Jean Rouch: the Creative Combination of Opposites

Finding the proper approach to an ethnographic film, a work of anthropology, can be difficult. This is true not only in Poland, but it may be particularly true in Poland. This area in filmmaking, though represented by some accomplished directors in Poland, such as Jacek Olędzki, Piotr Szacki and Andrzej Różycki, among many others, never turned into a strongly active, widely discussed, thoroughly typical branch of Polish anthropology. The festivals of ethnographic films that took place in Łódź for over a decade disappeared, no doubt for financial reasons, as well. This is a real shame, because it seems that film, itself an intermediate space, between materiality and non-materiality, for instance, lends itself splendidly to creating, studying and contemplating a space of encounter with the Other. The transgressive and metaphorical potential of film and movies has been wonderfully exhibited in such films as Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo or Wojciech Marczewski’s excellent Ucieczka z kina Wolność.