their brows, but there’s a fire in their gut, a Felliniesque panache. In one humorous, scatological sequence, an animal caretaker plays cat-and-mouse with a veteran elephant before carting hefty heaps of its dung. There is a bit of Buster Keaton slapstick here, a reminder that as experimental as he is, Dziworski also looks back to classic cinema, particularly to comedy. A work of documentary,
a staged fantasy—whatever it may be, Szapito revels in those rare moments when we suspend our breath wait- ing for something improbable or absurd to happen. Joan Didion may call this “magical thinking,” an expres- sion of our innermost hope to forestall death, if even for one instant. In this pursuit, the sheer pleasure of fakery, Dziworski makes the camera our ideal accomplice.
in t e r view with bogdan dziworski ELA BITTENCOURT: In the 1970s and ’80s, Poland saw a
burst of creative nonfiction, which some filmmakers, such as Marcel Łoziński, attribute partly to the closely knit group of directors who screened their work for each other and shared creative ideas. Łoziński names Agnieszka Holland, Wojciech Wiszniewski, and Krzysztof Kieślowski as part of his circle. Was this kind of fervent exchange also part of your experience?
BOGDAN DZIWORSKI: No, maybe because I don’t
believe in top-down objectives in art; the instinct has to come from you personally. But at the same time, back then we had little film available and it was expensive, so we needed to think beforehand about what we wanted to shoot and how. Today, I could shoot for hours—we all have digital cameras—but when it comes to selec- tion, the outcomes are often poor, which is to say that back then we had discipline. We lived in difficult times, our stores stood empty, but we were driven to fight for our work.
EB: You began with photography.
EB: In Arena of Life, we watch the animals from the point of view of the performers. You’ve always said that the regular POV, of the spectators, never interested you. What you seem to show instead is more of a theater of emotions.
BD: And I believe that this way the viewers can write
their own context. I like to weave different ideas and approaches into a single form, so there is always a ten- sion between the fleeting moments and the scenes that are staged.
EB: Where did your fascination with the circus come from? 29 BD: I live with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images
encoded in my head. I was always more interested in a given person’s facial expressions, or in the dirt that you can glimpse under his fingernails.
EB: You also like to place your camera in peculiar places.
BD: For sure. In Biathlon, we attached about forty-five pounds of equipment to the skier’s back.
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