Filmoteka Muzeum

Pop corn is a yellow neon sign operating as a commercialised, processed (like GMO) identification of the colour of corn, which invites and announces the forthcoming collage of pop origins. Upon more detailed viewing, the film can paradoxically produce an impression of a multiplied pattern of a mainstream film, as if its contemporary form stored at Sèvres – or it can also appear as a typical Borges’s map of Baudrillard’s simulacra and simulations.

Pop Corn not only pivots around the idea of the contemporary cinema for multiplex consumers, but also directs those consumers in the direction of conscious digestion of digitally modified audiovisual nutrition. Reception of such works is close in some regards to the reception of contemporary sound pieces, like Karkowski’s noisy horror. On the one hand, multiplication of the accumulated stimuli to the extent which deadens the message, absorbs and allows to succumb to the essence of a given work (which refers to nothing and connotes nothing in the traditional meaning of the word); while on the other – this deadening often sparks reflection on the essence of the very medium, the artifact it concerns.

Glorification of the abundance of the multi-channeled stimuli, though at first irritating for an average viewer because of its seeming carelessness of chaotic, hyperreal monster, casts the viewer away with a centrifugal force to the level of investigation into the self-referential character of that artifact. And although the medium of film usually relies on a certain – if not always coherent – continuum, a sense of certain beginning, middle and end, in Pop Corn we are dealing with a hybrid of moving image texts, mixed to such an extent that the scraps of narration, which could be located with great effort, are merely remnants in the mind of the viewers, accustomed to reception of classic narration. Initially, the viewer is lost and tries to catch the scraps of their memories, recognise film references, in order to cease dividing their perception into parts the next moment, and focus on grasping the entire thing – the multi-stimuli, non-narrative, audiovisual hybrid.

Pop corn is not only a film about film in film, but a multitude of films in film, which concerns the essence of the very form, the techniques of how moving image operates. What comes across as interesting is the fact that, from the perspective of the process of producing the film work, Szczerbowski tried to employ in Pop Corn films representing various, major, most popular genres. The multi-layered channel of a dozen or so half-transparent films was edited from comedies, horrors, action, catastrophic, and erotic films, as well as melodramas. Pop corn appears as a dream of film, as a nightmare after a film marathon, where the layers of films overlap, merge and permeate each other simultaneously, thus generating a not entirely digestible, hyper-Borges film map.

References: A. Hirszfeld, Szczerbowskiego obraz zwielokrotniony, [in:] Wizje i Re-wizje. Wielka Księga estetyki w Polsce, Cracow 2007; A. Hirszfeld, Robert Szczerbowski, [in:] New Phenomena in Polish Art after 2000, Warsaw 2007.
 

(AH)

Year: 2005
Duration: 30'30''
Language: no language
Source: BETA SP

© Robert Szczerbowski

Acquisition date: Aug 22, 2011
Acquisition: deposit
Ownership form: deposit