Filologia filmoznawstwa Karola Irzykowskiego
Karol Irzykowski’s Philology of Film Theory

Author(s): Sylwia Borowska-Kazimiruk
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Karol Irzykowski; ekphrasis; Jonathan Crary; Tenth Muse; philology; film theory
Summary/Abstract: This article presents Karol Irzykowski’s ideas about film art as an original proposition of both philological and visual analysis of a new cultural phenomenon. Irzykowski was one of the Polish theoreticians who appreciated this new position of the individual wholost his or her strong beliefs in empirical capabilities of cognition and, therefore, the belief in the abilities of language which transformed into the crisis of realism’s ocular-centricmanner of description. The Tenth Muse is an original, innovative proposal of overcoming such a crisis of human perception. Irzykowski claimed, in opposition to the Bergsonian mechanism of cinematographic perception, that observation is a means of constructive cultural expression of an individual whose unstable existential position may be understood as a chance for establishing a new dynamic, a new cultural environment. An imagebe comes a never-ending impulse to overcome static forms of art, social schemes and perceptual staleness. Irzykowski mobilized his philosophical theories of seeing and his own ideas on literature’s mechanism of metaphor and combined them in his complex film theory framework, where the metaphor – both filmic and literary – gives an opportunity for breaking through a series of static linguistic and visual representations and reaching moments of true sense of one’s existential condition. In the article, this theoretical approach is presented in the light of the debate about therole of philology and its position in contemporary literary practices after the “audiovisualturn,” which has established new, complex relations between the individual, one’s text andperceived object/image.

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