In Alain Resnais’s documentary Night and Fog (France, 1955), the off-screen narrator says: “War slumbers, always with one eye open.” The dramatic consequences of what lies behind this metaphor are felt above all by human beings—especially when the machinery of war sweeps them up against their convictions or without their consent. At the same time, war—as a subject, a historical fact, a source of motifs and associations, but also as a notion that eludes simple definition (“a condition of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state”—as phrased in The Oxford Essential Dictionary of the U.S. Military)—finds reflection in art. There is no need to argue for the potential multidimensionality of this encounter. It is, however, worth narrowing our focus and examining with scholarly precision how images of war function within the conventions of documentary cinema. There are at least five reasons that justify such a narrowing.
First, Polish and international cinema offer a fascinating wealth of aspects that pertain to the documentary/war adjacency. We mean both the diversity of stylistic strategies (ranging from poetic meditation—found, for example, in the work of Humphrey Jennings—to the rawness of reportage, with a whole gamut of solutions in between—yet always connected to what we would like to call “the art of documentary cinema,” going beyond the simple recording of images of reality) and the motivations behind a given work. Its core may be the need to bear witness (to crimes or to the suffering that results from them), but no less interesting—at least from a historical–film perspective—are those works driven by propagandistic–political reasons (a telling example is Zbigniew Raplewski’s documentary Saved in Memory [Ocalałe w pamięci, Polska, 1986], made in response to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah [France, 1985]; there are also documentaries that simply make the wartime–propaganda thread their main topic: see Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp’s War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death [USA, 2007]). Add to this issues related, for instance, to time (documentaries based on reconstruction vs. those built from materials created in wartime realities) or quasi-genres within the non-fiction convention (e.g., the documentary portrait), and a rich bundle of film-studies questions emerges—often still awaiting discovery.
Second, it is hard to deny that the thematic–aesthetic vitality of the proposed topic is evidenced by many titles that, after 2022, document the reality of Ukraine attacked by Russia. And while there is no shortage of outstanding films in this group (let us mention only Maciej Hamela’s In the Rearview [Skąd-dokąd, Poland, 2023] and Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted [Przechwycone, Ukraine, 2024]), we encourage contributors above all to seek research inspirations in the entire history of Polish and world nonfiction cinema (a history richly endowed with works, creative figures, and diverse issues related, for instance, to the Spanish Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, wars on the African continent, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the First and Second Gulf Wars). This is very important, among other reasons, because it offers a chance to eliminate significant gaps in Polish film-studies reflection (to point only to the work of Ken Burns, Jon Blair, or Roman Karmen).
Third, let the planned volume attempt at least partially to reduce the imbalance that appears in studies of war in cinema—where the predominance (in terms of the number of books and individual articles) lies, as one might easily guess, on the side of scholarly reflection on the conventions of the fictional. Examples of texts that address our topic (to be found, for instance, in David L. Anderson’s The Columbia Guide to the Vietnam War [2002] or in the volume edited by Martin Löschnigg and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, The Enemy in Contemporary Film [2018]) demonstrate, however, that this imbalance has nothing to do with the quality of the material under study; rather, it reflects differences in the popularity of film conventions within Polish and global cinematography.
Fourth, in view of the diversity of potential research material, we propose that submitted articles exemplify both broader—synthetic—approaches and extensive, detailed analyses and (re)interpretations of specific documentary works (considered, of course, against a reconstructed historical, cinematic, cultural, etc., context). Both approaches—and all solutions in between—offer an opportunity not only to take up a weighty subject but also to demonstrate in practice a wide array of tools for studying documentary cinema.
Fifth, one aspect of the proposed problematic has a special status in contact with documentary film: the creators’ confrontation with the topic of death, inevitable in the context of war (in a broader sense, not limited to war, Sophie Monks Kaufman writes on this subject in the essay “The Weight of Death in Documentary”). Viewers sometimes encounter it in the form of large numbers (there is no shortage of them in Errol Morris’s masterpiece The Fog of War [USA, 2003]), but far more naturalistic depictions are not uncommon either (for example, Janus Metz’s Armadillo [Denmark, Sweden, 2010]). We also encourage tackling this thread—and its aesthetic/ethical implications.
The celebrated conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein once said (1972): ”The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed. (…) And because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events . . . by the way they vote, the way they behave, the way they think.” With this in mind, we invite indepth reflection on “images of war in documentary cinema.”
We await your submissions (in Polish or English) until September 30, 2026. The planned publication date for the volume is 2027. Although the journal provides basic copyediting in English, authors of English-language submissions whose native language is not English are required to arrange stylistic editing of their texts by a native speaker of English. Please carefully study the submission guidelines, available at: https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/i/about/submissions.
Any questions may be directed to the editorial board of “Images” or to the editors of the planned volume (email addresses below).
Prof. Mikołaj Jazdon, PhD
(Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; mikolaj.jazdon@amu.edu.pl)
Michał Oleszczyk, PhD
(University of Warsaw; michal.oleszczyk@al.uw.edu.pl)
Piotr Pławuszewski, PhD
(Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; plawusz@amu.edu.pl)