Dare to be Critical: Making Films in Poland Under Communism Control

Anna Misiak painted a portrait of Polish censorship – with emphasis placed on the 1970s. While introducing the formal structure of the system (from pre-production to distribution license), she demonstrated its intrinsically flexible character as well as the negotiable and cyclical nature of control; the same point was also well demonstrated by Daniel Bird’s detailed case study of the troubled production history of Andrzej Żuławski’s NA SREBRNYM GLOBIE / ON THE SILVER GLOBE. Misiak’s paper showed convincingly that Polish censorship cannot be described in terms of a linear model of progress, i.e. in terms of change over decades from a rigid and strict structure to comparatively lenient forms of control. Rather, argued Misiak, the situation is best perceived as a push-and-pull system characterized by cyclic change. What was particularly striking about this description was that similar claims could also have been made about the dynamics of Hungarian censorship, which to-date have been considered quite unique to Hungary – hence the image of the “happiest barrack in the Soviet bloc”