Reymont, Isms and Cinema

Marek Hendrykowski

Abstract

What Hendrykowski mostly finds in Władysław Reymont’s prose is cinemacity - manife­sting itself not only in the writing technique but also in the writer’s imagination, his cinematic perception of the world. This feature of Reymont’s prose does not only result from the interest he had in the art of motion pictures but also from his inner need to construct his worlds represented in the way similar to purely cinematic methods: the alternating backgro­unds, locations, mixture of themes, changeability of viewpoints, an episodic structure of reality. In this creative temperament and techniques Hendrykowski sees similarities to David Wark Griffith, one of the greatest silent movie makers. According to Hendrykowski, Reymont is the artist who had always looked for his place in modern art; a flexible and consciously eclectic artist who drew on various artistic trends from realism, Impressionism, naturalism, Symbolism, Modernism to Expressionism. He was also a writer deeply involved in the social life of his nation, the prose writer with a flair for documentary writing, who replaced the cool description of events with lively reporting.