Filmic Representations of the 'Polish Mother' in Post-Second World War Polish Cinema

Abstract

It is clear that cultural representations of the mother are of central import-ance to the life of all historical societies. These representations no doubt range from the most degraded and entrapped images to the most sublime and exalted (these contradictory possibilities may even be interwoven). The discourse of the ’maternal ’ is therefore potentially a site of contesta-tion, ready to be filled with those meanings which a society needs to ascribe to both the social role and subjectivity of real mothers and their representations. The debate about the meanings of the maternal is, of course, to be subsumed within those more general arguments about the representations of women. In Alice Doesn’t Teresa de Lauretis describes this process: By ’woman ’ I mean a fictional construct, a distillate from diverse but con-gruent discourses dominant in Western cultures (critical and scientific, liter-ary or juridical discourses), which works as both their vanishing point and their specific condition of existence... woman, the other-from-man (nature and Mother, site of sexuality and masculine desire, sign and object of men’s social exchange) is the term that designates at once the vanishing point of our culture’s fiction of itself and the condition of the discourses in which the fictions are represented. (de Lauretis, 1984: 5) It is my task here to locate the meanings of a substructure within these more general debates about the representations of women as mothers. This substructure is to be found within the familiar constructions of

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