Not in the Canon, but at the Centre of Matters

Alicja Helman

Abstract

Andrzej Gwóźdź’ book Not in the canon. In the Footsteps of German Cinema (Obok kanonu. Tropami kina niemieckiego, 2011) inaugurates a Publishing series “Germany - Media - Culture” under the patronage of the Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies. The publication is the result of the author’s involvement in a research programme dealing with German cinema. This book is not a work of a film historian who tries to fill in the gaps. Rather it presents a cultural studies point of view, which finds interesting clues and ideas in film images. Such interdisciplinary research leads to innovative and original results. Gwóźdź moves in the area of his choice equipped with a kind of compass: a set of preferred theoretical assumptions. For him, the history of the cinema is the history of techniques and forms of imaging, and, therefore, of different discourses and forms of visibility. Helman points to the fact that Gwóźdź, even when he is writing about film makers and matters known to Polish cinema goers and researchers, reveals all those details in German cinema that we are unaware of. This is because previously we perceived them in a dif­ferent way, from a different perspective and in a different context, in a different diachrony and synchrony.