Abstrakt

To tell about the invisible. An attempt at analysing the movie Ida by Paweł Pawlikowski

The present text is the first attempt in Poland at analysing the movie by Paweł Pawlikowski, Ida. The author’s premise is that the cinematographic means of expression which are employed in Ida serve to convey meanings which do not result merely from the course of the action and which are not contained in the dialogues. A closer look at the camera work, at the relation between the image and the sound, the recurrent stylistic means in the film allows one to reach the meaning which results from the deep structure of the cinematographic message. The article frequently mentions the statements made by the makers of the film, the accounts from the shooting and the postproduction periods because here the process of the analysis is understood to a certain extent as the reconstruction of the process of creation. The fundamental aim of the analysis of Pawlikowski’s film is to situate it within a historical and cinematographic context, reference to which has direct justification in the structure of the film. Such an attitude opens Pawlikowski’s work to the subsequent stages of interpretation and facilitates a polemics with the reading of Ida which is already well‑established in critical works.

Key words: Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski, Łukasz Żal, Holocaust, film and history, frame composition, light in cinema