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Description
Agnieszka Holland is the most internationally recognized Polish filmmaker. There is a significant gap in contemporary research on Holland in both Polish and international film and media studies. The proposed project will undertake this task. The proposed research program aims at examining Agnieszka Holland’s films and television works within three main theoretical frameworks: the concept of authorship in film and media, transnational film and media culture, and global women’s cinema and its correspondence with transnational feminism. These three theoretical frameworks will help to chart a concrete and nuanced approach to Agnieszka Holland’s large and complex body of work. The point of departure for the analyses will explanation of the impasse of using traditional concept of authorship in relation to Holland’s work. Holland’s films and television projects do not offer stylistic and semantic consistency and, thus, they do not fit the traditional concept of authorship. In order to contribute to the research in the field of transnational cinema and media, the project will analyse the noticeable evolution of Holland’s work from politically determined migration to economically conditioned transnational projects. Analysis of her work from the perspective of women’s cinema will demonstrate necessity of critical reconsideration of transnational feminism. The main product of this research project will be the first full-length monograph of Agnieszka Holland in English published in an international academic publisher and two full-length articles published in international peer-reviewed journals. Its original approach to the problem of authorship will be a significant contribution to Polish film studies, whereas its importance for international research lies in redressing the absence of Eastern European production in academic discourse.
Summary of project results
The main research goal of the project was to examine the versatile work of Agnieszka Holland, the most famous Polish filmmaker, a three times Oscar nominee and the recipient of numerous film festival prizes. In her native Poland she is popular not only due to her prolific oeuvre but also because of her radical political statements registered in media, where she appears on a regular basis. Abroad she is known as a director of Holocaust films, Hollywood adaptations of literary classics, and a collaborator of global streaming platforms such as HBO and Netflix. Despite her reputation, scholarship has not addressed adequately the versatility of her prolific work in film and media. The project “Transnational cinema of Agnieszka Holland” has redressed this lacuna in research, while exposing a complex nexus of changing geopolitical circumstances and various modes of film production within which she has worked. Versatility of Holland’s cultural production required a critical reassessment of theoretical concepts and categories customarily used in film and media studies. First, despite her manifest authorial agency, her work cannot be conceptualized as traditional auteur cinema due to the lack of thematic and stylistic consistency. Instead, it has been approached as a newly emerging “dispersible” authorship in transnational women’s cinema. Second, her long-lasting international career in film and media also represents a significant evolution within transnational model of cinema from “exilic cinema” to “sojourner cinema” that refers to filmmakers who decide to travel across various countries as requested by individual projects. This trajectory parallels the changes occurring within the concept of film and media authorship, from traditional model of singular authorial agency controlling aesthetic and semantic aspects of individual creative projects to post-authorial model where an emphasis is put on various collaborative networks, including industrial factors as well as various artistic scripts. Third, the perpetually evolving transnational authorship of Agnieszka Holland parallels her works’ negotiations of the concepts of women’s cinema and its feminist ideological and aesthetic underpinnings. As the conducted research has demonstrated, Holland’s work called for revisions and re-considerations of transnational feminism in that it required more complete inclusion of Polish (and Eastern-European) transnational cultural production in contemporary networks of global cinema and pertinent academic discourse
The research conducted during the project’s implementation has resulted with comprehensive examination of Holland’s more than four-decades-long professional career, during which she has navigated among the politically engaged cinema of late socialism, exilic cinema, global Hollywood cinema, and transnational European art cinema, while also working within art, popular and activist cinema. The research foregrounded this versatility and the contradictions in Holland’s work, interpreting them as artistic equivalents of the migratory movements of human and monetary capital characteristic of the contemporary world, as well as a reflection of the transformations of cultural production within the former Eastern Bloc.
The main output of the research project is the monograph The Films of Agnieszka Holland. It is the first monograph in English of the most internationally recognised Polish filmmaker, and as such it is an original and overdue contribution to the field of film and media studies. It examines Holland’s versatile work, while also offering critical examination of theoretical and critical concepts such as authorship in film and media, transnational and women’s cinema.
Furthermore, the monograph presents a critical reassessment of communist cultural production, especially those of its sectors that were authored by women. Its methodological approach combines textual analysis, production studies, and reception studies. The methodological pluralism provided adequate research tools to analyse the fluctuating, prolific body of Holland’s work. Accordingly, the conducted research has enabled not only to identify the specifics of her authorship, but also to engage in a critical examination of theoretical concepts employed in contemporary film and media studies. The monograph situates Holland in multitude of authorship discourses in contemporary film and media examining how her public persona is oscillating between a traditional figure of auteur, celebrity director, and political activist. Holland’s work in film and media as well as her activities performed in various spheres of public space have been conceptualized as a nexus of contradictory ideological and aesthetic discourses that disrupt traditional classifications and hierarchies within cultural production. The author proposes an original concept of “affective laborious collaboration”, which has proved an efficient and revelatory tool in examining Holland’s authorship, while also demonstrating its operative potential in analyzing subjective positions in contemporary audio-visual culture.
Analysis of her film and television works made abroad - foregrounding her gradual shift from the position of an exilic artist to the economically determined position of a director-for-hire working within global Hollywood cinema and streaming platforms - has led to a critical re-examination of the concept of transnational film and media. Finally, analysis of Holland’s work in the context of women’s cinema has made an important intervention in the realm of transnational feminism by recognizing the traditionally marginalized Eastern European female experience. In general, the monograph overcame the limitations of both global (Western) and local (Polish and Eastern European) discourse on transnational women’s cinema and media work. In general terms, the monograph contributes to the fields of film and media studies, gender studies, East European studies, and social and political studies.
Results of the conducted research on Holland’s directorial career have been presented at several venues: six international and one Polish research conferences, four research essays published in international academic periodicals and a collected volume; and several public lectures aimed at a general audience. The most important outcome of the undertaken research is a monograph titled The Films of Agnieszka Holland, published in July 2024 by the Edinburgh University Press.
The project’s pioneering approach to the problem of authorship in film and media has contributed to the Polish and international film and media studies in terms of expanding academic knowledge on the Polish filmmaker and her contribution to transnational cinema and feminism. As the project has negotiated various critical and theoretical frameworks developed by Western and Polish scholars, it has established new and much needed channels for knowledge transfers and exchanges. It has also facilitated more substantial inclusion of Polish transnational cultural production in contemporary networks of global cinema and pertinent academic discourse. As a Gold Open Access publication it is available for general readership.
Although the project has been focused on Agnieszka Holland’s work, the research conducted during the project implementation has outreached the field of film and media studies. The director’s artistic and life biography lends itself to be approached from the wider perspective of political, social, and economic changes occurring worldwide in the 20th and 21st centuries. As the project employed a broader category of authorship and approached it as a personal agency operative in specific circumstances, it has revealed various mechanisms of exclusion based on gender and geopolitical position. Analysis of Agnieszka Holland’s participation in various economic and cultural formations of cultural production has revealed different mechanisms of exclusion that have been occurring in real and symbolic space. Furthermore, an emphasis put on Holland’s political and social activism, especially her participation in the debate on the migration crisis, has demonstrated a close and complex connection between politics and culture. Consequently, the conducted research on Agnieszka Holland has a serious potential to raise awareness of equality in terms of gender, ethnicity, and social belonging