How the West corroborated Socialist Realism in the East

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2. Giuseppe Zigaina, Agricultural
Workers, 1951, 200 x 150 cm,
Warsaw, The National Museum


Mateusz Birkut (once revered as the hero of the socialist labour competition) finds in a
closed area of the repository in the very same museum his dislodged statue. There was,
however, a marked difference between her reaction and mine to the startling encounter
with the repressed past in the storage of public memory. Agnieszka found in the darkness
the object of her desire, and in the unforgettable scene, while sitting astride on the top of
the fallen figure of the Stakhanovite turned on his back, she shot a close-up of his face
with a hand-held camera, in the presence of the astonished members of her crew.4 By
'possessing' bodily the silenced monument to the former hero of socialist labour competi-
tion, she repositioned socialist realism within the Polish cultural and historiographical dis-
course of the late 1970s, initiating the process of its return from the depths of its enforced
oblivion onto the attainable level of its academic evaluation.5 By contrast, my approach to

4 This shot, nota bene, constitutes a yet unrecognised case of the domineering female gaze in the masculine-oriented
cinematic discourse. Laura Mulvey's seminal essay on cinema as dominated by masculine gaze was written and publi-
shed just a year before Wajda's film was made (see: L. MULVEY, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 'Screen' 16,
1975, 3).'

5 The figure of Birkut was cast in plaster for the needs of the film, and the scene in what was to be taken as the National
Museum in Warsaw storage was actually shot in the former Central Museum Store of the Ministry of Art and Culture in
the remote palatial residence of Kozłówka, which, since 1994, has housed Poland's first Gallery of Socialist Realist Art.
On Kozłówka, see, amongst others: L. LAMEŃSKI, Galeria sztuki Socrealizmu w Kozłówce, 'Biuletyn Historii Sztuki'
LVIII, 1996, pp. 177-9. On the place Kozłówka in the academic reevaluation of socialist realism in Polish art history, see
also: K. MURAWSKA-MUTHESIUS, Curator s Memory: The Case of the 'Man of Marble', or the Rise and Fall of
Socialist Realism in Poland, [in:] eds. W. Reinink, J. Stumple, Memory and Oblivion, Rotterdam 1999, pp. 905-12. The
plaster cast of the 'Man ofMarble' was donated by Andrzej Wajda, together with other memorabilia from the film to the
newly opened Museum of Cinematography in Łódź.