Łucja Iwanczewska ponders the strategies and cinematic decisions of Andrzej Wajda. Her thesis is that the director created a symbolic historical imaginary for postwar Polish society. She states that Wajda’s films are a kind of mediated personal participation in the life of the collective: his cinema "was meant to remind us of the collective’s past, while participation in the past was meant to establish the present, traveling through forms of history and social life." Iwanczewska believes that Wajda’s films about the war have entered the social consciousness and created a symbolic field for Polish history.