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Majka from Movie-land (Madness of Majka Skowron)

Stach Szabłowski

Was the girl by the name of Majka Skowron mad? To answer this question one needs to refer to a somewhat forgotten yet engrossing 1972 novel by Aleksander Minkowski.¹ In a nutshell, the adventure novel is a story of a rebellious teenager. The plot is set in a particular place and time: the Masurian Lake District at the height of the relatively short spell of communism in Poland. However, the scope of the story transcends the particulars of time and place. It is an archetypical narrative about the process of the growth of an individual, about initiation, self-recognition, confrontation with the Unknown which ultimately turns out to be one’s own self. Minkowski inscribed his narrative into the drama of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with clear allusions to the play. While we are in communist Poland of the 1970s, it is but a costume, a replaceable set decoration. Minkowski’s novel is one of those inspiring texts that open passages to other texts, other places and times.

In the collective imagination of my generation (those born in the 1970s) Szaleństwo Majki Skowron [Madness of Majka Skowron] functions not so much as a text, however, but an image, a memory of the TV series, directed by Stanisław Jędryka, based on Minkowski’s novel.² This was a production for young people. This target group should be treated very seriously. One of the characteristics of culture in communist Poland were works such as Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, precisely attuned to the sensitivity of the audience of the transition period, i.e. the youth, a social and existential group which is elusive and hard to define. This should be borne in mind since productions tailored to young people, inserted in between the offer for children and the adult culture, are nowadays few and far between. They have been replaced by a homogenous “family” entertainment. On the other hand, the entire contemporary mainstream of popular culture is in a sense youth-oriented and in general there is little else to choose from. In the context of the ubiquitous yet elusive category of contemporary youth, the teenager Majka Skowron and her alleged madness stand out all the more conspicuously.

This character, deposited in the archive of collective memory, is once again set in motion, this time in the field of art, as the key figure of Zuzanna Janin’s project titled Majka From the Movie.³

What kind of project is it? To capture its essence one needs to open up to the transgressive and paradoxical nature of contemporary art, its mobile and ontologically flickering nature, the ability to be a few things at a time and to function simultaneously on a number of parallel levels. At its basic level, the Majka From the Movie project is a series of videos whose structure resembles that of a television series. Like episodes of a single soap opera, all the works have the same trailer and an identical ending, with autonomous episodes taking place in between. From this starting point and from the idea of shooting an “art” series that resembles the format of TV productions, Janin’s project develops into a multidimensional enterprise. Combining the discourse of collective and individual memory, it is an attempt at telling a story from the point of view of an individual, a reflection on the entanglement of fiction and reality in contemporary culture. Last but not least, it provokes reflection on the indelible mark stamped by cinematography and popular culture on our image of the world and of ourselves.

A television series which reconciles fragmentariness and continuity of narration seems the most appropriate form of accounting for contemporary experience. It is the most fitting form since it comes closest to the way we perceive reality, itself falling into sequences of episodes and ever open, always to be continued, in line with the phrase to be continued… that concludes each part of Zuzanna Janin’s project.

The Majka From the Movie project is not only about the potential inherent in the very formula of a series, however, but about a particular series titled Szaleństwo Majki Skowron. Each episode starts off with a trailer borrowed from Stanisław Jędryka’s TV production of 1976. While Zuzanna Janin’s work contains elements of a remake, sequel or even apocrypha of Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, the project is better described as a contemporary palimpsest of a historical visual text. This new narration is superimposed on another, already existing one. The first work (the 1976 series) still shows through the new one (i.e. the present-day video project); both “texts”, the old and the contemporary one, merge and make up a totally unique quality.

At this point we come to the key point of the entire undertaking, i.e. the unique construction of the identity of its protagonist, the “mad” Majka Skowron. In the 1976 series the part was played by the teenage Zuzanna Antoszkiewicz, currently known as Zuzanna Janin. The artist performs a daring symbolic operation – using her younger self as a means to “enters” the reality of the movie, she emerges on the other side of the looking-glass that cinematography puts up to reality. Once there, the author gains a nearly unlimited and “magic” power over the represented world. No wonder Minkowski’s text draws on The Tempest, in which Prospero, through his magic, freely shapes the reality of the Island, creating mirages, illusions and manipulating the shipwrecked protagonists who roam his world. In Shakespeare, Prospero calls his magic “Art”. Indeed, he is the figure of the artist, or author, who appears in his own text.

Zuzanna Janin make use of her “magic” powers on the Island, which in her particular case is a TV series from the past, by liberating her protagonist from the constrictions of time and space. In Jędryka’s production the hero is immersed in the reality of a movie like a fly in amber. She remains a teenager throughout, always in the Masurian Lakeland, and the 1970s last forever. In turn, Janin allows Majka to grow up, to visit other places and touch other moments of History; she is free to experience “all the rest”. Majka is liberated through the technique of found footage; Janin’s palimpsest is woven out of quotations from the history of world cinema as well as of contemporary films made by the artist herself, where Majka is played by Mel Baranowska, Zuzanna Janin’s daughter. In this way the identity of the protagonist expands and transcends that of the individual. Majka is an icon of Poland’s youth culture under communism, an archetypical rebellious teenager, and she is Zuzanna Janin’s past and her future, as personified by her daughter, a woman in her early twenties. She is also Janin herself as an author within her own work.⁴ This is, however, not the end of the metamorphoses of Majka Skowron, a character straddling reality and cinematographic fiction. Thanks to the “edition of attractions” that working with found footage enables, Majka leaves the Masurian lakes and sets out on a trip through movie images, donning ever new masks and playing many parts. She is Daria, the hippie from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, who in a gesture of generational, anti-establishment rebellion blows up the house of her father, a famous architect. She travels along Lynch’s Lost Highway, dances with Tarantino’s postmodern protagonists and with Marlon Brando in The Last Tango in Paris. Through Polish movies of “moral unrest” she observes the erosion of the communist system in Eastern Europe, only to find herself in the “heart of darkness” of war-ravaged Vietnam depicted in Apocalypse Now, in present-day Japan, and even within a cartoon whose heroes fight a never-ending battle with some ultimate cosmic evil. In one of the episodes of Zuzanna Janin’s series Majka, played this time by Mel Baranowska, meets Slavoj Žižek at the Central Railway Station in Warsaw. The protagonist tells the famous philosopher, incidentally known for his fascination with the cinema, that she is on a journey through culture and asks for some signposts. Žižek advises Majka not to seek her heroes in culture, not to find inspiration and role models in people but in their actions. Indeed, in the Majka From the Movie project the protagonist plunges headlong into a whirl of activities, events, plots, and cinematographic action.

The narration of Majka From the Movie as a transgressive movie of the road (weaving between different culture texts) begins around the year 1968, at a time of cultural revolution, of a breakthrough that was in large measure the cornerstone of contemporary reality. One of the motifs in the narrative of the Majka From the Movie project is the process of transferring Polish experience of postmodernity onto an international level. 1968 was a symbolic year in Poland as well. Its protagonists, students and young people who felt the need for change, were much like their peers in Paris or New York. Still, the significance of the events was far from identical and their contexts were markedly divergent. Majka From the Movie interestingly presents the parallel experience of the young generation in Poland and in the world; until 1989 this experience developed separately, on two sides of the iron curtain, notwithstanding all the convergences. This can be seen in the soundtrack of Majka From the Movie, where Marek Grechuta meets Pink Floyd, and Mira Kubasińska plays back to back with The Doors. The terms of “revolution” or “communism” meant different things in rebellious Paris that it did in Warsaw (or in the Masurian Lakeland) under communism, where leftist rhetoric had been appropriated by the totalitarian regime. Still, both here and there we were watching the same films and it is no coincidence that Janin inscribes Majka into the context of world culture precisely with the help of pop music and cinema. We watch films – but in some way films tell a story about us, as they tell a story about Majka Skowron, a figure who is both the protagonist and the narrator, viewer and image, a fictitious creation and a real person. In this context the question about the madness of Majka Skowron becomes purely rhetorical; without a doubt Majka is mad and her madness is the madness of the world.

Stach Szabłowski,

Warsaw, JANUARY 2010

^1. Aleksander Minkowski, Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, Wydawnictwo Harcerskie Horyzonty, Warszawa, 1972.

^2. Szaleństwo Majki Skowron, a 9-episode television series, director: Stanisław Jędryka, screenplay: Aleksander Minkowski on the basis of his own novel, production: TVP, 1976.

^3. Tomasz Kozak was the artist’s guest collaborator during the project. The artist made a work Shelter-Skelter that might be defined as a pilot or a trailer of the video project made by Zuzanna Janin as a series.

⁴. . It is worth pointing out that the element of a multi-generational identity transcending that of the individual appeared in Zuzanna Janin’s art before. In a series of photographic installations from the 1990s, “Follow Me, Change Me, It’s Time”, the artist superimposed laminated photos showing fragments of bodies (hands, legs, bellies) of the herself and the women of her family: her grandmother, sister and daughter. The layers of superimposed pictures made up sequences developing in space and time. Time frozen in an image extended onto generations of women related to the artist both emotionally and genetically.

The term originates in Sergey Eisenstein’s theory of the cinema.