playlists, s01e05, "If You Never Leave" (Mar-Jul, 2020)

This playlist is filled with the video footage from only one film: Bluszcz (The Ivy, dir. Hanka Włodarczyk, 1982). Written by two art historians (Hanka Włodarczyk and Anda Rottenberg), it revolves around one year from the life of one woman, Kinga Wilczewska. She's a writer who grows frustrated with both herself and her surroundings to the point of taking a leave from work, which she plans to dedicate to writing her long-delayed book. Divorced and raising her daughter by herself, she nevertheless enjoys a seemingly comfortable socio-economic situatedness. In the meantime, in another flat in the same building, as a deux-ex-machina teaching moment, another woman, a mother to a few children, not divorced and without any income on her own, is regularly abused by her alcoholic husband, whom she eventually murders. But this is neither an exploitatively social film, nor a cinema afflicted by a “moral anxiety” of any kind, which you would find in the films of the seminal wave produced at that time.

Playlists are gif-able audiovisual collages that result from my queries into music and film. Sometimes incidental and at other times project-oriented, they all share a similar duration, one that would fit a 90-minute cassette tape or, more specifically, its two 45-minute sides, one that could be played at one sitting or entered and exited at any point, without any loss on the plot.