CCPS Roundtable. Polish Cinema in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From the Center to the Margins

Contemporary Polish Cinema of National Remembrance

Polish cinema remains deeply embedded within the framework of national memory, actively participating in the (re)production of Polishness shaped by romanticism, the experience of partitions, and the traumas of twentieth-century regimes. Within this field, historical cinema has occupied a particularly prominent position, encompassing both the artistic auteur cinema of figures such as Andrzej Wajda and the Cinema of New Memory of the 1960s. Following the political and economic transformations of 1989, historical cinema retained its significance: between 1990 and 2023, approximately 200 historical films were produced in Poland, marking a gradual yet visible resurgence at the turn of the century through the wave of Polish heritage cinema. This trajectory intensified following the establishment of the Polish Film Institute in 2005, which facilitated the emergence of what is now referred to as the Cinema of National Remembrance (CNR).

Focused predominantly on the twentieth-century history of the Polish state and nation, the CNR is a diverse and multifaceted phenomenon. In this presentation, Durys proposes to examine the CNR as a site in which affective practices engender communities of memory, thus negotiating the relationship between the center and the margins of Polish cultural memory. By employing melodrama as a mode and the crime genre as a narrative framework, Durys will delineate the central images and affective investments within these films, while simultaneously attending to the silences and omissions that persist at the margins of this cinematic discourse. Through this approach, she aims to demonstrate how contemporary Polish historical cinema functions as a dynamic field of cultural production, articulating contested visions of Polishness while also exposing the affective and ideological limits of these representations.

Elżbieta Durys is a Fall 2025 Widzinski Senior Fellow at CCPS and an associate professor of education (Cultural Studies Center) at the University of Warsaw. Her recent research focuses on film and history, remediation of memory in film, contemporary Polish historical cinema, as well as film education. In her work, she stresses gender perspective and critical theories. Durys has written numerous articles on film, co-edited two volumes on American cinema (2006, 2007) and two volumes on gender in culture (2005, 2014), and published three books in Polish—the analysis of John Cassavetes oeuvre (2009), the monograph of American police movies (2013), and Film as a Source of Historical Knowledge (2019). She is a member of the editorial boards of Literatura i Kultura Popularna (since 2018) and Education Research Quarterly (since 2021).

Deaf Cinema

As the first technology capable of recording sign language, film was deliberately adopted by
deaf communities as early as the 1910s. The exclusion caused by the introduction of sound in
the late 1920s proved to be a catalyst for the growth of deaf audiences. Today, films by deaf
filmmakers are flourishing thanks to the accessibility of affordable filming and editing
equipment, and the distribution systems of disability and deaf film festivals and the internet.

Similar to other Eastern European countries, the deaf film movement flourished in Poland from the late 1960s onwards. In this presentation, Zdrodowska will present the dynamics of the Polish deaf film movement and how it correlates with political, social, and cultural changes in Poland and the Polish deaf community. In the socialist state, fostering a distinct deaf identity was discouraged, and social, political, and cultural activities were controlled by the state and its institutions. This influenced deaf filmmaking during communism and after its collapse. Another significant development was the adoption of the concept of Deaf culture, which reshaped Polish d/Deaf filmmaking in the 2010s.

Magdalena Zdrodowska is a Fall 2025 Widzinski Senior Fellow at CCPS and an associate professor of media studies and cultural studies at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She works at the intersection of disability studies, deaf studies, history of technology, and film studies. She currently focuses on the relationship between cinema and deafness and approaches deaf-related technologies, deaf spectatorship, and deaf filmmaking as lenses through which to view the history of cinema as both art and technology. She serves as a chair of the Disability Studies in East Europe research platform and as a member of the executive committee of the Society for the History of Technology SHOT. Zdrodowska has translated L. Davies' Enforcing Normalcy into Polish (2022). She is currently working on her third book, Deaf Cinema. Her earlier monographs are Telewizja na pograniczach [Television on the Borderlands] (2013) and Telefon, kino i cyborgi [Telephone, Cinema and Cyborgs] (2021).

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.