Visions of Avant-Garde Film , livre ebook

VISIONS OF AVANT-GARDE FILM
VISIONS OF AVANT-GARDE FILM
Polish Cinematic Experiments from Expressionism to Constructivism
Kamila Kuc
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2016 by Kamila Kuc
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ISBN 978-0-253-02397-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02402-2 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-02405-3 (e-bk.)
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In memory of Michael O Pray (1945-2016), a friend and mentor
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Protocinematic Phase: The Pioneers (1896-1918)
1 The Cinematograph and Historical Consciousness: Actualities as the Earliest Experiments with Film in the Polish Territories
2 Discovering Medium Specificity: The First Polish Claims for Film as Art
3 The Earliest Polish Experiment with Artist Film: Feliks Kuczkowski s Animation in the Context of the International Avant-Garde
Part II. Polish Avant-Garde Movements and Film (1919-1945)
4 Karol Irzykowski s Tenth Muse : Animated Film as the Highest Form of Film Art
5 The Theoretical Apparatus: Polish Futurism and Avant-Garde Film
6 Polish Avant-Garde Films, Discourses, and the Concept of Photog nie
7 Polish Avant-Garde Film and Constructivism
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
If history is the past interpreted for the present, it follows that every generation needs its own history, rewritten with a different emphasis and from new viewpoints.
-Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915
A HISTORY OF POLISH avant-garde film exists in fragments. 1 Most sources cover particular filmmakers and movements rather than the subject as a whole. In the English-speaking world, it is generally believed that the first ever attempt at making an avant-garde film in Poland was Apteka ( Pharmacy , 1930), by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. While the Themersons are generally considered the leaders of Polish avant-garde film (their work certainly being the most innovative at the time), the film projects of their contemporaries more often than not remain obscured. It has been assumed that during 1918-1939 Polish avant-garde films existed only as unrealized projects. So far no methodology has been developed for a critical assessment of the films destroyed during World War II. This is the case with the works of Feliks Kuczkowski, who began making animated films in 1917. Had they survived, they would have been the first examples of Polish avant-garde film. The unrealized projects of Mieczys aw Szczuka, Karol Irzykowski, Teresa arnower, and Jan Brz kowski, as well as the films of Jalu Kurek, Jerzy Gabryelski, Janusz Maria Brzeski, Kazimierz Podsadecki, Jerzy Zarzycki, and Tadeusz Kowalski, were scripted and some were made prior to or simultaneously with the work of the Themersons. They have been marginalized because most assessments in film histories take as their main criterion only films that existed only in their material form. 2 The unmade, lost, and unrealized films to this day reside outside the main discourse. 3 Using the most recent approaches, such as those of Ian Christie, Giuliana Bruno, and Pavle Levi, allows us to revisit the many common assumptions about avant-garde film in general and here these will be applied to Polish avant-garde film in particular. My book, in line with the above sources, takes a more unorthodox view, based on the inclusion of unrealized and lost projects as crucial contributions to the development of an avant-garde film in Poland.
The only surviving examples of Polish avant-garde film are the three films by the Themersons: Przygoda cz owieka poczciwego ( The Adventure of a Good Citizen , 1937), Calling Mr Smith (1943), and The Eye and the Ear (1944-1945). The work of the Themersons has been discussed at length in an international context. 4 In investigating the intellectual climate that defined the Themersons work in film, the following questions are relevant: What were the origins of Polish avant-garde film prior to the Themersons? Who were the key people associated with it? To what extent did early avant-garde movements (expressionism, formism, futurism) influence later practices in the field of avant-garde film? What were the unique features of Polish avant-garde films and the discourse around them, and which areas constituted points of convergence with other European film avant-gardes? What was the relationship between theory and practice of avant-garde film in the 1920s and 1930s? By addressing these questions, this study demonstrates that the origins of Polish avant-garde film reach back to the debates that took place in the 1910s.
This book deals at length with the period 1896-1924, before the arrival of any avant-garde films proper on the Polish art scene, which happened eventually in the 1930s. However, by tracing the origins of Polish avant-garde film back to the 1910s, my findings invite at least a debate with the theorists who believe that avant-garde film began in Europe only in the 1920s and in America in the 1940s, as does P. Adams Sitney in reference to the work of Maya Deren. 5 In line with my argument in this book, opposing Sitney s view, Bruce Posner and Jan-Christopher Horak consider that Deren (the Themersons being seen as a conceptual equivalent) was not the first American to explore experimental cinema. 6 Unseen Cinema , a series of DVDs of American avant-garde film (restored by Posner), thus begins in 1894 with Annabelle s Serpentine Dance (W. K. L. Dickson and William Heise). 7 I, too, propose the inclusion of earlier films and activities around them as part of the avant-garde film tradition.
This study begins with Zygmunt Koroste ski s 1896 text Kinematograf-Fotografia ruchu i ycia (The cinematograph-Photography of motion and life). 8 The importance of this text to my overall argument is twofold. It demonstrates that within the writings concerning the basic features of the cinematograph, there were by 1896 already several individuals who foresaw its future potential not in entertainment and narrative-based practices but as a witness to historical events (thus recognizing its alternative, documentary function). Koroste ski s text challenges the general historiographical assumption of Boles aw Matuszewski s 1898 articles, Une nouvelle source de l histoire: Cr ation d un d p t de cin matographie historique ( A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography ) and La photographie anim e, ce qu elle est et ce qu elle doit tre ( Animated Photography, as It Is and as It Should Be ), as being the first texts about the cinematograph written by a Pole. 9
This book ends in 1945 with the Themersons last film, The Eye and the Ear . This date marks a change in the Polish film industry, which was completely destroyed during the war. Nationalized in November 1945, the Polish film industry faced the problems of a new organization starting from scratch, which is a subject that warrants a separate study. 10
Throughout the chapters of this book I aim to show that despite the lack of many primary materials, it is possible to identify a range of terms and practices that relate to the development of Polish avant-garde film and its aesthetics: the documentary film tradition (as seen in the works of Koroste ski and Matuszewski), animation and pure cinema (the films and writings of Kuczkowski, Kurek, and the Themersons), photog nie (the writings of Anatol Stern, Kurek, Stefania Zahorska, and Karol Irzykowski and the films of Kurek and the Themersons), and montage (Brzeski and Podsadecki and the Themersons). While investigating these elements, this book proposes that there were two phases related to the development of avant-garde film in Poland. During the first phase early theoretical discourses about film (reviews, articles, pamphlets) were formulated. This is seen in the work of Matuszewski and Kuczkowski, Matuszewski being particularly important here since he was both a theorist and a practitioner. This model of a filmmaker-theorist is particularly present in the 1920s and 1930s film avant-gardes, as seen in the examples of French impressionism and Soviet montage film (and was later prominent within the international New Waves, as exemplified by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, among many others). This was the phase during which the aesthetic qualities of film were first debated. 11 During this period a series of international experiments took place. Christie refers to it as the protocinematic phase-the time when ideas about the nature of film were beginning to take shape and films often existed in the form of unrealized projects of many artists and critics. 12 Christie thus calls for a new way of writing a history of films made before the time of the canonical avant-gardes, such as futurism, Dada, and surrealism. 13 His argument includes film projects that were never made or did not survive