Perhaps it takes a woman to understand the complexity of masculine roles in today’s id-pol landscape of culture wars. Agata Pyzik sympathizes via fellow Pole Anna Gawlita’s Krzyżoki (Horse Riders) – a short documentary on a particularly Polish ritual.

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What is the weight of rituals today? The internet and online life make us think this is the way all people live now: Totally wired, detached from more intense bodily experiences, and occupying a «liquid modernity» – to use Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase – where the meaning of all myth, all ritual, custom, the past, the present, and the future are melded into one undistinguished experience of «now». Yet, not accidentally, we have a strong resurgence of identity politics, of various clinging to identities allegedly endangered by the invasion of an «alien» element. This feeds the majority of right wing-leaning politics, but hardly only them: The left is now equally entrenched in culture wars.

Perhaps that’s why I feel a little disturbed by Krzyżoki, a short documentary by Anna Gawlita. In it, all the things I’d rather steer away from loom large: A strong sense of masculinity in the old, traditional way; the ritual; rural Poland – which thinks God-knows-what of the likes of me, an uprooted young urbanite woman, childless and family-less, swimming in liquid modernity as deeply as possible. The fact a film like Krzyżoki has been made at all is a clear sign that such id-pol based on nostalgia for the «golden days» presents itself as attractive – or at least intriguing – even to an emancipated, modern woman, as a female film director/producer like Gawlita is bound to be.

Some Customs Are Necessary

With her excellent DoP Tomasz Wolski executing stunning black and white images, sound engineer Marcin Lenarczyk, and composer Michał Górczyński, she manages to create a captivating spectacle. Krzyżoki shows a group of rural men from Sternalice village maintaining an Easter ritual: After the holy mass they ride horses, effecting a short pilgrimage tracing the village’s borders. Not really used to riding horses, and in fact completely modernized in their agricultural work, this ritual allows the men to maintain a relationship with the land with their «bare hands», so to speak. They drink vodka, pray, and discuss the commercial side of their job. The place of agriculture in modern Poland is shaky, neither respected by the state nor the majority of society. It demands grit to remain a farmer in Poland. Therefore, it’s understandable that some rituals restoring virility and manhood are essential.

Masculinity is being challenged by contemporary culture, and rightly so. But I also understand how men could feel a bit lost and in need of establishing rituals to restore a sense of manhood and personhood. And even if I can’t claim to understand the men in the film, or why they do it, in a way I get them – as much as I get my male friends who organize Sunday football clubs. Men are twice as prone to depression as women. And even if some softer, urban men claim to happily shake off patriarchal influences, embrace cultural change, and give space to women, they surely feel enormously confused as to what makes them men, per se. In this way, perhaps Krzyżoki is not so much an «ode» to traditional masculinity as it is a fascinated eye – a woman’s – casting a glance at this almost «heritage» expression of it, and asking where contemporary masculinity can go next.