Simon Leibovitz-Grzeszczak
Bobok - Film - 2010
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 12
Film
A corpse floats down a river in wartime Europe. A mouthless vampire pulls out his dead tongue and scatters images. A macabre hallucination, grotesque and unfathomable baroque idiocy, BOBOK, the figure of the porous cretin, invents gloomy apostrophes, reluctantly, gets stuck in and proliferates the swallowing. A stupid zek, a smudgy trickster, "Ostradek" and thingummy, mortal remains: a monster.Here we are talking about what continues to participate in the world, in any fashion, in its regime of forms that weigh us down, higgledy-piggledy son and heirs.
Of History, of the hidden culture, of these always pre-existent, pre-dominant frameworks, the Polish tradition has always cultivated a radical counterpoint, at least since Witkiewicz: a distrust of Form, the "Face" (Gombrowicz), "Cheap rubbish » (Schulz). Even cynical or transgression regimes (with Borowski or Rawicz) remain in this framework concerned with the reading of not what is said, but meant, of "the absolute strangeness that horror generates". (Ricœur). Here the idea is to suggest by a sort of kapo travelling the distances between the filmed subject, the subject filming and the spectator subject in a shapeless geometry. How horror (and even more so as a genre...) matches up with grotesque and trivial. How a motif arises and resists in its random enterprise, faced with its dregs, its empathetic bestiary and congeneric? What is the meaning of the capacity of a culture to 'semantize' the very destruction it is aiming at? The burlesque mode wonders also. BOBOK attempts to present and configure what cannot be seen, recognised and to take charge of it (literally). The regime of ambiguities generates games, that is to say a space of friction, of fiction, in that gag also means joke. This oblique aesthetic takes in the articulations and paradoxical solidarities as an exercise in sight and thinking, like a dialectics of sensations at the mourning of language. From the mouth to the oral a jaw trots, the motif proliferates and the animals join in: a muddy choir looks for its voice and its tongue like a tower of Babel, mobile, labile, daft, like a Marx Brothers set up. If "to directly render this racket strange would only be to prolong it and propagate it" (Borwicz), an ethical-Abschmack is growing and tries to put its feet in its mouth. Hence there is a flop.
