Cinematic Projection
Film Performance

Cinematic Projection is the reconstruction of a film screening assembled into a single whole with separate components constitutive for the conventional cinema show. It consists of the following: a trailer (Pawel Althamer), the starting numbers (Pawel Kwiek), film studios" title sequences (Maurycy Gomulicki & Ilian Gonzalez), a film "story" (Zbigniew Libera reconstructing Pawel Kwiek's project), the caption "The End" (Robert Szczerbowski), and the closing credits (Oskar Dawicki).

Cinematic Projection is an attempt to revitalise conceptual the "spoken" films made in Poland in the 1970s by Pawel Kwiek and Andrzej Dluzniewski whose goal was to provoke mental projections in the viewer"s imagination. "Films" whose tradition dates back to the first modern avant-garde, and especially its dadaist-surrealist variety represented, for instance, by the Belgrade-based Hypnists and their "radio-cinematographic poems", but also by the futurist poets who saw writing as a kind of cinematographic practice.

The projection opens with a trailer for another film, the film, according to Pawel Althamer's unique concept of existential cinema, of real life (life as a film in which we are the actors). The mission of emancipating cinema from its entanglement in technology is continued by Zbigniew Libera, an artist we remember for his analyses of the work of perception and imagination, from his studies of the afterimages of memory (What Does the She-Liaison Officer Do?, Positives). He replays Pawel Kwiek's 1972 film work The Commentary – a radically textual work that uses neither tape nor projection, existing solely in the form of a verbal commentary. Kwiek "performed" the film standing in front of the audience and improvising a "live" narrative about what the film is about. This took place in a cinema hall with the lights on. The narrative was a medley of clichés and stereotypes typical for mainstream cinema. Kwiek wanted thus to activate a mechanism of "mental" projection (the visualisation of text in the viewer"s imagination). In keeping with the practice of the Workshop of the Film Form, which radically rejected literature-based cinema, he argued that it doesn't make sense to make a movie if you can narrate it. WFF, like New Wave filmmakers such as Grzegorz Krolikiewicz or Andrzej Zulawski, accused Polish cinema of the 1970s of neglecting the cinematographic aspect by sacrificing the visual layer for the plot (for Zulawski, for instance, the Cinema of Moral Concern was not cinema but radio broadcasting). The Commentary was a radical rejection of film-mediated cinematographic communication on behalf of direct communication with the viewer.
Cinematic Projection is accompanied by film frames from "nonexistent films" by Christian Tomaszewski.

Lukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski
in association with Archfilm (CSW ZU) and Piktogram

Cinematic Projection
Film Performance

Pawel Althamer In a Real Time Movie, 2004
Pawel Kwiek The Starting Numbers, 1971
Maurycy Gomulicki & Ilian Gonzalez Mystic Dramatic Corporative, 2004
Zbigniew Libera Film - The Commentary, 2007
Robert Szczerbowski The End, 2006
Oskar Dawicki Tribute to All People of Film, 2006

Cinematic Projection opens the Polish New Wave film festival that will show works by Dziworski, Kostenko, Krolikiewicz, Leszczynski, Piwowski, Skolimowski, Wiszniewski, Uklanski, Zanussi, and Zulawski.