Saturday, Oct. 15
3:30pm
AFS CInema
6226 Middle Fiskville Road, Austin, TX 78752 (map)
FREE Admission

Artist in person!

Experimental Response Cinema joins the Austin Polish Film Festival in a special presentation of the films of Polish artist, curator and writer Kamila Kuc, with the artist in person to introduce her work. Kuc’s work reflects her interest in how film, as a technology of memory, can be seen as an innovative creator of memories themselves. Her films explore complex relationships between personal and collective memories, especially those which subvert social and political constructions of identity.

The program includes the premiere of her latest work I Think You Should Come to America.

PROGRAM:

Fluchtpunkt (2015)
Super8 transferred to HD
Duration: 1min 53sec
Direction/Editing: Kamila Kuc
Sound: Timothy Nelson (timothynelsonmusic.com)
Many beliefs and cultures perceive circle as a pure, divine shape. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man treats the figure of a human as a perfect measure of proportion. In Fluchtpunkt the recurring and accidental circular patterns that pervade the out-of-date film allude to a circle of death (rather than life). They reinforce the ironic take on anthropocentrism as seen through the testimony of the Stutthof concentration camp. In doing so, this film takes as its starting point a hidden aspect of the filmmaker’s family history to explore an auto-ethnographic impulse that relies on a more detached and indirect approach.

Batum (2016)
Super8 transferred to HD
Duration: 8mins15secs
Direction/Editing: Kamila Kuc
Cast: Genie Kaminski
Second camera: Nina Zabicka
Sound: Rob Godman
Voice: Genie Kaminski
Still photography: Kamila Kuc/Daisy Rickman
Batum takes as its starting point the experience of near drowning in the Black Sea of Batumi, Georgia. As such, the film is induced with a desire for an auto-ethnographical self-interrogation. Images that feature in the film are a constellation of personal and prosthetic memories, acquired through historical and cultural knowledge as exemplified by the poems of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Stalin, among other cultural tropes.

Poland: A New Nightmare, Hearst Metrotone News
(1982, 16mm, USA)
Found footage film from the Basement Films archive
Beginning with the following words: ‘Communications with the outside world are cut off. Poland is isolated’, this fascinating documentary engages with the key aspects of Polish history, from the 18^th century partitions of the country between Russia, Austria and Prussia, to the fall of Communism and the emergence of the Solidarity movement, with the leading figures such as Lech Walesa.

I Think You Should Come to America (2016-17)
2016-17, 16mm and Super8 transferred to HD
Country: UK/USA/Poland
Duration: tbc
Direction/Editing: Kamila Kuc
Sound: Timothy Nelson
I Think You Should Come to America explores a paradoxical fascination of the Poles behind the Iron Curtain with the ideal of America as a ‘land of freedom.’ Using archival footage, excerpts from letters from a Native American prisoner, documentation of my involvement with the Movement for the Supporters of Native American Indian Rights in Poland, and the fiction writings of Sat Okh (Stanislaw Suplatowicz, 1920-2003), the film investigates the cultural conditions in which memories are created. While critically evaluating my own enchantment with America, as a teenage girl from Communist Poland, I interrogate various patterns of perception in order to produce a form of reflection that is personal and political, bringing together a network of complex cultural, familial and physical forces that wish to find their expression in the act of historical and personal self-inscription. (KK)