A FEW STORIES ABOUT A MAN
ARENA OF LIFE
rush to rebuild and to industrialize—crushed by increas- ing economic stagnation and despondency. Unlike his colleagues, who often found inspiration
in the news and shaped it to creative ends, Dziworski springs from the realm of video and film-installation-art. Today, we are used to the blurring boundaries between film and the visual arts (artist Steve McQueen’s full- length feature Twelve Years a Slave, or filmmaker Isaac Julien’s multi-video installation at MoMA are but two recent examples). Indeed, the 1970s and ’80s saw a slew of transmedia Polish artists, including Dziworski’s col- laborator Zbigniew Rybczyński, whose Oscar-winning Tango was the first Polish computer-art animation. Dziworski was not alone in his chimeric mode, yet his films remain some of the most indefinable. They are first and foremost films about move- ment, and then, in that self-reflexive way of all
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contemporary art, about the medium itself. Such is the case with his eleven-minute short Biathlon, one in a string of “sports” films that he made in the 1970s. Dziworski captures skiers during jumps and races, but also in a series of spectacular crashes and in the moments of respite (on a ski lift, awaiting a jump). In its unusual camera angles and surprising effects, Dziworki’s short draws on the experimental energy of Leni Riefenstahl’s iconic and infamous Olympia, yet its overall aesthetic couldn’t be more different. Where Riefenstahl extols spectacle, Dziworski nearly voids spectatorship. Except for a few rare shots of the audience, he instead emphasizes the athletes’ loneli- ness. Foregrounding vulnerability and risk, Biathlon includes repeated scenes of rescue after a crash. Thus by stressing repetition and failure, Dziworski cuts the heroic element back to human scale.
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