The program presents films, or queer cinematic errantries, made by Rafal Morusiewicz, a queer researching artist, born in Augustów (Poland) and currently based in Vienna. Their filmmaking practice mixes found footage material with samples coming from films, music videos, and audio tracks, as well as text, which is original, quoted, or paraphrased. Through this collaging practice, Morusiewicz generates audiovisual and textual sites, full of fragmented autobiographic, fictional, and theory-based stories, sites that intersect multiple histories, politics, social realities, and cinemas.
On-line screening and conversation with the artist- curated by Masha Godovannaya
The event is free // However, registration is required: [email protected]
The program:
- The Joke, 5.05 min., digital video, 2015
- The Lived, 5.15, digital video, 2016
- The River Is a Cemetery, 9 min., digital video, 2016
- copia de la copia (de la copia), 23.13 min., digital video, 2020
total: ±43 min
The Joke (2015) is a short film reminiscing about the illicit relationship between the two protagonists of Egymásra nézve (Another Way, dir. Károly Makk, 1982), as well as the non-diegetic narratives about the film. The protagonists, played by two Polish actresses and later dubbed in Hungarian, the protagonists were dubbed by Hungarian voices, represent the first film in Poland and Hungary to have at its center a lesbian romantic-sexual relationship.
The Lived (2016) is one part of my diptych that fabulates on the homoerotic friendship of the two protagonists of Jak daleko stad, jak blisko (How Far Away from Here, How Near, dir. Tadeusz Konwicki, 1971). Told through implications and silences, their story is juxtaposed with audiovisual and textual quotes from Querelle (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) and Fast Trip, Long Drop (dir. Gregg Bordowitz, 1993), both of which rhyme homoerotic desire with friendship, loss, and mourning.
The River Is a Cemetery (2016) is a remix of Z daleka widok jest piękny (It Looks Pretty from a Distance, dir. Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal, 2011), screened during the ASCA workshop (University of Amsterdam, March 2016) as a film companion to the text on the chronopolitical disposition of language and its opacity. The latter provides a filter and a contaminator to the violently heterosexist male habitus of the Polish countryside, juxtaposed with the latter’s barely acknowledged reminder of the multiple deaths of Jewish Poles around WW2.
copia de la copia (de la copia) (2020) compacts several years of my “PhD in Practice” project on queering/remixing Polish films at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It contains quotes from more than 20 films made in Poland in 1952–1989, along with samples from film soundtracks, music tracks, and elsewhere, i.e. vintage gay porn movies, music and home video films, and social media clips. While reaching towards the past, both socio-political and personal, the film also reacts to the current socio-political situation in Poland, with the introduction of “LGBT free zones,” violation of democracy, police brutality, and state censorship.
The event is free. However, registration is required. Please, send us an e-mail [email protected] and we will send you a link for the event.