Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Greenwich
Restless bodies, buried texts: Sikorski, The General, and the archive
This article identifies how specific cinematic strategies have been used to visually challenge conventional Polish narratives of heroism during WWII. The article conducts a close analysis of a film, The General (Jadowska, 2009), and television series, General: Assassination at Gibraltar (Jadowska and Kazen, 2009), which reconstruct the 1943 death of the Polish Commander-in-Chief, General Sikorski. In delineating how these representations destabilise traditional views of Polish history and memory, the article puts into dialogue Jacques Derrida’s writing on the archive with film theory around digital cinema, arguing that Jadowska’s works are obsessed with the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘copied’ archival documents and footage.
