solo exhibition Game with Moving Mirrors – Part Three, Wyspa Art Institute in Gdańsk, 2008

K.W.: You showed your film Found Footage at the Wyspa Institute of Art in the form of an installation. It is a film which plays after a coin is slotted into a special machine, standing next to a row of cinema seats. You built a small, seedy cinema there, similar to the cinema from William Friedkin’s Cruising, fragments of which you use to create your own film. It is thanks to this arrangement that we feel like visitors to the seedy porno cinema in that film from 1980. It is your only work which you show in such a way. Why did you want to create a situation like that? You have arranged it in such a way that it reminds us of the situation seen in the film, which is additionally reinforced by the fact that the action takes place in the cinema itself.

B.B.: When I worked on cinematic stories, I found this one and thought that such a form would be best. Because it is a story where reality intermingles with fiction in quite an implausible way. It is cinema within a cinema. Box within a box. And you don’t know which box is the first and which the last. Perhaps it is my installation? Or perhaps the entire exhibition and the building full of films? It is pretty funny because Al Pacino starred in Cruising, so I wanted to make a cut with him in my Shooting Star.
First, I viewed the film in a regular way and, although the film is freaky in itself, nothing special caught my attention. Next, I loaded it into a special programme and watched it at accelerated speed. The specific property of this software is that it stops the action when an important change in the content of a given frame occurs. And suddenly the film stopped on a pornographic frame which I had not noticed before! So, I had an exact moment of “a hot scene” in the film: I approached my computer and could not believe what I was seeing! A classic pornographic shot – genitals during intercourse in a film in which, as I remembered, there was nothing of the sort.
First, I thought that the film had been downloaded from the Internet and someone had inserted it before putting it online. So I bought an original DVD of the film and it turned out that the same shot was there. Later, I read various texts written on the occasion of the release of a new edition of the film after twenty years, which concerned a case of censorship. Friedkin was forced to cut 40 minutes from his film in order to be able to show it. He had to censor it because its morality was “too bold”. Later, he edited these pornographic frames back into the film subliminally. He himself said in some interviews that he did it as a protest against censorship but, in other interviews, he claimed that he inserted these scenes as a form of rape.

K.W.: Did he want to rape his viewers?

B.B.: This film is very bizarre. It’s the story of a serial killer chased by a brave detective, Al Pacino. The pornographic frames are incorporated into the murder scenes; the thrust of a knife changes into the thrust of a penis and so on, interchangeably. However, when you watch the film very carefully, you discover that the murderer is played by different actors, and the person acting the part when the killer is caught is also a different actor. Some people consider this to be the director’s clumsiness; however, the director claims that his film deals with evil, the evil side of our personality which, as in The Exorcist, transplants itself from person to person, and that in fact no one fully understands his film. Still, 40 minutes are missing from the film after censorship, so the swapping of actors becomes completely senseless in this version. There are many strange things in the film; nevertheless, there are also many completely real things in it – the clubs and the people enjoying themselves there are genuine. Friedkin employed many people who were not professional actors. This film proved to be a major scandal in many ways but today it is becoming something of a cult masterpiece.

K.W.: A complete mixture of real life and fiction. The characters of your Found Footage are, among others, a real radiologist and his real assistant shown in a scene where they perform a brain scan on the possessed girl from Friedkin’s The Exorcist – certainly, this is a frame from Friedkin’s film in which real hospital staff also appeared. One member of that staff later turned out to be a real murderer. Bateson, that was his name, killed a film critic, Addison Verrill, and it was a sexually motivated crime. Later, Bateson became Friedkin’s consultant behind bars during the shooting of Cruising – a film about a killer who may have been a real person but was never caught, and so became something like a Jack the Ripper figure. One theory says that the killer was Bateson himself, the radiologist’s assistant. That would mean that in making his film about the killer, Friedkin consulted the actual murderer. Taking all of these elements into account, along with that cinematic situation and the fact that a film critic was the victim, I thought that perhaps your film is a work about the perception and reception of the image.

B.B.: Indeed, this film is in a way about what is real. It is about what is probable. On the other hand, my motive for making this work was my enormous astonishment. When I realised that there were those mysterious frames in the film, I began to investigate what it was about.

excerpt from the interview Fatal Infatuations Will Set Us Free – A Conversation with Bogna Burska by Kamila Wielebska, catalogue Films. Bogna Burska, ed. Aleksandra Grzonkowska, published by Wyspa Art Institute, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, BWA Zielona Góra, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, 2014