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Class Struggle, or the Return of the Repressed

Summary/Abstract: Jerzy Hoffman’s film Trędowata (1976) belongs, according to Zygmunt Kałużyński, to the history of ‘Polish psychopathology’. Jagielski, drawing on tools developed on the basis of psychoanalysis, Marxism and affective film theory, points to the repressed class antagonisms and ideological contradictions which Hoffman attempts to work through in his film. The author traces the symptoms of what is repressed in society in the work’s melodramatic excess. It is in this excess that Trędowata’s political unconscious manifests itself. The problem of a conservative revolution restoring the old order based on gentry ideology is linked to the genealogy of the ‘new elite’ (‘upstart aristocracy’). These conflicts are expressed in the film through the figure of the class uncanny: the mechanical body of Stefcia-doll, which produces an alienation effect rather than one of proximity, disrupting the film’s conservative and reactionary message.

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