Comparative Literature 391W - Dream,Hist&Identity/PolishFilm

What happens when a nation "dreams" itself, when it projects an image of its identity and uses it to negotiate its socio-historic predicament? Perhaps modern Polish cinema, which rose from the ashes of the Holocaust and World War II and in a new communist age, offers as good a case study as any of this important question. In the course of this class, we will look at Polish history as mediated through the lens of film in works by Wajda, Has, Munk, Kieslowski, Roman Polanski, Skolimowski, Zanussi, Holland, and more recent filmmakers such as Pawlikowski, who have also more readily addressed social and psychosexual norms, applying a queering lens to traditional motifs, including family, the church, death and sexuality. Accompanying these works is the notion that the very act of recreating history necessarily transforms it into something else. In these diverse "dreams of Poland" and of Polish identity - some more serene, some more hallucinatory - we will also get a better sense of what Deleuze meant when he warned of getting lost in someone else's dream.

Description: What happens when a nation "dreams" itself, when it projects an image of its identity and uses it to negotiate its socio-historic predicament? Perhaps modern Polish cinema, which rose from the ashes of the Holocaust and World War II and in a new communist age, offers as good a case study as any of this important question. In the course of this class, we will look at Polish history as mediated through the lens of film, in works by Wanda Jakubowska, Andrzej Wajda, Wojciech Jerzy Has, Andrzej Munk, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland, and more recent filmmakers such as Malgorzata Szumowska, Wladyslaw Pasikowski, Wojciech Smarzowski, and Pawel Pawlikowski, who have also more readily addressed social and psychosexual norms, applying a queering lens to traditional motifs, including family, the church, death and sexuality. Accompanying these works is the notion that the very act of recreating history necessarily transforms it into something else. In these diverse "dreams of Poland" and of Polish identity - some more serene, some more hallucinatory - we will also get a better sense of what Deleuze meant when he warned of getting lost in someone else's dream.