This essay and review article provides a panorama of phenomena and themes related to the fundamental difference of interests and the permanent conflict stemming from the schism and crisis in values that occurs between he changes in the field of broadcasting technology and technological revolutions and the memory of cinematography and film culture.

This essay deals with some of the secrets that have been studied and explored for centuries by the science of literature and the sciences of art. The author searches for the logical-philosophical origins of the phenomenon of ‘mystery’, and discovers them in the sphere of the autotelic properties and anthropocultural functions of literature and art.

The article presents a panorama of selected topics and research issues relating to the functional characteristics of props, both in the past and present.

Marshall McLuhan was one of the most significant and influential, not to mention popular, mass media researchers and commentators. The article offers a detailed introduction to the essential methodology of his works. By taking a fresh approach, this study explores and explains the basic structure of McLuhan’s method for describing, analysing and interpreting various themes and phenomena connected with media communication, emphasizing the key relationship between theory and practice as a way leading toward “understanding media”.

Zorientowana interdyscyplinarnie próba charakterystyki fenomenu chochlika występującego w rozmaitych tekstach kultury: od struktury wiersza do wydarzeń życia społeczno-politycznego.

The article attempts to reread Karol Irzykowski’s classic treatise on cinema and to recognize the importance of its significance in the context of the entirety of changes and achievements of humanistic culture in the interwar period.

This article deals with the basic issues related to the evolution and methodology of research on art. The author highlights the close relationship between theory and practice of artistic activity and underlines the cognitive advantages stemming from the interdisciplinary approach of formulating and solving research questions in the domain of reflections on art.

Hendrykowski Marek, Na białym szlaku. Zapomniany film o wojnie [“On the White Trails”: a forgotten film about the war]. „Images” vol. XXVI, no 35. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 103–115. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.35.05. The article is an analytical and interpretative study of behind-the-scenes aspects and the poetics of a little-known feature film titled On the White Trails, directed by Jarosław Brzozowski and Andrzej Wróbel.

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.

The article provides a comparative analysis of the style and composition of Klara Kochanska’s student short feature film Lodgers. (produced by the Polish Nation Filmschool in Łodź in 2015) as an example of film narrative practices typical of the academic exercises of students today.

Andrzej Wróblewski’s Drama Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957) was one of the most important Polish modern painters of his time, closely con- nected both with key issues of the 20th-century European avant-garde in art, as well as socialist realism in post- war Poland. The article is a sui generis glossa to Wróblewskis retrospective exhibition “Recto/Verso” presented in Winter-Spring 2015 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw.

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.

The Lambeth Walk, or the spectator liberated from the pressure of the picture A quintessential work of British and European cinema of World War II “The Lambeth Walk” is the epitome of world-class art of moving picture editing. Marek Hendrykowskis close-reading analysis places this short movie in its aesthetic, cultural and generic contexts and in the international landscape of the anti-propaganda film.

Parabola is the essence of the short film Two Men and a Wardrobe (and likewise Mammals and The Fat and the Lean). Parabola is dominant of the genre, not merely an occasional and distinguishing attribute. In its interior, we find traces of other genres. These include noir comedy, slapstick burlesque, existential drama, the thriller, and drama of the absurd, grotesque and macabre. The poetic dimension of Polanski's short film, in which reality confronts and permeates the skilfully constructed and captivating fantasy presented by the artist, allowing all the elements of the genre to be combined into a common whole.

The author introduces the problematics of the changing discourse of face. He argues that it requires a special attention given the scope and strength of mediatization processes permeating contemporary culture. In the article the consecutive historical phases of reflection on the cultural role of face are presented, spanning from ancient Greece and Middle Ages to late modernity. Such undertaking serves as a rich background for the detailed study of discourse of face in cinema and other screen based media.

Autorstwo utworu audiowizualnego – substancja i struktura

The semiotic mechanism of representing time present in documentary film has remained the same since the 19th century up to this very day. This is governed without exception in the cinematographic “message” by the choice and combination of visual and audio elements shown on the screen, together with the process of fragmentation and segmentation of images in respect to the reality being communicated. The nature of information contained in the moving pictures is one of communicating integrated experiences of the world, and experiences of civilization and culture. Thus conceptualised, information and the process of informing have a dimension that is par excellence anthropological. There in fact lies the broadly understood process of experience on the part of man and society - regardless of the changeability and ad hoc nature of the subjects raised in a given piece of subject matter - representing each time its ‘what’ and ‘how’. Regardless of the means of film expression used, there is always the same point of significance: the difference in the potential between what is known and that which is unknown. That is why the creative documentary proves on each occasion to be a mutual discovery of both known and unknown reality - one shared by the filmmaker and audience.

The revision of key topics that are related to film parody. The crucial question of Marek Hendrykowski’s research sounds as follows: what is the semiotic mechanism that gives parodistic effect expressed in the language of motion pictures? According to the author, conditio sine qua non of each parody are: incorrectness, caricatural exaggeration, comic effect, deconstruction, pars destruens and new meaning of old characteristic elements confronting the audience and its common memory. In the light of new reading and revised definition of this term, film parody is not a separate genre but rather meta-genre in its relations to many other film genres and individual screen performances being object of parody

The long history of the “Marlboro Country” and “Marlboro Man” advertising campaigns (1954- 1989) represents the renewability of a certain image which was perfectly designed and meticulously thought out. This history constitutes a well-developed “syntagma” which consists of not one but many different, individual versions of a message. What is important is that the administrators and creators of these advertisements succeeded in keeping a semiotic balance between the personal characteristics of a particular model and the image schema which this model was to maintain. Each of these versions sustained the image that had once been created (stability of a cliche) and at the same time featured different representatives of this image and presented them in ever new ways that refreshed the previously achieved expression (dynamics of innovation). This was a multi-stage project which had been planned to “last long”. The “shape” of the Marlboro Man’s model face is a kind of personal testimony to the excellence of the product offered. The representatives of this image kept changing, but its matrix, which made these representatives similar to one another and instantly recognizable as part of a well-known stereotype, turned out to be surprisingly stable and unchanging over several decades.