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Through Michal Kosakowski 's eyes we see the wars that are daily waged within every single person's existence.
It is not in the remote distance that Michal Kosakowski is searching for the extent of the world's globalisation - he detects the battlefields in the microcosm of our own existence.
The idea for JUST LIKE THE MOVIES (2006) was born in a living room, in front of a TV set when, on September 11, 2001, those two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, generating images that were endlessly repeated over the following days and weeks all over the world.
Just like almost everyone else, Michal Kosakowski had a sort of instant deja vu in this vertiginous moment a feeling of having already seen all these images before. Thus began a long and arduous examination of hundreds of Hollywood movies, on the search for pertinent moments, clips of which were then assiduously assembled into a 21-minute reconstruction of the events of 9/11, all made from found footage shot long before that infamous date.
The film's soundtrack, composed and produced by Paolo Marzzochi, recalls the first silent movies, hearkening back to the very birth of cinema itself.
A view of the sky over Munich, Germany, from his bedroom's balcony, inspired the film DEEP WATER HORIZON (2010). The cloud formations recall drifting oil films, seeping oil leaks in deep waters. The catastrophe caused by the eponymous oil rig?s collapse in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was built up into a global disaster by the media. The news mercilessly exposes the contrast between unmanageable ecologic damage and weeks of helplessness caused by the failure of human technology to contain the disaster.
The necessity for HOLY WAR (1999) presented itself to Michal Kosakowski during the Christmas season while riding an escalator in an Austrian shopping mall, in which thousands of shoppers were busy clearing out quickly emptying shelves in hustle and bustle ? a behaviour that reminded the director of the hoarding typical of imminent humanitarian disasters. Thus begins a process of build-up and provisioning that will find its first culmination in the gift giving on December 24 and will continue until the turn of the year. What Michal Kosakowski does in HOLY WAR is basically a documenta tion of how the battle is waged.
Other battlefields were identified by Kosakowski in his hometown Vienna, as on the national holidays, which are partly organised by the army ? see SLEEPERS (2002). Each October 26, the Austrian army presents its heavy machinery and equipment to the public. Tanks, artillery, missiles. Families stroll through the exhibition area in harmonious community. However, once one isolates the children from the alleged protection of their families, the army?s weapons can be identified as instruments of an armament industry whose aim it is to socialise society's youngest members for the benefit of the country's defence. Thus the state's concern for the normative power constituted by the family is unabashedly confirmed in such military activities on national holidays.
Michal Kosakowski pays a visit to a friend's hometown, Novi Sad in Serbia, five years after the Kosovo war and the NATO air raids. THE HEART OF IT (2010) shows images of a destroyed city and scenes of the continuing functioning of the agronomy-based life of a post-war society. The quest for the HEART OF IT relates to the realities of contemporary life between loss, love of life, and survival techniques both physical and mental.
The consequences of modern war permeate everyday life. The battlefields of daily life demand an identification of complicity/responsibility and the acknowledgment of guilt or success within one's own microcosm, caught as it is inside a globalised world. And this is perhaps what all Michal Kosakowski 's films, diverse as they are, have in common: in one way or another they all strive for insights into the nature of universal truths.
Pressetext
KünstlerInnen: Michal Kosakowski
