playlists, s01e05, "If You Never Leave" (2020)
87’53” | Audiovisual query
Austria | 2020
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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.
Bluszcz ("The Ivy," dir. Hanka Włodarczyk, 1982)
Bluszcz ("The Ivy," dir. Hanka Włodarczyk, 1982)