2022, 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.