Topografie i krajobrazy. Filmowy Śląsk
Topographies and landscapes. The cinematographical Silesia

Author(s): Ilona Copik
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Photography, Sociology, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: landscape; cinematographical topography; Polish cinema; regional cinema; Upper Silesia
Summary/Abstract: The book is devoted to the cultural phenomenon which is known as “filmowy Śląsk” [“the cinematographical Silesia”]. The author analyses and interprets films whose common theme is the landscape of region presented on the screen, in the process of its transformation: from an industrial to a post-industrial one. She treats cinematographical works as “geographical and cultural events” i.e. forms of creative activity (images/texts and artistic practices), which constitute representations/constructions of a place. The fundamental theses of the work are focused on the statements that, on the one hand, in the place which is represented on the screen, there are intersecting senses and discourses of a given culture, which one may decode in the course of an analysis, and, on the other hand, cinema participates in cultural processes, it participates in the mediatised production of culture and identity. Further chapters constitute a development of these theses in the perspective of the relations which obtain between Silesia, cinema, the landscape, identity and memory – individual and collective memory (national, regional). In this work, the keyword is landscape – a concept which links the themes of the relation between the thing which is real/mediated, aesthetic and cultural, demonstrative/experiential, etc. A cinematographical landscape here constitutes an image of a country (of a place), an object of a particular “visibility” which is accessible to the faculty of vision, and at the same time a pretext for anthropological considerations oriented toward the forms of some kind of participation in the screen-related space, of its co-experiencing and deliberation.

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