Fulbright Statement of Purpose

STATEMENT OF GRANT PURPOSE
Elizabeth Skadden, Poland, Filmmaking
The Democratic Revolution of the Cassette Tape in former Communist Poland

“When you think of Poland and the 1980s, music was the only thing that mattered; literature was terrible, and theater was dying,” stated Robert Jarosz, tape archivist and author of the book Generacja, in an interview with me in September 2011. Until the 1960s, recording equipment was extremely expensive and heavy. Within Communist Poland, this meant that the state had complete control over the production of audio mass media. Polish bands required permission from the censorship board to perform and create albums, and bands from outside Poland were censored based on perceived anti-communist sentiments. With the advent of the personal cassette tape recorder, individuals took it upon themselves to develop a structure for copying and distributing recordings of both unsanctioned Polish performances and albums smuggled in from outside the Soviet Bloc. This form of media, which could be manipulated by the user and not by the state, democratized the way in which citizens created and distributed audio content and politicized them through everyday resistance.

I am seeking support from the Fulbright Commission to spend the 2012-13 academic year in Warsaw to research and create a 30-minute video documentary about the cassette tape subculture unique to Communist Poland. This subculture began in the 1970s and continues to influence Polish music and artwork today. The video will present interviews with former band members, artists, scholars, and people in the contemporary music scene and tape collectors. It will also explore the histories of individual cassette tapes as an entity in their own right. The medium of video is perfectly suited to capture the physicality of these tapes, as well as the quality of the audio on them. Footage will also be shot using super 8mm film, an intimate, also obsolete medium that conveys the feeling of the time period in which these bands were active.

By creating a video documentary, I will investigate how the distribution system of illegal cassette tapes contributed to the underground resistance against the Communist Party by creating an artistic community outside of both the Soviet and Western paradigms. Highly portable, easily copied and disseminated, it enabled a unique access to Western music and Polish musicians who did not have state approval. Though several countries from the Soviet Bloc participated in music sharing, Poland has the special distinction of being the country with the heaviest trade of live recordings from their own country. Inspirational to the Polish counterculture, this music acted as an audio media form of the political newspaper or book. Although the subculture was creating the tapes, almost every Polish citizen at that time was taking part in listening to them. By trading and listening to these tapes, citizens were defying the political system and thus gained power of resistance. In 1981, martial law was declared in Poland in an effort to subdue widespread strikes. My interview subjects described this time as very prolific. Unable to attend school or work, counterculture activists created bands and listened to music to a much wider degree. In the two years of martial law, the number of bands in Poland increased from around 100 to almost 3000 countrywide.

The relationship between video and music is an integral part of my work. I have been creating documentary films for over ten years, exhibiting at the Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest as well as working commercially for record labels. In the last year I have also toured both Europe and the United State creating and projecting live visuals for the band No Age. My experience is unique in that I understand both the academic and DIY band worlds. This was made apparent in September of this year when I gave a lecture and made an art piece for the Connected Communities Symposium at the University of Newcastle about cassette tape culture in former East Germany. While interviewing subjects from the former East Germany, I noticed how familiar our experiences were, even though our backgrounds were very different. After giving the lecture, I was pleased that members of the mostly academic audience commented that they were surprised at how interested in this subject they found themselves, even though it was not a topic they followed.

I plan to be based in the capitol city of Warsaw as the majority of bands began there; many of my interview subjects either live in Warsaw or pass through there frequently. I also require frequent access to the 3,000 cassette tapes in the archives of Robert Jarosz. I will spend at least eight months interviewing subjects about their relationship to the music, about their band, if they were in one, and finally asking them to discuss one record or tape of which they have a special memory. I have already interviewed Tomek Lipinski, the lead singer of the influential band Tilt, and Tomek Wiśniewski, the former manager of the band Dezerter. On the basis of these interviews, I have also been promised further interviews with self-organizing cassette tape distributors, music fans, and members of formerly banned music groups. Kuba Kosma, a film producer in Warsaw, has offered his support in navigating the film community in Warsaw; and Sławek Pietrzak, the owner of S.P. Records and former member of the band Kult, will allow me access to his contacts and information about current artists in Poland. The last four months I will devote to editing and finishing the film with creative support from Marta Dziewanska at Museum of Modern Art and Marianna Dobkowska at Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and Marta Szymanska at Lodz Photofestival in Lodz.

I have conducted interviews so far in either English or German, both of which I am fluent in. I am very interested to be able to conduct my interviews in Polish as the quality of the conversation becomes better when conducted in the interviewee’s native language. In the year before the beginning of the grant I will take Polish classes at the Berliner Volkshochschule and study privately with Ania Pabis in Berlin. I am confident in my linguistic abilities, as I have learned both German and Spanish to fluency. To further my linguistic abilities, I propose to spend the first academic semester attending language classes at the Polonicum, the language center for Warsaw University. I am in contact with Leszek Kolankiewicz, head of the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University, about my project and endeavor to learn more about Polish culture at that time. In the second academic semester I plan to meet with Thomas Ferenc, Chair of Sociology of Art at Lodz University, which is located one hour outside of Warsaw. Thomas is engaged in research on the archeology of images, which is related to my own studies in media archeology, a field that examines obsolete media in an attempt to better understand our relationship with the technology that shapes our lives. Other possible avenues of support include the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the multimedia department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Ewa Ciechanowska at the Lodz Film School in Lodz.

The legacy of Poland’s cassette tape culture can be seen in music sharing websites such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even Youtube. These websites bypass the mainstream structure of record labels, promoting a close culture of relationships formed around a taste in music, where fans and musicians have direct access to one another. I look forward to the opportunity to showcase in a documentary how the Polish underground band community circumvented the mainstream in order to gain access to a culture they loved, and in doing so, discovered their own creative force.