Histories of Polish Migrants in European Cinema

Krzysztof Loska

krzysztof.loska@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-798X

Abstract

Review of the book Polish Migrants in European Film 1918-2017 (2019) by Kris Van Heuckelom. The Belgian film scholar draws attention to fundamental problems regarding the theme of migration: the need to link local and global aspects in the study of the history of cinema, the possibility of situating film production in a transnational perspective, and the change of the image of Polish migrants over time. Kris Van Heuckelom tries to address the question how cinema supported common stereotypes and how it reflected a certain way of thinking that has placed the East in opposition to the West and tradition in opposition to modernity. The chronological arrangement of the book allows the author not only to capture the significant political and social changes taking place in Europe, but also to show their impact on the ways in which the migrants have been portrayed in films. One should emphasize particularly the valuable originality of the parts of the book in which Van Heuckelom presents his argument, referring to the films rarely mentioned by other authors, and draws attention to their uniqueness in comparison with the mainstream film production.


Keywords:

European cinema, migration, Polish migrants

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Published
2020-05-25

Cited by

Loska, K. (2020) “Histories of Polish Migrants in European Cinema”, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (109), pp. 216–222. doi: 10.36744/kf.272.

Authors

Krzysztof Loska 
krzysztof.loska@uj.edu.pl
Jagiellonian University Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4078-798X

Professor of Human Sciences and the Director of the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He is the vice-president of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies and member of Editorial Advisory Board of the bi-monthly Ekrany. He has authored 150 papers and dissertations on media, popular culture, film history and Japanese cinema, published in various journals (Kwartalnik Filmowy, Studia Filmoznawcze, Przegląd Kulturoznawczy, Ekrany, Kultura Współczesna, Ethos) and edited volumes. He has published twelve books (in Polish), e.g. Dziedzictwo McLuhana – między nowoczesnością a ponowoczesnością [McLuhan’s Legacy. Between Modernity and Postmodernity] (2001), Poetyka filmu japońskiego [Poetics of Japanese Cinema] (2009), Kenji Mizoguchi i wyobraźnia melodramatyczna [Kenji Mizoguchi and the Melodramatic Imagination] (2012), Nowy film japoński [New Japanese Cinema] (2013), Mistrzowie kina japońskiego [Masters of Japanese Film] (2015) and Postkolonialna Europa. Etnoobrazy współczesnego kina [Postcolonial Europe: Ethnoscapes of Contemporary Cinema] (2016).



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