Forms of Otherness: Films by Andrzej Barański

Sebastian Jagielski

Abstract

Baranski’s style is a non-normative, as it opposes the formal strategies dominating in Polish cinema. In his films we are dealing with a strange paradox: although the artificiality of the presented vision is clearly marked, the viewer is under impression that these films are very real. That is because Baranski’s aim is not to evoke the reality, to give us a faithful reproduction of an object or place, but rather he wants to offer the viewer their representation. The analysis of the style of the director is preceded by a presentation of his creative method that oscillates between ethnographic transparency and ethnographic fiction. In the main section of the article, the author presents some of Baranski’s work (At Home, Woman from the Provinces) and analyzes the intertextual references to formal structures of films such as Kaneto Shindo’s Naked Island or the contemplative cinema of Yasujiro Ozu. Jagielski points out significant differences between Baranski’s films and films described as “cinema of moral anxiety” such as Wajda’s Man of Marble and Falk’s Top Dog (Wodzirej).