Religious and quasi-religious attitudes in four Polish documentaries from 2008 – 2019

Kopczyński Krzysztof, Religious and quasi-religious attitudes in four Polish documentaries from 2008–2019. “Images” vol. XXX, no. . Poznań . Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. –. ISSN -X. DOI ./i.... +e paper aims to present di,erent ways of showing religious and quasi-religious attitudes in contemporary Polish documentaries. +e discussion is based on four feature-length -lms: Kites by Beata Dzianowicz (), Communion by Anna Zamecka (), Who Will Write Our History by Roberta Grossman (), and Tell No One by Tomasz Sekielski (). +e author evaluates the methodological usefulness of re/ection in the documentary of the “religious -lm” category used in Polish research and the concept of “transcendent(al) style” taken from Paul Schrader’s book. Occasionally touching upon the question of the relationship with audiences, the author also mentions the paradigm of Polish Romanticism present in contemporary culture.

methodological usefulness of the "religious lm" and "transcendent(al) style" categories for thinking about the documentary. I also occasionally touch upon the issue of the relationship with audiences, which some of the aforementioned authors have found interesting.
De ning the notion of a "religious lm", the authors of the monumental Światowa encyklopedia lmu religijnego [World Encyclopaedia of Religious Film], published in Poland in , took into account: 1. lms on biblical themes; 2. adaptations of works of literature widely considered religious; 3. lm hagiographies and biographies of people important to particular religions or denominations; 4. lms about people who devoted their lives to God and serving others; 5. lms whose makers wrestle in various ways with the requirements of morality determined by religion; 6. lms of 'hidden religiousness' , the analysis of which enables deep spiritual or metaphysical meanings to be noticed; 7. selected lms which super cially exploit religious themes (death, the a erlife, hell etc.), but are identi ed as religious by many viewers.
[ ] e encyclopaedia's editors decided against including " lms whose lifespan and territorial reach have been very limited" and lms, especially documentaries, "whose distribution has been limited to closed audience groups". Given the lack of in-depth research on the Polish documentary market[ ] and the poor availability of analyses of other documentary markets, the practical application of all the aforementioned criteria for documentaries has to be di cult.
e Rev. Andrzej Luter, a critic, would rather call Lis and Garbicz's publication an Encyclopaedia of Films with Religious Motifs. In his opinion, it is impossible to say what makes a lm Christian, Catholic, or religious. " ere are lms which -through the existential dilemmas of a speci c character and his or her spiritual choices -touch on the transcendent. And these are the lms that speak most strongly to audiences: there is no ideology in them, no traces of religious indoctrination", he argues. [   -.
Paul Coates is not keen on the category of "religious lm", either, beginning his thoughts on "' e Religious Film': a Genre?" by invoking Monty Python's Life of Brian ( ). Pointing out the widespread institutional a liation of religious lms, he distinguishes "between 'religion' and 'spirituality' , with the former involving the institutional codi cation and transmission of beliefs, the latter being more loosely-de ned, independent, even individualistic. "[ ] Spirituality in the latest cinematic productions is the focus of Kempna-Pieniążek's book, in which religious lms play a greater role than is suggested by the whole chapter devoted to them. e author mainly analyses non-Polish narrative feature lms, but she also considers Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence ( ), an obvious example of a religious documentary in European cinema. [ ] In an article published four years a er the encyclopaedia was released, the Rev. Lis wrote: "Religious themes are becoming noticeable in Polish documentaries, but so far few lm experts or historians (and theologians) of cinema have decided to study this area of lmmaking. Religiousness has thus become a doubly undescribed reality: by the lack of its lm images and their lm-studies analyses. "[ ] However, a di erent picture emerges from the volume Historia polskiego lmu dokumentalnego ( -) [ e History of Polish Documentary Film ( -)]. In the monograph's chapter entitled "Religious lms" which discusses the s, Mirosław Przylipiak assumes that religious documentaries are "all lms centred around people connected with religion (priests, believers) and/or religious institutions and rituals, and also lms intentionally expressing a religious worldview. "[ ] e author cites more than lms ful lling these requirements. He also polemicises with the Rev. Lis, who estimated the number of Polish documentaries about John Paul II at over , additionally accusing most of them of being hagiographic. Przylipiak points out that several dozen such lms were produced in the s alone. For precision's sake, let us note that the "religious lms" category is not distinguished in the part of the monograph discussing the period a er , although documentaries about John Paul II are represented there. [ ] In the introduction to the encyclopaedia, the Rev. Lis noted that studies on religious themes in lm were not well-developed in Poland, but "things are much better in Western European countries and in the United States. "[ ] Ten years later, Bartosz Wieczorek spoke of a "theological turn" in Polish research on lm, referencing the Rev.  Wieczorek underlines the great importance of theology in lm criticism. In his view, without it, our understanding of a lm may be "theologically erroneous" as well as shallow and short-lived. "Interpreting a given lm in locus theologicus terms thus requires speci c competences. Today one can nd many crypto-religious, anti-religious lms that try to use religious rhetoric, lms that use religious narration to undermine religion itself, and lms pretending to be religious but presenting the opposite values". e theologian critic thus defends religious lms against this trend. Only such a person can tell whether God is speaking to humankind through a particular lm.[ ] It is worth noting that over the past years, the category of religious documentaries has been absent from the output of authors whom I would count as part of the mainstream of global re ection on the documentary lm, including scholars such as Ian Aitken ( For the lmmakers of the documentaries I have selected, religion remains an important, albeit ambiguous, point of reference, thanks to the protagonists' attitudes related to religion. e question is, are there grounds to distinguish such documentaries, or even just the themes, scenes or sequences they contain, using criteria of the lmmaking cra , in particular those related to style? As we know, Paul Schrader used the term "transcendent(al) style" to analyse the works of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. However, he noted that it was applicable to the output of many lm directors from many countries who show a need to reconcile two universal possibilities: expressing Transcendence in art and taking advantage of the lm medium's nature. Schrader, who moved from lm theory to practice shortly a er the publication of Transcendental Style in Film ( ), was aware of the di culty of pursuing such a goal, but also that it was largely inevitable that lmmakers who treated lm as an art would want to pursue it. en again, he claimed that "many lmmakers have employed the transcendental style, but few have had the devotion, the rigour, and the outright fanaticism to employ it exclusively. "[ ] Schrader states clearly that transcendent(al) style and religious style, which he treats as a separate category, are not the only ones through which art can attain the Transcendent. Transcendence is understood differently in di erent cases, but it is reached via parallel and similar paths.
Semantically, transcendental style is simply this: a general representative lmic form which expresses the Transcendent.
[…] transcendental style refers to a speci c lmic form, although there could conceivably be several transcendental styles in lm.
[…] e study of transcendental style reveals a 'universal form of representation' . at form is remarkably uni ed: the common expression of the Transcendent in motion pictures.[ ] e author takes advantage of Jacques Maritain's proposed division into abundant and sparse means, showing that by moving towards the Transcendent, lm travels the distance from the former means to the latter. He also claims that religious lms are the most frequent examples of the overuse of the abundant artistic means. Finally, he admits that though they have universal value, Maritain's terms are extremely di cult to apply to speci c lms.[ ] In its desirable variant, "transcendental style seeks to maximise the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, nally, rationalism". It should transport the viewer from the familiar world to the other world "through the trials of experience to the expression of the Transcendent; it can return him to experience from a calm region untouched by the vagaries of emotion or personality". To Schrader, the greatest enemy of transcendence is immanence, which he notices in realism, rationalism, psychologism and expressionism. As he writes, "To the transcendental artist these conventional interpretations of reality are emotional and rational constructs devised by man to dilute or explain away the transcendental. . To him, this transcendence is not necessarily religious; it involves stepping over the horizon of ordinariness and having the ability to go beyond oneself. Documentary lmmaking that deserves to be called art shows that which is visible and incorporates that which is invisible. It respects mystery, but provides inspiration for overstepping reality.[ ] Meanwhile, invoking Kant directly and diverging slightly from Schrader, one can assume that the opposition of the transcendent would be the empirical. is makes it easier to consider the documentary lmmaking cra . In the common awareness, the documentary lies within the realm of experience, which is clearly related to all the functions that Michael Renov sees as driving documentary discourse: "to record, reveal, or preserve; to persuade or promote; to analyse or interrogate; to express. "[ ] Even if we enhance this list with a category important for the relationship with audiences -"to recover" -a documentary lmmaker aspiring to the transcendent(al) style will only stand a chance if this opposition is abolished, i.e. if we acknowledge that the camera encroaching upon reality, and also other tools supplementing its work, can nd the transcendent in the experience of the everyday, or, in particular cases, in restoring the viewers' experience to them, which they might then start seeing di erently. In other words, the function of the documentary has to be stripped of any univocity, in rejection of assertions that "tend to cast non ction lms in a single role, that of deceptive representations. "[ ] Even though Schrader -mistakenly, in my view -includes romanticism among the "conventional interpretations of reality", the paradigm of Romanticism can actually o er some inspiring means for interpreting religious attitudes in lm. In Poland, it continues to be a source of symbolic elements in the arts and in everyday behaviours. In English-language writing, it has been used in the analysis of lms in a religious context by Coates.[ ] Among other things, the paradigm of Romanticism covers epistemological courage in overstepping boundaries. is is based on a belief in the spiritual nature of the world, whose qualities are the easier to reveal, the simpler and more sensitive is the relationship between the observer and the world, and the greater the distancing from institutional patterns. is is an attitude embraced by many documentary lmmakers.
- As if upon a sign from above (Who Will Write Our History, dir. Roberta Grossman, ) Who Will Write Our History is a monumental project, a historical ctionalised documentary loosely based on Samuel D. Kassow's book of the same title. It tells the story of the Ringelblum Archive, one of the most important sources for research on the Holocaust. For the purpose of gathering documentation, Dr Emanuel Ringelblum formed a secret organisation in the Warsaw Ghetto: Oyneg Shabes, numbering members. Only three of them survived World War II, including Rachel Auerbach, on whose narrative the lm is based. e documentary combines dramatisations (Ringelblum is played by Piotr Głowacki, with the voice of Adrien Brody) with documentary footage, as well as archival lm and photographic materials. It meets the criteria for a Polish production, even though the producer and director, Roberta Grossman, and the main executive producer, Nancy Spielberg, are American. It was screened at Jewish lm festivals and in cinemas in the United States; it was also shown in cinemas in other countries and had a special screening at the Berlinale.
Who Will Write Our History chronicles facts, but it also poses some historiosophical questions: about the source of crime, and the sense and methods of remembrance. To the members of Oyneg Shabes, the most important value for which they risked their lives was the documentation of events for those who would not be able to believe them. e lm shows a variety of attitudes -including religious ones -in the face of inevitable death. e dramatised parts of the documentary include scenes of prayer and a yeshiva meeting. Orthodox Jews are also present in the archival materials, most of which were produced by German propaganda crews.
Rabbi Shimon Huberband was among those taking part in the work of Oyneg Shabes. It is mainly to him that we owe the documentation of religious life in the ghetto. It was very hard to follow religious laws at the time; there was no ritual slaughter, no meat or milk. e rabbi cited the example of a married couple who wanted to celebrate the feast of Pesach. e wife ate nothing because there was no matzah. e husband ate bread to stay alive. ey did not sit down at the table together to celebrate the holiday.
Huberband noted that people treated the commandments more loosely in the ghetto and did not seek advice from the rabbis. ere was nothing to ask the rabbis about, and their role diminished. Hersz Wasser wrote in his diary that the history of the Jews was not the history of rabbis, but of the whole nation. Rachel Auerbach, who was not religious, wrote that the closing of the ghetto occurred "as if upon a sign from above". Meanwhile, at one point, Abraham Levin changed the language of his diary from Yiddish to Hebrew, as if wanting to lend his notes biblical signi cance. e way religious Jews appear and disappear in the history of the ghetto's liquidation is related to the problem of theodicy. is was a time

Four Polish documentaries
when the existence and role of God was easy to question, alongside the signi cance of historiosophical interpretations of his actions and the axioms of faith, such as messianism. According to Marek Edelman, Jewish believers abandoned their holy books and proceeded straight towards the Holocaust. Nothing was le of them.
God let them down. He was punishing them for nothing. And so they turned away from God; they shaved o their beards, took o their gaberdines, le the synagogues.
[…] Religion went away… All those tall stories people tell, that when the uprising began the Jews prayed, they're just nice literary pieces. [ ] In formal terms, Grossman's documentary is a compilation of the expository and performative modes. On the basis of extensive research and consultations, it presents knowledge while taking care to maintain objectivism and historical correctness (the role of Polish shmaltsovniks [blackmailers], Jewish policemen, and the West's passivity are described with equal condemnation). is knowledge is supplemented with images contained in well-shot dramatised scenes and those put together from archival materials. e credibility of the latter could be questioned if one unceasingly paid attention to the propaganda bias of the archival footage. However, this is something the viewer does not constantly think about, or might even be unaware of. On the contrary, the editing in this case is absolutely in keeping with the requirements of transcendent(al) style: these materials show death -the lm's main theme -directly. e documentary does not explain why everything that happened, happened, because this is beyond its available cognition, and probably beyond cognition as such. In the ghetto, believing in God was just as abstract a utopia as believing that running an open kitchen would save lives. e archivists' motivation to work was provided by their Romantic delity to lost causes, shown without any tall tales or aestheticisation. Viewers are le only with remembrance and respect for the people thanks to whom it endured. ever handled a camera, but they quickly get the hang of it. ey carry out one of their rst cinematographic tasks on a windy hill, where Kabul's youngsters ght by cutting down one another's kites. Flying kites was banned by the Taliban, just like all forms of depicting human beings. For the students, the footage they shoot on the hill thus has the aspect of being a double overstepping of a religiously motivated ban, the violation of which the Taliban punished by death. One long shot taken from above captures an explosion. Black smoke slowly oats above the city. What actually happened is shown in the . -minute lm Otchłań [Abyss][ ] -one of several student documentaries whose fragments have been incorporated into Kites.
e lmmakers in this case were Ali Korosh and Mohammed Ali, two -year-old participants in the course. eir lm is what we would call a spontaneous observational documentary, which is an immediate response to an event and is di erent from a reportage in its usually less objective camera viewpoint and the use of supplementary footage shot at a later time.
Ali and Mohammed discontinued their exercise on the hill when they noticed a funeral taking place down below. It turned out to be the burial of a woman who had been killed in the bomb explosion. e students were given permission to lm during the ceremony. A er shooting the funeral, they went to the scene of the crime. ey also decided to conduct an interview with the murdered woman's son. ey arranged to meet him on the h day a er the funeral -the earliest possible time, since four days is the time of strict mourning in the Muslim religion. ey took the rst question they asked -about the happiest day in the interviewee's life -from a street survey that all the course participants conducted. e lm has multiple religious dimensions. A bomb planted in the name of God on Friday, the holy day, killed the protagonist's mother and other people. e funeral is held according to the rules of Islam. A beggar present at the burial asks for help in the name of God for a Muslim brother, and not simply a brother. ere are no women present, of course. On the other hand, the son takes part in the ceremony wearing a black shirt, not traditional clothes. And, most importantly, one of the people at the funeral says boldly to the camera that the Taliban's activities run contrary to Islam. is lends extra power to the concluding statement of the son, who recalls his mother teaching him that religion does not allow people to despair at death. e student exercise shows the documentary lmmakers' ability to respond spontaneously to the -unquestionably transcendent -call of reality, at the same time showing their courage in presenting views that are hard for their native audience to accept. Moreover, Abyss plays a particularly important role in the structure of Kites -a lm showing the impossibility of communication between lmmakers from Europe and young people brought up in the Central Asian culture of Islam, in a country where violating religious rules can still be punishable by death, even though the Taliban have been ousted from power. Abyss increases the believability of the danger involved. It is about crime in its purest form, because the murdered woman had done the Taliban no wrong. It tells its story in an unmediated way, showing an event taking place in the lm's actual time and space. In Kites, this e ect is enhanced by the explosion, an event that was lmed by accident. In this part of the lm, we move away from the observational mode towards the participatory mode.
Abyss is a religious lm in the sense of the de nitions discussed earlier, whereas Kites shows that the reality not readily accessible to the European camera also has a religious aspect that Muslims nd hard to cope with. It is not enough to be reconciled to death, which also appears in the lm in other situations and which is commonplace in Afghanistan. e lm's director rejects the easy explanation for attitudes, i.e. invoking the rules of Islam, something that viewers used to European axiology might want. us, although they expected a clari ed image, they will leave the cinema in a state of performative confusion.
Fragility of bonds of trust (Communion, dir. Anna Zamecka, ) Communion is a participatory documentary, no di erent from a ction lm in terms of lmmaking cra . It tells the true story of -year-old Ola, who takes care of her -year-old autistic brother Nikodem as he prepares for his First Communion in provincial Poland. ey both live with their alcoholic father. eir mother has le them and now has a child with another man. e First Communion is meant to o er a chance for her return, which is Ola's dream. e lm won awards at the Warsaw Film Festival and in the Locarno Critics' Week, received a European Film Award and a Polish Film Award, and was also short-listed for an Academy Award.
Communion draws its strength from the protagonist's relationship with the world. Fighting for her family, Ola becomes a Romantic child who sees more than the adults around her. And although the things she experiences are very painful sometimes, thanks to love she is the one who nds a way to get through to her disabled brother and to in uence her father, even though both of them exist outside the boundaries of so-called normalcy. e camera focuses on her; especially closeup shots turn her into a strong character whose face expresses emotions better than would have been made possible by abundant lm means. e father and the brother compete for the role of her main antagonist. e lm's director called the latter a prophet in the lm's development, introducing a metaphysical element into the story[ ].
In fact, he does o er some aphorisms, e.g. "reality becomes ction". He is also able to defend what he believes in. Risking that the priest, whom his sister calls "mean", will refuse to allow him to have his First Communion, he insists to the very end that the theological virtues are faith, hope, and gluttony. e communion ceremony is shown in an ambiguous way in the lm. Its formal importance seems to dominate strongly over the religious. It is of fundamental importance in the story's structure, as it gives Ola a chance to move a step forward in her plan to reunite the family, since the mother decides to take part in the celebration. We learn from the director that it was thanks to her e orts that the priest nally decided to allow Nikodem to receive communion[ ]. e love that rules in the world represented in this documentary turns out to be independent of religion; it has a separate and powerful status. ere is a reason why the Buddhist monks to whom Zamecka presented her lm in Japan asked about the role of religion in Ola's daily life. On the other hand, no such questions are asked of her in Europe, which she nds surprising[ ]. Perhaps it is because of something noticed by S. Brent Plate, author of the book Religion and Film: Cinema and Re-Creation of the World ( ) based on experiences from observing di erent religions. He wrote that "religion is about bodies, not beliefs. "[ ] Religion in Europe is more the sphere of beliefs, whereas the Buddhist monks sensed the energy of a body where goodness lived. Actually, everyone is good in the world portrayed in Communion; nobody is accused: not the unruly boy, not the father with his partiality for beer, not the priest who can say "get lost" and make the family lose the money they invested in the ceremony, not even the mother, although she le her children and husband and refuses to return despite her daughter's su ering.
An interpretation that attributes transcendental meaning to the communion presented in the story also seems justi able. e attitudes of the protagonists -Ola, Nikodem, the father and the mother -can be described in terms of fragility as understood by Levinas and especially Ricoeur, according to whom "the individuality of character, i.e. the limited practical and motivational opening up of the acting subject to the world, undergoes endless extension together with the drive for happiness, whereas in the realm of a ectivity, isolated vital feelings open up to the comprehensive, happiness-generating horizon of spiritual feelings. is existential dialectics builds the foundation of the socalled ontology of disproportion, which comes down to human beings' experientially given inherent disproportion, making them emotionally fragile and consequently fallible, imperfect beings. "[ ] is is the way [30] Ibidem.
[32] R. Grzywacz SJ, Krucha podmiotowość, czyli o sporze na gruncie Lévinasowskiej i Ricoeurowskiej lozo i człowieka oraz niektórych jego implikacjach dla rozumienia zdrowia psychicznego, "Logos i Ethos" in which Ola feels responsible for the "fragilities" shown in the lm: her brother's Christianity, her parents' relationship. It does not matter whether they are genuine or only imagined by her.
According to Ricoeur, the bond of trust woven between "fragility" and "the one responsible" is not created by reason, but comes from deep layers of emotionality. "When we come face to face with the fragile, a feeling of pity and compassion is immediately born. We very clearly feel a call to help, to protect the fragile. "[ ] Guided by such a premise in the process of absorbing the documentary, viewers might take responsibility for the fragility of which Ola's attitude is also a part. If this happened, it would be up to the viewers to say if the lm carries a "hidden religiousness" whose "analysis enables us to notice deep spiritual or metaphysical meanings". e documentary character of the message strengthens the credibility of the situation and the power of the call to help. e opportunity presented by the First Communion has not worked out, but perhaps a new one will appear in future. Nikodem -a prophet and thus a poet -stands a chance of extracting it from a world in which he plays a privileged epistemological role. Today, from the other side of the screen, we know this will not happen, because the father has since died,[ ] but this is of no signi cance for the immanent interpretation of the work and the expectations of its audience. ). e lm received a Polish Film Award and several other awards, although the festival circuit was not the lmmakers' aim. In the case of this project, winning Poland's most important professional lm award was of special signi cance. e voting members of the Polish Film Academy used it to show that they valued the poignant subject matter and the sources found by the lmmakers more than the lmmaking cra itself, which is not of the highest order in Tell No One.
An investigative documentary is participatory by its very nature. Its aim is to get to the hidden truth, and this is also the case with Tell No One. e power of the lm lies in the fact that its makers sought out many paedophilia victims, lawyers, and some of the perpetrators, and persuaded them to take part in the project, and also that they have incorporated archival materials. Sekielski sometimes used a hidden camera and recorded sound without his interlocutors' knowledge. He has also included interviews with victims who remain anonymous. He does not hesitate to inform viewers about which Roman Catholic hierarchs in Poland refused to be interviewed.
With some of its narrative solutions and its ambition to in uence reality, this documentary mimics the work of Michael Moore (and Sekielski even looks a little like him). However, its structure is that of a journalistic report, in which a cohesive three-part composition is less important than adding consecutive cases of child abuse by priests. e witnesses speak very emotionally about the events. e lm's imperfect cra smanship does not get in the way of viewers' strongly a ective reception of the testimonies, which gives the appearance of having been planned with faith that a lm can change the world. is is a Tyrtaean documentary in the sense that it bolsters up the victims' courage and puts fear into the perpetrators. It proves the great power of revealing the truth in de ance of the hypocrisy of the state and church hierarchies, the hostility shown by the public, and the indi erence of media institutions. It continues the discussion begun by Wojciech Smarzowski's Clergy ( ), a ction feature about the sins of church hierarchies, including paedophilia. With over million viewers, it was the biggest box o ce success in Poland in the st century, con rming just how powerful the topic Sekielski chose for his documentary is.
A few conclusions stemming from this lm shocked Polish audiences. First of all, there was the great extent of the problem and the impunity of the perpetrators, who o en took advantage of support from the church authorities and the state's sympathetic silence. en, there was the insolence, self-assurance, and hypocrisy of some hierarchs and priests, ostentatiously contradicting the laws of the Decalogue. Finally, there was the fact that the guilty group included the Rev. Henryk Jankowski, who had celebrated Mass at the Gdańsk Shipyard during the workers' strike in August , and the Rev. Franciszek Cybula, chaplain of Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Solidarity who was president of Poland in the years -. It is worth adding that both these priests had been secret collaborators of the communist Security Service. Wałęsa stated in Sekielski's lm that due to his peasant origins, which cast the clergy in the role of an unquestioned authority, he would not have dared to suspect the Rev. Cybula of anything.
Of course, Tell No One is not a religious lm, although, paradoxically, it ful ls the requirements of Przylipiak's de nition, as well as the Rev. Lis's (item ). Nor does it contain an attack on religion, though that would not have been surprising. Some of the victims of paedophilia declare themselves to be religious; others say they have lost their faith. As the knowledge about the subject of the documentary investigation grows, the viewer is taken further away from the transcendent. From the point of view of the present paper, the people in Sekielski's documentary represent quasi-religious attitudes in their purest form, despite the slightly excessive style applied by the lm's director.
In , Tomasz Sekielski made his next documentary on paedophilia committed by clergymen: Playing Hide and Seek. e same year saw broadcasts of Marcin Gutowski's reportages, Don Stanislao: e Other Face of Cardinal Dziwisz and Don Stanislao: Post Scriptum, which focus on the long-time papal secretary. e director of Tell No One has announced plans for a lm on the role of John Paul II in the dissimulation of crimes committed by priests and on the Redemptorist Tadeusz Rydzyk, head of Radio Maryja and one of the most in uential gures of Poland's political life. A summary of the second decade of the st century in Polish lm will have to give these investigative documentaries their due place. e discussion so far has aimed to show that an issue of fundamental importance for documentary lms -the attitudes of the people they present -can be considered separately from any attempts to classify a documentary in terms of its genre (or sub-genre) and its style. None of the projects outlined above are a "religious lm" in the sense of ful lling the criteria of various de nitions of the genre and enabling it to win institutional or -sometimes coinciding -theological approval. "Transcendent(al) style", on the other hand, does not appear as a useful category in re ecting on documentaries, and especially in trying to separate fragments of a lm that are devoted to religion from those that are not. e truth is, although they need to have the courage to not always evade stylistic and narrational aws, documentaries should follow a uniform, coherent style. It might be possible to prove the e ectiveness of applying Schrader's concept in the hermeneutics of Into Great Silence, but such an attempt lies outside the area of the present study.
However, this does not mean that Who Will Write Our History, Kites and Communion (Sekielski's investigative documentary being a separate trend) are not evidence of the possibility "to join an experience of the absolute to the idea of the absolute", if we refer to " e Hermeneutics of Testimony. "[ ] In the rst two of the above lms, it is the partially or fully religious experience of war and death, and in the third -the experience of a religious rite experienced by a protagonist endowed with an augmented sense of observation. Applying such an interpretative key to Kites and Tell No One additionally implies an ironic-Romantic overturning of the axiology created by institutional representatives of religions committing or at least allowing crime. Unlike in literature, where the more of circumstances are unusual and complicated the more the imagination of the reader works, lm can count on stimulating the imagination by referring to the audience's own experience. However, for this to happen, the author must rely on his sense of observation. is is usually when a documentary is made.[ ] I think this principle is noticeable in all four lms. To increase her lm's power as an instrument of cognizance, Roberta Grossman adds dramatisations; Beata Dzianowicz uses the lm-within-a-lm technique as a means of changing the character of the narrative and the relationship with the viewer; Anna Zamecka in uences events. For Tomasz Sekielski, the primary criterion for using speci c materials is their factual value. In each of these cases, the audience's own experience mentioned by Kieślowski can be a religious experience on di erent levels: as a metaphysical attempt to explain the course of history within the Divine logic of history, or only as minimised knowledge on the actions of the clergy of di erent religions in a world proceeding according to the rules they created.

Conclusion
Leaving a discussion on documentary lm as philosophy and as religion for a di erent occasion, I would like to o er a few words about the question of imagination raised by Kieślowski. If a documentary is to be a "re-creation of the world", it should expect the audience to work their imagination in accordance with the message of Blake and Coleridge, who speak not only of creation and re-creation with the imagination, but also of how it establishes laws that must be respected in this world. Such a model of action is close to the paradigm of Romanticism, especially the part related to epistemology. Art serves ever new cognizance and does not accept its earlier, ine ective instruments. It attains transcendence in a religious sense, but also in an act of creation that is considered heresy, stemming not only from rejecting the old but also searching for a new God, or determining that there is no God. And it is in this sense that the religious and quasi-religious attitudes shown in the four lms discussed here justify considering each of them as a documentary that is a Griersonian creative treatment of (religious) actuality.