Gluhovic, Milija. (2010) Exhumations : the return of the dead in Tadeusz Kantor’s Let the Artists Die and in Andrzej Wajda's Katyń. Polish Theatre Perspectives (PTP), Vol.1 (No.1). pp. 227-255. ISSN 2081-4844

Abstract

This article analyses Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre production Let the Artists Die (1985) alongside Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyń (2007), exploring the different modalities through which they present their viewers with ‘the necessity of confronting bodies from the past’. This reading of Kantor’s performance – staged during the communist period when the Katyn massacre was still a forbidden topic and officially attributed to the German military by Party authorities – looks to reveal the subtle processes by which the director adapts and multiplies his staging of autobiography to restore collective memories of what had been repressed by the official culture. It aims to situate Kantor’s work within a rigorously historicised, local and regional context, enabling non-Polish readers to perceive how what may seem to be ‘nostalgic’ dimensions of Kantor’s own ‘memory traces’ from the pre-war period constantly shift and are interrupted by their wider social resonances among 1980s Polish audiences. The modes of representation in Wajda’s Katyń are in turn examined through psychoanalytic discourse, notably through the conceptual lenses of mourning and melancholia (via Freud, and the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok), raising attendant ethical and political issues concerning how memorialisation is conceived and projected within contemporary Polish public discourse and cultural activity.

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