Film Series: The Everyday Absurd: Laughter during Socialism: "Teddy Bear"

Teddy Bear (Miś)
1980, People's Republic of Poland
Stanislaw Bareja
Rysiek (Stanisław Tym, who also wrote the screenplay), the manager of a state-sponsored sports club, has to get to London before his ex-wife Irena (Barbara Burska) does to collect an enormous sum of money from a savings account the two used to share in happier days. But getting out of a communist country is never easy, even for a well-connected operator like Rysiek. It seems that Irena has destroyed Rysiek's hard-won passport to strand him in Warsaw while she's off to London, forcing him to craft a scheme which involves the production of a movie with his friend.

Hilarity ensues as Bareja gives the audience a guided tour of the corruption, absurd bureaucracy, pervasive bribery and flourishing black market that pervaded socialism in the People's Republic of Poland.

The film series “Everyday Absurd: Laughter during Socialism” aim to show and deconstruct the everyday life and humour in in socialist societies through their own representation and language. Five movies from five different countries reveal different aspects of the everyday life during socialism. The film series starts with the Bulgarian bureaucratic and statistical absurdities, continues with a guided tour of the corruption, bureaucracy, bribery and black market in Poland, followed by insights into the common life in the Soviet Komunalka and the Czechoslovak educational system for adults, ending with the conspiracy drama comedy from Yugoslavia. Each of these everyday life “cases” has its own significance and context in the very same way as the movies had their own particular destiny in the given socialist societies – some were censured, other became part of the pop culture of the time and got to be perceived as “classics”, third were approved by the communist parties elites etc.

The goal of the films series is to approach humour in its political and social context from an interdisciplinary perspective. Comedy is here not only undestood as a genre but also perceived as a critical and in the same way handy tool of understanding particular societies and cultures, including those from the socialist era. As Kessel argues, “using humor as a category of analysis allows us to see not only how humour entertained but also how it worked as a cultural practice that both organized social order and revealed shared assumptions about society and politics” (Kessel, 2012:3-21).

The movies will be followed by discussions.