Studies in Eastern European Cinema Volume 4 Number 1
Transcription
Studies in Eastern European Cinema Volume 4 Number 1
SEEC 4 (1) pp. 29–46 Intellect Limited 2013 Studies in Eastern European Cinema Volume 4 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seec.4.1.29_1 . Z aneta Jamrozik Jagiellonian University How to be an actress (in Poland): The figure of the actress in Wojciech Jerzy Has’s How to be Loved (1962) Abstract Keywords This article interprets Wojciech Jerzy Has’s Jak byc´ kochana˛/How to be Loved (1962) as a film about the sociopolitical situation prevailing in Poland during the 1960s. The main focus is on the leading heroine and her acting, understood both as professional acting and acting in everyday life. The figure of the actress links the times before the war with the Soviet-influenced Poland of the 1960s. The article analyses this figure by drawing on Witold Gombrowicz’s writings on Polish collective identity, the ‘Stanislavskian aesthetic’ of acting and Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performance. film acting performativity actress Wojciech Jerzy Has Witold Gombrowicz Judith Butler Has and Gombrowicz Wojciech Jerzy Has’s Jak byc´ kochana˛/How to be Loved (1962) is a ‘star is born’ kind of story. However, unlike most films about young actresses’ path to fame, Has does not present it as a rags to riches journey. Not only is the plot presented in fragments, and some of them, especially at the beginning of the film, seem too short to be fully graspable, but also the story is visibly lacking 29 . Z aneta Jamrozik the happy ending anticipated in a film of this type. Instead, the focus of the narrative is on World War II, when the promising career of the actress played by Barbara Krafftówna was interrupted. However, How to be Loved uses this war theme, not unlike Andrzej Wajda’s Popiół i diament/Ashes and Diamonds (1958), to make a statement about the present, or as Andrzej Werner puts it when talking about Wajda’s masterpiece – ‘to build a bridge over a ten year period, between the late 1940s and the late 1950s’ (Werner 2011: 53). The beginning of the 1960s, when Has made his film, was a period in which Socialist Realist art that prevailed in Poland from 1949 to 1955 was considered to be over, as was Gomułka’s thaw also known as October 1956. As a result of the collapse of both paradigms, a new mix of ‘Soviet’ and ‘foreign’ thinking was introduced into art, whose purpose was to combine education with entertainment. In literature, managers replaced workers as main characters and immaterial work replaced material production (Krasuski 2006). Film-makers started to make more genre films, mostly comedies and crime movies, in order to compete with Hollywood. Hence it received the label ‘mini-Hollywood’ (Werner 2011: 175). The whole change was soon to be . described, after the title of Tadeusz Róz ewicz’s drama from 1962, as ‘our small stabilization’. Some critics regarded the term as reflecting a positive phenomenon of the depoliticization of life and culture in Poland. Others, however, pointed to the fact that the words ‘our’ and ‘small’ stand for the mediocre character of the alleged change; indeed the lack of any real change. This was also the time when the presence of Witold Gombrowicz was felt more strongly in Polish culture than before (Werner 2011: 177; Brodsky 1980), especially after his novel, Pornography, was published in Paris in 1960 . (Korczarowska-Róz ycka 2011: 87). Gombrowicz’s irony and absurdity provided a language to describe the gap between the happy endings and luxury shown in films or told in popular songs and the living experience of the majority of Poles. The writer attacked both Polish communists and their opponents. Both, according to him, tried too hard to behave ‘truly’ or ‘authentically’ and, by doing that, were forgetting ‘that man not only is himself but also pretends to be himself’ (Gombrowicz 1988: 36). According to Gombrowicz, the Poles have a great need for authenticity, but look for it in the wrong places. Thus, instead of accepting their own inauthenticity, they try to hide it by overperforming their national characteristics. The writer himself proposed a different path, advocating an authenticity based on acting used as a subversive strategy. In this approach, to be an actor means to ‘constantly sense one’s lack of authenticity’ (Baniewicz 1992: 102). In 1953, in one of the first instalments of his Diary, Gombrowicz addresses his countrymen by suggesting that if they hate acting, this is because it is an integral part of their identity. For him, acting was a key of being in the world and understanding it (Gombrowicz 1988: 37). I would argue that the abovementioned presence of Gombrowicz in the Polish culture of the 1960s is also evident in How to be Loved. Has, like the writer, compares acting understood as a profession with acting in real life, and he locates these different types of acting in the context of the Poles’ struggles with their own national identity, treating it with irony. In my reading of How to be Loved I will focus on the main heroine and her acting, understood both as a professional acting and acting in everyday life. I will draw mainly on the ‘Stanislavskian aesthetic’ of acting (Naremore 1988: 2), Gombrowicz’s writings on Polish collective identity and Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performance. 30 How to be an actress (in Poland) The dominant discourses on acting still follow humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers (Polkinghorne 2001) in locating existence ‘inside’ the individual and sharing its view that a person is free to choose his or her own behaviour. By contrast, Butler and Gombrowicz emphasize that choice stems not so much from the individual, but from the conditions of possibility offered by discourses, which prescribe what is an acceptable form of subjectivity. Thus, both cultural critics question the autonomy of the individual from the social, and propose a different kind of agency, one based on parodic repetition of ‘the original’: ‘The theory of gender performativity’ – explains Butler – ‘presupposes that norms are acting on us before we have a chance to act at all’ (Butler 2009: xi), while according to Gombrowicz the will that guides us ‘is collective, born in an interhuman dimension’ (Gombrowicz 2012: 22). However, while Butler maintains that there exists no extra-discursive subject, focusing mainly on the gender binary system, Gombrowicz concentrates on the binaries embedded in Polish tradition. He shows how the idea of ‘us’ vs ‘them’, as he puts it, governs Polish life in all its aspects. Gombrowicz claims that this type of thinking leads to Poles’ ‘one-sidedness’ and inauthenticity and attempts to reveal its mechanism by examining Polish history. He turns to the years of struggle to regain statehood after the period of partitions, which lasted from 1795 to 1918, seeing in this period a reason to draw a line between what is and what is not essentially Polish: History has forced us to exaggerate certain characteristics of our nature and we are what we are excessively. We have overstylized […] our excessiveness […] resulting in the fact that the type of Pole that we have evolved must stifle and destroy the type that we could have been and that exists in us as antinomy. Yet it would seem from this that the Pole is impoverished exactly by one-half of himself. (Gombrowicz 1988: 109) The mechanism of dividing everybody into ‘us’ and ‘them’ was continued in the fight with communism, and, as noted by many commentators (WnukLipin´ski 1996; Wydra 2000; Frybes and Michel 1996), did not cease after 1989. It is against the background of such crude divisions and Has’s oppositions to them that I propose to locate How to be Loved. How to be Loved as a film about Poland in the 1960s How to be Loved begins in the 1960s with image of a woman waiting at the Warsaw airport for her flight to Paris. The woman turns towards the camera and this move initiates her look back at the times before the war. The gesture of turning around is then repeated at the beginning of the next scene, this time, however, revealing the visibly younger face of the woman. From now on, the film goes back and forth in time as it recounts the life of the character, from the beginning of her acting career in 1939 to the trip to Paris in the 1960s. How to be Loved was the sixth film in Has’s career and is regarded as one of his most successful. After its premiere it was applauded both by critics and audiences as a masterpiece and ten years after the release was still considered the director’s ‘lucky six’ (Je˛drkiewicz 1974: 12). This adaptation of Kazimierz Brandys’ short story (1960) came out as ‘lucky’ not only for the director, but 31 . Z aneta Jamrozik Figure 1: Barbara Krafftówna turns towards the camera at the beginning of the flashback scene in How to be Loved. also for his actress, Krafftówna, who received a prize for the best actress at the San Francisco Film Festival. Krafftówna is accompanied by Zbigniew Cybulski, who plays Wiktor Rawicz, already a star in the theatre where the woman prepares for her great debut as Shakespeare’s Ophelia. From the very beginning Has stresses the difference between the two characters. Thus, while the woman is excited about her role as shown in the rehearsal at the beginning of the film, Rawicz, sitting in his chair and sipping his tea, seems half-bored, half-irritated by her practicing Ophelia’s monologue right next to him. His behaviour questions the difference between acting and non-acting, as it is unclear whether the half-asleep man is actually acting or rather resting while waiting for his turn. Thus, when the woman, doing her monologue, turns away from Tomasz (Artur Młodnicki), who plays Claudius, and sits next to Wiktor’s chair, it is unclear whether she is still performing the role from the play. The end of her monologue, in particular, raises this question, as she switches from the text of Ophelia to stating that she does not understand a word of it. The rehearsal has to be stopped because of the German bombings. The next scene shifts to Krakow already being under German occupation. It is important to notice that these moments of acting take place during the rehearsal. Through this device Has introduces a theme of performances without audiences and actors unsure how to act in a situation in which the border between the stage and offstage is blurred. In the episode discussed, Wiktor appears to be too bored to perform during the rehearsal, but he becomes more than eager to show off his skills afterwards, while the actress, on the other hand, excels during the rehearsal but later seems unsure how to respond to Wiktor’s overstylized, theatrical behaviour. When she ends her Ophelia monologue with a confession that she does not understand a word 32 How to be an actress (in Poland) of it, Wiktor laughs at her trouble, responding with the ironic ‘Darling, the words will reveal themselves at the thirtieth spectacle’. The difference between the two characters and their types of acting is reinforced by the fact that other characters call Krafftówna’s character by referring to the names of her two great roles: Ophelia (during the war) or Felicja (at the beginning of the 1960s) (Ostrowska 2011). Therefore viewers do not get the chance to know her ‘real’ name. In this article I will refer to Krafftówna’s part in the film as ‘Felicja’ (in inverted commas) whenever I will be writing about the actress with no ‘real’ name she plays in Has’s film, and Felicja – when describing the character ‘Felicja’ the actress plays in the radio soap opera. Wiktor’s name, on the other hand, is repeated throughout the film many times, even appears on the German announcement when the man becomes accused of a murder. The fact that ‘Felicja’ could just as well be called ‘the actress’, as she remains unnamed both in the novel and in the film, and the way Wiktor speaks to her, treating her doubts as childish, links her to the heroines from Socialist Realist novels, who are equally often either unnamed or have their names abbreviated to sound more childish (Piekara 2001: 30). Although the story in How to be Loved is presented from the woman’s perspective and guided by her inner monologue, the sociopolitical circumstances also play an important role in the story, as they both influence her monologue while, at the same time, being reflected in it. What connects her personal monologue with the sociopolitical situation in Poland the most is acting. During the war ‘Felicja’ has to act in front of Germans and Poles in order to convince them that she has nothing to do with Wiktor’s disappearance. Then she has to lie to Wiktor, whom she hides in her apartment, making the man believe that he is regarded as a national hero. Finally, she decides to take a job as an actress in a German theatre to avoid German officers Figure 2: Barbara Krafftówna as ‘Felicja’ and Zbigniew Cybulski as Wiktor in How to be Loved. 33 . Z aneta Jamrozik searching her place. Acting is thus shown in the scenes taking place during the war as a kind of strategy to keep up appearances or putting on a mask in order to survive. The threat against which the woman is fighting is both physical (Germans) and psychological – the Polish heroic myths that make Wiktor believe that one has to be a hero or a nobody, as there are no other options. Acting remains an important strategy also in the contemporary scenes. For example, on a plane to Paris, ‘Felicja’ notices the poor quality of her clothes and tries to ‘cover’ it by speaking French or using phrases typical for ‘those dumb pseudo-intellectual women who talk to foreigners in the Bristol Hotel’. Thus, as I would argue, Has creates a complex picture of Polish society after World War II, a society that still has to put on mask while going public and leads a double life. One of the motives for continuing this double life after the war was, as is emphasized in the above mentioned scenes, a sense of inferiority felt by Poles towards Europeans. The other reason, the one that Has could not stress enough at the time, was the fact that the People’s Republic of Poland was governed by a state dependent on Russia – a fact commonly known at the time, but never openly spoken about. This political situation affected the way people behaved, as many subjects were banned from official life, and therefore people could not speak of them freely in public. A similar point was made by Marcin Maron, who in his book devoted to Has, placed How to be Loved next to Szyfry/The Codes (1966), claiming that in both the director achieved a kind of balance between the individual and the national dimensions of the stories presented in them (Maron 2010: 79). How to be Loved can also be considered as one of Has’s most personal films, as the director suggested in an interview: They [personal memories] are present, first of all, in How to be Loved. But they’re more connected with Stalinism, than with [the German-Z˙J] occupation. Cybulski says there about the pain of waiting: ‘To wait! They always tell me, that I need to wait!’ This is exactly the experience of those days. During the occupation one was not afraid to speak to a friend. There was no double thinking, double morality. This was typical for the new times …. (quoted in Maron 2010: 211) Yet, it has to be stressed from the beginning, that by ‘those days’, Has clearly meant the years around the production of the film, and not the pre-war, or war times. Even the scenes that appear to take place during the German occupation served to comment on the duplicity of life in 1960s Poland. To capture this ‘double thinking’, which – according to Has – characterized post-war Poland, the director incorporated it into the filmic structure. This structure manifests itself most importantly through the character of the main heroine and Krafftówna’s ironic acting style, by means of which she emphasizes the fact that ‘Felicja’s’ attitude towards her life and her past is similar to the way actors analyse their characters before embarking on performing them onstage or in front of the camera. Krafftówna stresses that for ‘Felicja’ her work as an actress simply cannot be reduced to her playing the part of Felicja and then returning to herself. The role of Felicja Konopkowa affects profoundly the way others see her and how, subsequently, she perceives herself. The ideal housewife, Felicja Konopkowa, becomes suddenly more real than the unmarried and childless ‘Felicja’. Thus, her role functions similarly to a social convention, as it promises social recognition, yet at the price of reducing the real person to the role he or she 34 How to be an actress (in Poland) plays. As a matter of fact, Krafftówna’s character as a female star embodies two types of performance analysed in Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990): the social and the cultural. As for some of her viewers, like the one from France, she is Felicja the housewife, while for the others (like the journalists from the plane) she is a famous actress. Krafftówna uses this ambiguity as a subversive strategy to reveal the discursive nature of both performances. The act of exposing the power of the social and artistic discourses becomes a manifestation of the agency of the actress, both ‘Felicja’ and Krafftówna (Butler 1995: 136). ‘Felicja’ as a woman Has begins his film with the close-up of ‘Felicja’s’ mouth. The woman is sitting in the bar located at the Warsaw airport. The profile of her face remains barely visible, as she sits back to the camera. Yet, her lips, reflected in the mirror, occupy the centre of the frame. This way of framing puts an accent on the paradox of her fame, namely the fact that ‘Felicja’, thanks to her voice acting profession, can be simultaneously seen and unseen, visible and invisible. If she refrains from uttering a word, she will not be recognized as an actress who plays Felicja Konopkowa in the radio soap opera. But if she decides to speak, she reveals not herself but Felicja, as people tend to identify the actress with her role. Either way – the actress goes unnoticed. On the other hand, however, when she begins to speak, her body seems to vanish, as everybody begins to focus on her voice instead. This is depicted by Has later in the cited scene, when the waitress at the bar switches the radio on and the voice of ‘Felicja’ as Mrs Konopkowa ‘fills in’ the space, leaving the actress suddenly less important, especially since she is still situated with her back to the viewer. Thus, the opening of How to be Loved presents the woman not as a whole person, but rather as an audio-visual collage, made of parts which do not Figure 3: The opening shot of How to be Loved. 35 . Z aneta Jamrozik necessarily match each other. The woman’s lips – reflected in the mirror – seem too big, and we can hear her voice, while the lips, though opening and closing, remain visibly mute. This paradoxes seem to summarizes well Has’s reflection on performing the self and acting the role, suggesting that he considers them related, but not in a way typically associated with mainstream acting. For Has the affinity between acting in real life and acting onstage seems to be more material, and connected to body than imaginary ‘magic if’ with which Constantin Stanislavsky begins the chapter about imagination in his An Actors Prepares (Stanislavsky 2008). According to the Russian theoretician, the ‘magic if’ helps actors imagine themselves at the place of the character by lifting ‘the actor out of everyday life into the world of the imagination’. ‘Genuine “facts”, the normal world, do not exist onstage’ – explains C. Stanislavsky and he stresses: ‘the normal world is not art’ (2008: 60). Thus, an actor should ask himself or herself ‘what if I do if I were in the situation of my character’, and the ‘if’ is the key word here. Stanislavsky draws a line between acting on and off the stage, comparing the work of an actor to a children’s play: we know it is not going to happen, it is not real, but we let our imagination go. While, for Has, acting in real life and acting onstage remains the same, only the contexts differ each time, and as James Naremore emphasizes, ‘to become “human” in the first place we put on an act’ (1988: 22). An example for this kind of thinking about acting is presented by Barbara Krafftówna in one of the interviews about How to be Loved, when the actress confessed that in the scene of rape she deliberately remained barefooted, while during shooting the scenes that took place on the plane, she refused to take off uncomfortable shoes, although she was filmed only in close-ups and her shoes remained off-screen (Kuchtówna 1975: 32). However, for ‘Felicja’, this similarity is not only liberating, but also suffocating, as she herself suggests in her inner monologue, saying, that she ‘got a feeling of becoming the part of a background, of something that, till now, has been happening behind my back’. Thus, the woman seems to want to be more like a Stanislavskian actress, who can lock her identity safely ‘inside’, and, by that, do not have a feeling of becoming a part of the background, but rather be able to draw a precise line between actions she does on and off the stage. In contrast to that, ‘Felicja’, being at the beginning of her journey, notices that the context of her actions has always been decided for her by others. For example, in the rehearsal scene described earlier, it was Wiktor’s ambiguous behaviour, that led us to question her acting. This means that the actress has no power over the meaning of her acting. She does not ‘put on an act’. Rather, it is decided by others whether her ‘act’ is considered an acting in real life or acting onstage, whether she is phony or authentic. Stepping towards the background, ‘Felicja’ mentions in the opening monologue of the film, is thus an attempt to get enough distance to regain the power over the context of her own actions. The radio soap opera, called The Radio Dinners at The Konopkas, features ‘Felicja’ as Mrs Konopkowa and Tomasz as her husband. This relation turns out to be complex, when it comes to separate acting as everyday behaviour from acting as profession. For Tomasz probably has loved ‘Felicja’ since their war times, and it was him who offered her the part of his radio’s wife. ‘Felicja’, on the other hand, uses her personal memories as a base for improvising her radio part. This ability seems to be the main reason why she becomes so popular, so much more than Tomasz, who sticks to his lines. Has shows one of the recording sessions in which Felicja changes the text, 36 How to be an actress (in Poland) not only altering its ending, but also its convention by acknowledging the presence of the audience in the rhetoric question – ‘Who of us would think of respecting oneself, when a true love comes around?’. The episode proves that ‘Felicja’ can break the illusion of a Sunday dinner and at the same time remain Felicja who from time to time likes to speak to the audiences in her own name, as a private person. This utterance, however, seems to cause a stage fright attack in Tomasz, as he himself does not feel comfortable with this meta-acting convention. In spite of her successes, ‘Felicja’ feels ‘burnt’ as an actress, and is unable to cherish her acting work. One of the reasons for her attitude is her need to be recognized as a unique individual. This need, however, cannot be fulfilled, as the audience are only able to regard her as Felicja Konopkowa (thanks to her voice), or not to notice her at all. Thus, her voice and body covers each other in the way similar to the soap opera’s (as well as the ‘mini-Hollywood’ films) distracting people from the blank reality by offering them a sentimental return to the good old (pre-war) days. Thus, kitsch associated usually with soap operas, in case of ‘Felicja’s radio soap opera is not so much an expression of low artistic value, but first of all its artificiality, its being out of the tune with the national situation at the time, when ‘bourgeois’ couples like the Konopkas hardly existed. First of all, however, kitschy soap opera not only seems to entertain people and let ‘Felicja’ work in her profession, but gradually becomes the substitute of life for them and for her. The actress, therefore, comes to a similar conclusion to Gombrowicz, as the writer often would write about kitsch, comparing the communists desire to depict the People’s Republic of Poland as a safe haven to Polish anti-communists’ cherishing the memory of the nation’s heroic past instead of thinking of its present situation. In 1963 the author published in the Parisian monthly Kultura an essay titled ‘Kitsch’, commenting in it on communist attempts to present the system as a natural and obvious one. Gombrowicz stresses that the new methods of a ‘gentle persuasion’, emerging after the riots of 1956, although at first may seem so much different from the Stalinist’s violence, are, in fact, equally dangerous. Since, instead of attacking straightforwardly, they use the press and other media to create the image of the country, which remains only a kitschy illusion. Therefore, the main danger for the communists in Poland is no longer an open ‘anti-communis[t]’ attack, but one coming from the inside, shattering the illusory image, for ‘nothing more fatal can happen to a communist than his growing suspicion, that communism is a fake system’ (Gombrowicz 1993: 495). The Konopkas in their ability to leave behind the war and live as if nothing changed, resemble the Poles as described by Gombrowicz, who comments on their kitsch in his Diary, pleading: Oh, if only a fire would rain down from the heavens and cleanse the Argentine life of Poles of its excessive kitsch. I can’t understand these people. It is puzzling to me that a man who has passed through the seven circles of hell, who has experienced a situation that has touched the very depths of his soul, […], having landed in Argentina, joins a committee as if nothing had happened and begins to recite an immortal, it turns out, platitude. The knowledge of life that they gained, that they had to attain, is beside them. They have it in their pockets but not in themselves and in the end, even these pockets have been sealed. (Gombrowicz 1988: 56) 37 . Z aneta Jamrozik Felicja resembles the people described by Gombrowicz, but ‘Felicja’, the actress, is far from it. In fact, the war for her remains still a very much vivid experience, as proved by her remembering it during her journey to France. It is also noticeable, from the way she structures her memories, that she not only knows well the national myths about women, who sacrifice themselves for their ‘knights’, but also connects it with the myth of Ophelia. Since ‘Felicja’, not unlike Shakespeare’s heroine, who is accused by Hamlet first of pretending to be someone she is not, then of trying to make him marry her, has to put up with similar accusations posited by Wiktor during the war. ‘Felicja’ as an actress The very first image that ‘Felicja’ recalls is a close-up of hands: a man’s hands in leather gloves, and a bare woman’s hand holding them in a comforting gesture, as we hear the voices coming from off-screen. First, a male voice asking ‘Do you really believe, that I can be saved?’, then a female voice responds ‘A hair of your head will not fall. It’s not far now, you’ll be safe soon’. In the female voice we can recognize the voice of ‘Felicja’, while the male voice belongs to Wiktor. When the image fades away, ‘Felicja’ ironically compares her reminiscence to the screenplay: ‘Not bad for a beginning of a screenplay. In life, however, such moments one endures a bit worse’. This comment suggests that, by laughing at her own words, she tries to draw a line between her past and present situation. Comparing her past self to a (not very good) actress, while simultaneously restating her present self as the real one, ‘Felicja’ proves that Gombrowicz was right when he wrote that the Poles really hate acting. It is also important to add, however, that this kind of attitude is not limited to the Polish people, but paradoxically – as Naremore argued – is quite common among actors. This kind of thinking about actor–character relationship comes from the ‘Stanislavskian’ tradition of acting, which originated with Stanislavsky’s system at the beginning of the XX century, and still remains a basis of so-called common sense approach to acting. Naremore summarizes this approach by noting that ‘the hallmark of such attitude is the belief that good acting is “true to life” and at the same time expressive of actor’s authentic, “organic” self – hence the typical movie advertisement: “Clint Eastwood is Dirty Harry”’ (Naremore 1988: 2, original emphasis). Therefore, paradoxically, this tradition of acting is ‘really’ against acting. Many acting coaches still try to convince their students that they ‘have to be themselves’ since ‘the camera sees what you truly are at the moment’ (Comey 2002: 14). The way ‘Felicja’ begins her travelling back in time, her ‘memory work’, is significant in its resemblance to the process of emotional memory. Emotional memory, according to Stanislavsky, should bring with itself an ability to empathize with others, while empathy marks the beginning of the actor’s work in creating a character. In describing the process Russian theoretician used the ‘metaphor of the house through which the actor searches for the tiny bead of a particular emotional memory’ (Auslander 1997: 31). It appears that Has only changed the house for the plane, leaving the container metaphor untouched. However, the close-up of hands initiates the work of emotional memory not only for ‘Felicja’, but also – in due course – for spectators, as they are likely to perceive the two main protagonists through this image. The image will gradually be gaining in meaning, just as it will become a part of the viewers’ 38 How to be an actress (in Poland) memory. So far, however, we can see the close-up of the man’s hands, as he gesticulates a lot, using ‘wide’, so-called theatrical gestures, that make his words sound like a prepared speech. The man’s overstylized gestures also point to Has’s criticism of pretentiousness of the Polish heroic tradition. In the case of the woman, however, she herself comments on her words, comparing them with a line from the screenplay and pointing out their affectation. Therefore, ‘Felicja’s’ most intimate memory already presents people trapped in old national roles, though her comment marks her first attempt to break from this circle and see it from the double perspective. In this way, ‘Felicja’s’ words function like a parody understood here after Robert Hariman as an act of duplication where the original is placed ‘beside itself’ and the copy is used as a joke (2008: 249). Even the way ‘Felicja’ recalls her past brings connotation with watching a blurred image. This is manifested by the way in which ‘Felicja’ lowers her head and begins to stare into a distance, as if she was seeing there a scene from the past. This enables her to put herself as if outside the whole situation, and see it from a double perspective. The recalled moment is also important because of the way it presents ‘Felicja’. It makes her body parts replace her whole body, echoing a type of framing used in the scenes on the plane, and before that, at the bar. Thus, in the flashback, ‘Felicja’ is represented by her hand, on the plane – the space of technology, science and hygiene – she is shown only in close-ups or medium shots, so at best we can only see her torso. According to Patrick Tucker, this type of framing creates a kind of intimacy between an actor and a spectator; that is why he calls it the ‘“intimate” theater style’ (2003: 7). But, when used a lot, and this would be the case of Has’s film, such style figuratively disembodies the person who is presented in the frame. The images of hands and face of ‘Felicja’ become the most recurring visual motifs in the film. Has stresses their presence from the very beginning, when he makes Krafftówna hold a glass of cognac to the camera, showing her taking off and putting on leather gloves, or applying her make-up. Presentation of a dismembered body is also emphasized during the scenes in a closed, white, somewhat futuristic and sterile space of the plane. ‘Felicja’ calls it ‘hygiene’, and extends her observation on other passengers. The framing of her body, instead of conveying a sense of intimacy between the actress and the viewers, presents it more as an obstacle to intimacy. Those who would expect to gain an access to ‘Felicja’s’ mind by examining the close-up of her face will feel disappointed. The close-up that appears at the end of the opening sequence is more of a challenging look directed at the spectator, than a seducing gesture of a female star. Furthermore, until then, we can only see ‘Felicja’s’ back, while the fragments of her face are reflected in the hand mirror she holds before herself. This particular type of framing of a woman’s body does not position her as an object of desire, nor it offers a pleasure of voyeuristic gazing at her, but presents her more as a jigsaw puzzle to be solved by the spectator. The slow gestures she performs while applying the lipstick, the way she holds her glass, or the slow monotonous tone of her inner monologue, seem to have the meaning of what Bertold Brecht (Weber 2000) and Roland Barthes after him called a social gest, ‘in which a whole social situation can be read’ (1977: 73–74). The body-collage is to be examined as a sign of Socialist Realist way of presenting women’s bodies as disembodied and desexualized (Skwara 2006), rather than admired by a viewer. A similar type of dissecting framing one can find in the films of Classical Hollywood Cinema. However, in Has’s 39 . Z aneta Jamrozik Figure 4: The close-up of Barbara Krafftówna as ‘Felicja’ at the beginning of How to be Loved. film it is used to stress the social meaning of an image while obscuring the pleasure of looking at a woman’s body. Writing about women represented in the Socialist Realist novels, Ewa Toniak notes that ‘they are hard to “spot”’, since ‘they are all, though each in its own way – “disembodied”’ (2008: 86). The body is usually reduced to the depictions of hands and faces, what Toniak calls the ‘strategy of invisibility’, and argues that in this way, femininity is ‘safe placed’ in the body parts, that are not supposed to be connected with the flesh or evoke men’s desire. Thus, a woman can be viewed as a ‘sterile’ sign or – as Toniak calls it – a ‘rhetorical figure’ of femininity instead of an object of desire (2008: 86). Even ‘Felicja’s’ own thoughts circulate around the notion of hygiene, understood as being detached from a messy or dirty side of life. ‘Hygienic appearance’ – she says in her inner monologue after glancing briefly at her neighbour. It is apparent that she yearns for ordered ‘hygienic’ life, while at the same time knowing that this will not be enough for her. For example, when looking at the man, she begins to imagine: ‘If I married him today, I would have probably despised him a little, for he knows so much less than me’. The man, who – as we learnt earlier – did not spend the war in Poland and now lives abroad – for ‘Felicja’ stands for calm and order for which she yearns, but also the kitsch she is afraid of. Kitsch emerges from the fact that ‘he knows so little’, and – as ‘Felicja’ concludes after a while – ‘in certain circumstances he would say “It’s perfectly human”, and in others “It’s below the limit”’. By this comment the woman makes evident, that she – like Gombrowicz – finds ‘one-sidedness’ of a perspective inadequate to grasp the complexity of her situation. However, she herself looks at the man in exactly the same way, unable to overcome her prejudice and come up with more than one possible version of his biography. Therefore, while she can use a 40 How to be an actress (in Poland) plurality of perspectives offered by parody in relation to the past, it becomes more difficult when it refers to the present. Thus, although, this ‘hygienic’ man sitting next to her, who also happens to be a serologist, inspires her to imagine herself living another kind of life, she quickly forbids herself imagining such a scenario as being unrealistic. There is a parallel between the way in which Socialist Realism ‘saw’ a woman, and how many acting teachers still encourage their students to ‘see’ their bodies, when they compare it to an instrument. In both cases this leads to disembodying, though, as Linda Walsh Jenkins and Susan Ogden-Malouf argue, this process is different for male and female performers. The authors, having examined the differences between actors and actresses and how they are taught their craft in the United States, came to the conclusion that while male actors during their training learn how to get through the layers of defences in order to gain access to their emotional resources, female actors have to overcome their self-effacing habits to draw attention to their presence on the stage. However, this particular skill, apart from providing an actress with charisma or ‘star quality’, can also pose a danger for her, as the authors explained while writing about ‘the most danger case’, that is, the Method: ‘Method’ acting, as it is traditionally taught, asks the performer to align with a part, to search for those self-revelations that are appropriate to a role. The acting coach or director frequently serves as an all-knowing guru for whom the performer must be absolutely vulnerable (opening the way to both psychological and sexual exploitation) […] If an actress really knows the negative effects of what she is doing, she can only act if she effaces herself, she becomes disembodied. (Jenkins and Ogden-Malouf 1985: 66) Therefore, according to Jenkins and Ogden-Malouf, an actress really has only two choices at her disposal. She may protect herself by not giving away anything from her personal history during playing a part, but this will not improve her visibility onstage. On the other hand, she may align herself with a character, in which case she will lose a sense of being herself, through becoming one with her character. For this reason, whenever there is the belief that one can reveal his or her ‘true self’ through acting, then there is a danger of becoming the half-empty mirror image instead, as suggested by Gombrowicz in his notes about ‘Polish excessiveness’ by which Pole is impoverished exactly by one-half of himself, in addition to which even the half that is allowed to be heard cannot appear in a natural way. […] History imposes upon us an artificial conception of ourselves and forces us to simulate historical deduction instead of living our own reality. (1988: 109–10) The invisibility and disembodiment of an actress seems crucial for Has because it connects the theme of female acting with the way women were presented in the Socialist Realist art. Watching How to be Loved we learn that ‘Felicja’ was not famous, and hardly able to work in her profession, before turning to be a voice actress. Therefore, the voice acting implies here that an actress ‘can only act if she effaces herself’. Has also suggests that the woman is reduced to her voice also in everyday life. The voice of ‘Felicja’ (and with it her stardom) seems to have the power to 41 . Z aneta Jamrozik diminish the visibility of woman’s body, as suggested by the scene when she says goodbye to her neighbour from the plane. When asked if he will remember her, the man answers kindly, that he indeed liked her voice. Moreover, a bit earlier, when they were both still on the plane and ‘Felicja’ was trying to gain the man’s attention by using her acting as well as feminine ‘skills’, her efforts go unnoticed. Though one may feel tempted to follow Kaja Silverman (1988) and come to a conclusion that How to be Loved, unlike Hollywood cinema, grants the woman power over the story she recounts, the situation is more complex here. First, as was pointed out by Elena del Rio, the body should not always be ‘regarded as a passive surface of mute and dumb physicality’ (2008: 125), while disembodied voice, in contrast, be a sign of power. Second, ‘Felicja’ herself, after hearing her voice on the radio at the beginning of the film, seems unsatisfied and that is why she wants to step back to look at her figure and attempts to join her voice with her body. ‘Felicja’s’ desire to step back and look at herself has therefore two objectives. One is connected with her acting profession and the second with its social consequences. In both one can find a hostility towards acting understood as pretending to be someone else. The first remains more or less typical problem for all actors, and as that, it may be considered in line with Stanislavsky’s wish to create a system, that would help actors to deal with impossibility to observe their work, to estimate it, and subsequently – to improve it. As Mel Gordon outlines in his book about Stanislavsky’s legacy: Stanislavsky ascertained the special problems of the actor: inspiration and expression. Artists […] normally create just at those times they feel truly inspired. Only the performing artist must create on demand, on someone else’s time – for instance, six nights a week at 8:10 exactly. In addition, the actor alone does not see his labor at the moment he creates it. The performer’s expressive means – his body – is inseparable from his critical faculties. Therefore, unlike most other artists, the actor is dependent on others to direct him. (2010: 8) Of course, as we may see in the case of ‘Felicja’, actors can watch and listen to their performances after they have been recorded. Still, it is not the same as in the case of a writer or a painter, who can look at his or her work from a distance and make the necessary changes before it has been finished. In the case of ‘Felicja’ this ability to listen to her recorded performances at the beginning of the film only increases her sense of lack of agency in directing her own life. Later on, however, she decides to make the most of this mechanism by using its ability to double her voice as a parodic device, through which she mocks the dichotomy of the original and fake self. Furthermore, during her flight to Paris ‘Felicja’ starts to realize that this subversion of the idea of identity is possible not only through doubling one’s presence by recording it, but also by her very ability to act. Thus ‘Felicja’s’ efforts as an actress are not directed towards revealing of her ‘true’ self hidden behind the ‘everyday mask’, as proposed by Stanislavsky and his followers, but are used to reinvent her visibility and agency by presenting herself in a manner that challenges the division between acting and non-acting. The second aim of ‘Felicja’s’ actions has to do with the fact that she lives in a society, which, to paraphrase Naremore, ‘really hates acting’, therefore perceives it (and automatically everybody who does it) as faking. It will be useful to return for a while to the distinction between ‘Felicja’s’ and Wiktor’s 42 How to be an actress (in Poland) Figure 5: ‘Felicja’ (Barbara Krafftówna) observing Wiktor from behind the curtain in How to be Loved. types of acting. When the two meet after the war it becomes obvious that the man tried to live up to his myth, but he did that only by reciting the heroic stories he himself invented. ‘Felicja’, on the other hand, stands in the doorway and observes the whole scene from behind the curtain, remained both an actress and a spectator. This scene may be interpreted as another social gest, this time more profound then the previous one, as ‘Felicja’, walking through the space of the bar encounters on her way many examples of ‘excessive Polishness’, as Gombrowicz would probably name them, one of which is conveyed in Wiktor’s monologue. Thus, her in-between-position helps to reveal the overflow of national myths, roles and stereotypes among people, who would never consider themselves actors. Is she for real? In Gender Trouble Butler, analysing drag shows, describes the confusion resulting from the fact that a person, who may at first look like a woman happens to be a man or the other way around. This confusing moment throws into relief questions about the reality of either gender. As she notes, ‘if you examine what knowledges we are drawing upon when we make this observation, regarding anatomy of the person, or the way the clothes are worn’, then it becomes evident that this is all knowledge that has been “naturalized” through a process of normalization’ (Butler 1990: xxii). This moment of hesitation puts ‘the reality of gender … into crisis: it becomes unclear how to distinguish the real from the unreal’ (Butler 1990: xxiii). The problem with ‘Felicja’ is similar, though it refers more to her acting than her body as we may almost never be sure whether she is acting or is ‘serious’ or – to put it simpler – when she is Felicja and when she is ‘Felicja’. 43 . Z aneta Jamrozik The woman avoids situations in which she would be supposed to let her emotions go and she never seems to ‘behave privately’. This is stressed by Krafftówna’s acting, which, compared with the Stanislavskian tradition, appears lacking in sincerity. She never limits herself to simply speaking the words but always furnishes them with exaggerated movements and gestures, making ‘normal’ conversation look like an ‘overacted’ acting exercise. Michael Kirby once observed that ‘not all performance is acting’, however when for him the most problematic case would be a happening, as ‘the performers in happenings generally tended to “be” nobody or nothing other than themselves’ (2002: 40), for the spectator of How to be Loved what becomes more curious is the fact, that ‘Felicja’ hardly ever seems to be anybody else than an actress playing a role. The way Krafftówna plays ‘Felicja’ makes it look like if she is trying to question the difference between the acting and nonacting, and subsequently, the difference between acting in real life and acting onstage. This kind of ambiguity leaves spectators confused, as on the one hand, ‘Felicja’ seems inauthentic, since she makes her acting visible but by doing this she questions the whole idea of authenticity, as she does not try to hide her artificiality, even looks into the camera at the beginning of the film. This look can be interpreted as a manifestation of turning the gaze away from ‘one-sidedness’ and self-evaluation, while pointing towards the space occupied by the viewer, because s/he is the one, who evaluates acting and gender performances, pronouncing them natural or fake. How to be Loved tells the story of a woman, who does her performance of gender so convincingly that she becomes invited by one of her fans to perform the role of her mother ‘live’ in Paris. Thus, childless and lonely ‘Felicja’ gets a chance to have a family while performing Felicja Konopkowa. What does that tell us about the division between life and fiction? It certainly seems ironic that what is supposed to be a lie, a fiction, a role to play turns out to grant the actress with the very real ticket to Paris, while all the things she has done before, especially her love for Wiktor and sacrifice for him, suddenly seem like a ‘bad screenplay’. Thus, the border between fiction and truth proves to be less firm than expected. Film acting is a profession in which an immaterial product is to be evaluated by others rather than by the doer herself. Those who judge it, come with their own set of rules, usually embedded within the wider sociocultural context. How to be Loved presents the situation in which the sociocultural context was created by two groups, communists and anti-communists, both equally hostile towards acting, which led to the excessive or ‘inauthentic’ authenticity of both camps. Has shows that acting can be used as a subversive strategy, allowing a person to live authentically on his or her own terms, defying any social or cultural expectations. References Auslander, P. (1997), From Acting to Performance. Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London and New York: Routledge. Baniewicz, E. (1992), ‘The interhuman church. Staging Gombrowicz in post-communist Poland’, Performing Arts Journal, XIV: 2, pp. 97–102. Barthes, R. (1977), Image Music Text (trans. S. Heath), London: Fontana Press. Brandys, K. (1960), ‘Jak byc´ kochana˛’/’How to be Loved’, in Romantycznos´c´/ Romanticism, Warszawa: Czytelnik, pp. 156–210. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. 44 How to be an actress (in Poland) —— (1995), ‘For a careful reading’, in S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell and N. Fraser (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 127–144. —— (2009), ‘Performativity, precariety and sexual politics’, AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 4: 3, pp. i–xiii. Brodsky, D. (1980), ‘Witold Gombrowicz and the “Polish October”’, Slavic Review, 39: 3, pp. 459–75. Comey, J. (2002), The Art of Film Acting, Oxford: Focal Press. Del Rio, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Frybes, M. and Michel, P. (1996), Après le communisme: Mythes et légendes de la Pologne/After Communism: The Myths and Legends of Poland, Paris: Bayard Editions. Gombrowicz, W. (1988), Diary. Volume One (trans. L. Vallee), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. —— (1993), ‘Tandeta’/’Kitsch’, in J. Giedroyc and W. Gombrowicz (eds), Listy 1950–1969/Letters 1950–1969, Warszawa: Czytelnik, pp. 492–499. —— (2012), Diary (trans. L. Vallee), New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gordon, M. (2010), Stanislavsky in America. An Actor’s Workbook, New York: Routledge. Hariman, R. (2008), ‘Political parody and public culture’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 94: 3, pp. 247–72. Has, W. J. (1962), Jak byc´ kochana˛/How to be Loved, Wrocław: Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych. —— (1966), Szyfry/The Codes, Wrocław: Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych. Je˛drkiewicz, W. (1974), ‘Szósty – szcze˛s´liwy’/’Sixth – The Lucky One’, Film, 19, pp. 12–13. Jenkins, L. W. and Ogden-Malouf, S. (1985), “The (Female) Actor Prepares,” Theater 17: 1, pp. 66–9. Kirby, M. (2002), ‘On acting and not-acting’, in P. B. Zarrilli (ed.), Acting (Re) Considered, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 40–52. . Korczarowska-Róz ycka, N. (2011), ‘… bylis´my jak z oleodruku – jak ze starego, familijnego albumu umarła fotografia’/’… we were like if from chromolithograph – like . a dead photography from an old family album’, in M. Jakubowska, K. Z yto and A. M. 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Z aneta Jamrozik Zarychta (eds), Filmowe ogrody Wojciecha Jerzego Hasa/The Cinematic Gardens of Wojciech Jerzy Has, Łódz´ : Wydawnictwo PWSFTviT, pp. 109–135. Piekara, M. (2001), Bohater powies´ci socrealistycznej/The Protagonist of a Socialist Realist Novel, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Gnome. Polkinghorne, D. E. (2001), ‘The self and humanistic psychology’, in F. T. Bugental, J. F. Pierson and K. J. Schneider (eds), The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology, London: Sage, pp. 81–100. Silverman, K. (1988), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Skwara, A. (2006), ‘Film socralistyczny – ciało ekranowane jako inskrypcja ideologii?’/’Socialist Realism Film – the Cinematic Body as an Inscription of Ideology’, in K. Ste˛pniak and M. Piechota (eds), Socrealizm. Fabułykomunikaty-ikony/Socialist Realism. Stories-Statements-Icons, Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, pp. 315–325. Stanislavsky, C. (2008), An Actor’s Work. A Student Diary (trans. J. Benedetti), New York: Routledge. Toniak, E. (2008), Olbrzymki: Kobiety i socrealizm/Giantesses: Women and Socialist Realism, Kraków: Koporacja Ha!art. Tucker, P. (2003), Secrets of Screen Acting, London and New York: Routledge. Wajda, A. (1958), Popiół i diament/Ashes and Diamonds, Łódz´ : Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych. Weber, C. (2000), ‘Brecht’s concept of gestus and the American performance tradition’, in C. Martin and H. Bial (eds), Brecht Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 41–46. Werner, A. (2011), Polskie, arcypolskie … ,/Polish, Archpolish … Warszawa: Biblioteka ‘Wie˛zi’. Wnuk-Lipin´ski, E. (1996), Demokratyczna rekonstrukcja: z socjologii radykalnej zmiany społecznej/The Democratic Reconstruction: the Sociology of Radical Social Change, Warszawa: PWN. Wydra, H. (2000), Continuities in Poland’s Permanent Transition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Suggested citation . Jamrozik, Z. (2013), ‘How to be an actress (in Poland): The figure of the actress in Wojciech Jerzy Has’s How to be Loved (1962)’, Studies in Eastern European Cinema 4: 1, pp. 29–46, doi: 10.1386/seec.4.1.29_1 Contributor details . Zaneta Jamrozik is a Ph.D. student at The Jagiellonian University in Krakow and at The University of Central Lancashire in Preston. She is working on Michael Haneke’s cinema and Eminem’s music videos. E-mail: [email protected] . Z aneta Jamrozik has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 46