Pawel and Wawel

Pawel and Wawel gathers unique images and sounds from a journey through Iceland that position themselves between documentary gesture and performative strategy. The starting point and anchor of this trans-genre diary film, road movie, documentary film project, is the film festival initiated by Krzystof Kaczmarek “What`s the difference between Pawel and Wawel,” which more or less unsuccessfully tours the island with Polish classics.

Clamped together with a sound arrangement of opera songs, heavy metal, singing Carmelite nuns, beat boxers, the howling dog-man duet of the Museum for Bones, Sticks, and Stones, as well as variations of an obscure Synth-leitmotif, Kaczmarek arranges recordings of the impressions that he gathered like a diary. Focus here is on the scurrile and absurd aspects of the encounters, while also thematized are the constructive relations of landscape and identity and the touristic gaze itself. People, cities, and endless car drives through archaic landscapes meet with atmospheric dream sequences. The issue of the conditions and possibilities for a festival are present: film quotes, references, and reenactments of the screened film program laconically refer to the failure of the individual stations of his project. Forming precisely is a self-ironic perspective of the staged scenes in the real. In the collisions of image, sound, text, and artifact, which make the manufacture of meaning uncertain in this in between space, narration and logic topple nearly every scene and thus torpedo the film images’ emotional, poetically romantic dimension. At the same time, nothing seems more obvious in this unruly cinematic language than the sharp perspective on the film image itself.
(Kathrin Wojtowicz)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt