Biuro, natura, wyobraźnia, wiejska chata, fabryczna hala. Wizerunki artystycznej pracowni w dokumentalnym filmie o sztuce czasów PRL-u

Artists’ studios turned into museums are always specific representations of thepast – spatial images reflecting some idea of art and the artist, as well as his or herworks, and even the position of the spectator imagined as a visitor, admirer, insider,outsider or pilgrim.When a studio is shown through a film, its status of representation comes to theforeground very distinctly just because of the properties of the medium. A filmic representationof the studio is a result of combining images into a sequence, while individualimages attract the spectator’s attention to particular places, areas or aspectsof the space of creation, thus making him or her follow a certain trajectory of meaning.What is more, such a sequence does not have to be limited to the studio’s interiorsince the cinematic montage allows the director to expand it freely by adding somehistoricizing or contextualizing frames. Finally, film allows one to meet the artist inhis or her space through an interview, representation of the creative process or anactor-impersonator.In the first I discuss briefly three issues: the general idea of the present paperand its historical and theoretical contexts.First, my objective is to provide information on my research on Polish documentaryfilm on art in 1948–1989, which was financially supported by the Ministry ofScience and Higher Education. I was doing this research with help of a small team ofyoung scholars – phd students and a younger collegue from Institute of Art History atAdam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In this article I will not address generalproblems related to the filmic representation of artists’ studios, but discuss severalindividual cases.Second, the historical context is connected with the hopes of totalitarian statesto use mass culture, and particularly film, to manipulate the masses. Even though inparticular decades of the 20th century, and in different countries, those hopes wereput into practice in different ways, their ideological and practical implementation hada common basis. That basis can perhaps be best described by Walter Benjamin’s ideathat a modern wish to regenerate the world requires the destruction of the auratic artand influencing the masses with some other kind of artistic creation that could organizethem according to a fixed political purpose. Benjamin believed that the most usefulin that respect would be film, which in his opinion was both technical and massoriented.The masses could receive film with little effort so that it would imperceptiblyform their mental and imaginative habits, and therefore also a political bias.My point is that the filmic representations of artists’ studios must be approachedin the general context of the role assigned to film in the communist Poland, eventhough one should also remember that artists had various attitudes and censors keptchanging their criteria of appropriateness. Still, the research focused on the representationof the artist, his or her studio, and the ideas of art will reveal an officially acceptedpicture to be transmitted into the public space. One the other hand, oneshould remember that within precisely defined political limits Polish documentary(and other) filmmakers could ignore commercial aspects and refer to the acknowledgedhigh position of art, experimenting in different ways with a relationship betweenfilm and the visual arts.Third, my theoretical context is related to the status of the documentary or, thatof reality represented in documentary films. In my view, shared also by a number ofscholars, documentaries have an element of creation and their reality is alwaysprocessed in one way or another. My examples will include studio as office, nature,space of imagination, village hut or cottage, and engine room.