Visions of Avant-Garde Film: Polish Cinematic Experiments from Expressionism to Constructivism by Kamila Kuc (review)

In Visions of Avant-Garde Film: Polish Cinematic Experiments from Expressionism to Constructivism, Kamila Kuc traces the emergence of Polish avant-garde cinema. She fills the gaps in a history that remains largely "in fragments" (ix), all the while challenging the usual historiography, which dates the beginning of Polish avant-garde filmmaking to Stefan and Franciszka Themersons's first work Apteka (1930). Kuc discusses the critical engagements with the new medium in the late 1890s, the first cinematic experiments by Feliks Kuczkowski in 1917, the theoretical endeavours of Karol Irzykowski, and the various avant-garde movements from the late 1910s and the 1920s in Poland. All this, she claims, belongs to the "avant-garde film tradition" that preceded the "avant-garde films proper" of the 1930s (x). With only three surviving Polish avant-garde films—all by the Themersons—from the era under consideration, 1896–1945, Kuc calls for a film history that not only takes existing films into account, but also those that are lost or never came to fruition in the first place. She considers these films not in isolation but alongside what was made, thought, or written in relation to them: "A history of any film is a history of the relationship between the apparatus and the discourse that takes place around it" (140). To reconstruct the discourse around this period's largely lost avant-garde cinema, she looks at newspaper articles, film magazines, scripts, memoirs, theoretical writings, poems, cine-novels, drawings, and stills among other sources. As she finishes gluing the fragments, her bibliography clocks in at over a thousand titles.

After a quick consideration of a number of definitions pertaining to the avant-garde and a brief historical overview of Poland's modernization as well as its unique position between the avant-garde centers of Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, and Prague, Kuc opens Chapter 1 with the assessment of the earliest Polish writings on the "cinematograph," a fluid international word that could mean both the apparatus and cinema in general. In 1896, Zygmunt Korosténski published "The Cinematograph—Photography of Motion and Life" and in 1898, Bolesław Matuszewski, himself a maker of actualities, followed up with two articles, "A New Source of History" and "Animated Photography." The authors praised the cinematograph's ability to record reality, witness history, and recreate the liveness of motion—qualities that later still preoccupied Polish avant-garde thinkers and filmmakers.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the Polish side of the international debate on medium specificity in the 1910s. A key person in this debate was Karol Irzykowski, who published a prescient article in 1913 titled "Death of the Cinematograph." Edison's experiments with the synchronization of sound with image in the period 1912–1913 resulted in the short-lived Kinetophone, which prompted Irzykowski to issue an early lament about the death of silent cinema and look for the essence of the cinematograph before its potential disappearance. He found it in movement, but contrary to Korosténski and Matuszewski, he praised not so much the reality of motion as the plasticity of the image. Now film was valued not only for its veracity but also its aesthetics.

Feliks Kuczkowski, whose work preceded the canonical avant-garde cinema, is considered in Chapter 3. Influenced by symbolism, expressionism, and formism (a Kraków-based avant-garde art movement started in 1917), Kuczkowski developed the concept of "synthetic-visionary film," which he put in practice with his first work, Flirting Chairs (1917). Synthetic-visionary films were supposed to be animations made without script by one person free from the industry. Although most of Kuczkowski's projects were left unrealized, Kuc considers his work as "a backdrop to the emerging avant-gardes" (43).

Chapter 4 returns to Irzykowski and discusses his book The Tenth Muse: The Aesthetic Issues of Cinema (1924), published around the same time when his Polish-French counterpart Jean Epstein was producing his own most famous writing. Commissioned...