Adam Sikora’s Corpus Christi or things of Silesian life

Abstract

The title of Adam Sikora’s film refers to one of the most important Catholic holidays. Lipiny (Silesia, near Katowice), where it was filmed, is famous for the colorful and spectacular procession that takes place on Corpus Christi day. However, the film focuses more on the idiom of everyday life, life in a place where extreme poverty has emerged as a result of industrial transformation. The author claims Sikora’s film is close to an ethnographic documentary, and while it shows poverty, it does not exoticize it. It portrays the harsh reality, but at the same time agency, ways of “coping with” and solidarity in a difficult situation. The author claims that the strength of the film lays not only in “meanings” (“thick description”), but also “thin description”, often ignored by anthropologists, what referring to Eelco Runia and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht could also be called “presence” . Thanks to the depiction of mise-en-scène, many “stowaways” – Runia’s term, who advocates greater metonymicity of descriptions – appear in the film. The author thus argues with Jill Godmilow, who stipulates a break with traditional documentary (Kill the Documentary as We Know It).