Wajda’s Dostoevsky and Foucault’s heterotopia

Abstract

National paradigms in cinematography are increasingly giving way to a transnational paradigm: cinema is becoming polylocal. Polylocality first means locations not tied to one particular country and an international cast and crew. It also corresponds to the merging of two or more multicultural spaces interacting in the process of filmmaking that results in creating a kind of master space, which is more than their sum. Such understanding is based on the Henri Lefebvre’s definition of space as a product where the mental and the cultural, the social and the historical, are interconnected. Polylocality, as a rule, takes place in film adaptations of literary works made in a tradition different from the culture of the literary source and distant from it in time and/or in space. Examples include Nastazja (1994) by Polish director Andrzej Wajda that creates a special kind of cinematic space, to which the notion of polylocality applies to a greater extent than to many other screen adaptations. The paper attempts to outline this special space in the context of Michel Foucault’s ideas about heterotopia as a special location, illusory and real, open and closed, permeable and sealed, where the order of things is different. The author concludes that Wajda in Nastazja created a cinematic heterotopia, the structure of which includes heterochrony, crisis heterotopia, death-resurrection heterotopia, and cultural heterotopia.