Piotr Szulkin: The Catastrophes of Logos and the Absurdities of Existence
Abstract
Piotr Szulkin was one of the most important creators of the Polish cinema of the last decade of the Polish People’s Republic, who in an intriguing way tried to create a “separate cinema” in the realities of free Poland. Unfortunately to this day, no academic monograph or anthology devoted to his work (film, TV theatre, literary stories and paintings) was published in Poland. On the other hand, popular science articles on the subject of Szulkin’s cinema focus most often on the readings of this phenomenon of Polish culture in political or historiosophical contexts or related to the poetics of dystopia. And yet, both Szulkin’s science-fiction tetralogy, as well as several of his other cinema and television productions, are items that go far beyond these perspectives. Szulkin’s films can be regarded as some very interesting examples of creative drawing from various traditions of francophone thought (including Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard), aesthetic attitudes of the poetics of absurd and grotesque (with Beckett at the top), and also from selected anthropologists and sociologists of culture (Girard or Bauman). In addition to this kind of tropes in his film studies commemoration of the recently deceased director, Konefał also tries to find narrative threads and strategies from works by Piotr Szulkin, which may seem interesting to the younger generation of viewers who do not know his work (the author relies here on the opinions of students of Gdańsk film studies and Norwegian PhD students from the University of Tromsø).
Keywords:
Piotr Szulkin, dystopia, philosophyReferences
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Authors
Sebastian Jakub Konefałkwartalnik.filmowy@ispan.pl
University of Gdańsk Poland
Dr, adiunkt pracujący w Instytucie Badań nad Kulturą Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego. Stypendysta Fundacji Systemu Rozwoju Edukacji. Autor książek: Kino Islandii. Tradycja i ponowoczesność (2016) oraz Corpus Futuri. Literackie i filmowe wizerunki postludzi (2013). Redaktor naukowy i współautor książek Strefy mroku: groza w kulturze audiowizualnej (2017), Powieści graficzne: leksykon (2015), Anatomia wyobraźni (2014) oraz współredaktor antologii tekstów Sacrum w kinie. Dekadę później (2013). Jego zainteresowania akademickie obejmują m.in. kino gatunkowe, współczesne kinematografie nordyckie, badania post-humanistyczne, komiks, telewizję i gry komputerowe.
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