Mariusz Wilczyński: Animated Memories of Łódź
At the 2020 Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France, Poland was represented by Mariusz Wilczyński’s film ‘Kill It and Leave This Town’. A melancholic story, previously shown at the 70th Berlin Film Festival, the film is about memory, the music of Tadeusz Nalepa and the city of Łódź.
Fourteen years: that is how long it took Mariusz Wilczyński to finish his first full-length animation, the premiere of which took place as part of the new competition section at Berlinale – Encounters – in February 2020. Initially, the story was supposed to be only 20 minutes long, but over time, it grew, because new characters, themes as well as topics appeared. And now – it’s almost an hour-and-a-half long.
The narrative meanders, because Kill It and Leave This Town is a story about memory, and it is guided by emotions – not facts or dates. This corresponds perfectly with the characteristic style of Wilczyński’s animation: austere and restrained in the drawing as well as the colour palette, but full of visual metaphors, which sometimes literally flow across the screen.
The film has several heroes, but we spend most of our time with Jadwiga (voiced by Krystyna Janda), whose husband and son are going on a vacation to the seaside. She stays behind and faces the daily hardships of life in communist Poland: disinterested hostile saleswomen, trams jerking passengers around and gloomy weather. Jadwiga works in a morgue, where every day she deals with what remains of a human being – not considering the emotions and memories they leave behind. A few floors above, in the hospital, lays an old, sick woman (Barbara Krafftówna) who is visited by her son (Mariusz Wilczyński). They try to talk, but there is a sort of awkwardness and distance between them, which just cannot be overcome.
The director says that with ‘Kill It’ – this is how the film was baptized by one of its animators, Agata Gorządek – he wanted to finish the conversations that he ran out of time for in real life. The film is full of the type of melancholy and loss that cannot be recovered. The attempt at nullifying transience is about more than just perpetuating the figures of the parents by drawing them – it’s also about inviting outstanding Polish artists to record dialogues. Wilczyński says that by doing this, he wanted to save some of the history of Polish cinema and music that he so loved. Gustaw Holoubek, Irena Kwiatkowska, Andrzej Wajda, Tomasz Stańko, Tadeusz Nalepa, and Janusz Kondratiuk speak to us from the screen.
Apart from them, of course, there are also many living artists: Daniel Olbrychski, Krystyna Janda, and Barbara Krafftówna. Wilczyński recorded Kwiatkowska – who was already weak and fragile – in Skolimów years ago and says that it was a terribly touching meeting. The very recording of the dialogues written in the script changed the film’s shape – the artists’ personalities influenced how the characters developed and what sort of ‘lives’ they took on.
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Still from ‘Kill it and Leave This Town’, directed by Mariusz Wilczyński, photo: Adam Mickiewicz Institute / promotional materials
Wilczyński calls the film a magical time capsule, in which the last performances of Holoubek or Nalepa awaited the premiere. The music of the latter – violent with melancholy, bluesy – is one of the more essential elements of Kill It. The leader of Breakout was also a good spiritual guide in Wilczyński’s own life. According to the artist:
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He influenced me the most. Growing up, Nalepa’s music seemed to come from a different world. We were inundated with communist sugary pop, and then suddenly, a guy appeared who looked and played like an American. He did not smile; the image of Breakout was in general a bit gloomy.
Wilczyński, who decided to meet his idol while still in high school. After searching for a phone number and standing for a long time in a telephone booth, he finally reached Nalepa’s father, saying he was a young director who wanted to make a documentary film about the musician. After a few weeks he was able to get the address – Nalepa’s house was in a clearing in the middle of the forest, but no one was there. ‘Tired, I fell asleep in the forest’, says Wilczyński:
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I was awakened by the voices of Mira (Kubasińska – editor’s note) and Tadeusz, who was struggling with a padlock. I ran to them and scared them quite badly, because, first of all, I was always two meters tall, and after a nap in the woods, leaves and twigs got tangled in my clothes, so I looked like a yeti. Tadeusz quickly realized that I was not a student, but he accepted me.
The director adds: ‘He was my guru, mentor, he shaped the world of my imagination, of which Kill It is partly proof’.
The third hero – after the memory of Wilk’s [the artist’s nickname, meaning ‘Wolf’] life and the music of Nalepa – is the title’s ‘town’, Łódź. The city is where Wilczyński was born and raised, but he has not lived there for many years. ‘Today, years later, it has become a bit foreign to me, but if you were to wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me where is my home, I would, without a doubt, say Łódź.’ – declares Wilczyński, telling us that it was there where he had the most artistically fervent debates and where was most radical as an artist.
Wilkczyński left ‘this town’ to avoid being absorbed by its intensity, which could have distracted him from working on his animations – an accidentally discovered passion, but a true love nonetheless. ‘When I discovered it, I knew that I did not want to do anything else.’ – says Wilczyński, who always emphasizes that he is self-taught, and that he makes films according to his own method and not the Hollywood standard. He treats full-length animations a bit like an object that, in order to be created, has to go through a ‘production line’: first you need a complete script, then an initial version of the animation (the so-called animatics), dialogue recordings, and the actual animation with the actors’ voice work added.
Wilczyński followed a different path, and he matured with Kill It – he was constantly adding new elements, voices as well as emotions to it. And he is a bit surprised by the film’s positive reception at the festival in Berlin. ‘I knew that in Poland, it would have emotional significance – about 100 people saw it and most of them cried. But I was afraid that outside the country the film would be hermetic, and therefore [that it would be] misunderstood.‘
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Still from ‘Kill it and Leave This Town’, directed by Mariusz Wilczyński, photo: Adam Mickiewicz Institute / promotional materials
He was wrong, because the most significant media outlets – The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, The Screen Daily – have been full of enthusiastic reviews for Kill It. Critics understood it without difficulty as a melancholic story about loss and farewells, and viewers – as Wilczyński shares – decided to act on the conclusions they drew from the film and see their ageing parents while time still allowed for it. The director says:
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This is truly valuable. As artists, we are thrilled when we get a medal, praise, but for me what is most beautiful is when a viewer from Japan or Germany comes up to me and says that after the festival, they will go to visit their sick mother.
On the one hand, Wilczyński is glad that the film has aroused so much interest, has found a worldwide sales agent and will be invited to numerous festivals. On the other hand, he almost regrets that it all happened. He says:
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I’d love to go on vacation for a week or two now, and then make another film. It will not be as autobiographical a story as before, but I will make sure it has parts of me in it. I want to make ‘The Master and the Margarita’.
At the same time, he emphasises that the elements of his next film – Behemoth, Berlioz’s head – are found in Kill It. And in this film, unlike in Bulgakov’s work, they do good.
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Kill It and Leave this Town
Originally written in Polish, Jan 2020, translated by Agnes Dudek, Jan 2021
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