Polish New Wave Cinema - the history of a phenomenon that never existed - January 24 – 27, 2008

A rare selection of Polish  features, documentaries, and shorts from the 1960s to the present day –  including early work of Jerzy Skolimowski and Krzysztof Zanussi,  as well as Oscar-winning director Zbigniew Rybczynski, Andrzej Zulawski, Andrzej Kondratiuk,  and Grzegorz Krolikiewicz  – which all transgress the traditional methods of narrative  construction characteristic of their respective genres. This non-conventional  treatment of the cinematic form places these works somewhere between  contemporary art and cinema, in a domain that doesn’t properly belong  to either field. Due to their conscious conceptualization and formal innovation,  most of these films weren’t fully appreciated by the conservative film  audience; while on the other hand, the absence of any conscious application  of contemporary art discourse to film has excluded them from the context of  the art institution.

It was the conceptual artist Piotr Uklanski’s  “Polish Western”, Summer Love, which is also being shown, that prompted curators to identify an a-historical Polish “new wave”  that had never existed within a clearly marked period like that of the French  New Wave, but which coheres around a conscious rejection of conventional  forms and lends itself to contemporary art discourse. Special guests: Oscar-winning director Zbigniew Rybczynski and actress Elzbieta Czyzewska.

The program is curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Barbara Piwowarska.
  
Presented by  Anthology Film Archives, Archfilm/Archive of Polish Experimental Film at the  Center for Contemporary Art “Ujazdowski Castle” in Warsaw, and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, with generous support from Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Polish Film Institute. Production: KINO.LAB (CCA Ujazdowski Castle); collaboration: Piktogram.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street), New York, NY 10003
Tel. (212) 505-5181.  Tickets: $8 general; $6 students, seniors; $5 members