The Polish reaction to Peter Weir’s film The Way Back (2010) was centred on a discussion about the credibility of its literary prototype, Sławomir Rawicz’s book The long walk (1955). The author of the article does not discuss this con troversy; she prefers to concentrate on the adaptation that was chosen by the director, who combines different interpretations of the phenomenon of freedom in his movie. Weir’s approach can be regarded as transnational and such a perspective is suggested as a context for the interpretation of The Way Back. .
Deliberations about Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock lead to two conclusions. The first one is concerned with the interpretation of the film, and the interpretation has to refer to its symbolism with several traps lying behind it. The other one concerns the interpretation of the events, the interpretation of what happened and how it should be described. If the plot of the film is a list of the surviving sources, it opens for a historian a few options of interpreting the film. On the one hand, by referring to what he knows or what he considers rational, he can compile his own story from the material that is available to him. He can also focus rather on the symbolical meaning of the stories he has heard and connect them with the culture of the time and place he studies.
In the article there are described methods and functions of swan motif used in films Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir and Black Swan by Darren Aronofsky. In the work of Australian director very important on that mat- ter are the following: the main character (Miranda), pictorial intertexts, plot structure and some of the formal elements. In Black Swan various connec- tions between the film and Peter Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake are crucial. In the article there is also presented initiation process of both film characters, which is important for the swan motif. It is an area of comparison of these relatively different works as well. Last part of the article discusses elements of kitsch in the mentioned motif (because of considerable amount of it in low standard art) and tries to prove that methods of exploiting the swan motif by both Peter Weir and Darren Aronofsky are far from kitsch.
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