Być w świecie, którego już nie ma

Andrzej Barański’s filmmaking is indirectly autobiographical: the personality of the director, hidden behind literariness (almost all of his films were based on auto-biographical texts), manifests itself primarily in his individual style. Unable to directly confront his “self” on film, Barański elevates this encounter via image demonstrator into the invisible, and invests his messenger with two contrasting looks: a distanced and nostalgic one. The former results from the necessity to exist in hostile present time as well as from a flight into the reality of someone else’s memory, whereas the latter derives from the memory of the past; the past is his true spiritual present time. Barański’s uniquely peculiar and personal creative activity is also interpreted in the context of its complicated relations with the cinema and Polish cinematography at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s.