Afterimage

Foreign Film Series ~ Afterimage

Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - 7:00pm to 8:45pm
  • Chief Theater, 813 Lincoln Ave.

The library's free foreign film series presents great Polish director Andrzej Wajda's passionate biopic about avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski, screening at the Chief Theater.

Afterimage looks at the last years of Władysław Strzemiński, Poland’s best-known interwar artist and a theoretician. The film opens with Strzemiński (brilliantly played by Polish superstar Boguslaw Linda), a controversial and visionary artist (who only started painting after he became a double amputee), working in his apartment, only to be interrupted by the unfurling of the Soviet flag outside his window. As Stalinism spread to Poland, the unbending Strzemiński refused to compromise his art for the sake of the preferred socialist realism style. He eventually became persecuted and expelled from his Chair at the Łodz Academy of Fine Arts, but the ever-compelling and charismatic teacher was surrounded by loyal students who emboldened him to fight against the Party while they themselves risked jail for publishing his book (posthumously). Strzemiński, who created the concept of Unism, was a co-founder of the constructivist group Blok and the founder of the Museum of Modern Art in Łodz. Afterimage refers to a series of late-1940s Solarist paintings by Strzemiński, who was friends with Marc Chagall, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich and was once married to the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro. Their daughter Nika, played by the accomplished 13-year old newcomer Bronislawa Zamachowska, figures prominently in the film. After Strzemiński became a persona non grata, his art was “erased” from museum walls, but over the years he has come to symbolize artistic resistance against intellectual tyranny.

In Polish with English subtitles
Run time: 100 min.