Tag Archives: Polish cinema

Kinoteka 2014

kinoteka_2014
Poster for Kinoteka 2014

Kinoteka: 12th Polish Film Festival

24 April – 30 May 2014

Various venues, London + touring around the UK

Kinoteka website

This year, the 12th Polish Film Festival brings not only its usual bounty of new works and rare classics, but also very excitingly includes the first major UK retrospective of the work of the brilliant Walerian Borowczyk, a firm favourite at Electric Sheep. We will celebrate this very special event by making Borowczyk the focus of our next theme, starting in May, exploring his work through articles and our usual columns, including a feature by Borowczyk expert Daniel Bird, who collaborated to the retrospective.

The programme will celebrate Borowczyk’s rich and varied body of work, including his artwork, early shorts, animation and live-action features, many of which have been rarely or never seen in the UK and have been fully restored. Best known for insane erotic masterpiece The Beast, Borowczyk had started as a poster designer and acclaimed animator, producing the wonderfully inventive Angels’ Games in 1964 before moving into live-action features with the splendidly surreal The Theatre or Mr and Mrs Kabal and Goto, Island of Love.

For the first time, BFI Southbank and the ICA will be jointly holding a retrospective in partnership with KINOTEKA, running throughout May with film screenings, an exhibition, events and talks, featuring newly restored prints. In addition, the ICA will also be hosting the first UK exhibition of Borowczyk’s artwork, including preliminary work for his animated films, as well as his wooden sound sculptures. The ICA Cinema will also screen two shorts programmes including Angels’ Games.

Career Retrospective ‘Cinema of Desire, The Films of Walerian Borowczyk’ developed in collaboration with Daniel Bird, runs throughout May at BFI Southbank and the exhibition Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye’ takes place at the ICA from 20 May to 29 June.

Arrow Academy’s dual format (DVD + Blu-ray) box set release of Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection (released 18 August 2014) brings together key films from 1959 through to 1984.

Other highlights of the KINOTEKA festival picked from the press release include:

Pawel Pawlikowski multi-award-winning new film Ida will screen at a special centrepiece gala screening at the Barbican (24 May) ahead of its UK release later this year through Artificial Eye. Pawlikowski’s latest film is a poetic, almost Bressonian exploration of the limits of faith following the story of Anna, a young novice in rural 1960s Poland, who discovers a dark family secret on the verge of taking her vows. Exquisitely composed and shot in luminescent black and white, Ida won Best Film at the London Film Festival.

‘Sex in the Polish Socialist Republic’ is a fascinating and insightful look at sex and intimacy behind the Iron Curtain with a programme of Polish animation shorts from the Communist period, thematically linked around sex. The topic is transformed artistically and often ironically with works by leading Polish animators Julian J&#243zef Antoniusz, Andrzej Czeczot, Piotr Duma&#322a and Alexander Sroczy&#324ski amongst others. The screening at the Barbican (12 May) is organised in partnership with the London International Animation Festival.

Riverside Studios will showcase an exhibition of posters designed by Henryk Tomaszewski (21 April – 3 May) to mark the centenary of the birth of one of the founding fathers of the classic Polish School of Posters. Tomaszewski was known for creating expressive posters, based on visual shortcuts and metaphors, opening up a move towards greater simplicity as the foundation of his graphic language. The exhibition in London is a satellite event being held concurrently with a major exhibition of his work in Poland curated by Agnieszka Szewczyk; ‘I’ve Been Here; I Hope The Same For You’ Zach&#281ta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (14 March – 10 June).

And we are particularly looking forward to KINOTEKA’S Closing Night Concert, which takes place at the Union Chapel on 30 May, described as follows:

Produced by the Barbican, the concert will premiere two short films by the Quay Brothers with live soundtrack provided by the legendary Arditti Quartet. The Gala will be the UK premiere of the Quay Brothers’ latest short film Kwartet Smyczkovy, and the critically acclaimed In Absentia, taking existing musical compositions for their inspiration. In Absentia directly responds to Stockhausen’s electronic composition Two Couples (1992/1999). The hypnotic visual language of the film and fragmented mode of narrative intensifies the associative power of the music like an additional, visual voice in the polyvocal texture. Kwartet Smyczkovy – Paraphrase on Peter Handke’s ‘The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other’ – is based on Lutos&#322awski’s only string quartet, composed in 1964 and marks the centenary of the composer’s birth. The Quay Brothers react to the melodic superimpositions and flickering micro-rhythms of the composition with stark and eerie twilit images. The Arditti Quartet will perform these pieces live, in dialogue with the projection and will also perform Alban Berg’s Lyrische Suite, between the films, understood as an aural ‘film’ for the ears.

For more information please go to the Kinoteka website.

Kosmos: Polish and Russian Sci-Fi Cinema

Solaris

audio Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy talks to Russian scholar Sergei Kapterev (Institute of Cinema Art in Moscow) about Soviet science fiction and the connection between SF cinema and politics, the impact of the space race and the Cold War period, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979),and Roger Corman’s re-edits of popular Soviet SF films. (Originally broadcast 15/07/11 on Resonance FM)

Plus, in a Q&A recorded at SCI-FI-LONDON in April 2010, Alex Fitch talks to Polish poster designer Andrzej Klimowski and SF writer/journalist Wojciech Orli&#324ski about cinematic adaptations of the work of Stanislaw Lem from Steven Soderbergh and Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptations of Solaris to more offbeat films such as Edward Zebrowski’s The Hospital of Transfiguration.

Kosmos: A Soviet Space Odyssey runs at BFI Southbank throughout August.

Podcast produced by Alex Fitch

The Polish New Wave?

On the Silver Globe

audio On the Silver Globe is an esoteric Polish sci-fi epic directed by Andrzej Żuławski in 1977 – then lost and believed destroyed by the authorities for a decade before its cinema release. In 2009, the film was screened at Tate Modern as part of a mini-season of films titled ‘Polish New Wave – The History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed’. Looking ahead to the release of this film on DVD in the UK, Alex Fitch talks to Andrzej Żuławski about his struggles in getting the film released and the travails involved in making his horror films The Third Part of the Night (1971) and Possession (1981) under the eyes of a communist regime.

Alex Fitch also talks to Polish poster designer Andrzej Klimowski and his wife Danusia Schejbal (famously depicted as the victim of an assassin’s bullet on Klimowski’s poster for Robert Altman’s Nashville) about working on the fringes of Polish filmmaking in the late 1970s and whether the films of the time could be seen as belonging to an artistic movement.

Andrzej Żuławski will be the focus of a retrospective at this year’s Kinoteka festival which runs from 7-28 April 2016.

Podcast produced by Alex Fitch