It is not difficult to find a swathe of monographs, chapters, and articles on Polish music and Polish cinema: indeed, it is perhaps one of the best flourishing areas of focus of east central European arts. Surveys that focus on Polish popular music and/or cinema are more difficult to find, and even in Polish-language sources, there is a dearth of material in scholarly literature. Enter Ewa Mazierska's Polish Popular Music on Screen, a remarkable achievement of scholarship that combines film music studies, sociology of popular culture, and film studies into a volume that presents a retrospective of how Polish popular music has been used across Polish cinema broadly since the 1920s. Steering away from the more well-documented “auteur” directors, Mazierska explicitly states her intention to focus on the broadly populist realm of cinema: that which almost all critics, Polish or otherwise, have either belittled or simply omitted. Perhaps the most important myth to dispel in the book is one that the author returns to with almost every chapter, such is its widespread acceptance: that the cinema of Poland (and the eastern bloc more generally) was an inferior version of Hollywood trends, either Polonising American successes or producing pulp films for domestic consumption. Far from being an imitation of Hollywood, Mazierska traces the origins and evolution of several tropes that are unique to Polish cinema.
With a subject matter as broad as “popular music on film,” Mazierska divides the book into four main sections: musical theatre, biopics, music documentaries, and music videos. Chapter 2 focuses on interwar musical films in Poland, arguing that they should be considered “aspirational,” as opposed to utopian (51). With several examples, the chapter demonstrates how interwar Polish musicals differed from their Hollywood counterparts, primarily through their use of multiple genres of music in a single film. Tragically, owing to the loss of life of multiple stars, such films were not revived after the Second World War. Chapter 3 surveys musicals from the state socialist period, concluding that musicals “lost their privileged position” (107). The longevity of these films (or lack thereof) is a direct reflection of state ownership of the film industry, where popular reception mattered far less than perceived artistic integrity. Assessing musicals of the post-communist era, Mazierska concludes that the majority now recycle songs and “give them new life by presenting their new versions or putting them in new contexts” (145).
In contrast to musicals, biopics are rare in Polish cinema, though not uncommon. With examples like You Are God (2012), Mazierska argues that such films follow a “psycho-biography” format, though biopics in Poland are admittedly much closer in tone and format to their western counterparts. There has been a slightly higher frequency of television biopic series, which the author also devotes a chapter to.
On the subject of music documentaries, Mazierska shows how this format evolved from short news reports through to full-blown concert films, peaking in the 1980s (236), and a modern-day interest in the oft-disparaged genre of disco polo. Such documentaries privilege either “high-art” music or politically antagonistic styles, trends also seen in music documentaries across the globe. There is a striking lack of documentaries about individuals, however, either attributable to the state-socialist priority of high-art, or the more recent autonomy of artists (and their estates) on their public-facing image.
The Polish music video has evolved over time, with responses to genre or group-based films like Jailhouse Rock and Help!, to the program Telewizyjna Lista Przebojów, a response to the UK's “Top of the Pops.” From these, there were music videos for famous groups like Skaldowie (279), all the way to elaborate productions with arthouse directors. The book concludes with a chapter surveying the role of YouTube in contemporary music video production and consumption in Poland.
There is much rich material for the scholar: in particular, Mazierska surveys a formidable list of Polish cinema with extremely useful synopses. One downside of this approach is that chapters risk becoming a series of plot-summaries, with little critical commentary between them. The balance is always in favor of the critical narrative of each chapter, however, and the synopses are deployed to good effect. Polish Popular Music on Screen will prove essential reading for scholars interested in film and popular music in Poland, and especially through the intriguing and idiosyncratic combination of both.
