Women Who Eat Too Much - Consuming Female Bodies in Olish Cinema by Elżbieta Ostrowska (Taylor and Francis, 2016.)

7 Women Who Eat Too Much
Consuming Female Bodies

in Polish Cinema
Elżbieta Ostrowska
In her book concerning representations of the female body in Victorian liter-

ature, Helena R. Michie writes that its archetypal heroine “laughs, flirts, and
presides over presumably empty plates” and is rarely depicted “in the act
of either eating or starving” (1987, 12). Michie argues that “hunger, which
figures unspeakable desires for sexuality and power, becomes itself silenced
by Victorian euphemism, [and] a metonymic chain is set in motion where
hunger is displaced from the ‘center’ of literature and culture” (1987, 13).1
This hungerless Victorian woman seems to have a distant daughter in the
figure of the communist Super Woman. Polish Socialist Realist films often
depict women building communism, riding tractors and delivering speeches
at party meetings, yet they are almost never shown devouring a sizable meal
either in their homes or at factory cafeterias. Unlike their husbands, boy-
friends, bosses and fathers whose “healthy appetite” and unsophisticated
table manners signify their “appropriate” class and gender identity, socialist
heroines seem to transcend these carnal calls.
As in the Victorian novel, this constant absence of female hunger in Social-
ist Realist cinema may well be a metaphorical denial of both female sexuality
and desire for power.2 The cinematic Super Woman represents the new com-
Copyright © 2016. Taylor and Francis. All rights reserved.
munist subject liberated from the body’s calls and whims. However, these
disembodied female characters populated not only Polish postwar films that
were complicit with the communist regime, but also those privileging nation-
alistic, and thus anti-communist, ideology. The latter consistently modeled
its heroines upon the national icon of the Polish Mother epitomizing such
virtues as strength, dignity, self-sacrifice, and acceptance of suffering. Not-
withstanding other differences, both communist and nationalist ideologies
worked hand-in-hand in the production of bodiless female subjects.
Restrictive body politics permeated the whole of communist cultural pro-
duction, including cinema. Mikhail Iampolski identifies Soviet cinema as a
“sadomasochistic culture,” consisting of “desexualized bodies, unfamiliar
with pleasure and satisfaction” (quoted in Sarkisova 2008, 154). Commu-
nism’s anti-corporeal stance was paired with an imperative to build the per-
fect collective body of the proletarian state. It came as no surprise, then, that,
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the repressed
Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures : From the Bad to the Blasphemous, edited by
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Women Who Eat Too Much 129
body reappeared, often refracted in perverse forms, as indicated by the rapid
emergence of pornography. As Helena Goscilo succinctly notes: “By mid-
1992 pornography was thriving as a mainstay of the novelties introduced,
along with kiwis and deodorants, into Russia’s capital” (Goscilo 1995,
164).3 Certainly, the collapse of communism may be considered a liminal
point for body politics in both Russia and Eastern Europe.4 Cultural critics
frequently associate the era of communism with the disembodied subject,
whereas the postcommunist period of neoliberal capitalism is associated
with bodies commodified by structures of power and desire.5
While fully recognizing the importance of the political, economic and
cultural transformations initiated in 1989, I would argue that communist
and post-communist bodily discourses do not easily translate into binary
oppositions.6 For, as Michel Foucault states, “Where there is power, there
is resistance, and yet, or rather, consequently, this resistance is never in a
position of exteriority in relation to power” (Foucault 1978, 95). Therefore,
one can assume that the communist anti-corporeal stance evoked responses
of both bodily complicity and resistance. However, these acts of submis-
sion or rebellion are still embedded within a bipolar perspective regarding
communist body politics that, it might be added, dominates Western per-
spectives concerning Soviet totalitarianism in general. Adele Marie Barker
notices a “broader tendency to view the Soviet Union as a monolithic total-
itarian entity in which the relationship between rulers and ruled was one of
domination and subordination—rulership and resistance” (1999, 21). She
emphasizes an urge to question such a simplistic, though convenient, binary
account for communist totalitarianism: “It was . . . in the everyday life that
the grand master narrative of the Soviet Union moved in a Bakhtinian sense
from monologic to the polylogic as Soviet citizens proceeded to reformulate
or subvert it” (22). If Soviet totalitarianism is indeed a polyphonic discourse,
its body politics cannot be conceptualized into any binary model. There-
fore, the difference between disciplined and resistant bodies becomes partly
obsolete, especially in that the notion of resistance is in itself ambiguous.7 As

Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner note: “even while resisting
power, individuals or groups may simultaneously support the structures of
domination that necessitate resistance in the first place. . . . a single activity
may constitute both resistance and accommodation to different aspects of
power or authority” (Hollander and Einwohner 2004, 549). To determine
the extent to which communist “undisciplined” bodies have been legiti-
mated and coerced by the dominant power must remain an open question.
Whilst the disciplining strategies of body politics within communism are
easily identifiable and definite in their intent, acts of resistance remain neb-
ulous and ambiguous.
In seeking the presence of “resistant bodies” in Polish films made prior to
1989, I will not debate whether they were created with the intention to con-
test the cultural and political ideology of communism. Instead, I will look
for bodily imagery that may be recognized as a site of ideological opposition,
130 Elżbieta Ostrowska
contestation or doubt. Thus, my focus will be, to use the distinction pro-
posed by Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka, on “transgressive imag-
ery” used in selected films rather than the “transgressive behavior” of the
represented bodies. As they go on to explain, “Transgressive imagery refers
not solely to challenge and provocation on the basis of pictorial content
against ‘good taste.’ Rather, it denotes the confounding of the boundary
between ethics and aesthetics extending to the disruption of normative cul-
tural frameworks” (Papenburg and Zarzycka 2013, 6). Following this logic,
I also will examine formal devices employed to represent “resistant” female
bodies. Specifically, I will look for cinematic “oppositional spaces” (Frank
1991, 47) within which the viewer can observe the (potential) emergence of
an “undisciplined” female sexual body as it resists ideological containment.
In this essay, I will analyze a specific form of bodily resistance as mani-
fested by the consuming female body as represented in Polish cinema. My
contention is that female characters who consume food excessively reclaim
their bodies as a site of desire and pleasure.8 Post-war Polish cinema does
not often feature feasting female characters. When it happens occasionally, it
never attains the level of anarchic self-indulgence found in Věra Chytilová’s
Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966). However, these consuming bodies’ erratic and
non-systematic presence is still of importance as it unexpectedly and momen-
tarily disrupts the smooth surface of the ideal female body. Andrzej Wajda’s
films made before 1989, which are considered the core of Polish national
cinema, provide especially interesting examples of “hungry” women as they
fulfill their appetite in both a literal and figurative manner. To elaborate
on continuities between communist and post-communist body politics, in
the second part of the chapter I analyze Andrzej Żuławski’s infamous film
She Shaman (Szamanka, 1996) in which the figure of a “hungry woman”
becomes a political and cultural allegory.
“Hungry Women” in Andrzej Wajda’s Films

Andrzej Wajda, a filmmaker who has always been preoccupied with male
bodies, has occasionally displayed interest in an embodied female subject.
His film Maids of Wilko (Panny z Wilka, 1979) is exceptional in his oeuvre
due to its focus on female characters and their bodily pleasures. The viewer
frequently, and for a relatively extended screen time, sees five sisters as they
sit at a table eating their meals with visible delight. The food-laden table
becomes almost the center of their universe, its axis mundi. In this world
men are only passers-by. The male protagonist, Wiktor Ruben, comes to
their manor house only to re-visit the idealized world of his youthful mem-
ories. On his way to Wilko, he crosses a river by ferry, as if he is entering a
different world, a distinctly female domain.
In his “search for lost time,” Wiktor has a sexual encounter with one of
the sisters, Jola, which is, in fact, what they had both desired many years ago.
The next day’s breakfast carries a noticeable trace of recently experienced
bodily pleasure. Jola and her sister Julia sit at the table, giggling and devour-
ing their breakfast. Each bite of a fresh roll, each spread of butter or spoon-
ful of wild honey is singled out either in an image or line of dialogue. Jola
giggles and declares: “I am so hungry.”9 Although he is invited to join them,
Wiktor declines, choosing to stiffly sit aside and observe them. His evident
behavioral intimidation reverses the cultural cliché that men will express
their hunger after a sexually active night. Here, in contrast, it is Jola’s female
body that emerges as an active agent experiencing two sensuous pleasures,
sexual and gastronomic.
The gastronomic is often used in cultural texts as a signifier of the sex-
ual thereby establishing a cultural code of communication (see Douglas
2008, 45). In his original study of the nineteenth-century Russian novel,
Ronald LeBlanc uses Ronald Tobin’s distinction between two semiotic
codes operating at the crossover of the gastronomic and the sexual. The first
connotes (male) heterosexual desire as power and is communicated by the
French verb manger (to devour), whereas in the second it is coded as plea-
sure and is expressed by the verb goûter (to taste) (LeBlanc 2009, 3). Maids
of Wilko constitutes a domain of goûter which is, quite symptomatically,
accessible only to female subjects. Thus, Ruben’s ultimate restraint from
eating in the women’s house would denote his inability of both exercising
power and experiencing pleasure.
Two years earlier Wajda made Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru,
1976), a landmark of politically engaged cinema, which differs in every con-
ceivable way from the intimate psychological drama presented in Maids
of Wilko. This renders it all the more significant that Man of Marble also
features excessive female appetite juxtaposed with male restraint from food.
Agnieszka, the female protagonist, a young filmmaker who is trying to exca-
vate the Stalinist past, is often shown devouring sandwiches in public spaces
and unceremoniously drinking tea from somebody else’s cup. In contrast,
Mateusz Birkut, the hero of her film, is more than reluctant to eat a huge
meal provided by party authorities. When he finally drops his resistance and
decides to eat, he is unable to derive any pleasure from the meal. Later in
the film, Mateusz dreams about his unfaithful wife’s plum cake; however, we
never see him eating it. A lack of appetite, or its repression, is also typical of
other, both male and female, characters in the film. An older and renowned
filmmaker, Burski, picks a single cherry at his home. Hanka, Birkut’s wife,
distributes food to other men and bakes plum cake for her husband, yet we
never see her eat a morsel. Later, whilst working as a waitress, she again
serves food to her customers, leaving for herself only the sadomasochistic
pleasure of excessive drinking. If hunger and appetite are indeed signifiers
of desire, Agnieszka emerges as its patent manifestation, whereas Birkut,
and all other characters for that matter, constantly repress or are unable
to fulfill it. An absence, or repression, of bodily desire transforms him into
a bodiless subject, a potential signifier of the idealist communist universe,
the eponymous “man of marble.” If he is to reclaim his body, this can only
occur through a wound, an eventuality that occurs when he burns his hands.
At this point, the propagandistic bodiless “man of marble” transforms into a
suffering national body whose wounds signify his sacrifice for and devotion
to his fellow people.
In contrast, Agnieszka enters the fictional reality as an already fully embod-
ied subject. In the scene following the opening credits, we see her frantically
traversing the galleries of the National Museum as she voraciously devours
a sandwich (she does the same in Burski’s house later in the film). Her mani-
fested corporeality in the museum disrupts the ossified body of national tra-
dition as appropriated for the needs of communist ideology. When she later
shoots the fallen statue of Birkut with a hand held camera—a scene which is
often identified as a surrogate for an erotic act (with the woman astride on
top, it might be added)—this denotes both her desire for knowledge as well
as her determination and capability to fulfill it.
In Wajda’s films, the female desiring body occasionally, yet persistently,
emerges. It transcends the symbolic body of the nation only to be erased
from its surface by means of various narrative devices. In Maids of Wilko,
Wiktor leaves the women indulging their bodies (which most frequently
occurs in the absence of men) in a secluded place detached from (patriarchal)
civilization. In Man of Marble the female body is gradually disempowered,
losing its subjectivity, and finally is presented as needing support from the
male body (of Maciek Tomczyk, Birkut’s son). Nevertheless, the textual era-
sure of the female desiring body still leaves a trace of its erstwhile presence.
“How Tasty is a Polishman?” Female Cannibalism

in Andrzej Żuławski’s She-Shaman
A Brazilian film, How Tasty was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos
Santos, 1971), representing so-called Third Cinema, ends with a cannibal-
istic ritual that is initiated by a woman. The object of consumption is a
Portuguese mercenary who was captured by a Brazilian tribe in the sixteenth

century. According to their customs, their future meal had to live for a year
as both member of the tribe and husband to a young attractive widow before
he is finally killed and eaten. His wife of one year becomes the master of the
cannibalistic ceremony.
She-Shaman, a Polish 1995 film made by Andrzej Żuławski, also ends
with a peculiar cannibalistic ceremony performed by a young woman who,
like her Brazilian counterpart, also shared her life with the man that she con-
sumes. Another parallel exists between these two films in that both feature a
relationship between a “savage” woman and a “civilized” man. She-Shaman
presents its modern, Eastern European variant; the story is about Michał,
an assistant professor in anthropology, and “the Italian” (we never learn
her given name which might be seen as a symbolic act of depriving her of
subjectivity), a young wildly behaving woman, as they engage in an intense
sexual relationship.
In the first shot of Żuławski’s film, we see a cafeteria buffet filled with
endless rows of dishes. The Steadicam shot moves swiftly in order to keep
pace with a subject whose hand gesticulates at the food within the frame.
As a finger points out the displayed dishes one by one, a female voice makes
an inarticulate sound of disgust. When the camera reaches the cash register,
there is finally a cut to a shot of a young woman as she orders a salad made
of brains and a raspberry popsicle. The camera then follows her with a long
shot which reveals that the action takes place in Warsaw’s Central Railway
Station. The woman joins a man sitting at one of the tables without even
asking for his permission and starts to voraciously eat her choice of dishes.
The woman ignores conventional eating order, which would dictate that
brains constitute a “first course” and ice cream a dessert, and consumes both
simultaneously.
Altogether, this selection of dishes, the mode of consumption, and the
place at which it occurs provide a succinct introduction to the female char-
acter. Her disgust for “ordinary” dishes and her preferred order of “nau-
seating” brains (as many people would perceive it) may well be the first
“warning sign” of her unorthodox taste. The eating of brain tissue is often
considered primitive and disgusting by even the most devoted of carnivores.
Nonetheless, the female protagonist devours it with a visible pleasure that
clearly intensifies when she follows a bite of her main dish with a sensual
lick of the raspberry popsicle. If one considers the idiomatic Polish expres-
sion for fellatio—“to make one a popsicle”—the image acquires a decidedly
strong sexual undertone. Finally, this act of voracious consumption occurs
at a railway station, a space symbolizing transition, transience, and transfor-
mation opposing any notion of stability. Presented within such a milieu, the
female character is anything but a “domesticated” woman and her sexuality
appears to be outside any system of cultural norms.
After “the Italian” finishes her feast, she leaves the train station and starts
frantically walking along the streets. At some point, she encounters two men
who are excitedly talking on the stairs of an underway passage. One of them,
a priest, explains to his brother Michał that he has to move from the flat he
rents. The woman nervously asks about the rental price and insists on taking
it. Michał agrees to take her to the flat and show it to her. Once they arrive,
he rapes her. Initially, she responds to this with catatonic stupor, yet after a
while her body expresses intense erotic sensations. Devoid of dialogue, or
any act of affection, this sexual encounter is stripped of any placatory cul-
tural camouflage of love or romance. Both the content of the scene and its
cinematic rendition (for example, an absence of subjective shots) radically
contrast with aesthetic conventions usually utilized in love scenes (for exam-
ple, soft lighting, warm colors, soft focus, and so on). Żuławski decisively
blocks any possibility for a romance here.
Throughout the film, Michał treats “the Italian” with open contempt, say-
ing at some point that she only “eats, fucks, and shits.” When he decides to
give her a lesson in good table manners, he instructs her to keep her elbows
close to the body and to use cutlery instead of hands. He probably thinks his
lover badly needs such a lesson as she constantly violates the social rules of
food consumption. For example, at one point she eats cat food from a pet’s
bowl: whilst doing so she crouches on the floor and eats with her mouth,
only briefly using her fingers. When her lover takes her to a party at his
supervisor’s place, she throws food from her plate on to a glass panel which
covers an architectural project and smears it around with her fingers. Finally,
when in one scene Michał scolds her for not having any food in the refrig-
erator, she then takes out a piece of raw meat from a shopping bag, inserts
it into her vagina and tells him to “eat it out of her.” Her offer potentially
invokes a double disgust because, firstly it suggests the eating raw meat and,
secondly, placing it in her vagina merges the human with animal, the animate
with the inanimate. Probably most disgusting is a possibility of a woman
ordering a man to fulfill her sexual desire in her own way.
Disgust and disdain permeated critical reception of the film in Poland. Not-
ing certain similarities between She-Shaman and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last
Tango in Paris (1972), the film critics dubbed Żuławski’s film “Last Tango
in Warsaw” (Haltof 2002, 123; Mirska 1996, 12–15). Nine 1/2 Weeks by
Adrian Lyne (1986) is another film that might be recollected here, because it
also features food as a main component in sexual games played by two people
who barely know each other. However, these comparisons are only appropri-
ate to a certain degree. Although all three films present an intense sexual rela-
tionship between two strangers, Bertolucci’s and Lyne’s films are most likely
to cause shock or moral disdain, whereas Żuławski’s film produces an effect
of disgust from the outset. Furthermore, at the end of both Western films, the
male characters, played respectively by Marlon Brando and Mickey Rourke,
express their will to “start everything over,” almost making an effort to some-
how erase the erstwhile impersonal sex. In contrast, in She-Shaman nobody
wants a “normal” relationship and the denouement is not disappointing or
bitter, but revolting and terrifying. When Michał comes to the conclusion that
his lover is the incarnation of an ancient shaman and that she possesses a
power that she could use to destroy him, he decides to leave her and become
a priest. To stop him doing this, she kills him, utilizing a can of food (what
else?) and then proceeds to eat his brain from within his skull whilst he is
semi-conscious, on this occasion using a spoon as in the first scene.10
“The Italian” does not perform an act of cannibalism as an ancient ritual.
Instead she executes it in a rather quotidian way, as if it is part of an every-
day routine. Once she has consumed her lover’s brain, “The Italian” discards
his dead body, then changes her clothing and leaves the apartment. In the
closing image we see her in a long tracking shot as she aimlessly traverses
the streets of Warsaw at her typical frantic pace. The audience is afforded the
position of a distant observer who is perhaps not so much shocked by what
is happening but disgusted.
Colin McGinn notes that, “Disgust is an aesthetic emotion in that its pri-
mary focus is the appearance of its object, not what the object can do or
has done in the way of harm” (2011, 6). For that matter, one cannot fear or
hate an object of disgust, but merely avoids it (ibidem). Furthermore, disgust
stands apart from moral judgment, even if these two are often confused.
Such confusion seems to operate with Żuławski’s film, as the viewer is most
likely repulsed by both the narrative and the visual bareness and crudity of
sexual acts rather than offended by the immorality of an erotic relationship
between two unmarried people. When the heroine unclothes herself within
seconds in order to prepare herself for intercourse, she also strips herself of
all “feminine mystique.” Instead of an eroticized body, She-Shaman exposes
the viewer to a corporeal body along with all its physiological functions such
as eating, drinking, and excretion.
“The Italian’s” eating habits are concocted according to the rules of nature
rather than culture. As is commonly known, various eating rituals, such as
modes of serving dishes and the use of utensils, were developed to trans-
form a purely physiological act of food intake into a social, economic, and
cultural activity. As McGinn aptly notes, “Dining etiquette is . . . a device of
repression . . . The purpose of these rules is plain: to minimize the opportuni-
ties for disgust on the part of your fellow diners” (2011, 202). Whether food-
stuff is an object of delight or disgust depends on, among many other things,
its placement within a space of consumption. Once food leaves its proper
place, that being a plate, cutlery, or a mouth (which must close upon taking
a bite), and infringes upon a face, hand, or tablecloth, it becomes filth which
must be instantly removed. When the female protagonist of She-Shaman eats
with her hands, smears the food around her environment and alludes to the
possibility of eating raw meat, she tears apart the cultural veil behind which
the physiological aspect of human food intake is hidden. Importantly, she
also constantly touches food, thereby mobilizing the tactile aspect of the cin-
ematic image which, consequently, foregrounds her own corporeality. The
corporeal body resists becoming an “object-to-be-looked-at” (as conceptu-
alized by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema” (1975)) because its tactility mobilizes something other than ocular
modes of spectatorial response. Such a body cannot provide the viewer with
Mulveyan “visual pleasure” either, because it displays its viscera which are
objects of disgust rather than delight.
Disgusting eating habits define the heroine of Żuławski’s film as a social
outcast. As Jennifer Brown notes: “Food manners dictate inclusion in or
exclusion from familial, social, religious, and national groups” (2013, 3). The
lack of “proper” eating manners is symptomatic of “the Italian’s” deficiency
of “cultural capital.” As we learn from brief scenes which occur in her fam-
ily home, she comes from a provincial town, a backward world of poverty
and moral decline. She does not wish to change or heal this world though.
Instead she wants to escape it once and for all. Thus, she does not hesitate
to steal money from her mother in order to start a new life as a university
student. However, she does not dream about being a modern Cinderella who
will wait for her prince. Neither does she strive for either social advancement
or independence as encouraged by contemporary feminism. Her indifference
toward the possibility of climbing the social ladder is evident during the
professor’s party. She ostentatiously ignores all of the people gathered there,
not even attempting to penetrate the intellectual circle. Instead, she steals a
pair of elegant stilettos belonging to the host’s daughter, who also happens
to be her lover’s fiancée. Unlike Cinderella, she does not want to wait for a
prince to bring her a magic slipper (a symbol of awakening female sexuality,
as is commonly known) but assertively takes care of herself and her needs.
Stealing things is a violation of social order; in She-Shaman this is evi-
dently a patriarchal order. In “the Italian’s” family home, this manifests as
brutal and abusive oppression. As the party scene shows, the professor’s
home seems to oppose such lower class patriarchal objection, yet it is patri-
archal nonetheless. Michał’s supervisor looks kind and gentle, yet he acts as
a modern patriarch who has absolute power over everyone circled around
him. Being his daughter’s fiancée, Michał is assigned to inherit this position
of power. “The Italian” rejects and abuses both the lower and middle class
patriarchies and appropriates their possessions. Interestingly, each time she
steals, she leaves the closed space of an apartment and enters the open space
of the streets, traversing them for a prolonged period of time as if marking
her position as a traveller who will not be subsumed by any social or cultural
order. She remains “homeless” until the end of the film. After killing her
lover and cannibalizing him, she puts on her stolen stilettos and leaves the
apartment to walk along the streets without aim or destination.
The Canadian cultural critic jan jagodzinski interprets the final act of
cannibalism in She-Shaman as a disruption of patriarchal order. Offering
a Lacanian reading of the film, he argues that: “she has literally eaten her
materialized object a. This is her radical feminine Act given her position in
the patriarchal order” (Jagodzinski 2007, 323). In the last scene in which she
walks the streets, her steady and rapid movement marks her refusal to anchor
her body, and consequently her sexuality, within any socio-cultural order.
While focusing on the psychoanalytical aspect of the narrative presented in

She-Shaman, jagodzinski also refers to its socio-political components. He
claims that the heroine cannot find a subjective position within, specifically,
Polish society (2007, 318). Thus he opens the film for a more historically
specific reading. Despite the prevalence of non-realistic cinematic codes, cer-
tain elements of the film’s mise-en-scène clearly indicate that its action takes
place during the period of post-communism, a time of rapid change and tur-
bulence. A question arises: is the unorthodox sexual relationship presented
in Żuławski’s film in any way linked to the socio-political changes occurring
in Poland at that time? Polish critic Kamila Wielebska clearly recognizes
“the whole postcommunist savagery of behavior and relations” in the film
(2010, 129). However, it is my contention that representational accuracy is
of secondary importance here. If the film uses realistic codes of representa-
tion, it is not in order to depict Poland in the 1990s, but rather to produce
a political allegory of it.
To examine an allegorical portrayal of the socio-political reality in
She-Shaman, it is useful to return to the Brazilian film How Tasty Was My
Little Frenchman. Apart from using the same motif of cannibalism, the
films are also products of similar, in a sense, socio-political situations. The
Brazilian film belongs to the Third Cinema movement that was a cultural
response to the experience of colonialism and postcolonialism, whereas
She-Shaman is a part of post-communist cinema and it may be assumed that
it implicitly or explicitly deals with the changes of socio-political reality in
Poland in the 1990s.11 In this context, the act of female cannibalism seems
to be provided with political rather than psychoanalytical meaning. Frederic
Jameson’s concept of political allegory supports such reading. As he writes:
‘Third-world texts . . . necessarily project a political dimension in the form
of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an
allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and
society (Jameson 1986, 69). In their interpretation of How Tasty was My
Little Frenchman, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam follow this argument, and
they claim that the film “performs an ‘anthropophagic’ critique of European
colonialism, using the figure of cannibalism both to denounce the economic
cannibalism of European colonialism and to suggest that contemporary Bra-
zilians should emulate their Tupinamba [the tribe depicted in the film-EO]
forebears by devouring European technologies of domination in order to use
them against Europe” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 760).
Analogically, one can see the female character in She-Shaman as an
oppressed subject, within a post-communist and patriarchal system, who
performs an act of retribution. This allegorical reading becomes even more
complex if one takes into account the fact Michał represents not only patri-
archy but also a social class of intelligentsia that has traditionally been con-
sidered the core of the Polish nation. When the heroine kills and cannibalizes
her lover, it stands for a final decline of this once hegemonic class formation.
Polish film critic Julian Kutyła recognizes this symbolic meaning, yet he
overlooks the gendered aspect of the performed act of cannibalism. Accord-

ing to him, “the Italian” represents the rampant force of post-communist
capitalism that annihilates the anachronistic model of the Polish (male)
intelligentsia.12 Unlike Kutyła, I see the heroine first and foremost as stand-
ing for the oppressed female subject representing also a lower social class.
From this underprivileged position, she “devours” the patriarchy of Polish
intelligentsia.13
Żuławski’s film is not the only post-communist cultural text featuring
cannibalism as a political allegory. It also appears, for example, in a German
film The German Chainsaw Massacre (Das Deutsche Kettensägenmassaker,
Christoph Schlingensief, 1991). Nick Hodgin opts for an allegorical reading
of it and he claims that the motif of cannibalism presents an idea “that Unifi-
cation has allowed the West to devour the East” and is used to exploit “the fear
of political and economic consumption that was and continues to be voiced
by some Eastern Germans” (Hodgin 2014, 132). Slavenka Drakulić’s novel
The Taste of a Man also fits the postcolonial/post-communist framework.
Both its protagonists are strangers in the cosmopolitan city of New York and
both represent the non-Western world. Although the heroine conceives her
act of cannibalism as a sublime act of unification with her lover, it can also
be interpreted as a political allegory for a peculiar union between the two
subaltern subjects. Furthermore, she performs the act during her temporary
stay in the West, thereby “tainting” its space with “a savagery.” Thus, this
symbolic pollution might be seen as a (perverse?) reversal of colonization.
The Polish protagonist of Drakulić’s novel returns to her motherland as a
transgressive, yet also empowered female subject
Conclusion
As argued in this chapter, Polish cinema has not reveled in images of con-
suming female bodies. This moderation reflects the logic of patriarchy in
that it suppresses feminine corporeality. Masculine hegemony needs to
tamper with female appetite as it often signifies female desire and, thus,
female subjectivity. Polish postwar communist cinema has developed var-
ious strategies to diminish or entirely annihilate the embodied female
subject. However, it occasionally appears in films where it always desta-
bilizes patriarchal hegemony, as, for example, in the previously discussed
films of Wajda. She-Shaman, representing post-communist Polish cinema
features an excessive variant of the insatiable female appetite not only to
subvert hegemonic ideology but also to parallel the historical moment of
socio-political disruption. Unlike other films of that period which employ
realist modes of representation, Żuławski’s film creates a political allegory
addressing all catastrophic changes pertaining to both individual and collec-
tive post-communist identities.
Consuming female bodies are not transgressive or resistant per se. The
films position them within a complex net of intra- and extra-textual rela-
tions that can be foregrounded or, respectively, marginalized in the process

of reading and analyzing. However, as I have argued in the course of this
essay, the bodily imagery in Wajda and Żuławski’s films may be recognized
as a site of ideological opposition, contestation, or doubt. Female consump-
tion of food constitutes “transgressive imagery”, as it is called by Papenburg
and Zarzycka, that is capable of disrupting dominant gender and sexual-
ity discourses of both communism and post-communism. Wajda’s hungry
women attempting to articulate and pursue their desire defy the selfless and
bodiless model of femininity embodied by both a traditional figure of the
Polish Mother and communist asexual female worker. In turn, Żuławski’s
“She-Shaman” even if she is introduced as an embodiment of post-communist
commodification of female sexuality, eventually manifests her subjectiv-
ity. It takes up a perverse form but no other is available within patriar-
chal system. Hence, the consuming female body defies an easy-to-draw
line separating de-sexualized communist femininity and its over-sexualized
post-communist counterpart. There is no simple continuity between these
two different socio-political formations either, yet the demarcating line is
often fragmented and punctured. “Hungry women” travel across this porous
border, to reclaim their bodies from patriarchal sexual discourse.
Notes
1. Alice L. McLean refers to Michie’s argument and develops it into a broad con-
cept of “the gendering of appetite” (McLean 2012, 14–59). Similarly, in contem-
porary Hollywood “cinematic heroines are rarely allowed to eat at all—unless
they are nourishing their unborn babies” (Fox-Kales 2011, 15).
2. Certainly, their sexual desire is also erased by means of other visual and narra-
tive strategies (see Mazierska and Ostrowska 2006, 65).
3. A similar observation is made by Nanette Funk in her introduction to the col-
lective volume Gender Politics and Post-Communism. She draws attention to a
restrictive body politics implemented in the Eastern European countries during
the period of communism and the consequent liberation from this after 1989:
“In some countries there is now an incipient ‘sexual revolution’ and an apparent
recognition of the body . . . but also a new eroticization of domination in the
explosion of pornography” (Funk 1993, 11).
4. In his study of post-communism, Richard Sakwa gives elaborate discussion to
the importance of the collapse of communist rule. He quotes Václav Havel’s
statement: “The fall of communism empire is an event on the same scale of
historical importance as the fall of the Roman empire”; recognizing the scale
of this change, however, he also identifies post-communism as “a multi-faceted,
heterogeneous phenomenon shot through with paradoxes while at the same time
revealing the underlying paradigmatic shifts.” (Sakwa 1999, 1, 7). Implicitly,
he assumes as much continuity as discontinuity between these two epochs that
cannot be modeled into a simple bi-polar opposition.
5. For example, in her discussion of the way in which post-communist advertising
strategies use female bodies, Elza Ibroscheva highlights the rapid change of sex-
ual politics after the collapse of communism: “it is clear that Eastern European
women, almost overnight, have adopted a new, highly sexualized identity—one
that allows them to occupy both the position of consumer, but more importantly,
to occupy the position of the ‘consumed,’ widely and readily offering their sexu-
alized bodies as an expression of a newly found freedom to define their identities

in sexual ways” (Ibroscheva 2013, 445).
6. To undermine such a reductionist approach to communist and post-communist
body politics, Helena Goscilo discusses a parallel politics of the gaze mobilized by
both communist propagandist portrayals of Joseph Stalin and post-communist
pornographic images of females. She writes: “although the power relations they
construct for the beholder are polar opposites, the (desexed) Kul’t image and
the (sexed) pinup image are structured by the same pornographic aesthetic”
(Goscilo 1995, 187).
7. In their study of the category, Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner
emphasize the importance of questions regarding recognition and intent. They
write: “a careful examination of scholarly discussions about resistance shows
that many disagreements center on the question of recognition—including issues
such as whether unrecognized acts should qualify as resistance, and whose
assessments are most important.” Furthermore, they notice: “a potential prob-
lem occurs when different parties (actors themselves, targets, in situ observers,
and scholars) interpret the intent behind a particular behavior in different ways.”
(Hollander and Einwohner 2004, 541, 543).
8. On this aspect of food imagery in art, Ronald LeBlanc in his study of Russian
literary fiction writes, “a primary function that food imagery fulfilled within
artistic literature in Russia was to break some of the lingering aesthetic taboos
against corporeality that had been established during the neo-classical period”
(2009, 11). It needs to be emphasized here that food can signify both female and
male desire, however, here I am concerned only with the former.
9. A similar scene occurs in Roger Vadim’s film . . . and God Created Woman
(1956) after Juliette and Michel consummate their marriage. She announces
she is hungry, gets out of the bed and goes downstairs to bring some food for
herself and her new husband. Once she is downstairs where the two families are
consuming food during the wedding reception, she grabs a tray and fills it with
an enormous amount of food as if confirming her insatiable appetite in both a
literal and figurative sense.
10. Whilst cannibalism is a relatively common motif in the horror genre, especially
in its slasher variant, it also appears occasionally in non-mainstream cinema, as
exemplified by How Tasty was My Little Frenchman or the more recent, The Cook,
the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) by Peter Greenaway. It also appears in
Eastern European cultural texts. Slavenka Drakulić’s novel The Taste of a Man (an
English translation of the novel was published in 1997) deserves a special mention
here as the Croatian writer made her heroine Polish. She is a young poet who
comes to New York for a stipend. Her future Brazilian lover is also visiting the city
in order to conduct some anthropological research. These two foreigners meet and
almost instantly embark upon an intense sexual relationship. Alas, this relationship
can last only for a short time as both must return to their countries, he to his family
and she to her fiancée. Unable to accept this separation from her lover, she kills him
and then proceeds to eat parts of his body, discarding the leftovers around the city.
Whilst on the plane back to Poland, she thinks to herself: “And he is here, inside
me, enclosed forever in my body, in my every cell. He lives inside me. He touches
with my hands, breathes with my breath, sees through my eyes” (Drakulić 1997,
212). Apparently, cannibalism is for her the ultimate realization of their love, a mys-
tical communion of their bodies. The novel’s first-person narration exhaustively
explains her motivation for the deed of romantic cannibalism.
11. For a possibility to use postcolonial approach to post-communist cinema see
Mazierska et al. (2014).
12. In his essay on She-Shaman, Julian Kutyła notes “a parallel between the self-
destructive relationship of the male protagonist played by Bogusław Linda and
Polish intelligentsia’s attitude to the capitalist transformation” (Kutyła 2010, 75).

13. This reading radically opposes Ewa Mazierska’s interpretation that claims
that “The Italian” is a victim of patriarchy (Mazierska and Ostrowska 2006,
121–22).
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Women Who Eat Too Much - Consuming Female Bodies in Olish Cinema by Elżbieta Ostrowska (Taylor and Francis, 2016.)

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Women Who Eat Too Much - Consuming Female Bodies in Olish Cinema by Elżbieta Ostrowska (Taylor and Francis, 2016.)

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7 Women Who Eat Too Much

Consuming Female Bodies

In her book concerning representations of the female body in Victorian liter-

obsolete, especially in that the notion of resistance is in itself ambiguous.7 As

“Hungry Women” in Andrzej Wajda’s Films

“How Tasty is a Polishman?” Female Cannibalism

Portuguese mercenary who was captured by a Brazilian tribe in the sixteenth

While focusing on the psychoanalytical aspect of the narrative presented in

overlooks the gendered aspect of the performed act of cannibalism. Accord-

tions that can be foregrounded or, respectively, marginalized in the process

alized bodies as an expression of a newly found freedom to define their identities

Polish intelligentsia’s attitude to the capitalist transformation” (Kutyła 2010, 75).

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