Jeffrey Sharlet charts the unlikely impact of Westerns on Polish poster art and politics
Look up “Shane” (as in Alan Ladd) in a Polish literary dictionary, and you’ll find the following definition: “a psychologically credible personification of goodness.” The movie itself, when it played the Polish provinces, was titled The Man From Nowhere. To Polish audiences, that meant more than it would to Americans, who understood Shane’s mysterious provenance as a landscape still in formation, the ether of opportunity. For Poles, “nowhere” was home: a country overrun by one aggressor after another (though usually Russians) for a few hundred years, a nation that was not really a nation.
Then one day an electrician by the name of Lech Walesa rode into town. A different sort of man from nowhere, but a very recognizable Shane. An ordinary guy, he emerged from the masses to fight for freedom. The liberty he sought was the sort Shane had an eye for: the freedom for folks to settle and get by. The myth of the American Western revolves around the individual, and by the time Walesa made the scene, American Cold Warriors were primed to see him as the second coming of the Lone Ranger. But in truth, Solidarity was never less than a mass movement, and like Shane, Walesa was more a man of the people than any person in particular.
I say “was”, because Walesa didn’t ride off into the sunset. He stuck around, and his white hat has been getting grimier with each passing year. It was one thing to fight corrupt communism; it’s another to call for the censure of socialism even while you insist on the rights of neofascists such as that latest man in black, Jörg Haider. Then there are the years of anti-Semitic innuendo, the pandering to the lowest (and richest) representatives of capitalism, and his impending defeat in Poland’s presidential elections at the hands of a popular, competent, young ex-communist–add it all up and you’re looking at a fallen hero, a man whose morality seems fitted to another time.
That’s where Gary Cooper comes in. When Poles ran the Soviet-sponsored military dictatorship out of town in the national elections of June 4, 1989, they did so under the gaze of Cooper in his most famous role, that of the sheriff Will Kane in the 1952 film High Noon. For more than three decades, Polish posters for Western films had been one of the country’s highest art forms–the result of a tradition of graphic arts combined with a fascination with the mythic themes of the American West and the curious neglect of government censors when it came to movie posters–but the medium arguably reached its apogee on that day, with a poster of Cooper that graced nearly every polling place. He stands with a folded ballot collaged into his hand, against a white background underneath the red banner of Solidarity: high noon for the old regime.
Although this is probably the best-known movie (inspired) poster in Poland, it’s also oddly out of synch with the themes that predominate the form, as extensively illustrated in Western Amerykanski: Polish Poster Art & the Western, a gorgeous catalog for an exhibit held by the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, edited by the museum’s research director, Kevin Mulroy.
A more representative image is Marian Stachurski’s poster for High Noon when it first played in Poland in 1959. Against a red background, a nearly abstract image of Cooper stands with empty hands at his side and a dead gunslinger sprawled before him. Cooper’s gaze is neither on the enemy nor burning out of the poster; it’s cast to the side on a woman in white, an almost anonymous drawing of Grace Kelly, who peers curiously at the corpse. The contour lines of the dead body are the red of the background, the blood
that suffuses the scene; Kelly’s dress is etched in with care.
Cooper’s body is the least detailed of all: a few blocks of black and white with gold for a belt buckle, a watch chain, a star. The three figures form a triangle: the viewer’s eyes at first jump to Cooper’s, then follow his to Kelly’s, hers to the dead man, and through the conduit of his collapsed form back to Cooper. Who matters most here? The hero? He wants to know what the lady thinks of what he’s done. The lady, embodiment of civilized society? She wants to know
what a dead man looks like. The slain villain? He’s dead. But still, he seems to glare up at his killer–once righteous, now implicated in the crime he sought to purge. And on and on in a nervous cycle of guilt and confusion. High noon is past, the town is safe for the womenfolk, but there’s still a bloody corpse to account for.
Which brings us back to Walesa and the politics of allegory and art. These days, Walesa no longer looks like a hero; rather, he stands revealed as an uncertain man, committed to a brand of justice that’s uncomfortably akin to the wrongdoing it was meant to correct. There’s no black and white here, there’s only gray, and it’s a particularly dirty hue.
Likewise, the posters collected in this book offer a vision of the American West and its mythic representation that’s hazy rather than well-defined, concerned with complicity as much as with courage. Most are abstract: shapes are more important than lines, the expressiveness of colors stronger than their accuracy. And the meanings of the films, as interpreted by Polish artists, outshine even the star power of Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum or John Wayne. In one of the rare posters in which a specific actor is depicted (Cooper withstanding), Jolanta Karczewska’s 1965 ad for North to Alaska, Wayne is realized via black dots on white, his shoulder, his cheek, his hat disappearing into nothingness.
Many of the posters specifically emphasize the ephemeral nature of heroism. Jacek Neugabauer’s 1967 poster for Major Dundee shows the hero as hardly more than a smudge of white against a black background, his blue uniform engulfed by the darkness. Waldemar Swierzy’s 1978 poster for The Missouri Breaks depicts the hero’s face overtaken by prairie, grass growing up and through his beard, sprouting from a hat that has lost its form. Jerzy Flisak illustrates The Ballad of Cable Hogue, about a fight over a waterhole, with a cowboy whose face, made up of three thick black lines, is almost nothing but water. For a nose our hero has a spigot; but a sighting notch near its mouth clues us into the fact that it’s also a gun. “The protagonist ultimately metamorphoses and becomes one with the object of his obsession,” writes Frank Fox, one of four essayists who contribute solid background on the posters to the book. “Yet even in this altered state he cannot transcend violence.”
If the classic Western was at least ostensibly about, in Western historian Richard Slotkin’s phrase, “regeneration through violence”–the bad guy gunned down, the cattle rustlers chased off the range, the Indian brutes Exterminated–it also revealed that violence inevitably swallows its purveyors, a theme Polish artists cottoned to instinctively. After all, their posters were subversive dissent against a foreign-guided government nonetheless made up of their own. And if Polish movie-goers, accustomed to thinking of their country as the martyr of Europe, reacted to Indian characters with empathy, the posters perhaps spurred them to consider Poland’s participation in their own hometown massacre of the Jews as well.
But that’s history. When we’re watching Westerns we’re not thinking of Lucky Lech or the tribes of Israel; we want cowboys!
Or at least, we used to. The Western reigned supreme on Polish screens from 1956–when the Cold War thaw following Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalin allowed them back in the theaters after a long absence–until a few minutes past the high noon of ‘89. Communism collapsed and the latest fairy tales from America rushed into the gap, with American marketing know-how in hot pursuit. No more clunky posters that don’t even look real! One world, one poster, Big Daddy Adam Sandler pissing on a wall a million times over around the globe: Thus the east was won.
Back when it was still wild though, right was right, wrong was wrong, and men were men. Except, of course, when they weren’t, as in Jerzy Treutler’s 1972 poster of Anthony Quinn metamorphosing into a horse for Flap, or Maciej Zibikowski’s 1974 image of Cliff Robertson as rearing stallion for J.W. Coop. Then there’s Brigitte Bardot as the greatest Indian killer of them all, a regular Ms. Death with a Winchester, in Marian Stachurski’s eerie 1970 poster for the British Western, Shalako. Or better yet, Annie Oakley, in Stachurski’s 1958 poster for Annie Get Your Gun.
Painted in carnival colors, the poster depicts the movie’s main characters as icons floating on a field of twilight blue, Annie holding the center with the two Bills, Pawnee and Buffalo, on either side of her; lying on his back beneath her, a dandy in pinstripes peeping up her skirt; hovering above her, a smiling Indian gripping the barrel of her gun as if it was a peace pipe.The motion of this merry-go-round, it should be noted, is distinctly counterclockwise. Plug in Dubya to the left of her, Bad Vlad Putin to the right, Lame Billy Clinton below, and in the Indian’s spot, lips kissing a muzzle, take your pick: Chechen, Kosovar, Rwandan, a poor Pole left out of the European Union. It’s still the same story. After so many hard luck years, Polish poster artists understood that’s the way myths work—time marches on, backwards as always.
[This essay first appeared in In These Times.]
