In celebration of the first major review of Polish animation in the six-decade history of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Culture.pl presents the pioneers of the genre, alongside the youngest generation.
Julian Józef Antoniszczak (Antonisz)
The filmmaker, inventor and composer made 36 films, including animated and experimental films. His works were characterised by a technique called "non-camera films", in which he explored the themes of transience and human fallibility through a technique that did away with the camera in favour of applying animations directly onto film tape.
Wojciech Bąkowski
His work in film reflects a new-found internationalism that references the developments of modernism whilst simultaneously engaging with the legacy of the former East. His trademark style consists of expressive images and his low, trance-like voice in the background.
Walerian Borowczyk
The "cut-out" technique used in his first films with Jan Lenica worked well to convey an amusing message as well as grotesque expression right up to absurdity and horror like that of Ionesco and Kafka. From the start, Borowczyk treated animated film as a form of "highbrow" art. The presence of humour deserves to be stressed - in many cases absurd, and evoking associations with surrealism - in his animated and feature films.
Ryszard Czekała
As one of the reformers of Polish animation of the late 1960s, his focus on plot brought animated film closer to feature film or documentary. His films might have been told with actors, but the animation form provided additional meanings and greater expression.
Witold Giersz
As a director and writer of screenplays for animated films, he has remained an uneasy spirit, an artist in perpetual pursuit of inspiration. He has experimented in fields that aren’t necessarily associated with animated films, while introducing novel ideas to cinema.
Jerzy Kalina
His oeuvre encompasses a number of separate, varied activities invented by Kalina, such as "ritual actions," "determinants" and "living pictograms". His work generated social resonance of unheard-of proportions in the realm of public art. Since 1973, he has been creating animated films, winning awards at Polish and international festivals.
Mirosław Kijowicz
The director, production designer, filmmaker and painter made highly creative, clever films, and is a major player in Polish animation, right alongside his contemporary Jan Lenica.
Jerzy Kucia
On an international level, he is one of the best-known creators of Polish animation. Numerous retrospectives of his work have been held in festivals in Zagreb, Clermont-Ferrand, London and Cannes, and films have been aired by BBC, screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and distinguished with numerous awards.
Jan Lenica
His work helped transform the genre of animated film into one capable of communicating the most complex, difficult and serious messages. He was recognised as an talented graphic artist, set and theatre-costume designer, children's book illustrator, a major artist of the Polish poster school and postage-stamp designer, an experimental animator and an art critic.
Hieronim Neumann
His films use technical tricks, often based upon innovative solutions. They constitute a distinct phenomenon in Polish animation, at the same time being a part of its experimental trend and pushing boundaries of the form.
Andrzej Pawłowski
Photographer, designer, sculptor, and filmmaker known for creating films based on photographic forms without the use of a camera, and for new solutions for applied arts. He transferred Kineforms, born as a result of a fascination with suitcase theatre and photographic techniques, to film and won a medal for these innovative forms at the Expo '58 in Brussels.
Izabela Plucińska
Her films employ a characteristic method of plasticine animation, which she constantly develops and perfects. Her technique gives an effect of the fluent merging of colours into one another.
Józef Robakowski
With the Workshop of Film Forum, he focused on an analysis of new media language, striving to rid film of "alien elements" - anecdote, literary forms, narration - and make its language simpler and the information denser. From 1974, Robakowski also embraced a new medium - video art.
Zbigniew Rybczyński
Rybczyński uses film and electronic media to create visual images that are not merely reflections of the superficial but rather penetrate the truths hidden deep inside. This is what the artist considers indispensable to achieve the aim of representing - and first and foremost understanding - the real world.
Piotr Szulkin
Having established himself as a director interested in humans as social beings, he is an artist who analyses ideas to the point of obsession, exploring such themes as the evil that influences an individual’s behavior in society - portrayed as a kind of imprisonment or incapacitation.
Stefan and Franciszka Themerson
The writer-painter couple worked together on seminal films in the history of Polish animation, including The Eye and the Ear, completed in 1945.
Daniel Szczechura
He aims to make films that resemble narrative features, and exhibits a tendency to compose shots in a cinematic manner rather than in a manner characteristic of the visual arts - as a filmmaker, not as a draughtsman.