Dr Karolina Kosińska - Head of Section
Dr hab. Zbigniew Benedyktowicz
Dr Beata Kosińska-Krippner
Dr Ewa Fiuk
Dr Tomasz Szerszeń
Mgr Danuta Benedyktowicz
Mgr Justyna Chmielewska
Mgr Grzegorz Nadgrodkiewicz
Mgr Klaudia Rachubińska

Tel.: (+48 22) 50 48 234

The Department’s activities comprise research into Polish artistic and popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the context of European and world culture, with particular emphasis on cultural anthropology, film studies and audiovisual arts.
The Department is a natural continuation of the first Polish institution of film theory – the Department of Film History and Theory, established by Professor Jerzy Toeplitz in the then National Art Institute in Warsaw in 1949. The Department’s current shape and research profile has evolved over the years, influenced in particular by the work of Professor Aleksander Jackiewicz carried out between the 1950s and the 1980s. The Department is unusual in that it combines film theory with anthropology, where film history and theory are studied through the perspective of anthropology, while the study of anthropology draws largely on film. The Department is made up of two research teams that collaborate with each other, the Anthropology of Culture and Audiovisual Arts Section and the Film Studies Section.
Both teams publish the Department’s results or work in progress on an ongoing basis in IS PAN’s periodicals “Konteksty. Polska Sztuka Ludowa” [Contexts. Polish Folk Art, a quarterly] and “Kwartalnik Filmowy” [Film Quarterly] (some of the oldest publications of that type in Poland). As the guiding principles behind the publication of the periodicals are openness and an interdisciplinary approach, the texts published in the periodicals are not limited to the work of the Department’s employees, but also include articles by other outstanding Polish and foreign representatives of the humanities, such as film scholars and critics from various academic institutions in Poland. The periodicals also feature the work of young Polish and foreign academics.
In addition to their regular publications, the Department’s activities are wide-ranging and besides research, also include organizing conferences and exhibitions, which gave rise to a series of projects dedicated to the art of Zbigniew Rybczyński (the anthology Zbigniew Rybczyński. A Traveller to the Land of the Impossible /1993/ and the conference The Work of Zbigniew Rybczyński and New Media and Contemporary Culture /March 2001/), the multimedia project Malinowski – Witkacy. Photography: Between Science and Art (May-June 2001), the conferences Home – A Way of Existence (4-6 February 2010) and Polish Television Soap Operas (18-20 May 2011), a series of lectures and film projections for cinema goers as part of the series Iluzjonowe Spotkania z Kwartalnikiem Filmowym [Cinematic Meetings of “Iluzjon” Cinema and “Film Quarterly”] (March-December 2010).
The two-tiered approach can also be seen in the ongoing research work of the Department’s employees and collaborators – half of the doctoral theses defended in recent years within the Department serve as an example of film theory studies written from the anthropological perspective.