Paweł Pawlikowski’s Journeys: Television, Cinema and Kinesthetics

Dorota Ostrowska

Abstract

Throughout the late eighties and nineties Paweł Pawlikowski, a contemporary British-Polish film-maker, made a number of documentaries for a BBC a series of TV dramas, the most famous being Last Resort (2000). In 2004 his first cinema feature My Summer of Love was released. The shift between the two forms of vision, one associated with television and the other one with feature film-making, has oriented Pawlikowski’s overall aesthetic and thematic concerns, which could be regarded as an example of „kinesthetics”, a new type of visual forms which draw on both televisual and cinematic modalities. „Kinesthetics” address tensions appearing in the encounter between television and cinema apparent not only in Pawlikowski’s works but also in the creative output of some of the most important post-war directors: Bergman, Rossellini, Sokurov, Wenders, Kieslowski and many others. „Kinesthetics” also imply movement and transformation between television and cinema which in the case of Pawlikowski’ s documentaries is thematized into the accounts of his travels to Eastern European countries or the travels of Eastern Europeans to the West. Pawlikowski’s journey between the media of television and cinema and his critical attitude towards television aesthetics serve as a metaphor for his blurred sense of not only his artistic identity, forged between television and cinema, but also his personal identity, which, like that of many Eastern European travelers to Western Europe, is hybrid, fluid and transit.