At Atlas Sztuki, we don’t screen feature films. Even if it’s known (even before the premiere) that it may be a work leaving a significant mark in culture. At Atlas Sztuki, we often showed documentaries. Feature films are “displayed and played” at festivals. As long as we stick to the rules adopted by one industry or another, everything is in its place. The red carpet was rolled out in Gdynia, stars and well-known industry figures arrived, and media reports heated up the atmosphere of competition for the Golden Lions award. In such a situation, everyone knows what and when to do. Who should smile, who should not enter the frame of the working teams, who should keep a distaste distance, and who and for how long should enthusiastically elaborate during an interview about the chances for Polish cinema.
In art, in its creation or reception it takes so little, just to stare inappropriately, to get engrossed in a book left by someone, to inhale unhealthy smoke, to mix up a bus number and then to struggle with the feeling that we are not in our place, that everything is not in its place. Festivals are a natural environment for such feelings.
It’s nothing serious, it passes after a moment, without complications. It leaves a vague suspicion that tangling up simple matters is somehow necessary for us. Out of nowhere, phrases like “the conspicuousness of meaning” appear, completely impractical in daily life. From such conspicuousness, it’s only a small step to oddities like phenomenology, or the metaphysics dismantled by it. They have nothing to do with the professional film industry. Nothing, except for “the conspicuousness of meaning”. The constant confusion in language between the functions of a film projector and a laterna magica is one of the effects of this archaic, direct conspicuousness.
Filmmakers rarely delve into Husserl’s proposals from a hundred years ago to subject all European metaphysics, already stale by then, to “mental destruction” (gedankliche Destruktion). To dismantle, to strip down (Abbau) everything that surrounds us. To bring what we experience down to the level of direct immediacy, prior to any language. Such immediacy can lead “to the roots of the previously given world”.
More or less consciously, most filmmakers “making a film” intend to “shake up”, “reach”, “convey”, that is, to arrange for others a gedankliche Destruction genau. The legendary solitude of the director in Husserl’s language comes down to remembering to distinguish two types of signs that refer to something. You can “show” (Hinzeigen), you can “indicate” (Anzeigen). Husserl wrote that in a silent monologue (isn’t that where a director’s work begins?) “words, like everywhere, serve as signs. (…) everywhere we can talk about showing (Hinzeigen). The transition from expression to meaning, from the significant to the signified, is no longer an indication here. Hinzeigen is not Anzeigen. This transition or, if you prefer, this reference, is done here without any existence (Dasein, Existenz). (…) In “solitary mental life”, we will not use real (wirklich) words, but only words presented in imagination (vorgestellt)”.
Many who wrote after Husserl, led by Derrida, reproached him for how quickly and imperceptibly his rational project of looking at everything on its own terms, outside any convention, turned into another wave of metaphysical perception of reality.
A wave splashing against the hard everyday life in the same imperceptible rhythm with which the Baltic Sea splashes against the shore in Gdynia or the beach near the Grand Hotel in Sopot. From this splashing begin endless labyrinths of signs, their notations, their repetitions in our heads. Endless disputes about the rights to represent what is not a sign (and about royalties).
We don’t hear this splashing like the sounds of nature, it reaches us by the rights of a voice. A voice whispering something important, directly into our ear. Such a whisper, such an echo changes the immediacy in an incomprehensible way. We have nothing more at our disposal, only that determines what each of us is willing to recognize as an important image, and what as meaningless. Only that decides our judgment of reality.
Those sitting on the jury of the Gdynia festival have the same. Poor people, they have to cope with expectations, moods, the intuition of the entire industry, and still remain partly themselves.
They can only be advised that the conventional division into feature and documentary films does not matter at all. Everything we see, we narrate, we fictionalize. Everything we fictionalize, what we tell freely inventing becomes a document, a source, and a trace of someone’s immediacy. For thousands of years, we then return to such artifacts.
As we know, they don’t have to be from celluloid film.
They can be on canvas, they can be stone.
They always have to be full of verve. Just like this latest media production.
Not much time has passed since the premiere of the premiers. It must be admitted, the plot twists are almost cinematic, hard to believe in such a pace of events.
The verve of the experts is surprising. Just let it end well.
We need very simple, emotionally clear situations to maintain the ability to recognize what is important, despite the noise, clamor, distracting context, and filters applied to the information reaching us.
The simplest, spontaneous gestures expressing collective emotions resist this blurring image deformation the longest. That’s why they are so important in every carefully planned and implemented political or marketing campaign.
Our team won!
