Being Forty After Forty Years: A Portrait of the 1970s, or an Intelligentsia’s Voice in the Struggle to Shape the Future Sphere of Power

This article is an attempt at a fairly detailed analysis of the TV series Being Forty in its first version of the 1970s. The text proposes an interpretation of the film from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and in particular reconstructs the social sphere of the film’s protagonists, which consists of the intelligentsia elite, the nomenklatura, the lower intelligentsia, and medium-level technical personnel. In the picture produced by the filmmakers, the role of the intelligentsia, especially its multi-generational old elite, is dominant. This vision does not fully correspond with the real place of the intelligentsia in Poland during the Gierek era. The authors of the article thus interpret the film as the scriptwriters’ appreciation of the intelligentsia, both in respect to its lower technical staff and to the part of the nomenklatura that was less rich in cultural capital. The interpretative framework proposed in the text seems useful for analyzing other works of art in order to reconstruct the social relations of the times in which they were created