Infected by Strzemiński

Memory is a space, where – like in the afterimage – the imaginary meetings sometimes happens.

In 1948, four years before his death, Polish radical avant-garde painter Władysław Strzemiński was teaching for a few months in Film School in Łódź – it was just before Polish filmmakers (Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polański, Jerzy Skolimowski) began the golden era of Polish cinematography. This marginalized and forgotten thread allows us to pose a question: what would happened if Polish cinema of 50s and 60s – rather neorealist and symbolist – opened for more radical vision of image? How it would looks like if it were “infected by Strzemiński”?

Infected by Strzemiński, a work from 2013, is a potential or alternative story, one of the histor(ies) of cinema, according to Szerszeń’s conviction that history is open for the constant rereading and that what never happened (but potentially could) have the same importance as what happened in reality.

From the formal point of view Infected by Strzemiński plays with a convention of film still (fotos) from 50s, 60s. Each photo combines classic stills from Andrzej Wajda’s films from 50s with afterimages of fragments of Władysław Strzemiński’s formal works (called “afterimages”) and create a space of phantomatic, imaginary meeting.