Alicja Helman (1935–2021)

Abstract

Alicja Helman passed away on February 24th 2021 in Torrivieja, Andalusia, where she had lived with her husband for the last four years of her life. With her demise a certain epoch in Polish film studies has ended. I met her in the mid-1980s. My academic career was just beginning, whereas Helman, widely known simply as ‘Alicja’ was already a distinguished figure in the Polish film studies, author of many books and essays on film theory published regularly in the most prestigious Polish film magazine of the time, Kino. I liked her way of thinking about cinema and tried to give my first writings on film a similar shape, therefore I wanted her to supervise my doctoral thesis. I asked my friend, who happened to know Alicja, to pass her my most recent achievement, a long, around 50.000 words typescript on the filmic narrator. I waited for her to come back to me for several months, which seemed to me like ages, but, most importantly, her reaction was favourable. Alicja agreed to supervise my PhD; later she also reviewed my habilitation work. In the meantime, we became close colleagues, perhaps even friends. Beyond doubt my professional life would have been very different without her. This is my story, but with some minor alterations it could have been a story of many people from my professional milieu in Poland. Alicja exerted an enormous influence on Polish film studies. The time of her professional career overlapped with a dynamic growth of this academic discipline, both in Poland and elsewhere. When she started her work at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1955, this discipline was a novelty, represented by a handful of professors, such as Jerzy Toeplitz. Now, several hundred Polish academics carry on research on various forms of moving images, and it would be difficult to find an institution of higher education, with departments of humanities or social sciences which does not conduct this kind of research. Admittedly, it probably would have happened without Alicja, for such was the zeitgeist, but it did happen with her enormous contribution and on her terms. For a long time nothing significant in Polish film studies could have happened without her involvement, be it conferences publications or launching of individual careers. In the 1980s and the 1990s practically all young Polish film studies researchers passed through her hands. She supervised and reviewed doctoral dissertations and habilitation theses. Some time ago Alicja herself told me a story. A young student meeting her for the first time exclaimed: ‘Wow, I can see a monument to Polish films studies’. This statement, probably a sign of the highest appreciation for Helman’s elevated position, and more than slightly ambivalent for her (although she told the story with amusement), was very true. Alicja Helman was, is and will remain a monumental figure in the Polish films studies. Alicja, a person of legendary diligence, whose numerous activities could be easily distributed among several people, left her successors and tributaries a surprising task. Either out of modesty, or of lack of time, or perhaps due to some other, unknown reasons, she was reluctant to catalogue her publications. To my knowledge, she didn’t make a list of her works, which in the world of academia, with its ‘publish or perish’ attitude, is very rare. This brings about problems to anyone who would like to know how many books and articles Alicja has published. A lot, for sure, but what does it mean exactly? The only reliable source