Pamięci Topsy / Re-membering Topsy, 2022
wideo / video 9’

On January 4th, 1903, an elephant named Topsy, who had spent years performing in a circus, was publicly electrocuted. The execution was filmed by Thomas Edison’s company, producing Electrocuting an Elephant — one of the earliest cinematic recordings of real death and a haunting image at the intersection of cinema, spectacle, and cruelty.

Michał Matuszewski’s video essay revisits this fragment of film history as an epitaph to Topsy — an animal whose life and death were marked by human violence. By decelerating the original footage to a single frame per second and re-editing it with subtle precision, the work reveals otherwise invisible presences: gestures, spaces, and temporal suspensions between life and death.

The piece reflects on cinema’s dual nature as both an apparatus of preservation and an instrument of disappearance — where every frame is a trace of life already gone.

Presented at the exhibition CYRK, National Museum in Warsaw (Królikarnia), May–September 2022.

Life Is Movement: Polish Biological Cinema (in progress)

Teaser: https://youtu.be/Kud1WxSjGUs 

Developed within the Essay Film Studio (vnLab, Łódź Film School).
Teaser → https://youtu.be/Kud1WxSjGUs

This long-term video essay project revisits forgotten strands of Polish scientific and biological filmmaking, especially the productions of the Educational Film Studio (WFO) in Łódź. These films — such as Development of a Bird Embryo, Work of the Trout Embryo Heart, or Life Is Movement — oscillate between vitality and death, observation and manipulation, biology and metaphysics.

The film reflects on the microscopic aesthetics of cinema, its ambivalent power to animate and dissect life. Through archival materials, Life Is Movement constructs a “micro-theory of cinema” — suggesting that film, as a medium, treats all beings, including humans, as laboratory specimens.

Animal Gaze – wideoesej, reż. Michał Matuszewski

(work in progress) 

Teaser: https://vimeo.com/493910930 

Animal Gaze (in progress, expected completion 2027)

A found-footage research film supported by the Culture and Animals Foundation.
Teaser → https://vimeo.com/493910930

Animal Gaze is an essayistic exploration of cinema from a nonhuman perspective. Re-editing fragments of film history — from early cinema to contemporary avant-garde and popular culture — the project examines how animals have been represented, framed, and silenced within the anthropocentric logic of the moving image.

The film seeks traces of an “animal gaze” hidden within the history of cinema, asking how film might reveal the presence of nonhuman subjects and how visual technologies could be re-imagined beyond the human viewpoint.