Death devoid of essence : the cconclusion to the Iwaszkiewicz-Wajda triptych

The article comprises an attempt to follow the main idea underlying Andrzej Wajda’s film adaptations of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s short stories Brzezina (film The Birch Wood, 1971), Panny z Wilka (film the Maids of Wilko, 1979) and Tatarak (film Sweet Rush,2009). The teleology of these artistic creations manifests a paradoxical sense of the experience of death, which combines three aspects into a oneness, namely, unexpectedness, solitude and fear. The last of the adaptations in question, namely, Tatarak, evokes above all the first sense of death, doing so on the three levels of the film’s innovative plot structure, namely, the reality plane, the autothematic motif and the plane of fiction. Subject to particular analysis are the images in Tatarak which were inspired by specific paintings and used by the director in Krystyna Janda’s monologue on death. Another significant element in the text is reflection on the medium of cinema itself, which is an art that embodies the phenomenon of existential paradox: the presence of the absence. This particular nature of the medium of cinema was explored already by early film studies.