Papers by Kornelia Boczkowska
Adaptation , 2024
Although the experimental found footage film recycles Hollywood films so that the outcome may rad... more Although the experimental found footage film recycles Hollywood films so that the outcome may radically differ from the original story, there are no accounts on how it adapts images from mainstream cinema to represent human–animal relations, linking to gender and masculinity. To fill this gap, I discuss how experimental film Horsey recycles footage from three Hollywood productions—Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Swimmer, and The Black Stallion—to construct a new narrative, which displays a very close conformity to the prior text, shifting the focus to human–horse interactions. Raising questions about the traditional understanding, scope, and limits of adaptation in avant-garde film studies, Horsey fits in with the broader tradition of cinematic recycling of mainstream cinema as it exemplifies intertextuality as a direct form of quotation, taking quotation as appropriation through cuts, detournement, compilation and free association. Particularly, following Guy Barefoot’s understanding of adaptation as an intertextual form of recycling, Horsey is distinctive in its sole use of found footage from the three Hollywood films as it fully acknowledges the recycled material, strongly alluding to the original stories, and simultaneously re-processes them through a collage of pre-used footage, slow motion, washed-out colours, and an altered soundtrack. Despite appearing to merely extract images and sounds from Reflections, The Swimmer, and The Black Stallion, Horsey emerges as a productive site for recycling Hollywood cinema, placing it into new contexts and audio-visual configurations and offering more complex, engaging ways of looking at how humans connect to horses.
Rethinking History , 2024
While in social history and mobilities research, the study of railway mobility is becoming increa... more While in social history and mobilities research, the study of railway mobility is becoming increasingly popular, offering new insights into (trans)national railway cultures, there is less interest in illicit mobility, unconventional modes of travel and non-regulated, irregular patterns of movement, such as train hopping, and the way they function in experimental film. To fill this gap, I build on the recent mobilities literature to discuss two stylistically distinct experimental films, Reading Canada Backwards (Steve Topping, 1995) and Portland (Greta Snider, 1996), which offer a social commentary on train hopping, typically associated with the history and material conditions of North American railway travels. Challenging the larger freighthopping mobilities discourse, both films confront the historical legacy of the hobo, as reimagined by occasional transients and punk drifters, as a product of capitalist enterprise, railroad transportation services and failed bourgeois masculinity. While in narrative and documentary films, hobo culture often emerges as an alternative, intrepid lifestyle and a personal philosophy based on economic or environmental concerns, Reading Canada Backwards and Portland take a more critical and ironic take on riding the rails, highlighting its casual spontaneity, playful creativity and affective potential, which questions the drifter as an active agent of marginal mobility practices.
Mobilities, 2023
Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat pas... more Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat passengering links to experimental film and 360 video or how it responds to the broader relationship between automobilities, the organization of car travel and on-screen storytelling. To fill this gap, I follow up on the profiling of the passenger as a distinctive subject and object of infrastructures of mobility to discuss the backseat passenger’s experience, seen as both a socially engaged and embodied practice, in four stylistically distinct works, Larry Gottheim’s Harmonica, Lluis Escartín’s Mohave Cruising, Ken Jacobs’ Berkeley to San Francisco, and ASMR Driving at night: Back seat view. While Harmonica, Mohave Cruising and Berkeley to San Francisco are selective, self-aware experiments, which play out in various forms, ASMR is an authorless 360 drive video that lacks much aesthetic value and continues the long-established culture of scenic road and auto-tourism, turning on-site visitors into virtual tourists. Although each work approaches passengering visualities differently through exhibiting forward, side, parallax and 3 D views, they all articulate a multi-sensorial experience of driving and offer a relatively novel take on the practices of automobility through shifting the perspective of the driver and frontseat passenger to the backseat view.
Feminist Media Studies, 2023
Seen as historically masculine, the road movie has privileged the white heterosexual male and thu... more Seen as historically masculine, the road movie has privileged the white heterosexual male and thus perpetuated its traditional patriarchal configuration. To counteract the genre’s gendered nature, some scholars have pointed to the growing need to study women’s road movies, yet never in the context of experimental filmmaking, which was institutionalized as thoroughly masculine with women’s work dismissed as peripheral or excessively lyrical. To fill this gap, I build on feminist geography and automobilities research to discuss the “feminine” road movie aesthetics in contemporary experimental films, Sophie Calle’s No Sex Last Night (1992), Su Friedrich’s Rules of the Road (1993), Michaela Grill’s Carte Noir (2014) and Faith Arazi and Madeleine Mori’s Through a Field (2019). While Carte Noir and Through a Field construct a lone female nomadic story and Double Blind and Rules of the Road embrace the couple road movie format, all works contest the road as a masculine space and question the genderedness of mobility through a strong emphasis on the (female) self and embodied practices of driving. This signals the cinematic transformation of women from a desired object to a creative subject, consequently denying the spectator the usual pleasures associated with voyeurism, fetishism and the (patriarchal) spectacle.
Short Film Studies, 2021
Through reconstructing the crime scene, Echo undermines the omniscient power of the forensic gaze... more Through reconstructing the crime scene, Echo undermines the omniscient power of the forensic gaze and problematizes the relationship between the image and haptic spectatorship. While eliminating the spectacle and affect, the camera intensely lingers on characters' facial image to engage viewers in the voyeurism of an absent scene of violence.
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, 2021
Although remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmm... more Although remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmmakers have also embraced the road movie tradition and reproduced existing material for new audiences to retell, readdress and rearticulate the prior story, exploring the dialectics between repetition, differentiation and genre. Interestingly, however, while the remake, seen mostly as a genre phenomenon, has received some critical attention, remaking in the avant-garde film scene has been rarely explored by adaptation theory and practice. To somewhat fill in this gap, the article situates two recent avant-garde films, James Benning's Easy Rider (2012) and Jessica Bardsley's Goodbye Thelma (2019), within the framework of remake and adaptation studies and proposes that both works function as acknowledged and transformed remakes of the classic road movies, in which the outcome radically differs from the original story and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries of the genre. In doing so, the projects fit in with the broader tradition of cinematic reworking and recycling as they continuously reference and exploit earlier films by creating their alternative versions as well as a strong sense of place and movement.
Papers on Language and Literature , 2021
Despite the growing popularity of ecocriticism in avant-garde film studies, most publications in ... more Despite the growing popularity of ecocriticism in avant-garde film studies, most publications in the field still downplay numerous links between experimental film practice, slow ecocinema and online nature videos. This remains in a striking contrast to the increasing potential of slow eco-media to offer viewers an alternative model of how to reflect on and interact with the natural environment and environmentalism-related issues on screen. Likewise, this paper puts four stylistically distinct works, ranging from selective, self-aware 16mm and digital experiments of individual artists to environmental 360-degree videos, in the context of slow eco-cinema and discusses the ways they engage with an environmentally conscious discourse through embodying a sense of the eerie. Even though they resist adopting an activist imperative, Aspect (Richardson, 2004), Nightfall (Benning, 2012) and two VR nature films, Walking in the Woods (2016) and the 360 degree video, Relaxing Walk in the Forest (2017), evoke the eerie in their meditative rendering of the forest land- and soundscape, seen as one of the key sites of environmental humanities, and consequently fit in with the broader context of slow and ecocinema. While all works encourage the practice of perceptual retraining, Nightfall and Aspect provide a psychically charged and emotive experience of landscape and nature videos offer a more complex form of an ecologically-oriented gaze through voyerism as well as the conflict between the virtual and the real.
Mobilities, 2021
Despite the recent upsurge of interest in automobility as a vital area of research, there are no ... more Despite the recent upsurge of interest in automobility as a vital area of research, there are no accounts on how it links to the road movie and its derivatives in avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. To fill this gap, the article extends Archer's use of film and genre studies in automobilities research to discuss how Highway (Hilary Harris, 1958), Dozer (Anna Geyer, 1999) and Driving Dinosaurs (Emma Piper-Burket, 2019), which span over sixty years of experimental filmmaking, revision the road movie's automotive mobility through articulating a phenomenological and affective experience of highway driving. Echoing the new mobilities paradigm and recent phenomenological turn in film studies, the works illustrate how the cinematic representation of automobiles and the Interstate Highway System varies in tone from elegiac and celebratory to ironic and ambivalent, signaling the shift from the postwar frenzy of automobility to the modern system of mobilities after the car. While all films reproduce the ideology of American exceptionalism and reflect on the nation's mid-20th century love affair with the car, each of them offers a different take on the practices of automobility, ranging from their high-modernist moment in the 1950s to the postmodern disillusionment in the regime and impossibility of automobility.
Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, 2020
Commonly known as non-places or stopping places, hotels create their own sense of domesticity and... more Commonly known as non-places or stopping places, hotels create their own sense of domesticity and seclusion, simultaneously invoking an uncanny screen presence due to their non-contradictory nature. Likewise, this article builds on the theory of an architectural uncanny and weirdness to analyze how Chantal Akerman’s Hôtel Monterey and Pat O’Neill’s The Decay of Fiction delineate interior spaces to evoke an (un)homely domesticity and (un)belonging human presence. In particular, to prioritize the hotel architecture, Akerman relies on a partial and fragmentary representation of interiors, whose larger picture is always beyond spectators’ vision, and O’Neill’s creates an engrossing tension between haptic visuality and optical perception, which gives rise to the fetishism of decay. Consequently, while Hôtel Monterey’s indoor architecture presents a spectacle of largely mute, impenetrable spaces with no or little human interaction, The Decay of Fiction’s domestic spaces form a permeable layer through which shadowy figures continuously enact their fictional roles.
Screen Tourism and Affective Landscapes, 2023
Although film tourism is a well-established activity, tourism that stems from the growing interes... more Although film tourism is a well-established activity, tourism that stems from the growing interest in filming locations featuring the U.S. national parks is still a niche. This makes a striking contrast with the unprecedented role of national parks, known for their cinematic appeal on the big screen, in creating iconic backdrops for films like Star Wars (Death Valley and Redwood National Park), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Arches National Park), The Shining (Glacier National Park) and Thelma and Louise (Canyonlands). To fill this gap, the chapter discusses how the evolution of film-induced drive tourism to virtual windshield tourism has affected tourists’ embodied experiences of affective landscapes under the post-digital conditions, as evident in the recent proliferation of YouTube scenic drive videos of U.S. national parks.
Studies in Documentary Film, 2023
Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from re... more Although the relationship between cycling and cinema has recently received some attention from researchers, there are no accounts on how it links to experimental documentary film and avant-doc storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on cycling to discuss the rider’s embodied experience of travel in a few short and stylistically distinct works, Chuck Hudina’s Bicycle (1975), Jon Behrens’ Girl and a Bicycle (1995), Vanessa Renwick’s The Yodeling Lesson (1998), Ken Paul Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002), Tomonari Nishikawa’s Into the Mass (2007) and Tony Hill’s Bike (2013). Despite a different format and narrative focus, which questions the genderedness of cycling, explores it in a trance and dreamlike state or turns it into the sheer spectacle of motion, all films echo the recent phenomenological turn in film studies and present cycling as a multisensorial, kinesthetic practice, demonstrating how the rider-bicycle hybrid assemblage relates to both cycling mobilities and the riding environment. Compared to narrative and fiction film, experimental documentary film looks at the bicycle identity as a distinctive subject of inquiry and maps cycling not so much through its traditional connotations as through the actual lived experience, one that is not necessarily already pre-determined, mediated and ideological.
Studies in Documentary Film, 2021
The emergence of post-media aesthetics and hybrid media culture marked by media convergence as we... more The emergence of post-media aesthetics and hybrid media culture marked by media convergence as well as diachronic and synchronic hybridization has resulted in an ongoing re-evaluation, re-contextualization and re-mobilization of the city symphony film’s practices, which offer novel cinematic experiences by abandoning the genre’s traditional narrative trajectory or editing patterns and replacing them with new digital forms. Following this trend, I analyze the ways in which Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill and Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake operate within the post-digital sublime and database documentary framework, and consequently play with or critique the standard city symphony format and message centered around the concept of decay or kino-eye. Particularly, both works oppose the genre’s traditional montage and postmodern aesthetics by means of database and interactive storytelling, and instead rely on the mutability of the digital image and image-altering software, which seemingly lacks or merely imitates the sublime. To counteract this effect, the post-digital sublime takes a participatory form and is based on enquiry and discovery (Tracing) or novelty, invention and surprise (The Global Remake) rather than boredom and repetition traditionally associated with an unbounded potential of technology and the banal.
Text Matters, 2019
The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s... more The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre’s traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss “laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst” (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg’s film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist’s loss of innocence in the film’s finale, and t...
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2018
This paper aims to present the ways in which Ben Russell’s films, the quarry and TRYPPS #7 (BADLA... more This paper aims to present the ways in which Ben Russell’s films, the quarry and TRYPPS #7 (BADLANDS), tend to draw on conventions traditionally associated with ciné-trance (TRYPPS #7), as developed by Jean Rouch, and film-performance (TRYPPS #7 and the quarry). While both pictures invoke the presence of the sublime, the quarry transforms the featured landscape into an image-object and hence fails to represent the lived experience and instead provides the audience with a spectacle or a sensation simultaneously engaging them in the performance on their own terms. Meanwhile, TRYPPS #7’s reliance on ciné-trance becomes more evident in its attempt to expose the hypnotic and deceptive capabilities of moving-image media, which do not only distort the spectator’s rational sense of space and perspective, but also connote the phenomenon of possession itself through featuring the protagonist’s narcotic trance. To achieve the desired effect, Russell creates an atmosphere of sublimity and trans...
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2018
In this paper I discuss the ways in which Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) and Qu... more In this paper I discuss the ways in which Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) and Quixote (1965) evoke Native American Indian heritage and western-hero road poems by challenging the concept of the American landscape and incorporating conventions traditionally associated with cinéma pur, cinéma vérité, and the city symphony. Both pictures, seen as largely ambiguous and ironic travelogue forms, expose their audiences to “the sheer beauty of the phenomenal world” (Sitney 2002: 182) and nurture nostalgic feelings for the lost indigenous civilizations, while simultaneously reinforcing the image of an American conquistador, hence creating a strong sense of dialectical tension. Moreover, albeit differing in a specific use of imagery and editing, the films rely on dense, collage-like and often superimposed images, which clearly contribute to the complexity of mood conveyed on screen and emphasize the striking conceptual contrast between white American and Indian culture. Taking...
Papers on Language on Literature, 2021
This is a review of Scott MacDonald's The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2).... more This is a review of Scott MacDonald's The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2). Oxford UP, 2019.
Introduction: Landscape, Travel and the Gaze in Experimental Film and Video, 2021
This is the introduction to the special issue of Papers on Language and Literature (vol. 57, no. 1)
The Cinematic Sublime: Negative Pleasures, Structuring Absences, 2020
This paper analyzes the ways in which Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971) and Bill Morrison’s De... more This paper analyzes the ways in which Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971) and Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) rely on the uncanny and the weird in their evocation of the sublime archival image’s physical and conceptual disitegration while operating within the decayed cinema framework. Drawing on Žižek’s and Jackson’s view of the sublime as “a permanent failure of the representation to reach after the Thing” (203) or “absence (...) foregrounded [and] placed at the semantic center of the text” (159), the uncanny in the examined works embodies one’s experience of the unrepresentable and is produced as an effect of looking by the film-text, structures of looking, lighting or sound (Creed 30). Meanwhile, following H.P. Lovecraft’s theory of the weird and Freud’s concept of the uncanny, Fisher defines the former category as preoccupied with surrealism and involving an encounter with the strange based on “the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together” and constituted by “the presence of that which does not belong”, which invokes the quality of shock, a sensation of wrongness or the Lacanian jouissance (10). Taking this line of reasoning, it seems that the analyzed films, whose precarious aesthetics resonates with a surrealist sense of “sublime decay” (Wechsler), transience and obsolescence, create both an uncanny feeling of reflective and restorative nostalgia and a weird landscape of haptic visuality in an attempt to explore the decay of the sublime archival image as the mechanism of memory and time permeated by Freudian death drive (Derrida 13) rather than to simply exemplify Cheshire’s death of cinema. To achieve the desired effect, Frampton draws on a minimalist camerawork, single static shot composition, voice-over narration or distorted sound-vision relationship and Morrison uses decomposing shots of the cellulose nitrate footage, slow motion and associative editing enhanced by Gordon’s haunting score.
Short Film Studies, 2020
The article analyses how Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger predates slow cinema by evoking situative... more The article analyses how Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger predates slow cinema by evoking situative and existential boredom. Rather than simply facilitating modernist and temporal ways of seeing, Leth explores the creative potential of Warhol's post-Romantic boredom, marked by both duration and meaninglessness, to counteract the anti-immersion effect and amplify receptiveness.
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture , 2019
The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg's... more The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre's traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss "laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst" (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg's film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist's loss of innocence in the film's finale, and the act of roguery itself. Meanwhile, Anger's poetic take on the outlaw biker culture, burgeoning homosexuality, myth and ritual, and violence and death culture approaches the question of roguery by undermining the image of a dominant hypermasculinity with an ironic commentary on sacrilegious and sadomasochistic practices and initiation rites in the gay community. Moreover, both Duel's demonization of the truck, seen as "an indictment of machines" or the mechanization of life (Spielberg qtd. in Crawley 26), and Scorpio Rising's (homo)eroticization of a motorcycle posit elements of social critique, disobedience and nonconformity within a cynical and existential framework, hence merging the road movie's traditional discourse with auteurism and modernism.
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Papers by Kornelia Boczkowska
In particular, the work investigates a set of human cultural activities performed by both countries in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, embracing i) philosophical systems; ii) scientific thought; iii) technology, specifically space research and exploration; iv) the individual witnesses’ space impressions; v) the official space policy objectives; vi) the concepts of spacescape and space culture and the national space ethos at the beginning of the new millennium. The research, conducted qualitatively, will be pursued with the premise that certain differences in the way humans perceive the world might be rooted in disparate cultural systems of the American and Russian nations. This hypothesis is based on Richard Nisbett’s research on the relation between culture and human perception of reality that has revealed the predominant role of certain areas of culture in shaping human processes of cognition. In this respect, my cross-cultural examination of the American and Russian perception of the universe additionally attempts to demonstrate the extent to which particular aspects of culture affect it.
Chapter 1 presents the primary assumptions of the paper, having their roots in the notion of human perception of reality and the role culture plays in it as well as it introduces the main research methods of the paper.
Chapter 2 examines how perception of the universe evolved since the beginning of human civilization and discusses the meaning of cosmology in the context of culture. It also traces the cosmological thought in its philosophical and scientific dimension which serves as a theoretical introduction to the next chapter.
Chapter 3 attempts to determine the shape of the American and Russian pre-Cold War universe understood as a purely mental construct. In order to complete this task, it discusses both countries’ i) philosophical movements, particularly the Russian cosmism (both religious and scientific strand) and the Whiteheadian process cosmology; ii) scientific thought and achievements, specifically the development of observational cosmology (U.S.) and the beginnings of space research and exploration (U.S. and USSR). The chapter also seeks to answer the question whether it was cosmism and process cosmology or political tension during and after the Second World War that could have fueled the two countries’ first inquiries into space.
Chapter 4 investigates the Soviet and American perception of the cosmos during the Cold War rivalry. Here, the cosmonauts and astronauts’ reports, memoirs and interviews, containing space impressions, serve as the main basis for the analysis. The chapter introduces the concept of the “overview effect” coined by Frank White, depicting a multidimensional nature of the experience of space travel. The study deals with both short and long-duration orbital flights, including the U.S. moon missions. It argues that there is a clear distinction between the Russian Cosmos and the American Space functioning as mental constructs in the two nations’ cognitive view of the universe. Lastly, it attempts to demonstrate the extent to which particular aspects of culture affect these perceptions.
Chapter 5 discusses the post-Cold War perception of the universe existing in the cultural mentality of the Russian and American nations. In order to establish its form, it focuses on i) the internalization of cosmology; ii) new space policy objectives; iii) the globally emerging concepts of spacescape and space culture; vi) the national space ethos. The chapter argues that, despite today’s considerable resemblances in space endeavours, the nationwide perception of the universe remains, to a large extent disparate, providing the framework of what might be considered the American Space (Final Frontier) and the Russian Cosmos (High Frontier). Finally, it attempts to assess the impact of certain aspects of culture on the final shape of the two countries’ space perceptions.
The main outcome is that the American and Russian perception of the universe in the 20th and 21st century is grounded in a set of distinct features generated mainly by the philosophical and scientific heritage of the two nations rather than any other aspects of the national and global culture. It is also concluded that the universe functions, to a large extent merely as human mental construct, having to do more with both culture-specific and global worldview than reality itself.