WANDA GOŚCIMIŃSKA, A WEAVER
unnaturally large loaf of bread, knobby hands and nose in extreme close-up, Wanda’s marble-like flesh. Capturing her from below, Wiszniewski monumentalizes Wanda in imitation of social-realist aesthetic, posing her as if in a wax museum. Wiszniewski’s use of stilted tableaux and way of freezing figures in rigid postures is a visual proof that socialist iconography was in fact ludicrous. Wanda is in a way a flip-image of Urszula, the young
woman from Marcel Łoziński’s So It Doesn’t Hurt, another film in this series. Propagandist organs usurp both of these women’s lives. Urszula fights to reclaim her iden- tity, whereas “Wanda,” always more construct than per- son, disappears into the public limelight. She delivers her lines in a rigid, robotic monotone, as if reading them; elsewhere, a guest at her table praises her in the booming voice of a public orator. In the film, personal and public gestures overlap until what we commonly think of as a biographical “document” reveals itself as a kind of fiction.
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Wiszniewski’s film is a study of an aura, or of a signifier drained of meaning, for everyone here is a shell or embod- ies a role. Before reality shows and Big Brother celebrity, Wiszniewski examines Eastern European simulacra. Fascinated by slogans and official speak, Wiszniewski
extends his critique to language. At times, it is as if he channels Plato, or more precisely, Plato’s Cratylus. Just as Plato did in his treatise on rhetoric, Wiszniewski provides us with a civic lesson: When words are used to lie and to obfuscate, there is little hope for real public discourse or for democracy. It is this moral concern that makes Wiszniewski our contemporary in an age when phrases such as “special investigation procedures” have been used to justify unlawful rendition and torture. Wiszniewski was on an artistically radicalizing trajec-
tory. Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver is a mind-bending hybrid, but his eleven-minute short Carpenter, made a year later, is even more of one. In the short’s opening,
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