Prace w oryginalnej (kolorowej) wersji dostępne są pod adresem: https://www.behance.net/gallery/68541945/chaos
The article is an attempt to interpret The Five Obstructions, a film by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth that is a documentary record of a real meeting between the two directors, and of the project they undertook. According to plans, Leth was supposed to make five new versions of his film The Perfect Human from 1967. The result of Trier and Leth’s cooperation represents a hybrid of genres, difficult to classify by means of standard categories. Most of all, however, the film is self-referential, and therefore, the article discusses different aspects of documentary work in general, including the originality of a work of art, the issue of difference and repetition, the situation of the creator, and the concept and status of a work of art. Ultimately, the interpreted film provides a potential starting point for formulating a thesis on the documentary as a set of artistic conventions and rules for creatively engaging art and reality.
Since the beginning of the cinematographic industry there has been a visible interest in exploring two themes: death and sex, whereas the motif of dying and sexuality/eroticism seem to be mutually exclusive in mainstream movies to such extent that they rarely appear together on the screen. To shed some light on this cinema tendency of separating eroticism from dying we investigate some of the factors of the phenomenon as well as the ones that could have contributed to the shift we have noticed. The majority of films devoted to the subject of dying and eroticism concentrate on a very limited range of visual and narrative schemes. In our paper we present the main clichés, plot and visual schemes, motifs and narrative techniques in contemporary cinema. Although the unique power of the cinema is “matter of making images seen”, it could be argued that the cinema uses not only the command ‘open your eyes to’, but also the command ‘close your eyes to’. In this way, audiovisual culture closes its eye to the entwinement of the motif of dying with the themes of eroticism.
The article pertains Andrzej Berbecki’s script of a documentary entitled “Niosąc ziemie”, centered on the life and works of Julian Przyboś. The script, unpublished and unmade, was found in the poet’s home archive. The text divides into three parts: the first shows Przyboś in various everyday life circumstances, the second is a discussion about his writings, while the third is an interview with the poet. The script is abundant in references and poem quotes taken from Przyboś’s poetry, endeavouring the intersemiotic translation of his poems.
American critics often refer to showrunners as television auteurs. Do showrunners deserve this title? Applying the assumptions of Francois Truffaut’s la politique des auteurs, as well as Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory, this article discusses the case of Matthew Weiner, the showrunner of Mad Men, a television series set in the 1960s America. Examining each stage of the show’s production process allows to prove that Weiner had decisive influence on scripts, direction, casting, cinematography, costume and production design, music and the editing of his project. Perhaps it is time to stop considering series as a collective work – due to the differences between director’s role in film and in television – and instead focus on its auteur features, since it can be argued that we owe the latest golden age of television to the increase in the showrunners’ creative autonomy.
The takes issue the VR experience in the context of the concepts of realism. He presents the process of create the cinematic VR and its references to reality in the type of non-fiction media. He also points to the ethical dimension of the issue by referring to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy.
This close-reading analysis and interpretation examines the original form of Woody Allen’s masterpiece Zelig (1983). The author combines a film studies approach with an investigation of epistemological and semiotic reflections on moving images. The author emphasises that more than three decades ago Allen gave to a wide audience a critical, sceptical and ironic vision of the “documentary” (esp. regarding the “truth”) status of moving pictures. This study also introduces also important terminological distinction between “mockumentary” (“fake-documentary”) and a contrasting category, that is, “documentary fiction” (also called “docufiction”), giving an instructive and precise definition of both.
In my article, I examine the relationship between the documentary and performance. I focus special attention on Maciej Sobieszczanski and Łukasz Ronduda’s film The Performer , which blurs the boundaries between film genres. Oskar Dawicki is a performer, and the protagonist of both a creative documentary and a feature film – this balancing on the borders of film genres and art is the focus of my reflections. The film’s authors took inspiration from the creative documentaries of Wojciech Wiszniewski and the plots of Grzegorz Krolikiewicz, in which characters play themselves – in both cases, creative elements reveal the truth about each character. The most important aspect to me is the presence of the performer, which determines the form of the film and its reception. In my article I follow several themes which are key for understanding The Performer , among them the motif of disappearance and the relationship between the master and the disciple. I also deal with the problem of documenting performances – using the example of The Performer and the recording of Marina Abramovic’s activities ( Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic, 2007). I also refer to the documentary film on Marina Abramovic, The Artist Is Present , in which the performances recorded from 2010 go beyond the documentary formula.
Michal Marczak’s documentary Fuck For Forest was met with interest by both audiences and the media. This was due to the movie’s theme: the documentary tells the story of a group of activists living in Berlin who raise funds for environmental protection through a porn website. The film‘s premiere in Poland was accompanied by an aura of scandal, and Marczak’s movie was criticized by many for supposedly promoting pornography. The article analyzes the strategy used to promote the film in Poland and discusses various forms of commentary and media discourse on the film.
Interactive documentaries bring new possibilities of artistic expression. They allow innovative ways of engaging the viewer, personalizing experiences, and building a community. At the same time interactive documentaries bring challenges: the need of new production skills, openness to experimentation, the development of new financing models. There is still a need to create a language to describe new formats. The semantic elusiveity of this area seems to be reflected in its market position. The genre is suspended between film, documentary film and computer games and both the audience and the distributors have difficulties defining it. This text is an attempt to describe what an interactive documentary might be, what sets it apart from other formats, and what’s the viewer’s role in this type of audio-visual formats. We present a few flagship projects from different countries and we look at the Polish audio-visual industry. We conducted a survey, asking Polish artists working on so-called new narratives about their work conditions and the biggest challenges they are facing. The second part of the text covers the results of our study.
After decades of research, technological development as well as few discouraging setbacks, virtual reality (VR) appears to be on the cusp of its settled adoption. The incorporation of VR technology into the palette of everyday communication media is not only exciting for filmmakers and game designers, but also for every manner of storytellers: documentarians, journalists, educators, scientists – all professions involved in clarifying surrounding us reality and communicating about it. They all discovered that social change can be valuably stimulated by development of new technology – technology that serves in the same time as a classic medium to communicate and spread this news around. Considering the factors enabling us to capture and disseminate “a true story” in a highly captivating, immersive way (which previously has been preserved exclusively for entertainment and commercial productions), we should mention at least 3 crucial elements: technological innovation, psychological evolution of the viewer, application of VR beyond storytelling. The first two factors mutually interact and play off each other in terms of the changing threshold of perceptual tolerance as well as rising needs of the new spectator. The first part of this paper deals with the interdependency of these two elements. Structured conclusions will be enumerated as a practical reference for VR storytelling productions. The second part of the paper will deal with the third element enumerating the most inspiring cases from recent years – eye-openers for instigating social change, adding value and promoting wellbeing via VR technology. The engagement of VR in social change, innovation and nonfiction storytelling introduced the VR technology within the current media palette. It not only changes the nature of storytelling about reality, but fulfills the story that our reality builds.
Today we are seeing significant technological progress in the context of imitating reality. One technology which emulates our reality in comprehensive way is photogrammetry. The aim of the article is to illustrate the using of photogrammetry in the context of video games. The main part of the text is an analysis of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2015). The authors of this video game decided to apply photogrammetry in order to display vast spaces in which an avatar is moving. I indicate that such an implementation not only creates a reliable illusion of reality, but also crucially affects video games’ poetics and narration.
Finding a clear-cut boundary delimiting fiction from documentary has always been a controversial, daunting and unthankful undertaking. In the last decade, the blur between the two genres has been reinforced by the rapid advancement of web and AR/VR technologies. Interactive web-documentaries and virtual reality documentaries do not only promote new viewing habits – from swiping smartphone screens to scanning horizons with VR headsets, they shake up the very idea of what a documentary is. In this short scholarly essay, I argue that the feature of interactivity is the driving force redefining the documentary genre. This thesis builds on two case studies: 1) Interactive documentary Atterwasch and 2) VR documentary The Unknown Photographer. In the final section of the essay I revisit the definition of documentary reality and expand it with the addition of André Bazin’s notion of mise en scène.
Cinema under pressure The article contains a synthetic look at the issue of film censorship, taking into account its various forms. The author combines the perspective of a contemporary synchronous with the diachronic perspective, dating back to the distant origins of cinema and filmmaking, in conjunction with politics and ideology.
The dark sting of degenerate nature. Sketch of the dark-romantic inspirations in Wojciech Smarzowski’s Rose The text presents Polish dark romanticism as an important source of inspiration for the images of violence, includ- ing sexual violence, in Wojciech Smarzowskis Rose. The author reveals the mechanisms of this inspiration: visual, dramatic, intellectual, and refers to specific literary texts, from the Romantic era and later, by Antoni Malczewski, Seweryn Goszczynski, Juliusz Slowacki and Wlodzimierz Odojewski.
Criticism of Stalinism in 1950: André Bazin’s analysis of Stalinist era cinema The main purpose of the article is to analyze attempts at a critique of Stalinism in cinematography in the work of the outstanding French film theorist and critic Andre Bazin. Through a comparison of Bazins opinions with statements by his adversary Georges Sadoul, Lars Kleberg shows the vast context of the debate on this topic, which occurred in France in the 1950s.
Great semantic figures in film This study is devoted to the key issue for any research on film, film art and audiovisual communication - great semantic figures. Marek Hendrykowski extrapolates the repertoire of basic concepts developed for decades in literary science (author, reader, narrator, narration, character, time, space, events, plot, style, composition, etc.) into academic film studies. Following important scientific ideas formulated half a century ago by the eminent literary theorist Janusz Slawinski, Hendrykowski stresses that the scientific sense of using these categories is not limited only to cataloguing them.
