Alicja Helman passed away on February 24th 2021 in Torrivieja, Andalusia, where she had lived with her husband for the last four years of her life. With her demise a certain epoch in Polish film studies has ended.
I met her in the mid-1980s. My academic career was just beginning, whereas Helman, widely known simply as ‘Alicja’ was already a distinguished figure in the Polish film studies, author of many books and essays on film theory published regularly in the most prestigious Polish film magazine of the time, Kino. I liked her way of thinking about cinema and tried to give my first writings on film a similar shape, therefore I wanted her to supervise my doctoral thesis. I asked my friend, who happened to know Alicja, to pass her my most recent achievement, a long, around 50.000 words typescript on the filmic narrator. I waited for her to come back to me for several months, which seemed to me like ages, but, most importantly, her reaction was favourable. Alicja agreed to supervise my PhD; later she also reviewed my habilitation work. In the meantime, we became close colleagues, perhaps even friends. Beyond doubt my professional life would have been very different without her.
This is my story, but with some minor alterations it could have been a story of many people from my professional milieu in Poland. Alicja exerted an enormous influence on Polish film studies. The time of her professional career overlapped with a dynamic growth of this academic discipline, both in Poland and elsewhere. When she started her work at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1955, this discipline was a novelty, represented by a handful of professors, such as Jerzy Toeplitz. Now, several hundred Polish academics carry on research on various forms of moving images, and it would be difficult to find an institution of higher education, with departments of humanities or social sciences which does not conduct this kind of research. Admittedly, it probably would have happened without Alicja, for such was the zeitgeist, but it did happen with her enormous contribution and on her terms. For a long time nothing significant in Polish film studies could have happened without her involvement, be it conferences publications or launching of individual careers. In the 1980s and the 1990s practically all young Polish film studies researchers passed through her hands. She supervised and reviewed doctoral dissertations and habilitation theses. Some time ago Alicja herself told me a story. A young student meeting her for the first time exclaimed: ‘Wow, I can see a monument to Polish films studies’. This statement, probably a sign of the highest appreciation for Helman’s elevated position, and more than slightly ambivalent for her (although she told the story with amusement), was very true. Alicja Helman was, is and will remain a monumental figure in the Polish films studies.
Alicja, a person of legendary diligence, whose numerous activities could be easily distributed among several people, left her successors and tributaries a surprising task. Either out of modesty, or of lack of time, or perhaps due to some other, unknown reasons, she was reluctant to catalogue her publications. To my knowledge, she didn’t make a list of her works, which in the world of academia, with its ‘publish or perish’ attitude, is very rare. This brings about problems to anyone who would like to know how many books and articles Alicja has published. A lot, for sure, but what does it mean exactly? The only reliable source is a book Kino według Alicji (Cinema according to Alicja), published in her honour in 1995, where one of her many pupils, Andrzej Gwóźdź, put together all her academic achievements. This list includes 19 books that she authored or co-authored (Alicja often invited other people to co-author), 28 anthologies edited or co-edited by her, and 102 academic papers. One must also not forget about film reviews and popular articles, which have always constituted an important part of her output. And, obviously, the list did not cover her publications after 1995, and Alicja was active to her last days. After 1995, she published at least ten books (some of them with other authors), and high number of papers, articles, anthologies. Her last book, an extensive volume on film adaptations of Thomas Mann novels, is forthcoming. Polish film studies must now face a big challenge of cataloguing her entire output.
It is important to remember, though, that her publications, however impressive in quality and quantity, cover only a part of Alicja’s activity. She was also an accomplished academic teacher. She supervised at least 50 doctoral dissertations, organized a great number of conferences and ventures and was in charge of film studies departments at universities where she worked, especially the Silesian University in Katowice and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Both these institutions witnessed the same phenomenon: shortly after her arrival, the field of film studies began to grow, empowered by young enthusiasts, only to eventually become a respected centre of research. It wouldn’t have happened without one more of Alicja’s gifts – her ability to win people over and to find and mobilize their best resources. Alicja has great social skills, a participant, host or organizer of many informal meetings and parties during which serious debates intermingled with cracking jokes, and retelling anecdotes, some of which gained a legendary status. Last but not least, she was a cat lover, cats paraded proudly at her home, and she engaged in cat-inspired conversations at least as eagerly as in conversations on complexities of film theory.
The love of cats notwithstanding, it is film theory which drew primary attention to her writings and constituted a large portion of her academic output. Her first three books were about film music and sound in cinema, which is not surprising, given that her first degree was in musicology. Subsequent books concerned classical theoretical issues, such as film realism (Film faktów i film fikcji (Films of Facts and Films of Fiction, 1977) or ontology of cinema (Co to jest kino, What is Cinema, 1978). She was preoccupied with film semiotics; she was a member of several semiotic associations and published a two-volume Historia semiotyki filmu (History of Film Semiotics, vol. I. 1991; vol II. 1993). An important field of her research was film adaptation. She wrote a dozen or so important articles on the subject, which have canonical status in film studies departments in Poland, only to conclude it with a book under a meaningful title Twórcza zdrada (Creative Betrayal, 1998; sec ed. 2014), in which theoretical findings are condensed to about twenty pages, giving space to fascinating analyses of around 30 films. This testifies to versatility of Alicja’s writing. She was able to carry on a purely theoretical reasoning, barely mentioning any film title at all, as in Historia myśli filmowej (History of Film Thought, 2008), co-authored with Jacek Ostaszewski, but she was equally fluent in concealing theory behind close readings of films. Alicja’s theoretical findings are still relevant, but simultaneously to establishing her own theoretical concepts, she strove to keep Polish film studies in touch with what was going on worldwide. In the pre-internet era of the 1980s, when the Iron Curtain still existed and contact with the outside world was made harder by politics, she considered it simply her mission. It is through her that Lacanian film psychoanalysis came to Poland. Helman did not belong to its followers, but she honestly described its findings. She gave account of most recent achievements of film feminism and cognitivism. Alicja also translated important theoretical works. It is through her translation that Polish readers got acquainted with classical book of Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay (Dramat kinowy, 1990), or with Barry Salt’s opus magnum Film Style and Technology (Styl i technologia filmu, 2003), not to mention many important articles. She was always up to date with important trends in film studies, and managed to bring significant publications to Poland, which she eagerly shared with her colleagues, doctoral students and collaborators. Thanks to Alicja, we all felt that we belonged to the international community of film studies, keeping our fingers on the pulse.
Film theory, in its soft and hard version, gave Alicja visibility and a supreme position in the Polish film studies, but another part of her academic output, closely related to films, was no less important. Her books from that part can be easily laid out along the ‘authors and genres’ axis. On the one hand, Alicja published many monographs on outstanding film directors, such as Kurosawa (1970), Visconti (2001), Saura (2005) or Hartley (with Andrzej Pitrus, 2007). More recently her attention was drawn to Chinese cinema, which resulted in books on Zhang Yimou (2010), Chen Kaige (2012) and Tian Zhuan-gzhuang (2016). On the other hand, she was fascinated by film genres. Apart from an anthology Kino gatunków (Genre Cinema), which was published in 1991, and of which she was the editor, she authored also Kino sensacyjne (Thrillers, 1992), Kino kryminalne (Crime Cinema, 1974) and Film gangsterski (Gangster Film, 1990). If we took into account also articles, published both in academic anthologies and popular film magazines, it would transpire that very few authors and genres escaped Alicja’s attention.
Alicja bore a remarkably cinematic name, which is testified not only by numerous film adaptations of Alice in Wonderland. Indeed, the same first name was borne by Alice Guy Blaché, first female film director in the whole history of cinema. Moreover, a title of the renowned Teresa De Lauretis’ book - Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema – sounds as if it was coined especially with Alicja Helman in mind. Guests who came with their first visit to Alicja’s apartment in Kraków, were sometimes mistaken by a graffiti on the wall, which announced with Martin Scorsese words that Alice doesn’t live here anymore. Nobody knows who and when painted this graffiti and whether it was related to the protagonist of this tribute, but on the 24th of February 2021 it became painfully true.
The University of Gdansk, ul. Bażyńskiego 8, 80-309 Gdańsk, Poland
[email protected]