Twentieth Century Polish History Seminar Series

This paper examines politics of history and memory in Polish cinema during the rule of the Law and Justice party from 2015 to 2023. First, it explores feature films that glorified the mythologised community of the ‘Accursed Soldiers’ who fought the communist government after World War II, their supposed descendants, victims of the 2010 Smolensk air crash, and the Polish Righteous who sheltered Jews. Second, it analyses a drama series produced by Polish state TV, Krucjata. Prawo serii (Crusade. Great deeds will come, Łukasz Ostalski and Wojciech Tomczyk, 2022-23), which addressed the alleged consequences of unfinished decommunization and lustration. I argue that these film narratives constituted part of a large project, which sought to forge illiberal and ethno-confessional national identity based on nationalism, social conservatism, and Roman Catholicism and new elites. These ‘patriotic’ movies rewrite national past endorsing a “politics of assertion” (Assmann, 2020) which projects positive national self-images centred on heroism and martyrdom. The drama authored by Tomczyk targets post-communist and liberal elites, always portrayed as nationally, socially, and culturally suspect and imagines the work of “the deep state.”

Mikołaj Kunicki is a historian and film scholar. He received his PhD in History from Stanford University. Kunicki taught history at the University of Oxford, University of Notre Dame, and UC Berkeley and lectured on media and communication studies at the University of Wrocław. From 2013 to 2016 he was the director of Programme on Modern Poland in St Antony’s College. Kunicki is head of the European History Unit at Polish University Abroad (PUNO) in London and an Adjunct Professor of Cinema in Ithaca College London Center. His research concentrates on communism, nationalism, authoritarianism and their relationships with film and television. He is the author of Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism and Communism in Twentieth Century Poland (Ohio University Press, 2012) as well as articles and chapters on Polish and European history, cinema, nationalism and contemporary politics.