enthusiasts

enthusiasts camera

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cameraman
Enthusiasts 2004

enthusiasts spread

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Club Life
Enthusiasts 2004

enthusiasts cover

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Enthusaists Cover
CCA warsaw 2004

Vol 1: Enthusiasts

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Sub-Title

Date of Publication

June 2004

Location

Publisher

Centre for Contemporary Art [CCA]: Warsaw

Designer

Grzegorz Laszuk

Body

This book accompanies the exhibition Enthusiasts , and is the result of two years research amongst the remnants of Amateur Film Clubs in Poland under Socialism. The book builds a cultural context for the film-makers, their clubs and films; it features commissioned essays from the curator Lukas Ronduda, sociologist Sebastian Cichocki and cultural historian Mikolaj Jazdon, interviews with the film makers by Marysia Lewandowska and previously unpublished documentary material.

The Enthusiasts project celebrates the astonishing creativity of these amateur film makers.

Taken from the introduction, an email exchange between the artists and Adam Szymczyk Director of the Kunsthalle Basel.

CONVERSATION

Adam Szymczyk
Why have you been interested in the activities of the enthusiast?

Neil Cummings: The space of the amateur, enthusiast or hobbyist opens onto a range of interests and experiences generally invisible amongst the relentless 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.

Adam: I think one should also think about how the enthusiast or amateur was integrated into the communist system; because they enjoyed relative freedom and State support at the cost of distancing themselves from political issues. The activities of the enthusiast was perceived as quite harmless from the State’s point of view, as it was keeping a significant number of creative and curious people busy. It deterred them from becoming a threat to the system, in the way that dissidents were.

Marysia Lewandowska: Perhaps the more the state disarmed their potential opposition the more they invested in themselves, on a local level. The film club members seemed more intent, especially in smaller provincial centres, on creating spaces of discussion, of belonging and celebration. We could think of a process of politicizing on the level of self-awareness. Their amateur status, the internal network of competitions and festivals helped to keep their views local and specific. And with the exception of occasional review in “Ekran” and “Film” magazines, limited in terms of wider interest and reception. But those small social acts of scripting, casting, shooting, editing, screening and discussing added a potential for action in what were often bleak local circumstances.

Adam I don’t know if it adds to the discussion, but it’s perhaps important to remember that during the Communist time, there was a wide array of periodicals published, on various aspects of cinema. Perhaps not reaching many readers, but some of the issues of those magazines achieved almost cult status. I can remember very clearly waiting for a new issue of a pocketbook size black and white magazine “Film na _wiecie”. It was more serious than “Film” or “Ekran”, with monographic issues on film directors, or styles in cinema. Then there was the “Kino” magazine with fantastically stylish pinups on the back cover, with some quite serious film criticism inside. And there were some local magazines like “Obscura” which I think was published in Lód_ as a kind of samizdat-like photocopied booklet. In a way I agree that there existed a quite good climate for discussion among film-fans and academic writers, although not very visible to a broad audience, for obvious reasons. If political self-awareness was there, it was pretty hard to translate it into any kind of political act.

Neil: 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. And in this sense we think of their practices as being political -in the broadest sense.

Adam I like the notion of inverting work and leisure, but I think the politics of leisure in an authoritarian system belongs to a dominant and superior logic, which covers all forms of possible activity. Direct political action would be the only conceivable transgression of this logic. The big question is if art could be transgressive at all under these circumstances.

Marysia: Surely that’s right, the totalitarian dream of control and organization in every aspect of social life, complicates the idea of that kind of separation between work and leisure. But could direct action ever be possible without beginning in self/reflection, and with a desire for a different kind of organizing principle? All that has to happen through a local and intimate social engagement, which we see amateur film making as an example of.

Neil: And I’m not so sure if this superior logic you refer too, ever existed; an authority that covers all forms of action? But I suspect that, if it did, then yes the only means of transgression would be direct political action, which sounds like violence and terror. What we were thinking through is how, given the actual circumstances of State intervention: control of housing, work, food distribution, the broadcast media, etc; and the (false) celebration of industrial production, that the film club members on a local level made a space for “themselves”. And this space works on many levels. As a social club - these people were bound together by their passion for film. They watched and discussed foreign films in what looks to me like an “underground” network. To the clever and devious ways the film stock itself was siphoned off from officially sanctioned projects and used to make their “own” films; even the collaborative nature of scripting, acting, shooting, developing, and screening the films. So in this sense I think the members were truly productive, truly creative in time remaindered by labour.

And it’s this enthusiasm - for all manner of activities- that all political and economic systems are trying to harness for instrumental ends.

Adam: I think the dialectics which included emancipatory social processes on one side, and repression aimed at the conservation of old structures of power on the other - the dialectics leading to the awakening of civic society in the 1980 - has been changing dramatically throughout the last decades. What we have now is a consumer society where amateurs of any kind are not welcome, and professionalism has become a new religion. And I think this is precisely why it’s important to explore a kind of selfless attitude –that the amateur film makers embody- which is largely forgotten nowadays.

Neil: As for the big question as to whether art could ever be transgressive under these circumstances, I would suggest not. But it’s clear, even to someone who did not live under this regime, that ideas, emotions and aspirations find a form in these films that have no expression elsewhere. And in that sense they offer alternatives; mutual bonds of discussion and resistance. So no, not transgression, but difference.

The Exhibition

Our second group of exchanges relate to the exhibition, and how to find exhibitionary forms; of “reconstruction” or installation, or through the use of contextual materials -printed, projected, etc- that can set a scene into which, or through which, the films can be approached.

Adam: How to make this exhibition without it only (mis)representing a certain historical phenomenon?

Marysia: Difficult question, and it sounds a bit like a warning, and so it should! But lets start with this: What is my own investment in this process of representation?
On the conceptual level it forces me to deal with the historical phenomenon itself. It demands to reveal how that process was embedded, or not, in my consciousness. While we artists and intellectuals were all keen to attend the DKF (Film Discussion Clubs) screenings, no one I was studying with had the slightest interest in the amateur film-makers. Even less so when it was done by factory workers. Our indoctrination with the slogans of class solidarity kept us apart, until the events of 1980. So here for the first time is a chance to face those blanked out areas. In a way to acknowledge the repressed within my own relation to history. Of course, this cannot be easily done.

Adam: This is really interesting. I think there must have been a major difference between the 1960’s and the 1970’s as to how this possible creative alliance between the workers and the intellectuals was designed. For instance in the catalogue of the 1st Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbl_g from 1965 -which was organized and supported by local heavy industry- you see photographs of artists standing next to workers in a big industrial hall. They are engaged in a discussion about the technology of production, and on the opposite page you see the result of this exchange; artwork installed in public space, the ideal sunny space of youth, with the hope of advanced real socialism. Images of artworks and “production stills” are alternating with images of ship engines and gigantic turbines that this factory produced. What’s presented is a desire for melding together art and industrial production, work and leisure, reflection and action etc. In March 1968, the workers were maneuvered into a clash with young intellectuals and given the role of defenders of the nation and socialism, against the “Zionists”. The “Privileged Youth” were given a reproach.

Then came the permissive 1970’s under Edward Gierek, and an overtly consumerist decade, which brought some great and now forgotten films, mildly psychedelic imagery in graphic design, imported luxury goods for the few, and pop music through portable radios for everybody. This is the time when amateur film clubs flourished, and when the effort of authority is concentrated on creating this enormous space of entertainment, and also on giving a vast pop-cultural experience to the masses. This is the time when Park Kultury i Wypoczynku, a sort of socialist Disneyland, was created in Silesia, and when the organization of leisure became a political priority. When I think of my childhood in 1970’s Poland, I always have this memory of beautiful weather and blue skies always open between the apartment blocks. I think amateur film clubs were no different to other harmless activities such as DIY, model-making, amateur photography, sightseeing, camping or “being an artist”.

Marysia: Adam you seem keen to suggest that all amateur activities, including hobbies are the same. I recently came across an interesting review from of one of the film festivals in1969, where the critic Janina Szymanska begins with a similar suggestion by saying “ So amateur film making is just a hobby, some fun and a way of relaxing after work, not dissimilar from fishing or playing cards.” But for us amateur film making is a different order of activity, because the result of the activity –the films- are in many ways a reflection, criticism or celebration of the conditions in which they are made; and then, this reflection is offered –through screenings- to others. It’s difficult to imagine the activity of a fisherman or a model-maker being subjected to such social scrutiny through exhibition. So maybe, as producers of cultural artifacts, these film makers were closer to “being an artist“ than a fisherman. They carried a different social obligation.

Neil: We have the intention of “curating” three separate film programs themed as Love, Longing and Labour that run concurrently, in three different cinema like spaces. We want to reconstruct a small clubroom, and make an Archive Lounge. The Archive would make visible some of the vast variety of films, and enable our selection to be seen as a possible interpretation -one of many- and not in any way authoritative.

Adam: Well, how to keep the amateur film running and not let it fall apart into a series of disconnected film stills? I think one could depart from the very metaphor of film projection – a projection of a film image onto the screen can be translated into a projection of subversive content from the past into the present. And to try and free a possible speculative force of “quotation” from the linear history of amateur film clubs. I think the form of representation of the past needs to be meta-historical, in other words, it needs to deal with its own conditions; to represent but also attend to it’s own pretence to finality. This is all aside from representing the phenomena of the film clubs itself.

Marysia: Adam, as you not so long ago said yourself in Gazeta Wyborcza [national daily newspaper] “An exhibition is not the same as window dressing, it’s closer to a re-furbishing of the mind”. So the practice of exhibition carries some responsibility; it participates in the interpretation of knowledge, or experience and in this case history; so this feels very relevant at the moment. Currently, we are thinking of the exhibition as some sort of archaeology of a “double repression” in contemporary social and cultural history. Firstly, and as you mention above the enthusiasts and their products are dominated by the image of the professional in all aspects of cultural life. And secondly, the places to which the clubs were predominantly attached - factories and industrial complexes- are being erased from our European consciousness and replaced with images of consumption, shopping, service economies and communication. Things are always manufactured elsewhere.

Neil: I like the sound of this “speculative quotation” and that it could exist between history. Part of our interest relates to what I suggested above, in that enthusiasm rather than labour, is a potentially unlimited source of capital. So the possibility that the film-makers were truly productive in their leisure-time is extremely relevant for us all now. That is, given the current struggles to harness intellectual property, open source software development and issues around the creative commons, etc.
The growth in immaterial labour, service and communication economies mean that we no longer know when we are working or not. Free time disappears, and enthusiasm becomes a major resource for capital.

And I’d like to think that we are very wary of the authority, and what Marysia called the “responsibility” of an exhibition has over the material exhibited. We are keen to allow visitors a space for critical reflection on the themes we are momentarily “curating” the films into. That’s why a searchable digital Archive of films we have found and collected, but not screened, is so important. It means that visitors will be able to make their own programme, to complement, or contradict ours. We’d like to avoid finality.

Adam: Thank you for the conversation.

London, Basel, Warsaw, April 2004

Description

ISBN/ASIN

83 88277 33 2

ArtWords Link

Collected

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Sub-Title

a multi-site exhibition curated by Neil Cummings, coordinated by The Photographers Gallery, London

End Date

21 Jun 1997

Start Date

26 Apr 1997

Location

Body

On an individual and national scale we are associated with a bewildering array of clothes, tools, art, bibelot, gifts, cuisine, souvenirs, technology and rubbish. Objects are spilling from every shelf, cupboard, display case, vitrine, supermarket, gallery, shop, museum and land-fill site. Societies are collective, we are defined by evolving methods to classify, structure and direct this material avalanche.

The activity of collecting, perfectly plays out the tension between the drive for order and the tendency towards excess and chaos implicit in our material relationships. The collection cuts across all categories of objects, from the almost worthless to the literally priceless. Collected things hold the promise of a coherent space within the profligate material world.

Conventionally, thinking about collections focuses on works of art, specific national collections or the powerful men (sic) who assembled them. The site of collecting is presumed to be the public museum, or a certain class of private household -now bequeathed or bought by the state to become a museum (visit Sir John Soane's House). Museums are the space we have evolved to collect material things. Treasures of all kinds, looted, bought, found or stolen are woven into narratives of possession and belonging. Objects, acquired, classified, catalogued and displayed are used to support images of nationhood, or intense personal obsessions. Obviously, we are increasingly familiar with the idea of the museum as the ultimate destination of all past objects, or at least surviving examples of those things. Recently it would seem, the museum has come to dominates the horizon of every material thing. To achieve museum status -as an object or individual- is to participate in the past of the future.

The exhibition Collected recognizes the museum as the ideal image of the collection, but also explores stores, shops, flea markets and domestic spaces as the sites -amongst others- for engaging in contemporary collecting. Retail culture has exploited our drives to accumulate in series, to complete the set; things are manufactured to be collectable.

At the Photographers Gallery, Christian Boltanski`s, Inventory of a man from Oxford, 1974 makes a collection of one persons belongings through the activity of photography. Both Ming de Nasty and Mo Wilson, have made portraits of local collectors who participated in Wallsall Museums Peoples Shows. Lea Andrews tape slide work, tenderly opens the gap between a personal attachment to belongings, and the distant opinion of 'experts'. Louise Lawler showed a series of photographs that record the relationships of power implicit in the ownership and display of art. James Sillavan turns the obsessive activity of photography into the medium of collecting, developing his own extraordinary typology of things. Fred Wilson exhibited a set of images exploring how museum culture pictures 'the other' in a strange hybrid family album.

Collected slipped out of the Photographers Gallery and wandered through various contemporary sites in central London.

Fred Wilson and Richard Wentworth worked with, and exhibited in the Egyptian department at the British Museum. Andrea Fraser investigated the difference between the Inventory, Bequest and the Collection at the Wallace Collection. Susan Hiller inserted a small obsessive collection within the body of The Royal College of Surgeons of England, Huntarian Museum. Guillame Bijl curated a furniture collection in the vitrine of Habitat's premier store. Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska developed a guide, Browse which linked the British Museum and Selfridges Department store. Paul Smith displayed a selection of his own private collection in his Floral Street shop windows, and Richard Lowe an `Egyptomania' collector opened his astonishing apartment for public tours.

The journal Inventory produced a special Collected themed edition

Special thanks is due to Paul Wowbell then director of the Photographers Gallery. And James Putnam, John Reeve and Callum Storrie at the British Museum

To glimpse some background thinking, take a look at Everything a short essay that explores curation in relation to a wider circulation of material things. First printed in Curating; the Contemporary Art Museum and Beyond, edited by Anna Harding, Art and Design Magazine 1997

Contents CD cover

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CD cover
Contents Gallery Transit, Leuven

Enthusiasts

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Sub-Title

Films of Love, Longing and Labour
curated by Lukasz Ronduda

End Date

29 Aug 2004

Start Date

25 Jun 2004

Location

Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw

Body

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.

Enthusiasts breakfast

admin — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 18:03:52 +0100

Enthusiasts breakfast
Enthusiasts Warsaw 2004

Longing cinema

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Longing cinema, with audience
Installation, Whitechapel, London

Film makers

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Film Makers
Katowice, Poland 2004

enthusiasts

enthusiasts camera

enthusiasts spread

enthusiasts cover

Vol 1: Enthusiasts

Sub-Title

Date of Publication

Location

Publisher

Designer

Body

Description

ISBN/ASIN

ArtWords Link

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Collected

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Contents CD cover

Enthusiasts

Sub-Title

End Date

Start Date

Location

Body

Related Films

Related Projects

Related Publications

Enthusiasts breakfast

Longing cinema

Film makers