What was the starting point for your film?
The film emerged in the context of a research group in the Essay Film Studio existing in the vnLab next to the Polish Film School, which allowed access to over 300 films from the archive of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź. This was an institution in communist Poland that employed filmmakers to create educational films about numerous topics: from human anatomy, workings of the brain, pollution in the city, guides to survive in a nuclear attack, children’s stories, to instructional videos on how a woman should look.
I started to develop a relationship of kinship with the footage.
Looking at the footage for months, I felt it is charged with didactic institutional violence, but also haunted by dreams of unrealized futures. It was an interesting experience to be living through this footage, giving me a sense of spatial and temporal dislocation, especially while working on the film in the Netherlands, where I live. Perhaps due to a feeling of longing for home that the footage incited within me, I started to develop a relationship of kinship with it, which led me to eventually conceive the film from this framework: shifting from a didactic and disembodied perspective to one of kinship and closeness.
Taking the child as a narrator allowed for a push and pull between the image as representation and as surface, shape and form.
Since many of the materials were created for educational purposes, they were often about or addressed to children. I see the figure of a child as an interesting concept, because on one hand it’s associated with an elusive idea of purity, while on the other it is a site where normative socio-cultural production of identity is at its most intensified. The film that encapsulates this the most and that sparked the idea of a child narrator is called I COMPOSE, YOU COMPOSE, HE COMPOSES (dir. Grażyna Kędzielawska, 1976). It follows a child leading the viewer through basic exercises of creating meaning, for example arranging a square and a triangle to make a house. On one hand there is the playfulness of a child creatively making worlds, on the other, the socio-cultural reproduction of certain norms. This was even more evident in clips where children pretended to be adults, mimicking stereotypical gender roles. Taking the child as a narrator allowed for a push and pull between the image as representation and as surface, shape and form. And that is what interested me the most – to unravel and undefine the found images, for which the family and child served as most fitting methodologies.
According to which criteria did you select all the archive images that compose the film?
The selection process started quite organically, experimenting with putting clips together with sounds I either recorded or made and seeing how the images would start to transform. It was very much based on observation and striving to “listen” to the footage, seeing what stories and environments I could create by following the qualities of its affects.
I didn’t want to introduce queerness as a direct narrative, but rather as an action, queering these normative images through the process of the child’s construction of their world.
In my films, I strive to make spaces rather than linear narratives, so I would focus on each part in a spatial manner, sometimes starting with sound, sometimes narrative or a particular clip. From the beginning I wanted to shift the footage from representation, so I was curious about what it can “do” rather than simply show. I imagined certain scenes as active moments of transformation, where the images and sounds play the main role, such as the game of “1,2,3 Baba Yaga sees” or the child’s attempts at creating their identity.
From a very personal standpoint, the child was a way for me to investigate my own non-binarity and try to look for it within the footage, seeking for hybrids and moments that seemed somehow in-between. I didn’t want to introduce queerness as a direct narrative, but rather as an action, queering these normative images through the process of the child’s construction of their world.
Having the framework of the family, I then continued selecting the footage to create microcosms for each character. In order to convey this idea of a self-sustainable world of these women, I was careful to select clips that didn’t have men in focus, which significantly diminished the amount of material I could choose from. In many films women would be the side characters or assistants to scientists, or simply objects available for visual pleasure. Seeing how the female body has been viewed and regulated from the perspective of different scientific instruments of seeing, I wanted to include these as well, scrutinizing not only what is represented but how. All the non-humans were portrayed in a similar way, also allowing me to connect this footage with the story of the family, giving the characters forms of different organisms.
What made you choose the particular figure of Baba Yaga to tell this story?
There are many double agents in the film that blend together oppression and resistance, such as the distortion of the image, which is an effect I used to signal the family’s rejection of patriarchal norms, but also the embeddedness of these norms within their reality. Similarly, the figure of Baba Yaga is this double agent, a symbol of a lost order of peace, but also of her violent transformation into a monstrous entity. She serves as a figure of the tension between pre-defined identities and the capacity to self-define. I was fascinated by her hybridity, as in classic tales she is described as riding in a mortar, concealing her traces with a broom, and living in a hut standing on a chicken foot. In that sense, as a mythological figure, she seems to have carried a long history of different influences that have given her this current shape. Even the word “baba,” which now is a derisory term for “woman” in Slavic languages, comes from the Indo-European root “bab” – which in different languages served to create words for “grandmother,” but also “father,” “sister,” or “child”. The simplicity of the word itself, easily uttered by a child, allows for an expression of kinship.
The figure of Baba Yaga is a double agent, a symbol of a lost order of peace, but also of her violent transformation into a monstrous entity.
I was also inspired by the seminal work by Zygmunt Krzak, a Polish archeologist, who claimed to have found in Baba Yaga the remnants of the cult of the Great Mother, characteristic for matriarchal societies that he, and other researchers like Marija Gimbutas, claimed to have turned to patriarchy with the introduction of ownership of land, which developed with the Neolithic revolution. I was interested in this idea of the turn from matriarchal to patriarchal order and vice versa, seeing as that’s how my daily life looked like in childhood, going from my (seemingly) tightly sealed matriarchal house to the patriarchal reality outside. However, again trying to look beyond binaries, I was not too interested in which order is eventually victorious. Instead, the film came out from the desire to complicate this binary and find what hybrid forms are created from these two systems actually co-existing in one reality or in one character. I think Baba Yaga is an example of such a hybrid, serving me in the film as a tool to represent a certain “muddied” authority that doesn’t fully belong to one side.
