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PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

Postcards from the Past

Cinematic Techniques and Selective Memory in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida

Susanne Gomoluch

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

A young woman in a habit of nondescript color brushes the face of a statue. Both

figures are in a close-up, their faces situated in the lower left hand corner. The backdrop

is empty, exposing the viewer to striking contrasts of dark and light spaces and

highlighting the crisp black-and-white landscape that will continue to dominate the

narrative of Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2014 Academy Award Winning drama Ida. It is only

with the second shot that the statue and the young woman shift closer to the center of the

frame revealing that the woman is a young novice and the statue is that of Jesus. In the

background, we now see other nuns and novices bustling around. After a cut, the same

statue—now all brushed up—makes an entry into the frame from the lower left corner,

and, carried on the nuns’ shoulders makes its way diagonally across the entire frame.

Ultimately, it reaches its final destination: an empty, desolate field, covered by snow. It is

a wide-angle shot foregrounding the vastness and solitude of the first act’s setting. The

nuns, captured in the lower third of the frame, make a circle around the now erected

statue and begin their prayer.

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PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

Ida’s opening scene establishes the frame for the entire movie. The protagonists

appear either in extreme close-ups or extreme long shots; medium shots are scarce. Most

of the time, the protagonists are located in the margins of the frame; sometimes they are

not included in the mise-en-scène at all, suggesting that they either do not fully inhabit

these cinematic spaces or that the film is as much interested in the characters and places it

depicts as in those it omits. With the exception of the very last scene, where a shaky

camera follows the eponymous protagonist Ida—emulating her physical movement as

well as her emotional agitation—the camera never pans or tracks throughout

Pawlikowski’s film. The opening shots are indicative of the issues Pawlikowski grapples

with in his film. While scholarship on Ida has primarily focused on the movie’s narrative

aspects, this essay argues that the aesthetic and formal choices Pawlikowski and his

cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, made for Ida create a visual narrative that functions

independently from the one told by the screenplay. While the idiosyncratic aspect ratio

creates an image of Poland as outdated, narrow, and highly contained, the film’s peculiar

framing gestures toward the lack of a stable center. In other words, Pawlikowski jettisons

the standards of mainstream cinema and creates static scenes to critically comment on the

silence around Polish acts of Anti-Semitism that haunts the nation to this day.

After Ida’s release, very few viewers voiced opinions critical of Pawlikowski’s

film. One such voice was that of Hélène Datner of the Jewish Historical Institute in

Kraków, who noted that “Poles were not ready to receive the direct and overly painful
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PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

message of Pokłosie [Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film], whereas they easily accept the

dreamlike tale of a converted Jew” (Raichman 4). But since, scholarship on Ida has

caught on and the wide range of aspects examined mirrors Ida’s multifaceted nature. Kris

Van Heuckelom and Bram Van Otterdijk deliver a convincing analysis of Ida as a road

movie and a coming of age story. Their focus on mobility, social and geographical alike,

and the transformative nature of Ida’s journey leads them to the claim that the resolution

in Ida is to be read as a retreat from life under state socialism, prefiguring the later break

with the communist system as well as the belated processes of self-discovery after the fall

of communism (268).

In his article “Finding God in Pawlikowski’s Ida,” Steven Vredenburgh explores

the movie as a theological meditation. He interprets the movie as a visual construct of

Pawlikowski’s theology where God can be found everywhere, but in particular in the

unlikeliest of places. While visiting their family home, now inhabited by a Polish family

and, as we later learn, the murderers of Ida’s parents, Ida sees a glass-stained window her

mother created. Vredenburgh argues that “just as Ida experiences the invisible

transcendent presence of God [in this scene], the audience experiences the invisible

presence of color through Ida [making] the invisible …visible” (5). This way, the

audience gets a chance to witness Ida’s understanding of and encounter with God, but

Vredenburgh neglects to note that while the empty spaces visualize religion and
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PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

spirituality, they also foreground the missing millions of Jews killed during the

Holocaust.

Maciej Musiał’s article “The Story of Ida: Salvation not Mourning” reads

Pawlikowski’s movie through a psychoanalytic lens claiming that while struggling with

their past, their identity, and their faith, Ida and her aunt Wanda constitute two opposing

tones of melancholia: while Ida’s is pale but productive, Wanda’s is barren and blood red.

For Musiał, in Wanda’s melancholia the “red blood tone of sadism and hatred dominates

over the bleak, murky sadness of abandonment and guilt” as Wanda’s character reveals

strong hostility that pervades the pain of mourning (511). At the same time, Ida’s tone of

melancholia is “more subdued, pale, concealing the bloody-black atmosphere of

depressive conflict within her ego” (512). Musiał’s article suggests the lack-presence

dichotomy underlines the contrast between Ida and her aunt Wanda and their opposing

ways of dealing with loss and identity struggle—the former by filling her emptiness with

religion, the latter by rejecting any ideology due to her previous disenchantment with

communism. Regardless of their strikingly different expression of their depression, in the

end both women are left alone in their pain and their coming to terms with Holocaust

crimes. While these approaches are hermeneutically productive, they largely disregard

the striking formal structure of Pawlikowki’s film and overlook the critical aspect of Ida

as socio-political metaphor. Pawlikowski’s film goes beyond portraying only personal

struggles on a micro level, but focuses on Polish society writ large. Admittedly, Ida is
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permeated by religious references—after all, she is a novice nun—but religion is only one

aspect within the complex network of relations that underwrites Polish society, both in

the 1960s and afterwards. Melancholia, too, plays a significant role, but again, the focus

on Ida’s mental disposition relegates the comment on Poland’s national narrative to the

margins. Pawlikowski created a very timely film that gestures toward the lingering anti-

Semitism and xenophobia that becomes apparent in contemporary Polish politics in the

wake of the 2015 refugee crisis and the 2017 “Holocaust Law.”1 It is through the

interplay of form and content, I claim, that the narrative creates a link to today’s Poland.

More precisely, Ida triangulates three points in time: the crime itself, Ida’s discovery of

her family’s fate, and the moment of the audience’s reception. While the first event is

handled only indexically in the film, the second plays out on the level of narrative, while

the third aspect is encoded in the formal strategies that Pawlikowski employs.

Through the interplay of form and content, then, Pawlikowski queries Polish

crimes committed against Jews before, during, and after the Second World War—a

cultural time and place that Ewa Mazierska calls a “social landscape” in which “anti-

Semitism … not only existed …, but was widespread” (219). Shot in a crisp black-and-

1
Poland is one of the three countries that refused to admit any Syrian refugees—Hungary and the Czech Republic
being the two other. While the European Union was eager to force Poland to admit at least a minimum quota, the
Polish government reacted with defiance risking the exclusion from the EU. Poland’s row with the EU didn’t go
unnoticed and a number of major cities responded with nationalist, right-wing protests that rallied up tens of
thousands protesters each time, chanting “Today refugee, tomorrow terrorist.” Many politicians of the government
party attended these protests. Two years later, the same government passed a law, now known as the Holocaust Law
that criminalized anyone who implied the Polish government of complicity in Holocaust crimes. Initially, Poland
sought to convict anyone found guilty to up to three years in prison. After long lasting international pressure, Poland
amended the law to decriminalize it.
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white, the film’s anachronistic 4:3 aspect ratio—reminiscent of television programs from

the 1960s, the period in which Ida takes place—literarily leaves no room for widescreen

panoramas, confining the narrative to strikingly geometrical mise en scenes. Actively

drawing attention to Ida’s cinematic spaces, Pawlikowski constructs a world off-kilter, an

often hyper-static landscape that appears strangely flat to the viewer. This results in a text

whose scene composition is reminiscent of photography rather than film. In fact, in an

interview with the American Cinematographer (May 2014), Pawlikowski referred to

vintage postcards as the inspiration for Ida. Along these lines, this essay explicitly

addresses the director’s aesthetic choices, illustrating how they supplement and even

expand the film’s message. While Pawlikowski “tried to steer clear of making an issue-

oriented film”—the “issue” here being a “Jewish theme”—I argue that the narrative

inscribes critical comments on current Polish “issues” into the film’s visual style, while

the narrative focuses on more intimate developments such as the protagonist’s sexual

awakening and her coming to terms with her familial past (63).

To be sure, Ida echoes and subverts Hollywood Holocaust films, evoking in

particular the look of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List whose aesthetics

resurface—albeit significantly reconfigured—in the Polish film. Told in long, broad

strokes, Schindler’s List famously features opulent black-and-white compositions—at

times broken up by the inclusion of the color red—that accentuate the desolate situation

of the Jews in Poland, while the sweeping Oscar-winning musical score amplifies the
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film’s narrative of pain and redemption. The excessive affectivity and melodramatic

grandiosity embedded Schindler’s List firmly in the collective imaginary of the Western

world and to a certain extent, I claim, Pawlikowski’s film is a reaction to its brand of

image production. This reconfiguration is not without precedence in the director’s work;

Sissy Helff, for example, argues that Spielberg’s 2011 War Horse and Pawlikowski’s

Last Resort (2000) stand in dialogue with each other, both focusing on “British-European

encounters in order to illuminate imaginary Europes in general and European historicity

in particular” (136). In Ida’s case, Pawlikowski relies on a highly stylized, black-and-

white visual language to tell a story about the aftereffects of the Holocaust, while

changing several of the cinematic parameters established so forcefully by Spielberg’s

text. In an attempt to create what Pawlikowski calls an “antifilm” and moving away from

the great humanistic actions of Spielberg’s protagonist, Oscar Schindler, Ida revolves

around a coming-of-age story in which the concentration camps are long gone (Skaff

213). Set a little over a decade after the end of the Second World War, there is nothing of

the immediate threat and urgency that still fuel Schindler’s List. In addition, Pawlikowski

complicates the role of the perpetrator. Where Spielberg lends gestalt to the evils of

National Socialism in the form of the sadistic Amon Göth, Ida goes beyond blaming the

murderer of Ida’s parents and assigns guilt and responsibility to a whole village that

participated in the murder of a Jewish-Polish family, a crime that is discovered only

much later, pointing to massacres similar to that of Jedwabne (Heuckelom and Otterdijk
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268). Thus, Ida offers an interrogation of Poland’s assumed inability to work through its

own implication in the atrocities of the Third Reich reflected in the highly personal story

of a single individual.

As a moral portrait of the traumatized post-Holocaust and post-Stalinist Poland,

Wanda’s and Ida’s generations look back on centuries of oppression, wars, and ideologies

that had ravaged the country. All these factors, not only shifted the country’s borders, but

also the Poles’ understanding of themselves, leaving an imprint on fundamental things

such as language and culture, as much as heritage and the—sometimes haunting—past. In

Polish Cinema Now!, Mateusz Werner sees the subject of the Holocaust as well as the

Polish-Jewish relations as the “most powerful and pronounced problem for the historical

reckonings of the last twenty years” (62). Werner further writes that “The strong focus on

this problem … carries out the programme of filling in the “blank spaces” on the

culturally-inscribed historical map wrought by the politics of censorship” (62). I argue

that Ida refrains from filling these lacunae with any narrative, but leaves them

purposefully blank for the viewers to have space to fill these spaces with their own

interpretations and narratives. Until the very last scene, the central place remains largely

unoccupied because no one seems to know with what it could be filled. At the same time,

the emptiness, the hole torn into the heart piece of the picture appears to be so vast that it

has to remain unutterable – verbally as much as visually. Raoul Eshelman notes that Ida’s

protagonists are given “much too much head room,” arguing that the empty space gives
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room for the exercise of free will, “underscore[ing] the obligation to a higher order of

things,” which Eshelmann considers the central motif in this film (11). With the

exception of the order to visit Wanda Gruz, Eshelman argues, everything else that

transpires throughout the film does so due to free will, including Wanda Gruz’s suicide

(11-12). While this may seem true—after all, no one forces Wanda to jump out of the

window—Wanda’s suicide does not come out of the blue as most aspects of Wanda’s

character portray her as a deeply troubled woman. Many of her actions are responses to

her surroundings and her past tying her will to causalities. The same is true for the scene

in which Feliks, the murderer of Ida’s family, offers his confession “as a gift” (13). Feliks

is a simple man who faces the cunning and hatred of Wanda Gruz, a notorious Stalinist

prosecutor. He is unable to deal with the situation and together with the burden of his

deed he feels coerced into his confession—it’s a far cry from offering his confession

freely from Feliks’ point of view. And ultimately, the question of free will becomes a

problem once we turn our attention to the last names of both protagonists: Gruz and

Lebenstein. Gruz translates to rubble, debris, and the parallel to Wanda’s state of mind is

obvious; her life is shattered to the point of no return, a remainder of the destruction

WWII brought about. At the same time, Lebenstein—stone of life—is a marker that

reminds us of life, and without surprise, Ida is the one determined enough to continue and

carry on. Yet ultimately, it is the format, the 4:3 ratio Pawlikowski chose for his film, that

excludes the idea of free will because it frames and contains it in a rigid and anachronistic
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form. There is no expansion of the ratio, even in the much analyzed last scene of the

movie that shows Ida walking in the opposite direction of everyone else’s travel, shot

with a moving camera. Hence, while Pawlikowski allows for movement and shake up,

the ratio never changes and the free will remains contained, trapped if you will.

Ida’s 4:3 aspect ratio feels, without a doubt, idiosyncratic to 21st century

audiences. While Gus van Sant employed this old-school television format in Elephant to

emulate the medium of video games and, more recently, Andrea Arnold filmed American

Honey in a similar fashion to evoke the trendy Polaroids of the 1980s, Pawlikowski seeks

to imitate postcards from the 1960s. The initial inspiration was provided by

Pawlikowski’s own old family photo albums and that is why he decided to film Ida on an

Arri Alexa with a 4:3 sensor. The film was shot in color and later desaturated in post-

production. The anachronistic aspect ratio immediately draws attention to the formal

aspects as it challenges the conventions of modern cinema. 4:3 is a format mostly

associated with the early days of television. In today’s world of HDTV and the

ubiquitous 16:9 ratio, choosing 4:3 is a deliberate choice for anachronism. Ida explicitly

shows us an “old” view of Poland, a seemingly appropriate choice given the historic

period in which it is set. However, several details immediately subvert that simple

interpretation. For one, postcards mostly feature historically important landmarks or

beautiful landscapes that transport romantic notions of a specific place. None of this is

present in Ida; rather, instead of iconic tableaux, Pawlikowski captures everyday places,
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asymmetrically framed and often so empty and bleak that they appear surreal. Further,

the postcard format usually does not correspond to the almost square 4:3 aspect ratio in

Ida, pointing at tensions subtending the Poland on display. In fact, postcards are

traditionally closer to the wide-screen formats that the director so carefully excludes.

In this light, the aspect ratio evokes the idea of the postcard rather than actually

offering a filmic rendition of it. After all, a postcard is a form of communication, sent by

close ones while away. A postcard usually comes from a place that is decidedly not

home, and yet it ends up in someone’s household. Since space is limited, the messages—

written on the back of the postcard—are by default shorter than those in a letter. One has

to turn the postcard around in order to read the text that is attached to the image on the

front. This suggests that Ida, too, is a structuralist text; there is the glossy imagery on the

front—aptly mirrored in the film’s own dichotomy between visual style and narrative—

and the correspondence included on the other side. The postcard is also an artefact that

bridges (at least) two temporal and spatial coordinates. It is written in a certain place

before it is mailed off to another, where it always arrives somewhat later. Ida functions

similarly in that it connects several dots: Poland in the Sixties, looking back at the 1940s,

and eventually projecting into the present, the moment of watching the film. Regarding

the aspect ratio, the Poland we witness is narrow, contained by a frame that is not

conducive to movement and freedom. Being rather static, the framing suggests that as a

character Ida is confined not only to the walls of her convent but also more broadly by
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socio-political, cultural, and historical conventions. In this condition, it is impossible for

her to move on, a dilemma that the village in which her family used to live and where

they were murdered shares. Seemingly, time has stopped and any form of development is

hampered by the rigid structures that arrest everyday life. It is noteworthy that

Pawlikowski’s film, in contrast to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel for

example, never changes the aspect ratio. This suggests that the frame remains in place,

throwing itself in relief only at the end when the protagonist gains more independence

and the camera begins to move within the imposed limits of the screen. We may wonder

if the Polish word for film frame—klatka—is a more suitable expression for Ida as klatka

also translates to cage corroborating the idea that the development of both Ida and her

native country are vehemently curtailed. Any evolution beyond the frame/cage is

reminiscent of an outbreak, a violent rupture with unknown consequences.

Related to the postcard aesthetic, the film’s black-and-white—as a reminder,

added after shooting the film in color—further suggests a distortion of reality, in

particular a form of memory politics in which the earlier image becomes a vehicle for our

current understanding of the world. Pawlikowski uses desaturated sepia color to

emphasize the disconnect between the event and our memory thereof. However, the black

and white doesn’t look faded as in old photographs, but rather crisp and delineating. The

absence of color could be read as depicting a place devoid of excitement and also

differentiation, yet is critical to note that the use of black and white is not consistent
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throughout. Particularly in the shots taken outside there is very little contrast between the

characters and the backdrop as though every constituent of Pawlikowski’s composition

bleeds into one another. The boundaries between living beings and the surrounding

spaces become blurred to a point where the former turns into an element of the latter. The

matter changes slightly on the inside shots where the contrast becomes a lot clearer

underscoring the tension within and between the characters. Outside, Pawlikowski seems

to suggest, the stimuli that create the conflicts and contrasts inside, become just a part of

the vast picture of nature turning them into processes as natural as the changing season

until they eventually peter out and fade into the background. Inside, confined within the

walls of a building, the same stimuli receive a close-up, not only in Pawlikowski’s

camera work, but also in the viewers’ perception.

This contrast and interplay between form and narrative is best visible in the Jazz club

scene where the sepia veneer that covers almost everyone and everything is replaced by

actual black and white. On the narrative level, the viewer follows Ida’s process of coming

of age and it should not come as a surprise that for Ida the Jazz club is affectively

charged, changing her outlook on life. As if the problematic relation between Communist

regimes and Jazz was not enough, the forbidden fruit is even more striking as it is John

Coltrane’s Naima, during which Ida and the young saxophonist Lis dance and then kiss.

Pawlikowski’s choice of music is quite revealing here. Naima is Coltrane’s ballad

composed for the musician’s wife and was first released on his 1960 album Giant Steps.
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Coltrane himself called the song a hymn to his wife who convinced him to abandon

Catholicism and join Islam, and who helped him release the constricting ties of addiction

(Porter 96). Ida’s encounter with Coltrane’s piece puts her on a path toward a

confrontation the convent walls tried to prevent: she hears, and if we can trust what we

see, she feels the playful love and eroticism embedded in Naima. The attempt to lure her

away from her life in the convent is palpable. Shyly, yet without fear, Ida embraces this

confrontation—a decision that propels her closer to uncovering who she really is and

what she needs to do with her life. The scene eventually leads to her first experience with

sexual intercourse in her aunt’s bed. But the mundane life that Lis sketches out for Ida—

travel, marriage, children, dogs—is not sufficient for her. In the morning hours, she puts

on her habit and leaves her aunt’s apartment, and her lover.

The formal set up of the scene tells different layers of the story. The Jazz club is

located in a cellar bar and divided by an arch into two alcoves, one of which is the stage

for the band, while the other is filled with chairs and tables for the audience. During the

Jazz club scene, the arch that previously divided the club, now cuts through the screen

diagonally. With a focus on the dancing couple’s feet, the lower triangle of the screen

traces the dancing steps of the couple, while the upper triangle is covered by parts of the

arch. The viewer only sees a black patch whose diagonal line is gradually transparent.

Though during the Jazz concert the club was filled with thick clouds of smoke, the air

during the dance is now entirely free of it, looking almost crisp. The greys created by the
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stage lights during the concert disappear almost entirely and are replaced by a saturation

so high that Ida’s hair and dress are rendered almost black, while her skin becomes

almost translucently white. Yet the black arch that frames the scene does not merely

cover up parts of the scene, it also frames it, and isolates the events on the dance floor

from any outside interference turning the cellar bar into a grotto that serves as a locus

amoenus and a locus amoris. Just as the fact that she later leaves her lover, the formal

aspects already foreshadow the fact that whatever happens in the locus amoenus is an

isolated incident for Ida. The viewer does not have the chance to see the entire picture

because Ida does not reveal it. What we see instead is part of the frame as an empty

space. One may be tempted to interpret these empty spaces as an homage to

Expressionism, reading the scene set up as a visual rendition of Ida’s psychological

disposition. The empty spaces would then come to represent Ida’s lack of experience or

potentially her inability to come to an understanding with the paradigm shift she

underwent since her meeting her aunt Wanda. Admittedly, it may be the case, but only to

a certain extent. The empty spaces do not point to Ida’s psychological disposition, but

reserve this space to the viewers bestowing an active role, an agency in co-constructing

the film’s retrospective view on Poland. Throughout the film, Pawlikowski and his

cinematographer Łukasz Żal repeatedly create empty cinematic spaces that suggest both a

lack of focus and an absence. While such “empty shots” in Yasujiro Ozu’s films, for

example, evoke “a meditative detachment that is supposed to underline the transient

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nature of this world” other filmmakers use them to “heighten tension and emphasize the

world in which the characters are trapped” (Kapur, 91). In Ida’s case, Pawlikowski seems

to deliberately misplace its characters. In Ida, we often see an empty and bleak

background that contrasts the inner turmoil of the characters, a kind of reverse

Expressionism where psychological dispositions only coincidentally—if at all—

correspond to the landscapes. In an interview with the American Cinematographer,

Pawlikowski admitted that initially he had no intellectual strategy for the framing of Ida,

but that he noticed quickly that “there [was] something happening, something that

suggests meaning” (58-9). As I have argued in this essay the “something” Pawlikowski

invokes is a decentralization of the protagonists, the lack of dogma and propaganda.

Instead, Pawlikowski’s screen is at times so empty that its prompt towards its audience to

become active, to start reminiscing and thus co-constructing Pawlikowski’s tale the

movie’s natural extension. It is as if Ida’s message was that without an all-encompassing

cooperation in revisiting the past discovery the whole picture is not going to be possible.

In his essay ““Honor Your Masters” – History, Memory, and National Identity in

Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists,” Lutz Koepnick expands two new and fruitful

ideas leading to a better understanding of the visualization of history on the big screen.

The first idea is that of “surfeit memory,” first introduced by Charles Maier in 2001, the

other is that of “prosthetic memory” which was first mentioned by Allison Landsberg in

2004 (349). Surfeit memory leads Koepnick to define Germany after unification as a
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“host to a virtual memory boom, a fascination with material configurations that help

evoke or even reenact history in sensuous and seeming direct ways” (349). This new

sensuous experience, he further argues, is productive in ways a rigorously factual

dialogue with history is not, as it enables the spectators to co-create a historic narrative—

a version of which we see in Pawlikowski’s Ida. Prosthetic memory marks the

development of how recent technologies enable the spectator to live through imagined

pasts in “material ways,” as if they had been there themselves (349). At first sight, Ida

appears to fit this pattern: we see a sensuous film, a coming of age full of eroticism,

exploration, and identity struggle. But a second look draws us back to the empty spaces

created by Pawlikowski and Żal, in which the director’s imagined past is to a certain

extent refused an entry, while the imagined past of the spectator assumes an active role of

the fictionalization of the past. In the end, it is the inclusion of the spectators’ view that

makes Pawlikowski’s Ida remarkable. The spectator is not spoon-fed the director’s

rendition of past events—a danger recognized by Koepnick because “the prosthetic

memory, too, may paper over, rather than work out, lasting historical traumas, deep-

seated repressions, and irretrievable losses” (349). But with the creation of empty spaces,

Pawlikowski invites the spectators of his film to become active, to co-author the final

version of Ida, the Polish past, and possibly their own past. Here, Pawlikowski once

again undercuts mainstream cinema. He does not impose his interpretation of the past,

and yet he stages an important intervention into the way the current Poland reminisces the
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past. Naturally, the new bombastic German post wall cinema à là Hollywood, the focus

of Koepnick’s essay, has its counterparts in Polish cinema, too. Jerzy Hoffmann’s

Ogniem i Mieczem or Andrzej Wajda’s Pan Tadeusz clearly orient themselves on

Hollywood and reconstruct a national narrative to fill every Pole with national pride as

both films depict Polish literary canon spinning the narrative of valiant deeds, courageous

heroes, and a unified pre-partition Poland. Though Polish productions, both films could

serve as excellent examples for Koepnick’s critique of German post wall cinema.

Koepnick’s observations regarding the fictionalization of history clearly are not contained

by political borders and the sensuous cinema discussed in his essay evidently hit the

nerve of the mainstream. For some, Pawlikowski’s Ida is a welcome respite from historic

grandeur and heroism on the big screen. But for others, the film’s rigorous form creates

enough space to let one’s own engagement with the past unfold, making it a unique

exercise in awareness and agency, that can come as a threat. The movie’s invitation to

partake in the retrospective on one’s own past as well as that of the nation prompts the

viewers to consider deeds that are far from heroic, creating a picture of Poland not as the

victim of atrocious crimes, but the perpetrator—a point of view that may be entirely

novel to large parts of the Polish society.

To come full circle, let us return to Pawlikowski’s inspiration for Ida’s aesthetic

and formal aspects: old postcards. Until the early 1900s, when it was replaced by today’s

commonly used widokówka and pocztówka, the Polish word for postcard was odkrytka.
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Odkrytka refers to the term odkrycie—a discovery—or odkrywać—to discover, to

uncover. The discovery of a new view, of a spectacular sight comes with a friendly

greeting, but simultaneously serves as a document of having ventured into places

unknown. Pawlikowski’s Ida sends us a postcard from the past: from the site of young

woman’s shattering recognition of her past, and a country’s repression of its Holocaust

crimes. Though it is not a pleasant view this postcard represents, it is one that must not be

forgotten. Ida’s release occurred only a few years before Andrzej Duda’s and Beata

Szydło’s government refused to accept Syrian refugees seemingly forgetting generations

of refugees Poland’s own history had created. More remarkably, Ida precedes “Holocaust

Law.” The film seems to foreshadow the current political changes in Poland and in

hindsight, it is obvious that it came at a time when Poland had already begun moving

towards the political right, knowingly or not. It is a direct demand to come to terms with

the protagonists’ discoveries, but also to think about our own history.
 20
PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

Works Cited

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B. Benjamin. “Divine Purpose.” American Cinematographer, vol. 95, no. 5, May 2014,

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Elephant. Directed by Gus Van Sant, performances by Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, Timothy

Bottoms, HBO, 2003.

Eshelman, Raoul. “Jean-Luc Marion’s Postmetaphysical Phenomenology and Film. An

Analysis of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Ida.” Apparatus. Film, Media and

Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 4, 2017.

The Grand Budapest Hotel. Directed by Wes Anderson, performances by Ralph Fiennes,

Tony Revolori, F. Murray Abraham, Fox Searchlight, 2014.

Helff, Sissy. “Fragile balance: Imaginary Europes, Transcultural Aesthetics and

Discourses of European identity in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort and Steven

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2015.

Ida. Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, performances by Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata

Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik, Musik Box Films, 2014.

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PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

Kapur, Jyotsna. "The Return of History as Horror: Onibaba and the Atomic Bomb."

Horror International, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams. Wayne

State UP, 2005. pp. 83-97.

Koepnick, Lutz. ““Honor Your Masters” – History, Memory, and National Identity in

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PAC Postscript Gomoluch: Postcards from the Past

Porter, Lewis. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. University of Michigan Press, 1998.

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