Er(r)go… ,
… from a marketplace fair to Parnassus—the uniqueness of the paradoxical art of cinema: independent and monologic in its own way, speaking in its inimitable voice, and yet submerged in dialogicity, dependent and synthetic, greedy and incapable of existing without a dialogue with other arts or with its own interiority. Innumerable trajectories and spaces of this dialogue, sometimes unsuccessful or pretended, sometimes immoral, but unsurpassable by any other art form. The dialogue with the creations of centuries of artistic genius: with literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, music (vide sometimes undeserved labels: “pictures awoken to life,” “animated painting,” “visual music,” “music of pictures,” “architecture in motion”); the dialogue with video, performance, avant-garde theatre, “electronic painting,” with technologies of the future; the dialogue between the high and the low of culture. The social dialogue, here without the guarantee of safety: the guise of dialogue may mask an ideological and cultural monologue. Hence the dialogue with the society, but also a manipulative shaping of social consciousness or even agitation propaganda; the dialogue with other cultures, but also the “violence” of westernization on different cultures; the dialogue with the other and the alien, but also allocating them a place at the margins and projecting schemata of prejudices; the dialogue with censorship, sometimes bordering on flirtation. The dialogue with ideology, dialogue with power, dialogue with tradition, with the possible and the impossible, with utopia and dystopia, with chaos and order. The dialogue with time—inside its own cinematic reality, but also with the past and the future, with memory, nostalgia and history, the dialogue of heritage with the present, of avant-garde with tradition. The hidden dialogue with the outside of the picture: with what is “veiled” beyond the screen, with the space outside the frame, with the eye, the imagination and awareness of the spectator, with the body, with the relation between the pictures hidden in the interstice of the cut, with other possible worlds, with the projected though invisible observer.
And finally, the dialogue with the impossibility of dialogue.
Dialogues of Cinema is an Er(r)go issue guest-edited by Alicja Helman, to whom—on behalf of the entire editorial board—I extend my gratitude.
Wojciech Kalaga
No. 49 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-30
10.31261/errgo
English
Język Polski