TABLE OF CONTENTS

MAGDA LIPSKA, MONIKA TALARCZYK

Introduction: From International Solidarity to a New Color Curtain

PART I

Biographies

Extant List, Enrolled Students, Selected Film Stills

PART II

CONSTANTIN KATSAKIORIS

Effective Solidarity with the Postcolonial World: Cold-War Educational Assistance from the Socialist Countries

MATTHIEU GILLABERT

Students of Color and State Socialism: Can Double Exoticism Be Endured in Public Space?

MONIKA BOBAKO

The Jew, the Arab, the Pole: March 1968 in Poland and the History of an Alliance Between the Second and Third Worlds

Beata Kowalska, Inga Hajdarowicz

Unwanted Legacy, as Told by Its Witnesses: Arab Students in People’s Poland

BOLAJI BALOGUN

Cold War Internationalism: The Myth of Race-Blind Eastern Europe

BARTOSZ NOWICKI

Representing Africans in The Polish Review: A Projection of the PRL as Racism-Free

PART III

GABRIELLE CHOMENTOWSKI

The Training of Third-World Filmmakers in Eastern Bloc Schools before 1991

MONIKA TALARCZYK

We Want the Sun! Short Films by Łódź Students from the Global South, Compared with Models from Polish Art Cinema

KATARZYNA MĄKA-MALATYŃSKA

The Familiar, the Strange: Works by Students from the Global South in the Context of the Polish School of Documentary Film

MARIE PIERRE-BOUTHIER

Podróż to Poland: In Search of a Potential Moroccan Cinema

OLIVIER HADOUCHI

Voices and Faces from the Third World

RACHAEL DIANG’A

Sao Gamba’s Creative Legacy in Kenya

PART IV

“Documentary Film in Eastern Africa: Sao Gamba’s Secret Legacy” (2009)

“The Cinema and I (A Black Filmmaker)” (July 1986)

LÉA MORIN

Lesson 41: Going to Poland to Become a Moroccan Filmmaker

Filmography: Student Shorts

Magda Lipska is a curator and art theorist currently working at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, where she has curated and cocurated exhibitions including Niepodle-głe: Women and the National Discourse (2018), Danwen Xing: A Personal Diary (2017), and Lest the Two Seas Meet (2015, with Tarek Abou el Fetouh), as well as film and public programs. She edited the exhibition catalog Niepodległe: Kobiety a dyskurs narodowy and has contributed to publications including Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance (2017), Historie filmu awangardowego: Od dadaizmu do postinternetu (2020), and Pawlenski (2016). She is currently working on the post-conference publication What Are Our Genealogies? Realism, Socialist Realism, and Soc-Modernism in a Global Perspective (forthcoming, with Piotr Słodkowski).

Monika Talarczyk is a film scholar and associate professor at the Łódź Film School. She is the author of Wanda Jakubowska: Revisited (forthcoming in 2022), Biały mazur: Kino kobiet w polskiej kinematografii (2013, The White Mazur: Polish Women’s Cinema), Wszystko o Ewie: Filmy Barbary Sass a kino kobiet w drugiej połowie XX wieku (2013, All about Eve: Barbara Sass’s Film and Women’s Cinema in the Later Twentieth Century) and publications about women film directors including the Pantoptikum issue “Women in Cinema” (2022, no. 23), and the collection (Nie)widzialne kobiety kina (2018, (Non)visible Women in Film), edited with Małgorzata Radkiewicz. Talarczyk’s major research field is Minor Cinema (women’s cinema, minorities in film culture). In 2014, she received the Polish Film Institute Award. A member of the European Women’s Audiovisual Network (EWA), the Polish Women of Film society, and FIPRESCI (the International Federation of Film Critics). Currently developing the research project about Jerzy Toeplitz’s activity in the international network of film schools and film archives in the twentieth century.

MAGDA LIPSKA
MONIKA TALARCZYK

INTRODUCTION:
FROM INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY TO A NEW COLOR CURTAIN

“I always dreamed of coming to Poland and now the nightmare has come true”—this statement, by an unnamed student from an African country, comes from a volume edited by Ewa Nowicka and Sławomir Łodziński focused on adaptation issues that students from the Global South faced while on scholarship in Poland.[1] And while the respondent was quick to add that he did not intend to speak badly of his host country, when one reads the results of a survey conducted between 1985 and 1988 among a group of students at the School of Polish for Foreign Students at the University of Łódź (SJPdC)—where every foreign citizen who had earned a scholarship attended mandatory intensive language courses—one can hardly resist the impression that the turn of phrase was a Freudian slip. As such, it reveals a reality that has been assiduously papered over ever since with declarations of transnational fraternity and internationalist solidarity.

Eastern European scholarship programs for what were then termed Third World[2] countries were introduced as part of a wider agenda of assistance for developing countries that the United Nations appealed for in the mid-1950s, during the de-Stalinization period.[3] In 1960, Nikita Khrushchev inaugurated a university for students from those countries in Moscow, soon renamed after Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader who had just been assassinated. Educating Global South elites was not just a way of promoting socialism, but also a strategic move, aimed at striking political and economic alliances and circumventing Western domination. More broadly, it was an attempt to build an “alternative global modernity” based on the values of anti-colonial internationalism “committed to anti-imperialist politics and non-capitalist development.”[4]

This belief that a different world is possible began to wane in the early 1970s. Set in motion by the Helsinki Process,[5] the détente between the Soviet bloc and the West meant that European countries adopted a more continental focus in foreign policy. Contacts with Third World countries grew weaker. Internationalism’s ideological foundations gradually eroded, too. It was increasingly seen as a waste of money—money that could and should be spent at home, especially during the 1980s’ economic crises, felt acutely by all Eastern bloc countries.[6]

After Khrushchev’s declaration of an “opening up toward Africa and the Third World,” made at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, it became a priority of cultural policy among Soviet bloc countries to educate fledgling experts from the Global South, especially those who identified with socialism and communism. The purpose was to produce a left-leaning international elite. While economic and military aspects played a role as well, these student-scholarship programs are among the elements of diplomacy that are worth reexploring from a humanities perspective as a revealing cultural form activated during the Cold War era.

A Transnational People’s Poland?

The concept of transnational cinema emerged in the late twentieth century, conceived in response to a new order of film culture that, as a result of globalization processes and new flows of film production, was unhindered by economic and political boundaries of the Cold War period. As the scholars Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden explain in their Transnational Cinema, the concept serves to recognize global forces connecting the people and institutions of film beyond national borders while acknowledging that the category of nationality has grown less and less pertinent as a regulator of world cinema.[7]

But can this also be applied to studies of Cold War–era student film? Before trying to answer that question, we must return to historical concepts used to describe world cinema as well as cinemas of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. The term Second World, as a synonym for the Eastern bloc and its allies, first appeared in an essay published in L’Observateur in 1952 by the French anthropologist and demographer Alfred Sauvy, who wrote: “We speak readily of two worlds in confrontation, of their possible war, of their coexistence, etc., forgetting all too often that there is a third—the most important and, in fact, the first world in the chronological sense.”[8] Moreover, Sauvy suggested that the Third World was the raison d’être of the Cold War, with the global powers vying, if not to conquer it, at least to bring it under their sway.

That division, along with the table of the “worlds,” left a trace in film culture in the manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema” (1970) by the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, dealing with the phenomenon of new South American cinema. Translated into cinema paradigms, the geopolitical nomenclature resulted in their analysis in a split into “First Cinema,” as the cinema of global Hollywood, where “man is viewed as a consumer of ideology, not as the creator of ideology,” and “Second Cinema,” that is, auteur cinema, where a director searches for their own language and exposes ideologies, but remains caught in the trap of individualism. “Third Cinema,” according to Solanas and Getino, promises liberation through collective struggle against the system of capitalist domination—now widely understood to be inherently racist.[9]

Short films completed by Global South students while studying at the Łódź Film School during the Cold War are striking evidence that these filmmakers matured within a film milieu that had been nationalized[10] in 1945, which would then give rise to the Polish film school (auteur cinema) and the Polish documentary-film school (auteur documentary) a decade or so later. Within the bounds of student film, this shaping of a nationalized cinema and the Polish film “brand” on the international scene was accompanied by a cinema project that transgressed not only national boundaries but also those of the Eastern bloc. The term “socialist cinema” can be found in the era’s literature and journalism.[11] Far from being a monolithic bloc isolated from outside influence, this cinema even organized institutional paths of internal flows through student exchange. Boundaries were defined by ideology rather than the map. This allows us to use the category of “transnationality” in analyzing the global project of socialist cinema within world cinema of the second half of the twentieth century.

This “transnational People’s Poland”—as film scholars Sebastian Jagielski and Magdalena Podsiadło explain—encompassed various ways of internationalizing cinematography beyond the Iron Curtain, whether through attempts to open it up to the West or by integrating it with the greater organism of the Soviet sphere.[12] Those in charge of Eastern bloc cinematographies signed and implemented cooperation agreements, while controlling incidental examples of Western coproduction. Film schools in the Eastern bloc participated in the greater project, under the patronage of the Soviet Union, of internationalizing socialist cinema. As the cultural historian Marsha Siefert has written, the purpose of collective projects was to establish a socialist film elite through educational and formal associations: educating filmmakers sensitive to social issues in non-socialist countries, while establishing a transnational network of financial and technological support for like-minded filmmakers.

In short, it was Soviet-style cinematic internationalism.[13] Along with three forms that Siefert mentions of cultivating this internationalism—those being the Moscow Film Festival, annual meetings of Eastern bloc filmmakers, and Soviet coproductions—systematic work was being pursued by Central and Eastern European film schools. We can thus speak of a global socialist cinema organized around schools, festivals, Eastern bloc coproductions, and cooperation with the developing South, with the core idea of this Soviet cinematic internationalism.

A Continental School

The Łódź Film School (today the Leon Schiller National Film, Television, and Theater School; PWSFTiTV) has been described in the literature as a paragon of the continental film school during the postwar development of national cinematographies.[14] Shortly after the war, filmmakers were training at the Film Institute in Kraków, then in Łódź at the Film Department of the Fine Arts College, directed by Marian Wimmer. The Łódź Film School was launched in 1948, run by a generation of instructors including Eugeniusz Cękalski and Jerzy Toeplitz who traced roots to a committed group of prewar cinephiles. In the 1930s, they had been striving to elevate film culture in Poland and directing their own attempts to advance Polish cinema artistically. For five years, as members of the START Association of Art Film Enthusiasts (founded in 1930), they animated film culture in Warsaw and Łódź, organizing screenings and discussions, shooting artistic shorts (impressionistic, ethnographic, documentary), and lobbying public institutions and state authorities to create conditions for the production and distribution of films for more discerning viewers.

After the war, these STARTers received the first top awards for Polish film at international festivals: Wanda Jakubowska for Ostatni etap (The Last Stage; Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary IFF, 1948); Jerzy Bossak with Wacław Kaźmierczak for Powódź (Flood; Grand Prix for Best Documentary Short at the Cannes IFF, 1947). From their group came the Łódź Film School’s first rector: Jerzy Toeplitz, a cinema historian and film critic.

Toeplitz had already been deeply involved in organizing film education in Poland as secretary of the prewar Film Industry Supreme Council’s Committee for Film Training, tasked with establishing a national Film Institute.[15]

Shortly after the war, he joined an international network of cooperation for film culture, which led to his presidency of the International Federation of Film Archives (1948–72), and to the Łódź Film School’s inclusion in the CILECT International Association of Film and Television Schools (1955), and to European cinema masters including Vsevolod Pudovkin and Joris Ivens visiting Łódź, as well as theoreticians including Béla Balázs and Umberto Barbaro.[16] After Toeplitz was dismissed as rector in 1968 in the midst of Party-led “anti-Zionist” purges instigated that March, his stature on the international scene would be reconfirmed when he was hired to coorganize the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School (AFTRS) in Sydney. Toeplitz had accepted an invitation from La Trobe University in Melbourne to deliver a year-long lecture series on cinema history, then was appointed AFTRS’s founding director, a position he held for six years (1973–79), just as the Australian New Wave was being fomented.

Immediately after the war, Łódź, Poland’s third largest city and the nearest one to the shattered capital where the urban fabric had survived, was being transformed into an academic hub, a process that included the founding of the film school. In the late nineteenth century, the city had rapidly grown into a major manufacturing center; in the twentieth, just as the postwar period began, into a city of higher education, film culture, and nationalized industry. A key principle in the film-education project was joining theory and practice in parallel with humanities training. The declared model was, of course, Moscow’s VGIK, although sources show that the new school’s statute was also consulted with an IDHEC professor in France.[17]

Practical training required unique infrastructure that was developed alongside the reborn domestic cinematographic industry as a whole. Early on, students used equipment and soundstages of the Wytwórnia Filmów Fabularnych studios, founded in Łódź in 1949. In 1955, the school inaugurated its own film-production center, Szkolny Ośrodek Produkcji Filmów, fully equipped for shooting, lighting, sound recording, and editing. As part of their curriculum, directing students were required to submit an editing exercise, a production exercise, two documentary shorts, two feature shorts, and a TV show. For cinematography students, requirements included exercises in black-and-white and color in various footage lengths and film-stock types (16 mm, 35 mm). Two full shooting crews could work at once, and the technical staff was almost the size of the teaching staff (the latter numbered nearly one hundred). Due to capacity issues and budget shortages—funds allocated usually fell short of what had been applied for—Polish graduate students were allowed, per an ordinance from the minister of culture and art, to produce the practical part of their master’s projects with the professional Zespoły Filmowe state film studios.[18] This did not hold for foreign students, whose graduation films were made at the school’s production center. The sole exception is the Iranian Kaweh Pur Rahnama’s war drama, No Way Back, Johnny (1969), which Rahnama’s supervisor recommended for production at Zespoły Filmowe’s “Vector” studio.

Films from the Tower of Babel

Students from the Global South began arriving at the Łódź Film School at the end of the 1950s; the first were two cinematography students from India in 1959. These early candidates had either already studied at art schools at home or—this applies to advanced classes—had already studied on other scholarships for students from postcolonial countries (greatly facilitated by knowing a host country’s language, as with those from former French colonies applying to study at IDHEC).

Film schools in the Eastern bloc required foreign students to complete a year-long language course. Classes took place in international groups, as yet undivided into disciplines, and often at a distance from the main academic centers, sometimes in the countryside. In Poland, these language courses were initiated in 1952 at the Preparatory College for Schools of Higher Learning, renamed the School of Polish for Foreign Students (SJPdC), at the University of Łódź in 1957. Until the late 1970s, SJPdC was the sole such institution in the country.[19] Łódź, therefore, was the hub for adaptation and transfer for students with diverse aims from all over the world.[20] SJPdC course participants went from 132 in 1952 to a record 653 in 1989.[21] Alumni would then usually go on to study for degrees in technology, economics, and medicine; far fewer attended film or theater schools.[22]

Among 170 foreign students from 1948 to 1989 at the Łódź Film School, sixty-three came from countries of the Global South,[23] almost exactly a third of the total. The proportions are somewhat different than for SJPdC and the language program with which students began: most came from Africa (nineteen from North Africa, nine from Sub-Saharan Africa), then from Latin America (twenty-three), the Middle East (six), Asia (five), and the Caribbean (one). Demand peaked in the 1960s for film studies and the scholarship program, when there were a total of thirty students from developing countries, compared with a few in the 1970s and fewer in the 1980s. Within these numbers, in the 1960s there were larger groups of Moroccans and South Americans, while a group of Algerians attended in the 1980s. Figures for students from the Global South indicate that the 1960s had been a “golden decade” for the overseas scholarship program.[24]

Forced Adjustments and Adaptations

From the perspective of gender studies, in the case of students from the Global South, studying at the Łódź Film School proved an almost exclusively male experience. This seems specific to the Łódź Film School, as VGIK in Moscow, FAMU in Prague, and the Konrad Wolf Film University in Potsdam-Babelsberg all had women students from three continents. It is as yet unclear whether this was a recruitment bias at the Łódź Film School or due to decisions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the Cold War, the only woman from the Global South to study direction was Beverly Joan Marcus (1978–82), from the Republic of South Africa. Nancy Cárdenas—a Mexican poet, playwright, filmmaker, and pioneering lesbian activist—studied at SJPdC and intended to enroll at the Łódź Film School, but never did. Students from the Global South managed to avoid androcentrism, choosing to work with cinematographers including Tatiana Dębska, Ewa Strzałka, Jolanta Dylewska, and Katarzyna Remin, and focusing on women’s issues in their documentary shorts (including Marta, Elżbieta K., Zofia and Ludmiła, Aleksander). This was an effect of the the cultural offer of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), both in the recruitment of women into the Faculty of Cinematography and in trends in Polish documentary film, with working women as a frequent theme. It was also symptomatic of scholarship-program participants identifying with less-privileged peoples’ experiences of alienation, linguistic uprootedness, disabilities and alterity.

The film shorts made by these scholarship students reflect the development over time of two phenomena: the gradual diminishment from utopian enthusiasm to disappointment if not disillusionment, along with an empowerment among the protagonists, their growing ambivalence and postcolonial awareness. Initially welcomed with considerable fervor from both hosts and participants, the student-exchange project then generated issues of adaptation, racist incidents, security-police surveillance, and revealing exposure to real-existing socialism across the decades, all of which were felt in eventual assessments of the program as an educational experiment.

March 1968 brought a rough halt to internationalist aspirations. Participant numbers still looked impressive, but any age of innocence was over. Students from the Global South identified with the contexts of 1968 that were French and North African (Shadow among Others; Somewhere, Someday), Middle Eastern (Report: September 1969), and South American (Che; Guerrilla; Without Requiem), rather than with the anti-Zionist campaign that then raged in Poland. Francophone students were likely familiar with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where the political philosopher drew a close connection between his concept of negrophobia—which today is termed anti-Black racism—and anti-Semitism. This would have aroused real concern among them, even fear, as half of Poland’s remaining Jews were having their citizenships revoked to be permitted to emigrate. Meanwhile, their fellow students and professors were leaving their studies and being dismissed from their positions, including Jerzy Bossak, Aleksander Ford, and Jerzy Toeplitz, the long-serving rector and a founder of the school. The scholarship students, in their turn, were being tailed by security agents and being encouraged or pressured to turn informants.

Nomadism and Its End

This student-scholarship program was the second moment in history when people of color traveled to Eastern Europe. A first wave of such focused arrivals had followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, attracting mainly Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean activists including Claude McKay, George Padmore, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who traveled across Eastern Europe on their way to the newly created Soviet Union, seeking alternatives to Western racism and in the hope of new models from a classless, post-racial society.[25]

The second wave of migration to Eastern Europe took place in the postwar period and involved mainly people from the Global South, citizens of newly decolonized countries whose motivations for going to the Eastern bloc were completely different. As mentioned before, despite many having pro-communist sympathies, most weren’t planning to stay in Europe and were focused on getting a higher education and acquiring specialist knowledge, much prized and often unavailable at home. Of great significance were the scholarships granted by socialist countries, which also allowed young people from lower-income families to go to university. Their motivations, therefore, were more pragmatic than the broader social aims of the previous generation.

Both these waves, as the historian Maxim Matusevich points out, prove the insufficiency of the race theorist Paul Gilroy’s argument, posited in the latter’s book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, that modernity is geographically bound up with the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas by way of Western European shipping concerns, and a result of the material and cultural absorption it affected.[26] As argued by Matusevich and Monica Popescu, a scholar of African literatures, this genealogy should be expanded to include the Cold War–era experience of intellectuals from the Global South, mainly continental Africa: “An African diaspora in the Eastern bloc,” Popescu writes, “is not of the same order of magnitude as the diaspora shaped by interaction with western cultures; yet... it is not negligible either.”[27] In her research on South African literature, Popescu emphasizes that for an entire generation of writers and activists of the apartheid era, from Lewis Nkosi and Alexa La Guma to Mandla Langa, Chris Hani, and Ronnie Kasrils, their time in Eastern Europe proved a formative experience.[28]

This influence was mutual. Arriving in the insulated countries of the Eastern bloc, students from Africa, Asia, and South America confirmed ideological foundations of the socialist state and they also, as Matusevich points out, challenged them. Thanks to the freedom of travel they enjoyed,[29] they brought hard currency as well lively and unfamiliar clothes and fashion sensibilities, books, and music, implanting in socialist societies where they were aspects of “Western lifestyle” that may have been official condemned but overtly and appealingly reflected more global ways of thinking and being. Thus, by their presences in an “insulated socialist society,” these “modern nomads [...] often served as conduits to the outside world and in this capacity played an ideologically ambiguous and clearly modernizing role,”[30] as Matusevich writes.

This then came to an abrupt halt in 1989. What in Central and Eastern Europe was being hailed as an “opening out,” “unification,” and a “return to Europe” became for many Third World intellectuals a change freighted with treason, menace, and a closure. “Some non-European anti-imperialists,” as it is argued in 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe, “understood 1989 as a story of deglobalization through which Eastern Europe had sought a civilizational realignment to the white world and the racialized privileges this would afford them.”[31]

Consequently, if we interpret 1989 as a radical redefinition of Eastern Europe’s relations with Africa and Asia, then the Iron Curtain was not so much lifted as redeployed across the south, toward the Mediterranean Sea separating Europe from Africa. It is a moment that, following the novelist Richard Wright’s book-length report on the Bandung Conference in 1955, could be called a restoration of the color curtain. The fall of the Berlin Wall has set off building processes for other walls around Europe, as clearly indicated in 2015 by the migration crisis from the south and east, and the severing of migration paths that until then had remained viable for those from the Global South.

Like the communist past in general, the project of Soviet-era socialist internationalism, founded on ideas of equality, cooperation, and international solidarity that were being deployed in contradistinction to Western racial realities, was marginalized after 1989 and repressed from collective memory. Today, when the world again needs an alternative to global capitalism in its rapacious reliance on human and planetary resources, the ideals of that era are taking on a renewed significance. This book serves as a reminder that the pre-1989 reality and its values are part of our heritage.

In order to portray the scholarship project in its breadth of potential and its implementation structure, we have decided across the present volume to highlight it from four angles.

First, drawing from the Łódź Film School archive, we present capsule biographies of eighteen alumni whose experiences and filmographies have informed the research completed on this subject, a definitive list of enrolled students from the period 1948–89, and a selection of film stills from that same time frame, providing a glimpse of the visual character of the films discussed in various detail throughout.

Second, through discussing student-scholarship programs with Third World countries in a broad international context, and presenting the historical and political background against which internationalist solidarity was then being built (essays by Constantin Katsakioris, Matthieu Gillabert). One often-denied issue of the period was racism, a daily experience for many foreign students in the Eastern bloc. The essays by Beata Kowalska and Inga Hajdarowicz, Bolaji Balogun, and Bartosz Nowicki question any assumption of Eastern European exceptionalism on the subject of race relations. In her essay, Monika Bobako shows how Jew-Arab-Pole relations, contextualized by the events of the Six-Day War and March 1968’s anti-Semitic events in Poland, became the beginning of the end of the internationalist project in the PRL.

Third, we will follow the trajectories of foreigners studying in film schools of the Eastern bloc (Gabrielle Chomentowski), along with the aesthetics and politics of their short works. In their essays, Marie Pierre-Bouthier, Olivier Hadouchi, Rachael Diang’a, Katarzyna Mąka-Malatyńska, and Monika Talarczyk discuss how student filmmakers’ experiences of studying in the Eastern bloc impacted their subsequent careers. Finally, by way of selected source materials, we want to give voice to the book’s protagonists—that is, to overseas scholarship students and alumni of the Łódź Film School. This section includes John Alex Maina Karanja’s master’s thesis in the directing department, “The Cinema and I (A Black Filmmaker).” Jakub Barua, a Polish-Kenyan director, shares reflections on Sao Gamba, his mentor and friend, who was also a Łódź Film School student. Léa Morin has collected reminiscences from the Moroccan and Algerian alumni Mostafa Derkaoui and Abdelkrim Derkaoui, Abdelkader Lagtaa, Ahmed Lallem, and their Costa Rican friend Miguel Sobrado, who played protagonists in their student shorts.

This book’s title, as with that of the film program we presented in late 2019 at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, comes from a poem, “Point d’interrogation,” written by Abdelkader Lagtaa in Łódź in 1972 (see the insert to this book). This phrase is also the title of Lagtaa’s short student film in which he critically examines how Poles relate to their Roma neighbors. In the all-but monoethnic Polish society of the Cold War era—an abrupt, terribly costly legacy of the Second World War—Lagtaa sought ruptures providing glimpses behind the polished screen of socialist reality. Colorfulness brought into that reality by students from the Global South offered hope that a differing reality was possible. It’s a hope we need today, as well.

Translated from the Polish by Marcin Wawrzyńczak.

[1] Grażyna Zarzycka-Suliga, “Pierwsze kontakty studentów zagranicznych z Polską: Relacja z łódzkiej ‘Wieży Babel,’” in Gość w dom: Studenci z krajów Trzeciego Świata w Polsce, ed. Ewa Nowicka and Sławomir Łodziński (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 1993), 47.

[2] We use the term Third World in its original meaning; that is, to describe those countries (mostly postcolonial) that despite their socialist leanings did not wish to comply with either the West (capitalism) or the East (communism) and instead pursued a third way beyond imperial paradigms.

[3] The advanced educations of film students from the Global South at Eastern-bloc schools is a topic that receives growing attention through film-historical research and curatorial practices. See Tereza Stejskalová, ed., Filmmakers of the World, Unite! Forgotten Internationalism, Czechoslovak Film and the Third World (Prague: Transit.cz, 2017); Rasha Salti, ed., with Gabrielle Chomentowski, Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2018).

[4] James Mark, Bogdan C. Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht, and Ljubica Spaskovska, eds., 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 130.

[5] A joint declaration on principles was adopted for the first time during the Cold War on August 1, 1975, at the closing meeting of the third phase of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The consensus among the thirty-five participating states—all of Europe except Albania and Andorra, along with the United States and Canada—would guide relations between them.

[6] The generation that had arrived two decades earlier perceived their stays in Poland in quite different terms. See Beata Kowalska and Inga Hajdarowicz, “Unwanted Legacy, as Told by Its Witnesses: Arab Students in People’s Poland,” in this book.

[7] Elizabeth Ezra, Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

[8] As quoted in Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds or Division of Social Scientific Labour circa 1950–76,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 569.

[9] Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Toward a Third Cinema,” Cineaste 4, no. 3 (1970–71): 1–10.

[10] In the sense of being owned and managed by the state, typical for the Eastern bloc economies.

[11] Jerzy Toeplitz, Historia sztuki filmowej, vols. 1–5 (Warsaw: Filmowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1955), passim; Bolesław Michałek, “Historia kina socjalistycznego: Po ankiecie historycznej,” Kino, no. 9 (1979): 48–49; Rafał Marszałek, “Historia kina socjalistycznego: Między historią i krytyką,” Kino, no. 5 (1979): 47–51.

[12] Sebastian Jagielski and Magdalena Podsiadło, eds., Kino polskie jako kino transnarodowe (Kraków: Universitas, 2017), 18.

[13] Marsha Siefert, “Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Film Making, 1955–1972,” in Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 161–93.

[14] Duncan Petrie, Rod Stoneman, Educating Film-makers: Past, Present, and Future (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2014), 27. The Soviet Union became a leader in cinematic internationalism not only for political reasons, but also due to its pioneering role in educating filmmakers, including the first film school, the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), founded in Moscow in 1919. Film-education historians see three phases in the founding of film schools. First, they are conceived as tools of new political regimes, as with VGIK, set up after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, started by Italy’s fascist regime as the first such school in Western Europe. In the second phase, after the Second World War, film schools became institutions of national cinema, such as the Film and Television School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU, 1946), the Łódź Film School (1948), and the Konrad Wolf Film University in Potsdam-Babelsberg, East Germany (founded in 1954 as the German Academy of Film Art). The third phase, after the fall of Communism, saw the emergence of schools training professionals for the free-market film industry (Petrie, Stoneman, Educating Film-makers, 4). This list includes the Institut des Hautes Études Cinematographiques (IDHEC), founded during the Second World War in France, which would play a major role in educating students from postcolonial countries.

[15] Jerzy Toeplitz, “O talentach i wykształceniu filmowem,” Pion, no. 4 (1935).

[16] Toeplitz’s characterization of socialist cinema, published for the English-speaking public in 1968, may be considered authoritative, particularly given his international standing: “There are three elements which seem to me characteristic and really decisive for the character of east European cinema in all the countries I am speaking of[:] the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, R[o]mania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia. First, they are all state owned cinemas. The state takes on the task of financing film production, running the theatres, and also controlling distribution of films in foreign countries and the importation of foreign films into these countries. The second thing common to all these countries is that the rank of the cinema in the hierarchy of the arts is much higher than in the western states. There is a feeling that it is the duty of the state to take care of cinema, that the cinema is an important part of art—not entertainment, not industry, but art. The reason is quite clear. All the Marxists in all these countries have read the famous statement by Lenin that ‘of all the arts the cinema is the most important for us.’ The third common denominator in all these countries is the idea of the film school as nursery for future film makers. I think this is of the greatest importance because there is a natural influx of new people with fresh ideas coming out of the schools into film production. Production could hardly exist without the schools. Producers do not have to search for people who might be useful to them. There is a regular channel for young people interested in film and seeing film as a career leading them from school into the profession.” Jerzy Toeplitz, “Cinema in Eastern Europe,” Cinema Journal 8, no. 1 (1968): 3–4.

[17] Note on the Statute typescript, Jerzy Toeplitz Archive, Łódź Museum of Cinematography. Both educational models are discussed by Gabrielle Chomentowski in her essay, “The Training of Third-World Filmmakers in Eastern Bloc Schools before 1991,” in this book.

[18] Danuta Wódz, “Produkcja filmów szkolnych w Państwowej Wyższej Szkole Filmowej, Telewizyjnej i Teatralnej im. Leona Schillera” (MA diss., Łódź Film School, 1981), Łódź Film School Library.

[19] See Matthieu Gillabert, “Students of Color and State Socialism: Can Double Exoticism Be Endured in Public Space?” in this book.

[20] Universities in Warsaw and Kraków offered short courses and summer schools.

[21] Dorota Wielkiewicz-Jałmużna, “Studium Języka Polskiego dla Cudzoziemców Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego w latach 1952–2002,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis: Kształcenie Polonistyczne Cudzoziemców, no. 15 (2008): 25.

[22] Wielkiewicz-Jałmużna, “Studium Języka Polskiego,” 77.

[23] About one hundred attended FAMU in Prague during the same period; see Stejskalová, Filmmakers of the World, Unite!, 17.

[24] Based on data cited during Les Ecoles de Cinema au XXe siècle: Objet d’étude privilègie pour histoire institutionale des circulations artistiques et politiques, organized online by Dr. Gabrielle Chomentowski on November 24, 2020. An exception was the Konrad Wolf Film University in Potsdam-Babelsberg, East Germany, where the program was intensified in the 1970s by the new rector, Peter Ulbrich; see Ilka Brombach, “Filme ausländischer Student*innen an der Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen ‘Konrad Wolf,’” August 31, 2018, bpb, http://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/bildung/filmbildung/274740/filme-auslaendischer-studentinnen-an-der-hochschule-fuer-film-und-fernsehen-konrad-wolf.

[25] See Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

[26] Maxim Matusevich, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic: African Students as Soviet Moderns,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2012): 325–50.

[27] Monica Popescu, “Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating Eastern European Experiences for an African Audience,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 177.

[28] Popescu, “Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw,” 177.

[29] Unlike their Polish colleagues, foreign students were allowed to travel abroad twice a year, also to Western countries. See Patryk Pleskot, ed., Cudzoziemcy w Warszawie 1945–1989 (Warsaw: IPN, 2012).

[30] Maxim Matusevich, “Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora in the Soviet Society,” African Diaspora 1 (2008): 55.

[31] Mark et al., 1989, 9.