Decades passed after its fall before art critics knew how to speak about socialist realist cinema – finding within it unique themes, intuitive choices and artful tropes. The genre came late to Poland.

The first occurred around 1948, when the young, freshly graduated artist attempted to reimagine realism to be relevant after the catastrophic war. The second came in about 1956, when he tried to do ...

Socialist Realism: art socialist in content and realist in style. One of the burdens this new style had to bear in the capitalist West in later years was that it was labelled as formulaic ...