The article focuses on paratexts that refer to the work of Alfred Hitchcock. The author focuses on video essays, which either describe, analyze and interpret films made by the director of Vertigo, or to highlight specific themes that are characteristic of his films. The author briefly examines video essays as a new way of ‘writing’ about the cinema, and draws attention to the popularity of YouTube and Vimeo platforms, commonly used by vloggers to share materials they have edited. The next parts of the article are devoted to video essays thematically focused on Hitchcock and his work. By systematizing the issue and pointing out the most important components of video essays, the author distinguishes the following types of such short films: those that focus on specific themes in Hitchcock’s films; those regarding the director’s method; those examining the influence of his films; those analyzing specific films from different perspectives; those that read Hitchcock’s films in a historical perspective; and finally various video remixes based on the assembly of excerpts of Hitchcock’s works with shots from other films.
Artykuł dotyczy twórczości Kelly Reichardt – reżyserki, która od połowy lat 90. pozostaje jedną z kluczowych postaci amerykańskiego kina niezależnego. Wychodząc od założeń badaczy skoncentrowanych na zagadnieniu krajobrazu, autor przygląda się podejściu Reichardt do pejzażu jako takiego oraz charakteryzuje wizję stanu Oregon obecną w jej produkcjach. Przywoływane w tekście wypowiedzi Reichardt potwierdzają, jak istotne było dla niej poznanie Jonathana Raymonda – pisarza i przyszłego scenarzysty opisywanych w artykule dzieł. W kolejnych filmach – zwłaszcza tych, którym w tekście poświęcono najwięcej uwagi (Old Joy /2006/, Meek’s Cutoff /2010/, Pierwsza krowa /First Cow, 2019/) – oboje nie tylko przyglądali się stanowi z północno-zachodniego wybrzeża USA, ale też wykorzystali tamtejsze lokacje do nakreślenia portretu współczesnej amerykańskiej prowincji. Opowiedzieli o niej, operując poetyką slow cinema i odnosząc się do gatunku westernu.
EN
The article concerns the work of Kelly Reichardt – a film director who since 1995 is regarded as one of the most prominent representatives of American independent cinema. Starting with the observations of researchers theorizing landscape, the author analyses Reichardt’s approach to landscape as such and describes the vision of Oregon present in her work. The director’s statements cited in the article confirm the importance of meeting the writer Jonathan Raymond – the future screenwriter of the discussed productions. In their subsequent films – especially those that are at the centre of author’s interest (Old Joy /2006/, Meek’s Cutoff /2010/, First Cow /2019/) – not only did they look at Oregon, but also used the Pacific Northwest state’s locations to portray contemporary American country. In doing so, they used the poetics of slow cinema and conventions of the western genre.
Artykuł jest poświęcony twórczości Radu Judego – rumuńskiego reżysera, który po wyprodukowanym w 2015 r. Aferim! stale eksplorował tematykę historyczną. Autor przedstawia podstawowe koncepcje rozumienia filmu historycznego (odwołując się przy tym do ustaleń Williama Guynna czy Roberta Rosenstone’a) i szkicowo prezentuje estetyczno-narracyjne dominanty nowego kina rumuńskiego XXI w., by na tym tle odczytać dzieła Nie obchodzi mnie, czy przejdziemy do historii jako barbarzyńcy (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari, 2018) oraz Drukowanymi literami (Tipografic Majuscul, 2020) – dwa fabularne filmy Judego, w których reżyser, wyraźnie inspirując się teorią Bertolta Brechta, rozwija poetykę kina modernistycznego. Skupiając się na problematyce historycznej, którą analizuje za pomocą chwytów refleksywnych, Jude zdecydowanie zrywa z tematycznymi tendencjami kina Rumunii ostatnich kilkunastu lat.
EN
The article focuses on the work of the Romanian film director Radu Jude, who continued to examine historical topics after completing Aferim! in 2015. The author presents basic concepts of the historical film (with reference to William Guynn’s and Robert Rosenstone’s findings) and gives a brief overview of the dominant aesthetics and narratives of Romanian films produced in the 21st century. In this context, the author analyzes I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari, 2018) and Uppercase Print (Tipografic Majuscul, 2020) – two feature films in which Jude refers to Bertolt Brecht’s theory and updates the poetics of modernist cinema. By focusing on historical issues, as analyzed with the use of reflexive modes of storytelling, Jude tries not to follow the thematic tendencies of recent Romanian cinema.
The article is a basic analysis of the poetics and style of autobiographical 21st century documentaries. The author concentrates mostly on three films: Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), Kim Ki-duk’s Arirang (2011) and Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011) and views them as representatives of contemporary autobiographical documentaries. He refers to directors first to realize such films – Ed Pincus (Diaries, 1971-1976) and Jonas Mekas (majority of his films). Moreover, he considers Marcin Koszalka’s Takiego pięknego syna urodziłam (1999) as one of the symptoms of oncoming popularity in using such poetics. The author claims that the expansion of autobiographical documentary has been taking place since the turn of the century – even today, film directors decide to use professional cameras to record presumably important events of their life and edit this material into a coherent film. This change of filmmakers’ interests was surely enabled by the progress of new media and access to modern technologies. Nowadays there are many autobiographical documentaries similar to each other. Due to this the author considers reasons why movie directors decide to make the so-called “Filip Mosz’s gesture” (Mosz is a character starred by Jerzy Stuhr in Kieślowski’s Camera Buff ) and create documentaries about themselves. He juxtaposes reflexivity as well as cultural otherness, problem of staging and – most of all – ways of presenting film self-portraits in three mentioned documentaries. An important connection between Tarnation, Arirang and This is Not a Film – apart from their many differences – is their directors’ desire to treat moviemaking as a form of autotherapy and as a method of searching for identity.
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