Rural femme fatale or victim of patriarchy? Cinematic portraits of Jagna Paczesiówna

Abstract

The latest film adaptation of Reymont’s novel The Peasants, which places at the center of its narrative Jagna – a woman who embraces her femininity and other­ness, yet is suppressed by the community in the name of the common good – encourages a comparison with the cinematic portrayals in two earlier films based on the Nobel Prize-winning rural epic (bearing in mind that no copy of the first silent film has survived to this day, and we can rely only on sparse press reports).

This comparison is particularly compelling given that each subsequent screen version of Reymont’s Nobel-winning novel was released almost exactly 50 years apart (1922, 1973, 2023), offering a unique perspective for reception and interpretation across time.

Without focusing strictly on the issue of adaptation itself, the article undertakes an analytical reflection on three acting portrayals of the character Jagna, as performed by Maria Merita, Emilia Krakowska, and Kamila Urzędowska, drawing on voices from film criticism and, by way of contextual reference, evoking other female film portrayals from the respective periods in which the films based on Reymont’s tetralogy were produced.