The Uncanny Lenses: Film and Photography in the Polish Avant-Garde Poetry of the 1920s

• In Event: Humanity’s Liberation or Decline?: Representations of Technology in East/Central European Cultures in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

Similarly to the Western avant-gardists, Polish futurists and constructivists eagerly used varied new modes of artistic expression, including cinema and photography, as a means to rejuvenate poetic language. In his memoirs, Anatol Stern, one of the notable members of the futurist movement and later a scriptwriter, explicitly discusses different film techniques, including wide shots or cross-cutting montage, and how it benefited experimental Polish poetry. Photography likewise was frequently incorporated, and some representatives of experimental art in interwar Poland, such as the novelist, playwriter, and painter Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, were avid photographers, leaving a fascinating collection of images complementing their artistic oeuvre. Yet, the enthusiastic incorporation of cinema and photography as a theme or technique was also juxtaposed with more anxious visions of subjectivity mediated through the lens of a camera. In this presentation, I focus on spectral and uncanny subjects emerging from rather than represented through these new media. Foreshadowing or documenting death, the appearances of ghostly or vampiric subjects establish a dark, critical current within the avant-garde technological discourse that goes against images of technology traditionally glorified in experimental art. Such tendencies are visible in Tytus Czyżewski’s, Bruno Jasieński’s, and Mila Elin’s poems, which also problematize the relationship between photography and cinematography and the notions of time and space. In this view, the images and moving images captured by poetry become products of haunted technology, which, paradoxically, continues Young Poland’s irrational, neo-romantic, and techno-skeptical paradigm.

Author

• Agnieszka Karolina Jezyk, U of Washington