Superman z raportówką. O Hydrozagadce Andrzeja Kondratiuka
About Andrzej Kondratiuk's film Hydrozagadce

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes the realization, poetics and direct Deception of Andrzej Kondratiuk’s film Hydrozagadka (1971). In the sixties Kondratiuk created mostly short forms gravitating towards irony, grotesque, provocative happenings, games with conventions. Therefore, the formula of his cinematic debut in 1970, Dziura w ziemi, was surprising, as it referred to propagandist drama constructing the positive socialist hero, even if filtrated by subjective sensitivity. Hydrozagadka can be interpreted as distancing from the debut, with its parody of Polish positive hero and socialist mass culture created in the collage style. The subject of parody was the new type of villain-chasing socialist superhero promoted at time. The main protagonist, As (performed by Józef Nowak, actor associated with roles of communists “believer”) has the features of Superman but communist consciousness. Simultaneously, the film is – nolens volens – a parody of comic-strip stories “made in USA”: their paper heroes, childish fantasy, improbable plots, simplified psychology and axiology, banal humanism and intrusive didacticism. This fusion of both traditions is marked by genre hybrid emphasized by the director and typical for a large portion of Polish counterparts of genre cinema of the time, in which it was difficult to combine the ideological requirements with the imperatives of entertainment.

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