Filmoteka Muzeum

House on Its Head was edited by the cinematographer and director Adam Palenta on the basis of three hours of Wojciech Zamecznik’s family home movies. Made available to the public in the recent years, the archive is founded on the artist’s estate which remained in the hands of his son Juliusz Zamecznik.

Wojciech Zamecznik consistently documented his family and social life, creative work, holiday trips and journeys abroad throughout nearly two decades. The resulting material forms a loose – yet coherent from the perspective of the participants of the depicted events – collection of moments from the subsequent years, which at the same time manifest the repetitive rhythm typical of a life cycle. Palenta selected the materials to create an 18 minute shortened version, gathering the most important sequences and attempting to highlight the above mentioned internal cyclicality inherent in the records of ephemeral everyday situations.

Moreover, the film offers modern-day viewers a different perspective on the 1950s and 1960s, known mainly from film chronicles produced by the state, and the possibility to observe the period of “little stabilisation” on a specific example of a person who organised their everyday life in that era.
 

(MP)