Join the Slavic Literature and Culture Forum for a talk by Dr. Elzbieta Ostrowska (University of Alberta) on Polish cinema.
Paweł Pawlikowski’s recent feature Cold War has earned much praise and festival accolades all around the world. The film spins a tale of two lovers who travel back and forth across Europe divided by the Iron Curtain, without ever being able to settle down. The motif of a journey between various places, ideological systems, and cultural traditions reoccurs in Pawlikowski’s oeuvre since his early documentaries made for the BBC.
Dr. Elzbieta Ostrowska will look at how his films “travel” across Polish and Western European cinematic traditions and various systems of film production and distribution. Pawlikowski’s films travel from West to East, yet these two localities do not translate into a “here” and “there”. Instead, they establish a system of multiple mirror reflections and create a representational vortex that encapsulates the viewer’s gaze within the cinematic space rather than allowing to see “through” it.
Dr. Elzbieta Ostrowska teaches film at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Studies in European Cinema, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is a deputy editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Slavic and East European Studies