Transgressions: film recordings of the isolation period. Media studies analysis of short films inspired by the pandemic (HBO project)

Abstract

The review article is an attempt at a media studies analysis of short films made by Polish filmmakers commissioned by the HBO digital platform. They are all in response to the pandemic situation of isolation. The analysis deals with the transgression of artistic attitudes towards danger. In it, I use the tools of contemporary semiology: verbal and non-verbal codes that participate in creating meanings through destruction and a new reading of meanings hidden in film messages. I prove that artists, first of all, commit transgression, negating the existing reality and looking for a new film language that contradicts the Aristotelian structure of the three acts in order to disperse the images and meanings they carry. Secondly, I argue that the deconstruction of codes and the reassembly of meanings proposed by semiologists takes place in the artistic activities in question, as if in the opposite direction. Deconstruction - indeed, but not to discover the truth in a new context, but to look for it in bits of reality that function separately and do not create meanings. They are only separately illuminated and contoured images.

Keywords

• short films
• transgressions
• verbal and non-verbal code
• semiotics
• borders