The Agony of Tradition: How a Polish documentary faces the end of village music

The Agony of Tradition

A film titled Agonia (dir. Tomasz Knittel, screenplay by Adam Strug, TVP 2020) confronts the decline of Polish traditional music and its natural habitat head-on. Other cinematic texts have touched on this subject before — in Polish film, the theme arguably began over sixty years ago with a short documentary about ethnomusicologists Jadwiga and Marian Sobieski and the rural musicians and singers they recorded. That earlier work, Melodie, które nie zginą (Melodies that will not be lost), presented only a dozen or so snapshots of field recordings with concise commentary by Julia Hartwig. The narrator proclaimed that the melodies “will return, like migratory birds return to their family nest.” Roughly forty later films — both during the People’s Republic of Poland and after 1989 — took up related motifs. The author of this piece has worked as a screenwriter on about a dozen of them, each a biographical portrait of specific musicians performing in their raw, unstylized manner. Those earlier films treated the end of tradition as a secondary thread. The purely artistic Dziewcę z ciortem (dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1975) was an exception.

A Personal Vision

Agonia is the first film to place this subject at the center. Its strengths as reportage are undeniable — moments are stirring — and it adopts a journalistic perspective that sparks discussion. Because the picture is so heavily shaped by Adam Strug’s personal vision, it raises many questions and also provokes scrutiny of the filmmaker himself.

Like earlier films in the genre, Agonia features heroes from rural musical traditions — Kurpie, Radomskie, Podhale. Their screen time is short, yet each player or singer makes a strong impression, demonstrates a piece, and comments on it. In just a few lines of dialogue they assert their individuality, even as the narrative deliberately treats them as representatives of a broader community. Alongside them come two — or three, counting Krzysztof Trebunia-Tutka’s childhood pupils — generations of urban youth who mirror the wider dance‑house revival movement and, in places like Podhale, help ensure the continuity of traditional music. These younger participants, though they bring different habitus and more fragmented identities, makes a nest within tradition. Andrzej Bieńkowski, with his sociological‑ethnographic eye, links both groups. The result is a dense impression of one “new village” open to multiple interpretations.

Missing Pieces

A few absences deserve mention, if only to keep them alive in post‑film debates. Greater Poland, whose continuity differs from that of the Carpathians, and Lower Silesia, with its repatriate, migratory mosaic on former German territory, are not represented. Academics are scarce too: the older generation, including graphic designer and field documentarian Piotr Dahlig, who offered perceptive reflections little tainted by presentism, and the younger generation of scholars who (unlike previous arm‑chair researchers) are also active musicians. The author is troubled that the film omitted regional or micro‑regional song‑and‑dance ensembles and allied initiatives — groups whose provenance is far more intricate than that of state communist ensembles like “Mazowsze” and “Śląsk.” Those large, government‑established ensembles, it should be noted, carry a tradition preceding the socialist‑realist framework imposed later. One explanation stands out: the film deliberately mirrored the revival movement’s countercultural, quite elitist character, offering an alternative — however niche — to the organized, institution‑based patterns.

Two Cultures of Music

Strug probably wanted to draw a sharp line between two kinds of tradition. The first is archaic, raw — an act of communication “saying more than all the words” (as Krzysztof Trebunia‑Tutka puts it); a corporeal and spiritual event both causative and life‑giving. Stanisława Galica‑Górkiewicz remarks that “there is good in music.” The second is newer, less spiritual, cultivated for pleasure, for stage performance or simple remembrance — but even as a souvenir, it should be “full of style,” per Trebunia‑Tutka. These varieties differ fundamentally in their ontological impact on performance aesthetics. Still, the typology carries an evaluative charge that originates outside the culture it describes, since the bearers themselves often experience things differently.

Strug regularly invokes the past as if static. He calls the musical tradition a tripod of “commune (also tribal), noble and church”; talks of “19th‑century repertoire ranges,” “free Kurpie peasants, unfamiliar with serfdom, guardians of the royal forest,” and “isolation that allowed the oldest Masovian dialect and music to survive.” He yearns: “if we had lived a hundred years ago….” This romantic cast — probably intended to sharpen the features of a culture in agony — freezes the past like an insect in amber. The present, through which the remnants of the old legacy travel, cannot be pinned down, and the future remains a mystery. Yet isn’t that uncertainty itself fascinating?

In a crucial sense, a traditional culture stops being alive in its old way once it ceases to be a secret world bound by internal codes and taboos. Its living continuity relies largely on oral transmission as well as the often‑overlooked communication of the body (Connerton 1989). Apprentices had to steal craft secrets from masters still in the stream of living tradition — reveal some cunning. When tradition‑bearers begin describing their lore openly, they have already ceased practicing it, as Antoni Kroh (1999) notes suggestively. Folklore that no longer grows from a world that enabled it becomes talk about folklore (Sulima 2000), and practitioners turn into certified custodians of the story. City youth can take over traditional music relatively smoothly precisely because the culture that generated it is vanishing. That paradox accounts for the tragedy: people depart with part of their heritage interiorized. Their musical language can be learned, but it will never be the same. There is no reason why it should. In present conditions, that language can become something personal, a fragment of a mosaic, kaleidoscopic, identity — and the artistic quality expressed through it matters as much as fidelity to an older identity.

Feeling and Context

Emotion runs through Agonia, which begins and ends with a funeral. The most touching scene: an oberek played by mourners over the grave of Radom harmonist Tadeusz Lipiec. Nearly every segment radiates feeling — through statements, body language, the music itself. Although framed by journalistic commentary, the film never becomes an over‑intellectualized essay; ultimately it dwells on feeling, music’s raison d’être rendered auditory, voiced, performative.

A pivotal exchange occurs: “You have twenty good bands, so what more do you expect?” asks Andrzej Bieńkowski. Strug replies, “I expect context.” In a time of “village without village,” aren’t these feelings enough? At the end of the picture a handful of voices — Bieńkowski, Galica‑Górkiewicz, Ewa Grochowska — form a quiet postscript, a counterpoint to the smoke‑like gloom that hangs over most of the documentary. If feelings aren’t the real concern, then it’s unclear what Strug means by “context.” Perhaps metaphysics is being invoked. But why must context “happen,” especially while the music is still happening? Anthropological works and artistic statements often lay bare the author’s self, and this feels like one of them: the film becomes a portrait of Adam Strug.

Could the precise agony be understood et¬ymologically — as agon, a competition as old as anything, pitting Thanatos against Eros? That motif pulsed strongly in the ancient culture the narrator often fondly references. Elders die, their relatives mourn, and yet this only amplifies the desire to reaffirm life. At the same time, children play, young people celebrate (they would dance if someone played), sometimes a child is conceived. Feasting overcomes death. Afterward they go to a football match or for a Croatian seaside holiday. From the perspective of historical rivalry — death vs. life, tradition vs. modernity — the meaning of “agony” becomes less absolute, less of a justification for writing off living traditional music.

Cinematic Qualities

Agonia invites reflection and deserves scrutiny. It also possesses strong cinematic attributes: tasteful, breathing shots; clear direction with the right pace; impressive dramatic unity carried by original editing. Both director Tomasz Knittel and editor‑filmmaker Kuba Pietrzak demonstrate evident familiarity with the material. The soundtrack could work as a radio report on its own. In brief: a production worth recommending. Despite how it misses some issues and skirts others, the film offers something fresh in the documentary record of folk music — impossible to realize twenty years ago — but might age faster than expected, for reasons that could fill another movie, or at least another article.