Production, Consumption, Power, and Humor in the Films of Marek Piwowski

Abstract

This article discusses the way Piwowski represents work understood as production and consumption of various nondurable and even immaterial goods, such as popular music, leisure, and alcohol. My argument is that the director shuns what is regarded as the typical Eastern European setting of films about work— namely, a factory—and instead privileges places of immaterial production.3 In this way he draws attention to the fact that “work” has a much wider meaning than socialist economists
assumed, traditionally being preoccupied with heavy industry and hence production divorced from consumption. Instead, Piwowski is interested in such issues as production of leisure and pleasure, which appeared in Polish political and social debates only in the 1960s and gained in speed in the 1970s.