That Which Is Absent: Accounts and Memories of Women from the Warsaw Uprising as Ready-Made but Not Used Film Scenarios
Abstract
In Polish feature films about the Warsaw Uprising there are no women. They of course appear as nurses, civilians or message runners. But they are always part of the background, seen, but not looking, symbolic in their presence, and never the active heroines; always serving, and never independent or autonomous. If they are the heroines of the drama, then they are part of someone else’s drama, and are not given a voice of their own. Their narratives and accounts of life, even everyday life, are left unsaid, hidden behind grand and epic narratives of the heroes. The article is about women’s “micro-narratives”, the memories of women who lived in Warsaw and participated in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The memories give us a chance to see the Uprising in a different light, one that includes the women’s perspective and experience of the Uprising. Women’s accounts, due to their graphic nature and their uniqueness appear to be ready-made but not used film scenarios. [originally published in Polish in Kwartalnik Filmowy 2010, no. 69, pp. 95-120]
Keywords:
women, World War II, Warsaw UprisingReferences
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Authors
Karolina Kosińskakwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences Poland
Doctor of the Humanities, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Film and Audiovisual Arts – Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw); member of the Editorial Staff of Kwartalnik Filmowy. Her research focuses on problems of social realism and on British social cinema. Her papers were published i.a. in Kwartalnik Filmowy, Konteksty, Kultura Popularna, Czas Kultury and Kino.
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Copyright (c) 2013 Karolina Kosińska
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In issues from 105-106 (2019) to 119 (2022) all articles were published under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. During this period the authors granted a royalty-free non-exclusive licence (CC BY-ND 4.0) to use their article in „Kwartalnik Filmowy”, retained full copyright, and agreed to identify the work as first having been published in our journal should it be published or used again.
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