Michał Waszyński’s "Wielka droga". A polish stateless film

Abstract

The paper explores the production, distribution and reception of Michał Waszyński’s film Wielka droga [The Great Way], as well as the activities of the Film Section of the Polish II Corps of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Drawing on a contextual analysis of source materials gathered during archival research, the paper reconstructs the political, diplomatic and social background of the film’s reception in postwar Italy. The presented research findings cast new light on such issues as filmmaking during the time of war and Poland’s undetermined geopolitical status; the film’s entanglement with wartime and postwar diplomacy; the shaping of narratives concerning the Second World War; the emergence of Italian film policies in the late 1940s. All these problems led to the exclusion of Waszyński’s film from official distribution and its resulting absence from publications devoted to the history of cinema.
The paper draws on extensive archival research conducted in Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, Archivio Revisione Cinematografica della Direzione Generale del Cinema at the Italian Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo) in Rome, Archivio Cesare Zavattini at Biblioteca Panizzi in Reggio Emilia, the archives of the Polish II Corps of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and of the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade (SBSK) at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, and the Archives of the “Kultura” Literary Institute in Le Mesnil-le-Roi. I would like to express my gratitude to the employees of these institutions for their kind support during my research. The paper was written as part of the “Philosovietism in Post-Fascist Italian Film Culture” project, which is funded by the National Science Centre under decision no. UMO-2019/32/C/HS2/00536.