According to M. Giżycki (Not only Disney…), Kucia’s works ‘are built on the repetitiveness of themes, cyclicality of events, minimal, almost imperceptible changes’. He compared them to minimalist musical compositions. ‘The repetitiveness of sensations and actions puts the mind in a state between waking and dreaming.’ (Kw. Film. 19-20/1997)
It is connected with appreciating the beauty of the simplest impressions or phenomena. Giżycki recalls Stefan Themerson who told to look for beauty in the movement of clouds, the flash of a fish’s scale or even in the dancing of ‘the scratches on the surface of the film tape’.
Giżycki wrote:
Kucia saw the beauty in the concentrically spreading circles on the water surface or the reflections of light moving on the walls of the compartment of a moving train (or lift). He was fascinated by the everyday life’s monotony, by waiting before the barrier for the train to pass, by mowing of the grass.
Commonplace mundaneness, in the form of life in the countryside, traditional activities, tools, and landscapes all feature in his works. As the director said to Jerzy Wójcik (Rzeczpospolita 2/2002):
I concentrate on mundanity, the provincial, because it appears to me that there one can still find remains of the truth about the essence of our existence and about what of the original, of the true, was left in us. The world is changing. Tradition is dying and I’m getting old myself… So I try to remember the phenomena, objects, and habits that are disappearing, raise them to the rank of art and save them at least in the films.
Giżycki (Nie Tylko Disney…) wrote: ‘He is interested in both fleeting images of the outside world […] and preverbal states of our consciousness – image frames fixed in memory, though not always carrying fully revealed meanings, crumbs of memories’. He called Kucia a ‘film impressionist’.
‘I make films about emotions,’ says Jerzy Kucia ('Rzeczpospolita' 2/2002). ‘At one foreign festival, they were called animated documentaries. I guess that’s correct because they do document the emotional states of the characters.’
He was more interested in the individual, because, as he said on another occasion (Kwartalnik Filmowy 19-20/1997), he was more interested in ‘the details of a concrete life than what can be called the tactics of relationships between people’.
This may be the reason for the non-anecdotal nature of his films, which, in the words of M. Giżycki, are governed by the narrative. As the director said (Kino 4/2001):
In my films, the logic of associations, experience and emotions is […] more important than the logic of facts.
In Jerzy Kucia’s films, image, sound and music are in an integral relationship. In an interview with Monika Wysogląd (Film 31/1986), he said:
My films are rooted in visual arts. […] They also come from the crossroads of literature. I was never influenced by the tradition of animated film.
Critics point out that Kucia creates his world by ‘using various techniques, not limited to animation’ (J. Armata, Film 4/1989). He often uses photography, processing it in a certain way, for example by using laser. In the already quoted interview with J. Wójcik, Kucia said that although he uses processed, unrealised photography, he treats it as a supplement, in collages, because it seems to him that ‘the image is more convincing’ if he uses photos only as a quotation. Thus, he often combines drawings or a cut-out with a photograph or a film camera image, allowing the used technique to determine the nature of the events shown in his films. For example, in the film In the Shadow, the garden and the girl on the swing, both existing objectively, are presented using the photographic technique, while the visions evoked while swinging are presented using traditional art techniques. It is the same in Spring. M. Giżycki situates the director in the wider cinema genre which he calls ‘photo-animation’. However, Jerzy Kucia treats the formal side of his films as an instrument which is supposed to deliver the melody in the best way. In Tuning Instruments, he did not use photographs – the film consists of thousands of drawings made on paper and celluloid.
He got into animation by accident. In the interview with J. Wójcik, Kucia said:
I would probably also find my own form of expression in painting, but today I know that my work needs movement and sound.
It is the movement that allows to show the passage of time, passing, reaching out to individual and collective memory. In an interview with Bogusław Żmudziński (Kino 4/2001), Kucia said:
Time in film, especially in animation […] creates the possibility of moving on […] the boundary: a hat or shoes are no longer ordinary objects, they become fragments of experiences, a part of memory.
We can experience this in his films.
Originally written in Polish by Jan Strękowski, February 2005