Presentation Schedule
Japan as Cultural Proxy: Andrzej Wajda’s Nastazja (1994) and the Transcultural Geopolitics of Post-Communist Poland (107811)
Session Chair: Haozhen Xu
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Wednesday, 13 May 2026 12:30
Session: Session 2
Room: Live-Stream Room 1
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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Film Nastazja (1994) by Andrzej Wajda marks the culmination of the director’s long-standing fascination with Japan (Laskowska 2000), a perspective that gains additional relevance in the year marking the centenary of Wajda’s birth. Produced during Poland’s post-communist transition, this adaptation of the final part of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, staged in the aesthetic of kabuki theatre with a Japanese cast, functions as a cultural practice through which Japan is inscribed into a narrative of Poland’s repositioning within the global order after 1989. The paper analyses Nastazja as a work in which kabuki aesthetics operate not merely as an artistic form (Kawatake 2006), but as a tool for reorganizing perceptions of East Asia in Polish cultural discourse of the 1990s. In the filmed version of the Japanese stage production, both Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna are portrayed by the eminent onnagata Bandō Tamasaburō V. This casting choice, together with the transposition of kabuki conventions into cinematic language, exemplifies an asymmetric cultural transfer, in which Japanese performative tradition is subordinated to Polish cultural and ideological frameworks. The analysis situates the film within Polish–Japanese relations of the 1990s, including cultural exchange and image-making strategies (Miliszewski 2009; Rutkowska-Pałasz 2019), and within transcultural tendencies in Polish (Nowak 2017; Stelmach 2023) and Japanese cinema (Wada-Marciano 2012; Yoshimoto 2019). It also reconstructs the Polish reception of Nastazja in film journals (Kino, Film) and opinion-forming press (Tygodnik Powszechny), showing how Japan functioned in the Polish imaginary as a symbol of exoticism, inclusivity, and progress.
Authors:
Maciej Krauze, University of Lodz, Poland
About the Presenter(s)
Maciej Krauze is a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of Humanities, University of Łódź.
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