THE STRUGGLE FOR FORM
THE STRUGGLE
FOR FORM
PERSPECTIVES ON POLISH AVANT-GARDE FILM
1916-1989
EDITED BY KAMILA KUC & MICHAEL OPRAY
A Wallflower Press Book
Published by
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright Kamila Kuc & Michael OPray 2014
All rights reserved.
E-ISBN 978-0-231-85065-0
Wallflower Press is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press
The images included in Chapter 1 are reproduced by courtesy of the Themerson Estate and GV Art Gallery, London
A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-231-16982-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-16983-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-85065-0 (e-book)
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CONTENTS
It is in the nature of books of this kind that debts of many different sorts are incurred. We first would like to thank Yoram Allon at Wallflower Press for his immediate enthusiasm and support for the project, which he has sustained throughout its rather lengthy production, and, not least, for his patience.
For important help in the early stages, thanks are due to Paulina Latham and Marlena ukasiak at the Polish Cultural Institute, London; Marcin Giycki; Ryszard Kluszczyski; and ukasz Ronduda. We would also like to mention Agnieszka Wolak for her hospitality in Warsaw and her continual support and friendship. Others who often gave practical help and advice or offered critical discussion were A. L. Rees, David Curtis, Daniel Bird, Ilona Halberstadt, Michael Maziere, Kuba Mikurda and Ben Cook.
In particular, enormous gratitude is due to Adam Wyyski and Krzysztof Berowski at the National Film Archive, Warsaw, whose enthusiasm in locating materials went far beyond any professional duty, and also to Jasia Reichardt at the Themerson Archive, London, who gave her enormous support and in a generous spirit provided excellent stills of the Themersons films.
The same is offered to David Curtis and Steven Ball at the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection, Central St Martins, whose knowledge of the subject was extremely important and whose assistance with documentation and film viewings was crucial.
Michael OPray would also like to acknowledge the early financial support for travel in relation to the project of the Research Committee of the School of Architecture and Design, University of East London. Kamila Kuc would like to thank Urszula and Mariusz Dragan for their hospitality during extensive research visits at the National Film Archive in Warsaw.
Of course, we owe much to our contributors for their hard work and commitment, with little remuneration, as is the way more often than not these days, and we offer enormous thanks to them. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the magazines Lux Centre, Undercut and PIX in granting permissions to reproduce essays, without which the project would have been impossible.
MARCIN GIYCKI is a film and art historian, critic, filmmaker, photographer and educator, and the Artistic Director of the Animator International Animated Film Festival in Pozna, Poland. He teaches in Poland and the US and has published seven books and made a number of documentary, experimental and animated films.
MIKOAJ JAZDON is a film historian and Professor in the Department of Film, Television and New Media at Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna. He is the author of books about the documentary films of Krzysztof Kielowski and Kazimierz Karabasz and the editor of the first book on contemporary Polish independent cinema. He wrote several booklets for the DVD collection of Polish documentary classics (Polska Szkoa Dokumentu), and was the scriptwriter and the interviewer for a TV series about recognised Polish documentary filmmakers (Sztuka dokumentu). He is also the programmer of Klub Krtkiego Kina, a weekly programme of screenings and public meetings with film directors, and an artistic director of the International Documentary Film Festival OFF CINEMA in Pozna.
RYSZARD KLUSZCZYSKI is Professor at the University of d and the d Academy of Fine Arts. He published widely on video art, multi-media and avant-garde cinema. His current interests revolve largely around cyber-culture. He is an art critic and the author of many publications on Polish avant-garde and experimental film.
KAMILA KUC is a film and art historian and curator. She completed her PhD thesis in the history of Polish avant-garde film at Birkbeck College (2012) and is currently authoring a manuscript based on her thesis for Indiana University Press. She is a co-editor of the first Polish collection of Laura Mulveys most influential essays (ha!art) and is also co-editing the first in English companion to Walerian Borowczyks films for Berghahn Books. She teaches art and film history and theory at University of Brighton, Hertfordshire and Kingston.
MICHAEL OPRAY was Professor of Film in the School of Art and Theory, University of East London. He has published widely on avant-garde film and animation and edited Andy Warhol Film Factory (1989, translated into Japanese in 1991); The British Avant-Garde Film 19261995: An Anthology (1996); and, with Jayne Pilling, Inside the Pleasure Dome: The Films of Kenneth Anger (1990). He also wrote Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (1996, translated into Korean in 2004); The Avant-Garde Film: Themes, Forms and Passions (2003); and Film Form and Phantasy: Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics (2004).
JONATHAN L. OWEN completed his PhD on Czech cinema at the University of Manchester, UK. He has worked as an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and a Teaching Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He is author of the monograph Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (Berghahn, 2011) and has contributed various book chapters and articles, including to the journals Framework and Canadian Slavonic Papers. His research interests are East European cinemas, East European avant-gardes, animation, cult cinema and co-productions.
A. L. REES is a research tutor in Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, London. He programmes and writes about artists film, video and digital media. A new and updated edition of his 1999 book, A History of Experimental Film and Video, was published by BFI/Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Other recent essays are in Iconics (Japan), Millennium Film Journal (USA), Sequence and MIRAJ (London).
MATEUSZ WERNER, born 1970, PhD, is a philosopher of culture and film critic. He lectures at UKSW University in Warsaw. He is the editor of the philosophical quarterly Kronos; author of the book Facing Up to Nihilism: Gombrowicz, Witkacy (Warsaw, 2009), on the phenomenon of nihilism in literature; and editor of What Does Kielowski Tell Us Today? (Warsaw, 2008, in Hebrew) and Polish Cinema Now! Focus On Contemporary Polish Cinema (London and Warsaw, 2010; Seoul, 2012). He has recently edited a collection of Pier Paolo Pasolinis essays, After Genocide (Warsaw, 2012), and contributed to international film magazines such as Cahiers du cinma and Close Up (Italy). He is a member of FIPRESCI and the Polish Filmmakers Association.
