The title of Ewa Mazierska and Elżbieta Ostrowska's Women in Polish Cinema designates an area of film studies doubly neglected. In the field of Polish cinema studies, itself marginal territory, there has been scant attention paid to gender issues. The authors lay much of the blame for this at the feet of Polish film scholars themselves, resistant to gender studies out of an all too symptomatic hostility towards feminism as an alien, "corrupting Western influence". Attempting significantly to redress this situation, the authors establish a twofold purpose: to assess the representations of women onscreen and to reassess the place within Polish cinema of women behind the camera. Their analysis mediated by a strong sense of national specificity, Mazierska and Ostrowska reveal the range of historical, political and religious factors that have determined (indeed sometimes over-determined) constructions of femininity in Polish culture and film....
