“Fabulously Exotic Polesie”? Reportage from the Land of Yearning Songs by Maksymilian Emmer in an Ecocritical Perspective
Sławomir Łotysz
s.lotysz@gmail.comLudwik and Aleksander Birkenmajer Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4426-6401
Abstract
In 1936, a Polish short documentary Polesie directed by Maksymilian Emmer was awarded the silver medal at the Venice International Film Festival. The judges, as well as Polish film critics, praised work of the camera operator Jerzy Maliniak, particularly in landscape scenes. Among the critics, however, there were some controversies regarding the authenticity of how Polesie was portrayed. Some of them asserted that the movie was free from the idyllic convention, while the others thought that producers deliberately avoided showing what life really looked like in the poorest and most neglected areas of the country. The alleged primaveral character of nature in Polesie, as shown in the film, may also be challenged in the light of recent findings in the field of environmental history studies. The article argues that while Emmer and Maliniak did not show the real living conditions of indigenous population quite deliberately, they failed to recognize the real condition of local nature being lured by the common myth of fabulously exotic Polesie that thrived in Poland in interwar period.
Supporting Agencies
Keywords:
Polesie, Second Polish Republic, interwar period, environmental historyReferences
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Authors
Sławomir Łotyszs.lotysz@gmail.com
Ludwik and Aleksander Birkenmajer Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4426-6401
Professor at the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. His research interests include history of technology, disability studies, environmental history, and health diplomacy. Recent publications include Pińskie błota. Natura, wiedza i polityka na polskim Polesiu do 1945 rok [Pripet Marshes: Nature, knowledge, and politics in Polish Polesie until 1945] (2022). In 2014-2015, he was the Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. In 2017-2021, he was the President of the International Committee for the History of Technology.
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