Tango – a Dance of Universal Alienation
Tango – a Dance of Universal Alienation

Summary/Abstract: These comments and reflections (preceded by a screening of two short films by Zbigniew Rybczyński: Wdech-wydech /Inhale-Exhale/ realised jointly with Bogdan Dziworski1 and Tango, the Oscar-winner from 1983) originated upon the margin of a book on Rybczyński’s oeuvre prepared by the Film Workshop in the Institute of Art at the Polish Academy of Sciences. I would like to present them as a contribution to the theme: “Ethnology and contemporaneity”. Today, the very fact that contemporary ethnology deals with film as a cultural text is no longer exceptional, rare, strange or isolated as testified by the development of a separate domain, namely, the anthropology of film perceived either as a sub-discipline of ethnology or as a specific interpretation approach intent on analysis. Emphasis is placed on joint experiences shared by photography, film, ethnography, and anthropology4. A new type of “writing” or rather creating anthropology is progressing with the assistance of photography, the film camera, and video; this socalled visual anthropology contains anthropological reflection on contemporary and past phenomena of visual culture. My remarks, therefore, can be a contribution or justification of the legitimacy, need, and purposefulness of the application of such an anthropological perception of film, its examination from an anthropological perspective, and the discovery of the anthropological coefficient contained therein. Briefly and simply, such a contribution could be entitled: On the Need and Sensibility of Writing an Anthropological Commentary on a Film that No One Will Write Apart from an Anthropologist.

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