PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jóźwiak, Karol
TI  - Polish Memory of the Second World War and its Afterlife in the Early Cold War Italian Film Culture
DP  - 2022 Mar 1
TA  - Iluminace
PG  - 53--71
VI  - 34
IP  - 1
AID - 10.58193/ilu.1723
IS  - 0862397X
AB  - In this article I discuss production, distribution and reception contexts of Michal Waszynski's films produced in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. Particularly, I pay attention to the found-footage sequences embedded in those films. I analyze them in terms of a testimony and proofs for the war experience, which was hardly acknowledged in post-war Italy. Thus, I aim at reconstructing the wider political plan to which these films were inscribed, locating them on the backdrop of the Polish Army propaganda activity and diplomacy in Italy in the eve of the cold war. I show to what extent these films were entangled into diplomatic, political and ideological struggles between the Polish Armed Forces, the Moscow dependent Polish government, the Allies and the Italian government in the early post-war years. On a more general scale, this analysis uncovers the negotiations over boundaries of what was acceptable in the Second World War depiction in Italian film culture.