PT Journal
AU Jozwiak, K
TI Polish Memory of the Second World War and its Afterlife in the Early Cold War Italian Film Culture
SO Iluminace
PY 2022
BP 53
EP 71
VL 34
IS 1
DI 10.58193/ilu.1723
WP https://iluminace.cz/en/artkey/ilu-202201-0004.php
DE Polish Army Film Unit; cinema diplomacy; Cold War culture; Michal Waszynski; memory of the Second World War
SN 0862397X
AB In this article I discuss production, distribution and reception contexts of Michal Waszynski's films produced in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. Particularly, I pay attention to the found-footage sequences embedded in those films. I analyze them in terms of a testimony and proofs for the war experience, which was hardly acknowledged in post-war Italy. Thus, I aim at reconstructing the wider political plan to which these films were inscribed, locating them on the backdrop of the Polish Army propaganda activity and diplomacy in Italy in the eve of the cold war. I show to what extent these films were entangled into diplomatic, political and ideological struggles between the Polish Armed Forces, the Moscow dependent Polish government, the Allies and the Italian government in the early post-war years. On a more general scale, this analysis uncovers the negotiations over boundaries of what was acceptable in the Second World War depiction in Italian film culture.
ER