admiration of the men who had set them on this path. These films communicated two promises to women viewers: first, that a move from agricultural or domestic work in the village to industrial work in the city would necessarily lead to social advancement; and,
The “double burden,” of course, was by no means unique to state socialist countries, nor did state policy adhere to a clear East-West divide. In Western Europe, concern for working mothers seems to have peaked twice in the course of the twentieth century: in the 1920s, as a result of women socialists and trade unionists’ tireless campaigns for women’s rights, and in the years immediately following World War Two, when freshly victorious labour governments ushered in the welfare state. Inevitably, more radical suggestions, such as Norwegian socialists’ push for a “mothers’ wage” in the late 1910s and 1920s, when adopted, were rebranded as policies that benefited children rather than mothers (in this particular case as “child’s allowance”).20 Still, there was a growing recognition, particularly in the immediate postwar period, of the need for the state to provide at least a modicum of child care (if not relief from domestic work) so women could join or continue in the work force. This was the case in Western Europe only, of course, and not in the United States, where government policy actively sought to encourage women who had begun working as part of the war effort to return to full-time homemaking and child-rearing.
What was unique to state-socialist countries was thus not the fact of the double burden itself but rather the cognitive dissonance between the official state line on this question and the reality on the ground. When the Bolsheviks first took power, establishing the Soviet Union, they made gender equality a central tenet, granting women the right to work outside the home and promising to transform domestic duties—described by Lenin himself as “barbaric, unproductive, petty, enervating, stupefying, and depressing”—into collective remunerated labour.21 As scholars Natalia Roudakova and Deborah
The misery of working mothers, therefore, remained an open but unspoken secret, seen as both too prosaic to be worthy of public interest and too threatening since it undermined one of the regime’s proudest claims. Even the documentaries that succeeded the socialist realist fairy tales of the 1960s tended to focus on the less problematic portion of the female population: young, unmarried women. These films fell largely into two groups: portraits of young women excited to be starting their professional lives (such as Danuta Halladin’s At Rosa’s from 6 to 11 (U Róży od 6-ej do 11-ej, 1963) and Karabasz’s Krystyna M. (1973)); and those that sought to bring attention to the largely all-women provincial textile centers where it was nearly impossible for women to meet a partner and start a family in the first place (such as Helena Amiradżibi’s Zambrów (1962) and Irena Kamieńska’s Island of Women (Wyspa kobiet, 1968)).
Krystyna Gryczełowska
source: photograph (filmoteka narodowa—instytut audiowizualny [polish national film archive—audiovisual institute], 1-p-248-6)
In this fictional and documentary film landscape, Gryczełowska’s The 24 Hours of Jadwiga L. stood out as a film that dared to portray a long festering but unacknowledged problem. It is impossible to know whether Gryczełowska had seen Croatian director Krešimir Golik’s documentary From 3am to 10pm (Od 3 do 22), produced a year and a half earlier in 1966, or whether the two
Gryczełowska films her protagonist in unglamorous medium shots, much like the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman would film her protagonist in the now-canonical feminist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). For the most part, she allows Jadwiga to occupy the center of the frame, filming her from the mid-thigh up. The only exception to this are the repeated close-ups of Jadwiga’s legs and those of her co-workers at the factory which, in film scholar Paulina Duda’s words, “emphasize how their sensual function is undermined by physical weariness.”26 Indeed, the film opens with a starkly lit close-up of Jadwiga pulling stockings over her legs while an actual film noir plays off-screen on the television. This shot introduces the idea of a sensual femme fatale that the rest of the film goes on to undercut. Where the femme fatale is typically active, Jadwiga seems to passively drift along, driven onward by sheer momentum; where the femme fatale attracts dramatic events, Jadwiga’s life is an unending expanse of repetition and routine; finally, where the body of the femme fatale is an end in and of itself, Jadwiga’s body is only ever a means—of production and (social) reproduction. In this way, that single opening shot primes us to approach Jadwiga’s life critically, in terms of everything it is—and is not.
The soundtrack, too, plays an important role in emphasizing how Jadwiga has been brutalized—reduced to sheer animal life. Except for the dialogue of the off-screen film noir, a quick goodbye to her husband, and some words exchanged with colleagues during their break, we never get a proper verbal sequence. There is no voice-over to tell us what to think or any music, diegetic or non-diegetic, to add a moment of lightness. What the film offers instead is wall-to-wall bangs, clangs, hisses, creaks, and clinks. This auditory starkness reinforces the idea of a hostile, bleak world in which Jadwiga is but one machine among others.
Everything about the film, from Jadwiga’s abbreviated name in the title to the twenty-four-hour structure drives home the idea that the film is not about this particular woman but rather about all the women she represents. This is a clever move on Gryczełowska’s part. The official task of socialist realist art had been to present the “typical” person—in a highly idealized way. Here, Gryczełowska turns this officially sanctioned narrative structure into a tool of critique simply by adopting it all too earnestly—by doing exactly what the
Though Jadwiga is not a weaver and the film does not address prices, it nevertheless gives a tangible form to the frustrations that would, three years later, drive the women of Łódź into the streets. Moreover, it goes beyond merely naming the double burden: it draws on the specific affordances of cinema as a medium to make that exhaustion felt. The careful framing and the minimalist soundtrack combine to give viewers at least some sense of the indignities and hardships Jadwiga endures daily. Consequently, it draws our attention to the way submission and resistance play out not just in the public sphere but in everyday life. As historian Padraic Kenney writes, “we need to consider how women and men experienced communism and ask whether the denial of free organizations and censorship were the most painful repressions or whether the experience of communism at home or in the streets and stores was equally impelling.”27 Gryczełowska’s film, in documenting the meaningless toil at the factory, the time wasted in grocery store lines, and the ceaseless work of homemaking, makes a strong case for the latter.
Daily responsibilities, troubles, and problems do not often make their way into the cinema, even in documentary. Filmmakers usually look for the exceptional, the impressive, the shocking. Meanwhile, everyday life can also be a touching and important topic. […] The camera accompanies Jadwiga when she goes to work late in the evening, observes her in the factory, records conversations during break, the general weariness as the dawn approaches. And then home—sending the children off to school, shopping for groceries, cleaning, preparing lunch, a brief nap, lunch all together, […] washing up, some rest, and again to work. Life is not easy. […] For a long time we have not had a documentary film which, in taking up a socially just cause, would be so full of informational content.28
Camera (Kamera) magazine, in the meantime, recognized the documentary as the portrait of a “typical woman” that “very realistically portrays everyday life” but argued that presenting “truth and only the truth … is not enough.”
1.2 Our Friends from Łódź (1971)
Gryczełowska’s subsequent film, Our Friends From Łódź, was shot immediately in the aftermath of the 1971 strikes and would make clear that the women’s misery was not their fault but that of a state that underpaid and exploited them, as well as a patriarchal culture that insisted on viewing housework as “women’s work.” This time around, the director sought to address not just a particular stage in a woman’s life—which, after all, one could argue might get easier once the children are grown—but the way in which the overall arc of her life, from youth to late middle age, was predetermined. The film consists of three mini-portraits: of a young woman just starting out in professional life, a single mother with three young children, and a middle-aged woman with grown daughters. Each one is identified by a title card bearing her first name only: Urszula, Helena, Genowefa. Gryczełowska again stays away from voice-of-God narration that tells the viewer what to think, using the medium instead to foreground the women’s voices. One cannot help but wonder if Jadwiga’s silence, meant to convey how beaten down and hopeless she feels, has given way to a somewhat greater sense of agency in the wake of the strikes—or at least a tangible need to help the women speak, and to listen. Indeed, Ostrowska, in her study of the filmic representation of Łódz textile workers, singles the film out as the only one “in which the female protagonists openly articulate
Irena Kamieńska
source: photograph (filmoteka narodowa—instytut audiowizualny [polish national film archive—audiovisual institute], 1-f-3103-33)
As one might expect, the nineteen-year-old Urszula is full of hope and desires “a concrete” profession far from the factory, “a good husband, a beautiful apartment with nice furniture,” and “two children, twins: two boys.” The older women are increasingly tired and bitter. Helena speaks of her exhaustion and her inability to give her children a decent standard of living; Genowefa—about the debilitating physical effects of her many years at the factory, her frustration with the lack of help from her husband, and her hope that if they go to university, her daughters might escape her fate. Though the personalities of the three women are quite different, it is clear that they are meant to be read simultaneously as three separate individuals and three stages in a composite individual’s life. Though Urszula, the youngest, may be full of optimism, the film implies that it won’t last long—she is bound to move through the same stages as Helena and Genowefa; the factory labour that she now sees as a temporary way to earn a livelihood while looking for romance will soon become
Where socialist realism had promised women empowerment and self-determination, Our Friends From Łódź demonstrates just how few options are available to them in reality. In the weaving capital of Poland, employment is largely limited to the main industry in town; in a patriarchal society with double standards, romantic choices are limited to living with men who refuse to help, like Genowefa, or, like Helena, living without them. What is worse, the film argues that the system takes away not only the women’s hopes and sense of agency but also their physical health and their most rudimentary sense of self. Each of the three portraits sketches out a stage in the arc of the women’s progressive alienation from their own bodies. Gryczełowska interviews Urszula as she gets ready to go out: she shares her dreams for the future as she brushes her hair and applies make-up, drawing attention to the body as an object. In addition to seeing Urszula at work, we also follow her to a dance class in the park. As Ostrowska notes, this scene is “less about the objectification of the female body” than “about the reclamation of her body from the (communist) regime of work.”32 Indeed, Urszula seems at her happiest and least self-conscious in this scene.
If Urszula’s body is a sexualized body still capable of pleasure, Ostrowska argues, then Helena’s body is “almost exclusively … a maternal body” defined by her relationship to her children, and Genowefa’s is a “sick body,” defined by her various medical conditions.33 The film’s suggestion is clear: the sense of autonomy Urszula feels over her body, her ability to “shake off” the stultifying postures of factory labour, is temporary: as time goes on, her body will be increasingly instrumentalized until, like Jadwiga L.’s, it is only a means and not an end in and of itself. Polish film scholar Justyna Jaworska also notes that the women’s hair in the three segments becomes an important symbol of their aspirations and priorities. While Urszula spends a long time styling hers, Helena and Genowefa wear theirs short: a concession to their lack of time and interest in romance.34
Here is the twenty-year-old talking in the first person about herself … The thirty-year-old, silent at the looms, but in the scene in which she feeds her children shifts from the first person to the third (“mummy will give you more bread”), as if motherhood, this sphere of intimacy and freedom after hours of alienating work, cut her off from herself. Finally, Genowefa speaks again in the first person, but always from a distance while we see her work, which she has been doing silently for years. This is, to parody Guy Debord, “complete alienation”—the separation of the voice from the suffering body, understood now only as an appendage of the machine.35
These shifts endow Gryczełowska’s decision to use a different documentary mode in each segment of the film with additional meaning. Urzula’s ability to speak directly into the camera suggests that her body and sense of self are still indivisible. Helena has begun losing ownership of her body, as work and children lay claim to it. Genowefa, finally, seems to float above her deteriorating and seemingly doomed body. She has given up on it and now dispassionately observes herself going through the motions from above.
The title could, and even should, say: “Five Weeks after December,” but it’s almost certain that the government censors wouldn’t have liked that because after those few weeks, things were just beginning to feel ‘ok’ in the prl [Polish People’s Republic]. […] The very word ‘December’ became something unseemly, along the same principle that in a house where someone has hung himself, you shouldn’t speak of rope. And that
was the beginning of the new, ‘post-December’ era. I was overcome with the desire to show even just a fragment of this new reality, but without stalling, [sought] to do it quickly, while everything was still fresh in the memory, while it was still right ‘after the battle.’38
Doubtless, she felt the same way about the women’s strike in Łódź. Addressing the issues that led to the strike rather than the strike itself proved a wise move as it allowed the film to be screened at the 1972 Krakow Film Festival, where it went on to win the Bronze Lajkonik, or third place, “for its unmediated presentation of the important social problem of working women.”39
1.3 Women Workers (Robotnice, 1980)
Urszula Tes, author of a monograph on Irena Kamieńska, argues that an interest in women and how they live permeates the filmmaker’s whole oeuvre. Within that body of work, however, Tes identifies two distinct sub-streams: one featuring women who are “active and enthusiastic,” who take control of their lives and try to improve the world around them, often despite great resistance; and a second, featuring women who are completely “resigned and joyless,” who see no way out of their situation.40 She places Kamieńska’s breakthrough Women Workers (Robotnice, 1980) squarely in the latter category. The film is one of three in which Kamieńska examined the lives of women engaged in manual labour. The aforementioned Island of Women (Wyspa kobiet, 1968) sounded the alarm about young women’s inability to get married and start families when confined to largely all-female industrial towns. Day After Day (Dzień za dniem, 1988), in turn, presented a bitter portrait of two women, twin sisters, at the other end of their professional careers as bricklayers and transporters. On the brink of retirement, the twins reflect on a lifetime of hard labour and the gap between official propaganda and daily reality.
Working Women, produced in between these two documentaries, features women of all different ages, though many of the ones who speak identify as mothers and appear to be in their thirties and forties. The film first shows the women at work and, later, on their break, presenting their complaints to the crew. In the observational scenes, Tes notes, everything is structured around dramatic juxtapositions.41 Visually, cinematographer Krzysztof Pakulski chose to use high-contrast black-and-white film and to alternate extreme wide shots
In the break scenes, however, the women do not hesitate to voice their complaints. They explain that they had asked the factory management for very basic material improvements: lighter protective gear to replace their heavy aprons, comfortable shoes to replace their wooden clogs, efficient masks that would allow them to breathe, soap and warm water for showers, as well as buses on Saturdays to make it possible for them to get to work without having to walk for miles. The management, however, had dismissed all these demands. As Kamieńska herself would later put it, “they felt humiliated, not so much by the conditions in which they were forced to work—the dust, the moisture, the noise, the stench, the terribly primitive conditions—than by the attitude adopted toward them, their needs, and their assertions by the local establishment, the management of the plant, and the Party bosses.”42
Women Workers is more preoccupied with working conditions and the authorities’ unwillingness to listen to workers in what is ostensibly a workers’ state than the “double burden” as such. Unlike in Gryczełowska’s films, we never get to follow the women home. The concerns they voice, however, are very much defined by it: how to feed their children on their tiny salaries, and how to manage taking care of them while still getting to work on time given deficiencies in transportation. Yet the film is worth considering here because, like Gryczełowska’s films, it was produced in close proximity to another massive wave of strikes. Kamieńska shot Women Workers in the small town of Krosno, near the Ukrainian border, in February 1980. In August of that same year, the Gdańsk Shipyards would be up in arms again over a new set of price hikes, initiating a nationwide revolt. In this strike, too, women would play a key role only to be erased before the first accounts of the events were even written. It was the dismissal of a woman—the hero of labour turned opposition activist Anna Walentynowicz—from her post that sparked this second wave of strikes.43 And it was Walentynowicz and other women like her who closed
Gryczełowska and Kamieńska intentionally chose to concentrate on the conditions that necessitated activism rather than women’s activism itself. Their films, however, captured not only the conditions but also the emotions—frustration, indignation, anger—that moved women workers in 1971 and 1980 to turn off their machines and go on strike. The record of women’s labour activism was, thus, arguably better preserved in their films than in the historical accounts that would follow. And if the first two films were not widely viewed, Women Workers was eventually able to enjoy a glorious reception. The film was produced in February 1980, the same time as Marcel Łoziński’s daring Microphone Test (Próba mikrofonu). For that film, Łoziński recruited the dj of the internal radio station at the Pollena-Uroda make-up factory, which also employed primarily women. The dj, Michał, spent several days interviewing his colleagues about whether they felt like co-managers of the factory, in accordance with state doctrine. He then presented the factory leadership with a tape of the workers’ disgruntled answers. If Kamieńska’s film had taken the first step toward confrontation in presenting the women’s unabashed complaints, Łoziński went a step further, filming the authorities’ reactions to this log of irreverent griping. Where the earlier documentaries had operated within what scholar Bill Nichols has termed the “observational” mode of documentary, Kamieńska and Łoziński, sensing the political situation shifting, were intuitively driven to experiment with the “participatory” mode.46 Their films not only acknowledged the presence of the camera—they used it as a catalyst to provoke situations and initiate conversations that otherwise would not take place. In this way, their films become exercises in democracy and free speech. For both Kamieńska and Łoziński, the task of the filmmaker was no longer to present a thoughtful, delicate, and uplifting portrait, as in Karabasz’s work, or even a carefully constructed j’accuse!, as in Gryczełowska’s. It was to use the
2 Conclusion
It is not surprising that both Women Workers and Microphone Test were immediately shelved upon completion. Solidarity’s victory in August 1980, however, initiated a miraculous period of eighteen months when previously censored works could finally be shown and circulated. Both films were taken off the shelves and screened at the Gdańsk film festival already at the end of that month, and then again on television on 28 September 1980.48 Nine months later, Women Workers was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1981 Krakow Film Festival, beating out, as the newspapers noted, 101 films from twenty-nine countries.49 Picking up on a term very much in vogue in the West, critic Alicja Iskierko praised the film as a rare “look from below” at the world of labour.50 “Where reality cries out, the artist chooses restraint,” she wrote. “The only commentary accompanying these images of women’s daily hell are their own words, slippery and saturated with more of a sense of hopelessness than anger, words uttered between a bite of bread with jam and a sip of tea from a jar,” adding that what we see on screen “is not work; it is hard labour.”51
The film provided Solidarity and its supporters with incontrovertible evidence of the inhumane conditions in which many Polish workers toiled before August 1980. As critic Maria Malatyńska wrote at the time, “A face, hands, feet thrown directly at the viewer say more about how a person is treated than even the most ardent speeches at a rally.”52 One cannot help but wonder if the film would have been as effective in this evidentiary capacity had the workers on screen been male. Focusing on women allowed Gryczełowska and Kamieńska to advocate for some of the most silenced and heavily oppressed members of society; this focus also served as a unique tool for pushing back against the state. Like the striking women of Łódź, the filmmakers sensed that, on the
By then, the “double burden” was a fact acknowledged by all social actors: the party, the opposition, and women themselves. In 1977, even a figure as iconic as the labour hero Wanda Gościmińska would feel free to publicly state: “When one got home after a day of drudgery beside machines and an afternoon meeting, one still had to take care of the cooking and cleaning … One thought only about how to endure and not fall asleep, and how Sunday could not come sooner.”53 In 1981, Solidarity leaders, too, would openly acknowledge that “the acquisition of food has become for women [workers] a second shift.”54 The drivers of this transformation were doubtless the strikes themselves and the political actions that accompanied them. The films produced in and around the strikes by Gryczełowska and Kamieńska, however, helped identify everyday life—not industrial production, the space race, or some other part of the public sphere—as the site where the communist project had failed.
It was not the first strike that saw mass participation by women, however. Historian Małgorzata Fidelis has documented a number of successful strikes carried out primarily by women textile workers in the Stalinist period (Fidelis 2010). For more on these early strikes, see also Kenney 2012.
Matuszak 2011. Polish film scholar Elżbieta Ostrowska analyzes the economic and political situation of Łódź women weavers in greater depth in the opening sections of her article “Vanishing Women: Łódź Textile Workers in Polish Documentary Cinema.” Ostrowska 2017.
Ostrowska 2017, 132.
Jarska 2011; Matuszak 2011. Natalia Jarska is also the author of a book on women’s labour in the earlier Stalinist period: Jarska 2015.
Goldfarb 1982, 79.
Jarska 2011; Lesiakowski 2002, 133.
Lesiakowski 2002, 133.
Komitet Łódzki pzpr—Wydział Organizacyjny, “Ocena wydarzeń strajkowych w miesiącu lutym 1971 r. m. Łodzi” [Assessment of the February 1971 Strike Events in the City of Łódź], (March 1971). As cited by Matuszak 2011.
Rokicki and Stępień 2009, 86; Taras 1983, 145.
Mazierska 2015, 124.
One specific example is Krystyna Gryczełowska’s film Wola Rafałowska (1966), named after the village in which it was shot. This film inspired the government to legislate heirless property (Strękowski 2008).
Halladin’s They Were There (Były tam, 1985) and From Where to Where (Skąd-dokąd, 1988) would continue to build on Gryczełowska and Kamieńska’s approaches, with the former presenting testimony by women who had contributed to the building of an ideal workers’ city, Nowa Huta, and the latter presenting a series of interviews with young women leaving the countryside for the factories about their hopes and fears.
Gryczełowska 1975a. As quoted in Strękowski 2008.
Gryczełowska 1975b. As translated and quoted in Duda 2014.
Film scholar Ewa Mazierska points out that children were “practically absent from Polish socialist realist films, as [was] the case with other Eastern European cinemas of the time.” She suggests this might be because “the presence of children might undermine the idea that work is the most important thing in the lives of both men and women” (Mazierska 2017, 119).
Morvant 1995; Hannson and Lidén 1983. As quoted in Roudakova and Ballard-Reisch 1999, 21.
Studer 2015, 133.
Access to appliances and labour-saving devices, of course, differed widely across the West. So, too, did women’s working and living conditions within the Soviet bloc. For more on the specificities of “the double burden” across state socialist countries, see Massino 2019; Bonfiglioli 2017; Corrin 1992; Edmondson 1992; and Buckley 1989. For a fascinating comparison of women’s everyday lives across the East/West divide in Central Europe, see Fodor 2003.
For an excellent analysis and historical contextualization of Golik’s film, see Bonfiglioli 2017. I am grateful to Alexandra Ghiț for alerting me to the existence of this film and Bonfiglioli’s article.
Kenney 1999, 400.
Ostrowska 2017, 17.
Ostrowska 2017, 9.
Ostrowska 2017, 11.
Jaworska. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
Gryczełowska 1971. As quoted in Strękowski 2008.
Ostrowska 2017, 11.
Krystyna Gryczełowska, in Janicka and Kołodyński 2000. As quoted in Strękowski 2008.
“Nasze Znajome z Łodzi” 2022.
Interestingly, Walentynowicz explained in an interview with the nonfiction writer Hanna Krall that she was first motivated to speak out against injustice when she saw that the Women’s League (with which she was involved) was perennially being cheated of funds by the shipyard leadership. The interview was set to appear in Polityka magazine in October 1980 but was censored. Polityka placed a digital copy of it online in February 2017. Krall 2017.
Łoziński’s film is set in a largely female make-up factory, so his film can also be said to engage in elevating women’s voices, though the issues they raise are not as gender-specific as in Gryczełowska and Kamieńska’s films.
“Próba demokracji”1980.
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