Cielesność, intymność i seksualność w filmach Ulricha Seidla jako medium samotności i odrzucenia

Author(s): Beata Kosińska-Krippner / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl says that all his films are physical, because – in his opinion – it is important to make films physical and attract viewers to characters as close as possible. Kosińska-Krippner follows in his work various ways in which issues of corporeality and sexuality are grasped – including the use of an image of body as a tool of provocation or making the image of corporeality a specific medium of expressing reflection on man and the world, which he creates around himself. The director shows the body in its various facets and aspects, sometimes running away from its visual presentation, limiting himself to the verbal sphere and sometimes he dazzles us with physicality, nudity, debauchery and perversion, in order to tell us more about the human nature. Seidl shows his characters in the most intimate of situations, he looks at society without compassion, and leaves the evaluation to the viewers. He mercilessly exposes the ugliness of human existence, diagnoses the psyche (soul) of the modern man and the condition of his world and human relationships, showing what humans do with their own bodies and how they treat the bodies of others. The director robs the viewer of the illusion that normalised (prosperous) society and the dregs of society are distant and separate worlds.

Giuseppe Arcimboldi i Jan Švankmajer. Od gabinetów sztuki i osobliwości do kolekcji filmów jako zbioru dzieł osobliwych

Author(s): Bogusław Zmudziński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

In the article an attempt is made to adapt the modern idea of a cabinet of art and curiosities to the need of locating the achievements of art cinema in the context of a widely understood cultural tradition. Parallel to the relation between the phenomenon of still life paintings and the film phenomenon of object animation, Zmudziński discovers connections between the idea of a cabinet of art and curiosities in the work of mannerist Giuseppe Arcimboldi, in the context of a collector’s passion of the emperor Rudolf the 2 nd , and the way this idea functioned in the work of the surrealist Jan Švankmajer, in the context of contemporary collections of curios. The author relies on two important, yet culturally and historically very different examples, to make his argument, namely the fate of the relics of St. Louis the 9 th , King of France and the exhibition activities of the controversial anatomist and plastinator Dr. Gunther von Hagens. In his interpretation of the works of Arcimboldi and Švankmajer, the author builds a model of five levels of functioning of the concept of curio in the works of both artists. The starting point of this model is the adoption of so called objective interpretation when considering the relationship between humans and reality. In conclusion, the author argues that the central area of contemporary film collection of curiosities is filled with on the one hand animated films made with the object animation technique, and on the other hand feature films with peculiar protagonists who lose their subjectivity (and thus also their freedom), becoming puppets in the hands of fate, powerful and independent forces, or – at the most drastic – other people.

Topos ludzkiego ciała w "Oblężeniu" Juliena Bryana

Author(s): Marek Hendrykowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

Marek Hendrykowski’s close-reading study remembers and re-discovers one of the most influenced documentaries of the 1930s. Julien H. Bryan (1899-1974) was widely experienced American correspondent, photographer and documentary filmmaker. His "Siege" (released 12 February 1940 in New york City) gave unique two-week personal report from Warsaw during German invasion in September 1939. All dramatic pictures presented in this movie are based on true events filmed by Bryan with authenticity of every detail connected with civilians who try to survive in the bombed and ruined city. Siege as first documentary of World War II is charged with powerful emotions, since it is difficult to pass by the tragedies, pains and misery of real people.

Ostatni seans filmowy

Author(s): Marta Brzezińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The anthology of texts "Pamięć kina" ["Memory of Cinema"] (ed. Andrzej Gwóźdź, co. ed. Barbara Kita, 2013) is composed of eleven essays by prominent Polish film and media scholars and researchers, and is about their initiation into the world of film. Memories of visual fascinations are a commentary of sorts on the professional choices of authors, showing their paths of reflection within film studies and changes in the practice of cinema. The reviewer suggests contexts for the reading of the collection, although this of course does not exhaust all of the possible readings of the text, as the complexity of such a reading depends on film related interests and sensitivity of the readers. The area of reflection and its character, defined by the authors and creators of the anthology, suggests a metaphorical reading with the framework of palimpset and locus amoenus as respectively: the description of the work of memory and organising of the material, and the sensual figure of memory of cinema, and cinema’s memory.

Przemoc w filmach gore albo o obrzydzeniu, które obnaża współczesne stosunki społeczne

Author(s): Markus Lipowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The question of direct presentation of violence in films has long been controversial in the scientific world, and it is also of interest to the public. Since the 1960s the subgenre of gore is increasingly present in the mainstream cinematography, and the popular cinema is increasingly willing to adapt the aesthetic of violence typical for films belonging to this genre. Direct presentation of the destruction of human body has become part of contemporary popular culture. It is therefore an issue that should be considered from the sociological perspective. Accepting this as his starting point, the author asks in the article about the impact of virtual violence on the individual, and the extent to which gore films reflect the most important features of contemporary society. Using the example of three selected gore films Lipowicz tries to demonstrate, that the subgenre points to fundamental existential problems and questions of social integration in the era of postmodernity.

Co słychać w polskim kinie... międzywojennym

Author(s): Wojciech Świdziński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

"Polski film fabularny 1918-1939. Recenzje" ["Polish Feature Films 1918-1939. Reviews"] (2012), an anthology prepared by Barbara Lena Gierszewska, consists of 300 reviews of 200 Polish films shown in cinemas in the interwar period. Despite the ongoing digitalisation of archival material and expanding access to library resources, this kind of work is invaluable as an aid in the study of the history of Polish cinema. The selection allows one to examine not only the development of Polish film art, but above all the history of its reception. The book is also a story of the origins of Polish film criticism, which in the interwar period reached a very high level, and the reviews were written by such notables as Karol Irzykowski, Antoni Słonimski, Anatol Stern, and Marian Hemar. Among the reviews collected in the anthology of great value is the variety of opinions and polemics presented on such films as "Tajemnica przystanku tramwajowego" ("The Mystery of the Streetcar Stop"), or "Pan Tadeusz". The book, unfortunately, does not contain an extensive commentary, which could help readers outside of the film studies circle. Certainly including in the anthology texts with more in depth commentary could reach a group of readers interested in the history of the Second Republic, while the anthology could become a vehicle for imaginary trips to the cinema theatres of the 1920s and 1930s.

Ciała na sprzedaż - mroczna strona globalizacji

Author(s): Krzysztof Loska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The author addresses the issue of the dark side of mobility and migration, paying particular attention to the phenomenon of human trafficking. Following theoretical work of Arjun Appadurai, Loska accepts the assumption that film as a carrier of ethnoscapes is a cultural text reflecting changes taking place and capable of showing social problems. This does not mean that the artistic fiction is ideologically innocent, as most of the films analysed by the author rely on schemas associated with particular genres of popular cinema. Members of Western cultures (both as script writers and the protagonists) speak in the name of the victims. Most films referred to by Loska confirm the thesis of Gayatri Spivak, that the subaltern are deprived of a voice. They are also not present in the audience, as the films are dedicated to the majority, who are in need of a catharsis. This does not mean however that this perspective should be abandoned as one involved in (neo)colonial ideology. Rather, while remaining aware of its limitations, one should extract from the texts belonging to the popular culture, that which allows one to identify and present the real threat: the problem of trafficking in women and forcing them into prostitution.

Głos uwięziony w ciele

Author(s): Teresa Rutkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The author using selected films as examples explores the problem of the inner speech in film, in some of its configurations and functions of meaning in relation to the representation of the body in film. The voice in question is a first-person voice, articulated by a character, that is part of the structure of the film, the voice being an introspection leading the viewer to a special insight into a sphere to which other characters in the film do not have access; in this manner the viewer becomes an instance, whose presence has to be taken into account within the discourse of the film. This technique may take a variety of forms, as is shown by examples of such films as Derek Jarman’s "Blue", Dalton Trumbo’s "Johnny Got His Gun", Julian Schnabel’s "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", or "Life Feels Good" by Maciej Pieprzyca, but also Marcel Hanoun’s "Une simple historie" and "Shirley – visions of reality" by Gustav Deutsch. The inner speech is considered not only in terms of a film language, but also in its symbolic and artistic aspects.

Rytmy somatograficzne - Lucyna Winnicka w filmach Jerzego Kawalerowicz

Author(s): Paulina Kwiatkowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

Following Pierre Brossard, Roman Ingarden and his idea of layered film structure as well as Walter Benjamin’s discussion on the status of a film actor, the author reaches for a concept of somatography formulated in her earlier book, which might help to carry out a film analysis focused on the presence of the actor’s body in film. The analysis of the characters created by Lucyna Winnicka in Jerzy Kawalerowicz’ three films (The Train, Mother Joan of the Angels, The Game) allows one to identify the dominant somatographic rhythms that are determined by various methods: the manner of filming, formal, technical, aesthetic decisions, actor’s expression in the film and the frame, the interactions between actors and between the actor and the camera. Ultimately the goal is a reflection upon modernist status of the body in a movie, which body can no longer be treated as a basic obsession of the cinema, nor as something that film has to cross or abandon in order to discover thought.

Terror ciała i wstrętny stalinizm w filmie "Chrustalow, samochód!" Aleksieja Germana starszego

Author(s): Paulina Gorlewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The aim of this article is to analyse and interpret the image of male physicality in the film "Khrustalyov, My Car!" (dir. Aleksey yuryevich German /1998/). The starting point of the analysis is a question about the appearance of the socialist realist hero in the cinema of Stalin’s era and in periods when he was critically reinterpreted. Using German’s film as an example, ways in which an individual was subjugated in a totalitarian system are shown using the discourse of corporeality. The fictitious story of a tragic relationship between father and son can be interpreted as a metaphor of the traumatic soviet experience. Like every story about a trauma, inaccessible to the order of consciousness, and therefore also inaccessible to language, also this film makes the body the vessel of painful memory. In this case the body in question is a man’s body at various stages of development. The narrator experiences the terror of growing up in the socialist reality, while his father becomes a victim of a Stalinist purge and terror, whereas Stalin experiences the terror of death. In the film ideologically correct corporeality, imagined through the canon of socialist realism, is deconstructed. The director shows real bodies inhabiting Soviet Union: defiled, suffering and dead.

Ciało niedoskonałe? Seksualny aspekt niepełnosprawności fizycznej w kinie współczesnym

Author(s): Małgorzata Kozubek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

In films dealing with disability, independently of the convention, genre or the author’s strategy, there always appears the theme of sexuality. Often the whole story is organised around this theme. Sometimes it is a starting point, or appears only in one scene, but always one of great dramatic importance. The article discusses two opposite ways of presenting a disabled body in contemporary cinema in the context of sexuality. On the one side it is the desired body ("Quid Pro Quo", "Crash", "American Mary", "Boxing Helena", "A Zed & Two Noughts"), on the other it is the unwanted body ("The Sessions", "Hasta la vista!", "The Art of Flight", "The Be All and End All", "Shall we dance?", "Mundane History"). In both cases the body is subjectified, taken out of the discourse of the universal, ideal body, created by the postmodern culture.

Byt i niebycie. Reprezentacja kobiecego ciała w pracach Anety Grzeszykowskiej

Author(s): Agata Zborowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The author focuses on the analysis of three video works of Aneta Grzeszykowska. "Black" (2007), "Headache" (2008) and "Bolimorfia" (2008-2010) are analysed in the context of different ways of representing the female body in the history of art, but also taking into the account other works of the artist. The artist reveals the ways of showing female body and classifies them into a framework, using existing methods of presenting the female body in the work of feminist artists. Background and frame are important analytical categories in the article, as they are the basic mechanisms of presenting the spectacle. They make the body visible but also define its boundaries.

Performatywne identyfikacje

Author(s): Sebastian Jagielski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

Gays through the years referred to texts, subjects and symbols belonging to the dominant culture, giving them alternative and subcultural meanings. These texts provided them, especially in the pre-emancipation era, with the language which enabled them to express their experiences. Jagielski in his article focuses on the relations between the homosexual viewer and female stars (divas): he analyses the reasons for which gay viewers are so eager to follow film images, he considers the genealogy of gays’ fascination with divas, and doubts raised by this affiliation. He illustrates his argument with the image of Violetta Villas, a woman-monster, who by connoisseurs of good taste was rejected as rubbish. Her body was a carnival masquerade, an excess which it was impossible to accept. But this body appeared monstrous only when it clashed with the context of the socialist period in Poland. The star combined in her image that which is abjectal with camp, which through parodistic hyperbolization undermines the dominant models of gender and sexuality. Villas and “fagots” share in common the place in which they find themselves – they are beyond any boundaries.

Mama naga. Nagie ciało matki we współczesnych sztukach wizualnych

Author(s): Andrzej Pitrus / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

Andrzej Pitrus’ article is about the presence of the marginalised motif of acts of artists’ mothers. This theme is not common in visual art, as it is one of the remaining taboos. The works discussed in the article deal with this taboo in different ways. Creators of the works analysed explore various spheres – for some mother’s nakedness is a pretext for exploring intergenerational relations, for others it is a way of dealing with pop culture clichés, while some examine the sphere of sexuality. Andrzej Pitrus uses examples from a wide range of visual arts: films, photography, video art and video installations.

Krowa w łóżku, koń na fortepianie

Author(s): Marcin Giżycki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

In the history of the cinema there are several surprisingly similar scenes with horses, cows or goats standing or lying in a relaxed fashion on furniture in bourgeois interiors. The most famous come from "L’Age d’or" (1930) by Luis Buñuel, "Wrong Again" (1929) with Oliver and Hardy and "Moscow Laughs" (other English title: "Jolly Fellows" /1934/) by Grigori Aleksandrov. It seems that the impact and popularity of these lies in the fact that they break the social taboo dealing with the standards of coexistence between humans and animals, which leads to comic situations, but the popularity lies also in the fact that this is a link to the tradition of fairy tales, offering us a gentle detachment from reality.

Ciało w filmowym neomodernizmie

Author(s): Rafał Syska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

The subject of the article is the analysis of methods of presenting the body of actors and protagonists in contemporary independent cinema. The author chose three examples of artistic strategies presented by Bruno Dumont, Albert Serra and Alexander Sokurov – directors belonging to the neo-modernist trend in film. The presence of the body of an actor and protagonist is for each of them a target of interesting activities, although for each of them this results from different world-views and aesthetic notions. What they have in common is the resistance towards the classical techniques of psychological acting, the abandonment of conventional emotiveness, individualisation and personalisation of the hero and the intensive observation of the idiosyncrasies of actors and protagonists. To this, one must add the key topic of the intimacy of experience and the exploration of the physiological sphere, as well as the motif of physical sacrifice and sacralisation of the body.

Marilyn Monroe 1962

Author(s): Grzegorz Piotrowski,Karol Szymański / Language(s): Polish Issue: 83-84/2013

In Marilyn Monroe’s film creations from the second half of the 1950s, and especially the beginnings of the 1960s, and particularly in the change in her physical appearance, as well as in the steps she took in order to change her status, the authors see the symptoms of the process of the star-marionette freeing herself from the domination of rules and expectations of the “hegemons of the Hollywood spectacle”. Using the example of Monroe’s last, unfinished film Something’s Got to Give and her photo sessions from 1962 – Bert Stern’s from the “Vogue” and George Barris’ for “Cosmopolitan”, the authors analyse the way in which Monroe reached for creative (and feminine) autonomy through changing the way she used her mature, marked with age and experience body as means of artistic expression. In 1962 there is a marked shift from Marilyn Monroe as a star and a sex symbol, a metaphor or an idea towards Marilyn Monroe as a mature and independent woman and actress, a real, physical person with a real body, an Event.

Cloth Supplied

Author(s): Tamás Koltai / Language(s): English Issue: 180/2005

When I was a boy, some tailors’ shop signs (if a tailor had a sign at all, as most worked at home in straightened circumstances, with only a few customers knowing about them) would state that they undertook to cut suits from cloth supplied by the customer. Cloth supplied did not always mean something bought in a shop: often new clothes would be made up from old. More than once I was given an old suit of my father’s. On these occasions the tailor would ask, “Adjustment to fit?” Then he made a new suit out of the old.

Contingency and its consequences in Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Author(s): Tomasz Umerle / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

My paper proposes a new approach to the famous novel by Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy. In my reading of this work I use the category of contingency which I define by referring to the German philosopher Odo Marquard and literary theories of a monographer of the contigency in literature and film Rafa􀃡 Koschany. These are the basic inspirations for reflections on Tristram as a character, and simultaneously, narrator in the novel. In my view contingency manifests itself in Sterne's work in a two-fold manner it affects Tristram's life and narration. I will try to focus on the different ways in which these manifestations relate to each other.

Kazalište Playdrama

Author(s): Gesine Schmidt,Andres Veiel / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 3/2009