Contemporary European Playwrights; First Edition by Unknown
Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Figure 10.1 Maria Maj and Yacine Zmit singing on vertical screens in Grzegorz Jarzyna’s production of Dorota Masłowska’s Inni ludzie (Other People, 2019), courtesy of the TR Warszawa Archive. Photograph © Marcin Oliva Soto
The trope of the screen also moves from the domestic to the cinematic. In No Matter How Hard We Tried a film director (Man) speaks about and simultaneously constructs the historical biopic The Horse Rode Horseback, a parody of both Hollywood narrative on the one side and the dismal tragic endings of the classic Polish cinema on the other. In both cinema cultures, history is constructed through representational narratives that play a hegemonising function. The end of the play disrupts and places at risk everything that has come before. The Man, who commands the enunciative structure of his imagined film and Masłowska’s play, declares that Babcia was killed when her building was bombed during the war, which means in turn that her descendants do not exist. Little Metal Girl is a ghost of someone who has not died because she was never born. Jarzyna framed this revelation with archival footage, a bird’s eye perspective of Warsaw’s bombed-out streets. The footage is played across the set (another screen) in reverse, so destroyed buildings are made whole again, a filmic strategy that refuses cinema’s claims to untroubled access to visual archives. The projection then moves to the present day in which the former buildings form a large construction site. This technology mirrors that of human memory, which seeks to reconstruct what has been lost, abandoned, or destroyed, but which instead only succeeds in constructing something new. Babcia fails to recognise the street she was walking down the day the war broke out. The conflation of Babcia’s memory, her lack of recognition, and the archival footage require spectators to also look differently at the cityscape. Although Babcia’s memory has not been erased – she is neither senile nor suffering from amnesia – it does not help her to recognise the (transformed) street. This is comparable to a scene in Other People in which one character plays ‘Warsaw 2020’, a video game set in a city in ruins. In the former play, the authenticity of the technologies of the archive are themselves called into question through the reversal of a standard cinematic flashback, while in the latter Masłowska and Jarzyna construct the anxiety of Warsaw being destroyed a second time through a desire to play this destruction as a game. In both productions, the visual space breaks up and becomes pixelated, a site of spatial exclusion, through the destruction of the war and the reconstruction of capitalist wealth, and social prejudice based on class and ethnic difference. Jarzyna’s staging of screens thus develops an idiom for Masłowska’s social critique.
Babcia’s death in the war makes Mother and Little Metal Girl spectral, not as traces of a lost past but rather as imagined projections of an unlived future past. This again is playing with and subverting cinematic temporality. We are back in the world of the filmmaker who is a shadow on the back of the stage.
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