Through the Lens of Black Humour: A Polish Adam in the Post-Wall World (2024)

East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema

Michael Gott (ed.), Todd Herzog (ed.)

Published online:

21 January 2016

Published in print:

01 January 2015

Online ISBN:

9781474408592

Print ISBN:

9780748694150

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East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema

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Rimma Garn

Rimma Garn

(University of Utah)

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  • Published:

    January 2015

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Garn, Rimma, 'Through the Lens of Black Humour: A Polish Adam in the Post-Wall World', in Michael Gott, and Todd Herzog (eds), East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema (Edinburgh, 2015; online edn, Edinburgh Scholarship Online, 21 Jan. 2016), https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694150.003.0014, accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the popular and critically-acclaimed Polish director Marek Koterski, whose oeuvre, characterized by black humor and startling naturalism, is almost entirely unknown outside of his native Poland. Koterski's work must be considered in its entirety, as it represents an unusual phenomenon, an ‘octology’ – a coherent narrative consisting of eight feature films that centers around one protagonist, Adam Miauczyski, the director's alter ego. In this chapter Garn focuses on his use of black humour in two works: Day of the Wacko (2002) and We’re all Christs (2006). Like all Koterski's films made after 1989, a cataclysmic year for Eastern Europe, these two ‘post-Wall’ films depict life in communist and post-communist Poland with particular poignancy. Both films include references to the English language and to American consumer products, equally distant and irrelevant to the protagonist. They depict Poland as a world of helplessness and hopelessness, filled with suffocating apartments and elevators, and nosy, malicious neighbors. The tragedy is that Poland's radical transformation from totalitarianism to democracy changed nothing in Adam's life, and he still sees an empty future with nothing to live for, unless he turns to faith and love.

Keywords: Communism, post-communism, Polish cinema, Black humour, Marek Koterski

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Film

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