Karol Irzykowski's "The Tenth Muse: Aesthetic Considerations of Cinema"

FAIN: FT-55322-07

Sheila Skaff
University of Texas, El Paso (El Paso, TX 79968-8900)

Film theorist Karol Irzykowski (1873-1944) was commissioned by the Polish government to write “The Tenth Muse: Aesthetic Considerations of Cinema" as a primer on film aesthetics between 1922 and 1924. My translation of "The Tenth Muse" comprises the first complete, edited, English-language version of this masterpiece of film theory. My book includes a critical analysis of "The Tenth Muse" and an introduction to film thought in Poland before World War II. I argue that the theories of the relationship between language and motion pictures developed in the writings of Irzykowski and his contemporaries are rooted in the cultural policies of the empires during Poland's partition period.