In 1949, the Civic Fund for the Reconstruction of the Capital publishedWarszawa, stolica Polski(Warsaw, the Capital of Poland), which it claimed was the first photobook on the city of Warsaw in the ...postwar period.¹ Printed in three editions in just one year, the photobook presented a collection of approximately 400 sepia-toned photographs with one to six images per twopage spread, and was printed on heavy stock paper about 9.5 by 13.5 inches.
The photobook covered the history of Warsaw in illustration from the fourteenth century to the period of reconstruction in the late 1940s and presented a future,
Geographic specificity in feature films often comes from images of well-known landmarks, which help place the setting of a film on the audience’s mental map. Such cinematic mapping builds an imagined ...connection between moviegoers and places, making landmarks legible and decipherable whether a person has physically visited a place or not. In this way, sometimes subtly and at other times quite explicitly, film assumes a cartographic stance, transcends physical geography, and relies on a spatial iconography shared between the director, cinematographer, and audience. Through such mapping, film presupposes and contributes to a communal, abstract experience of place, and therefore participates
New York’s Empire State Building. The Tower of London. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science? Is it possible that for Poland’s capital this “gift ...from the Soviet peoples narody to the Polish people naród” belongs on the list of internationally recognizable architectural symbols? According to polls taken in 2013 byGazeta Stołeczna(The Capital Newspaper), the Palace of Culture and Science (Pa³ac Kultury i Nauki) is the architectural object most recognized and most likely to be remembered by foreign tourists visiting Warsaw.¹ Despite its prominence in the city center, however, some insist that
The newsreel, a “potpourri of motion picture news footage,” is an audiovisual artifact of the past.¹ The mere idea of the newsreel takes us back to an earlier era when the connection between the ...moving image, news, and its consumption by viewers was mediated by time and distance from the events it reported. A popular form of disseminating news in the United States and across Europe beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, newsreels were limited to movie theaters, were screened prior to scheduled feature films, and were often secondary to the main attraction and audience interest.
In
AFTERWORD Ewa Wampuszyc
Mapping Warsaw,
10/2018
Book Chapter
After 1989, questions of how to contend with space as textualized by socialism abounded. Whether it was the names of buildings, streets, or plazas, monuments to brotherhood and Soviet victories, or ...the facades of Stalinistera architecture and the 1970s Gierek-erabloki(housing complexes made up of geometric blocks with little to no adornment), verbal and visual remnants of socialism had permeated the built environment not only in Warsaw, but in all of Poland. Some forms of textualization were quickly removed in an attempt to erase communist reference points from daily life. For example, streets honoring Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and
