Notatki o neorealizmie. 1947
Notes about Neorealism. 1947

Summary/Abstract: Cesare Zavattini wrote that Neorealism remained an art of “fragmentary, ephemeral, piecemeal, missed encounters”. This text is an attempt at examining “Neorealist” photographs taken in the 1950s by Marek Piasecki, Jerzy Lewczyński, Zofia Rydet, Zdzisław Beksiński, and Tadeusz Rolke, and their relation towards the cinema, i.e. as takes from a never made Neorealist motion picture. Neorealism, together with its programme-like escape from subjecting reality to any sort of initial premises, its inconclusiveness, flight from didacticism, and finally – and this feature is perhaps of key importance – its unclear perception, was a sui generis “materialistic metaphysics of everyday life”, disclosing the ambiguity of a world shattered into fragments. By the very force of things, photographs taken by Piasecki, Lewczyński or Beksiński and evoking this aesthetic, became an instrument of a decolonisation of perceiving the reality of the early stage of People’s Poland, showed the then “undepicted world”, and, finally, was a sui generis visual, non-academic “anthropology”. The pretext for these reflections is the year 1947: a time of the worldwide triumph of the Neorealist cinema, the beginning of rebuilding Warsaw, the onset of Stalinism in Poland, and, finally – and this could be of utmost prominence – the year of the establishment of the periodical “Polska Sztuka Ludowa” (today: “Konteksty”).

• Details
• Contents