Studying Ida

by Sheila Skaff

Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida was exceptionally warmly received in the United States, culminating in the Academy Award for Film Not in the English Language, but it was not without controversy. Sheila Skaff’s introduction to the film explains the historical setting, including the violence that took place in the Polish countryside during World War II and was not exposed for sixty years, and provides political and cultural analysis to aid the reader in understanding the film’s setting and narrative. Skaff also touches on the influence of the film on current events in Poland, where censorship of it by an increasingly nationalist government has polarized the country. It also situates Ida within the contexts of Polish and world film history. Scene-by-scene analysis is accompanied in each chapter by background information that gives context to the aesthetic and narrative choices made by the director.

102 pages, Paperback

Published July 24, 2018

Reviews

[Darya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am very new to anything related to film scholarship, so a study of a film is necessarily full of surprises.
Least related to the subject of the book: how comes black-and-white movies are only associated with film before 1915? the attempts to color film took place for decades since then, and not only starting in the 1950s as I thought? (delving into wikipedia pages on coloring techniques for the whole afternoon)
More related to how this specific book is written, I was surprised at how one can "quote" films, describing the shots and the frames, analyzing them side-by-side.
Not that I am going to seriously branch into film study, but so refreshing.