Preparations for a vernissage are taking place at a modern art gallery. This is not going to be another ordinary exhibition, but a controversial performance devised by a prominent artist. The mortally ill man decides to become an exhibition object and die in front of the audience's eyes. Connected to life-support devices, he will be awaiting his end on a hospital bed.
This is the beginning of the short film by Piotr Adamski, a young artist. The Opening marks his entrance into the world of Polish cinema. The thirty-minute-long film's plot raises the question of the ethical boundaries of art, but also about the human body as its object. There are two female figures in this drama – the head of the art gallery responsible for the controversial exhibition (the excellent yet rarely seen on Polish screens Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik), and a nurse (Edyta Torhan) employed to take care of the terminally ill artist/object.
The sympathetic nurse, does not completely comprehend the point of the performance, while the reserved intellectual completely understands the underlying idea behind her dying’s friend choice, but she is afraid of the corporeal aspect of dying. She watches the man breathing his last from a distance – she wants to see the thought behind him, not the dying body. She prefers the poetry of art to the prose of bedsores and needles. The latter ones are the nurse’s domain – she is outraged death being turned into a spectacle, but at the same time benefits from it financially. To her, the corporeality of the dying man seems completely natural, unlike for the crowd of viewers, who stand with glasses of wine in their hands and watch the dying man, come closer to touch him, and pontificate about his intentions.
By filming the scene of the vernissage, Adamski draws a caricatural portrait of the art circles. But this satire is not at the core of his short film. The Opening is rather a story about the place where thought meets body, and then departs from it at some point. Even if Adamski’s provocative film poses questions we have already heard in cinema, they sound very true in The Opening. Also because the role of the dying man is performed by Zbigniew Libera, one of the most important Polish artists and a pioneer of critical art.
The Opening, granted the Don Quixote award and an award for the director of the best fiction short film during the 56th Kraków Film Festival, is Piotr Adamski’s film debut. The artist, born in 1982, graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, and Wajda School. In the years 2009-2011 Adamski co-created the artistic duet Adamski/Brzuzan together with Karolina Brzuzan. In 2009 he was granted a scholarship from The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and in 2011 a scholarship from Visegrad Fund. In 2010 he got the Samsung Art Master award.
- Otwarcie / The Opening. Written and directed by Piotr Adamski. Cinematography by Tomasz Woźniczka. Cast: Zbigniew Libera, Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik, Edyta Torhan, Sebastian Gawłowski. Produced by Studio Munka, Poland Studio, Culture.pl.