Enthusiasts

Background

There has been a spectacular transfiguration of Polish political and cultural life since the introduction of the market economy in 1989. It is as if Poland has played out in a lapsed-time film style, the economic and cultural changes of ‘western’ Europe. Fifty years of social evolution –from a manufacturing to a service economy - has been compressed into just over ten years. Poland is a crystallization of the forces at play in the rest of Europe; it projects a service driven, consumer led future, while it is content to forget its industrial past, and hide its manufacturing present.

And yet, all the former state owned industries - for example those generating power, refining steel or producing chemicals - play a central role in the economic and cultural life of the country. For, not only does industry manufacture the goods and energy necessary to generate our material lives, they structure our experience into ‘productive’ labour, and ‘leisure’ time. Before the economic changes, ‘leisure’ in Poland was itself organized through factory-sponsored clubs, various associations, sports facilities and even holiday schemes.

Out of this regulated network, perhaps the most popular clubs were those encouraging the making of amateur film. With 16mm film stock, cameras and editing tables supplied by the factory/state, a large number of clubs were created throughout Poland from 1950’s onwards. The films made, range from 2-minute animations, short ‘experimental’ films, documentaries on family, village, city or factory life; to historical dramas, features and ambitious mini ‘epics’.

We are aware of around 300 clubs registered since 1960 in a number of different industrial zones e.g. Nowa Huta, Biesko Biala, Poznan, Oswiecim, Bialystok, Warszawa, Katowice, Szczecin and Gdansk.

The enthusiast

The space of the amateur, enthusiast or hobbyist opens onto a range of interests and experiences generally invisible amongst the breathless flow of the State sponsored, or professionally mediated. The enthusiast is often working outside ‘official’ culture and its products, frequently adopting a counter-cultural tone of tactical resistance and criticism. A traditional model for representing the enthusiast is that work and leisure are locked in a binary opposition; the absence of one implicates the other. Work becomes the site of rational production, and in simple opposition amateur pursuits become the location of all that is denied by wage labour: the space of happiness, desire and enthusiasm. But nothing is that simple. The film club enthusiasts often invert the logic of work and leisure, becoming truly productive when pursuing their passions, and using work for their own rather than the factory or states intentions.

The films

In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s first popular feature film Amator (entitled Film Buff in English) 1979, the main character is a leading member of a factory film club. Kieslowski, along with other respected filmmakers was a frequent judge at amateur film festivals. He used his experience, and that of club members as a basis for the film.

In Poland the clubs and their films are themselves largely forgotten -tainted by their association with the previous political regime, and because of their amateur status. And yet the films simultaneously record and offer resistance to the deep structures of material life, which our political economy has evolved to administer – structures that are currently being dissolved by global networks of communication and service; formed by the exchange of images, promise, and brands. What’s extraordinary about these films, is that they represent the intimate experiences of people caught within these processes and relations -they are not official records, or scenes staged for the professional media.

As we tracked down the films and their makers we were astonished by their ambition. These were not standard ‘amateur’ films of family landmarks such as births, weddings and holidays, but were an aspiration to cinema. We saw extraordinary films that ranged from two-minute animations and wicked political satires, to short ‘experimental’ and ‘abstract’ films, from documentaries on family, village, city or factory life; to historical dramas and ambitious features with great emotional gravity. There is an astonishing range of material, beautifully crafted and largely forgotten – or, more accurately, ‘doubly-repressed’. Doubly-repressed because the films are tinged with an ideological past incompatible with the ideological present, and because of their ‘amateur’ status they exist below the consciousness of ‘official’ cultural institutions of exhibition – museums and archives.

As a result of our research into these films, their makers and clubs, we found a huge selection of forgotten footage, usually in people’s houses, and sometimes literally under their beds.

In 2003, joined by curator Lukasz Ronduda of the Centre for Contemporary Art [CCA], Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, we embarked on cleaning, restoring and digitizing as much of the material as we could find money to support.

As we worked on restoration and digitization, we began to develop ideas for exploring enthusiasm through exhibition. We were aware of, and wanted to avoid the legacy of, artists’ use of found film footage, where the film material is habitually stripped of its context and appropriated as the artists’ property. Through discussion, we realized our need to construct a social, material and conceptual context in which the films could be situated, while all the time being wary of falling into nostalgia.

The exhibition

With Lukasz Ronduda, we worked together on creating a context in which the films could be encountered; this involved screening official propoganda, building a reconstructed film club and three cinema spaces entitled Love, Longing and Labour. We created an hour long program for each cinema from found and digitalised films. Films not screened were available in an Archive Lounge, along with an exhibition of beautiful self-made film posters.

The exhibition was reconfigured as Enthusiasm for the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Kunst Werke, Berlin and the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona during 2005.

Read Anthony Hudek's situation and interpretation of the project as Atopic Places in Obieg.

The archive

We intend to transfer as many films as possible into digital code, storable on databases and DVD’s. This would both preserve the films (many are in a terrible state and in danger of being lost) and encourage visitors to curate their own sequence of films; in effect, to make their own film program and enable our selection to be seen as a possible interpretation -one of many- and not in any way authoritative.

We seeded the possibility of an on-line searchable database (money and goodwill willing), its developing on-line as the Enthusiasts: archive.

The Archive was featured as part of the i-commons summit 2006 in Rio Janeiro

You can get a sense of the beautiful catalogue
Or, you can read Leira Vergara's text on Enthusiasm and the Archive for Zehar Magazine, and read our Conversation from the cataloguue with Adam Szymczyk Director of the Kunsthalle Basel.