Promotional poster for the Polish programme, frame from "Podróż" by Daniel Szczechura.
A whimsical spectrum of Polish animation and experimental cinema is among the programme highlights of the 51st edition of North America's most historic independent and experimental film festival
Over its six day run, the Ann Arbor Film Festival presents almost 200 films - half of which are world or local premieres - spanning the world and representing multiple genres. Poland is in the spotlight this year, with two special programmes curated by Marcin Giżycki, the film historian, filmmaker, scholar and member of the Ann Arbor festival jury.
Giżycki launches his survey of experimental animation in Poland in 1957, which opened a period that is considered the genre's golden age. He sets those classic films by Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk, Jerzy Kucia, Kazimierz Urbański and Józef Robakowski with contemporary works of animation by Zbigniew Czapla and Wojciech Bąkowski.
The doctrine of socialist-realism wasn't enforced as strongly by the mid-1950s, thanks to the political thaw in Poland, and artists were liberated to explore new themes and means of expression. A turning point for cinema came in 1957 with Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk's debut, Once Upon a Time. As a humorous, minimalist take on free association, it used various shapes and cutout elements to smuggle in controversial political overtones. The film paved a new way for the genre - particularly after grand prize wins in Venice and Manheim.
The filmmakers followed up with House, which won the won the Grand Prix at the Experimental Film Competition in 1958 during the Brussels World Exhibition. Made up of episodes linked together without a linear plot, it proved that animation could be treated as a personal means of expression, much like art and music. In 1962 Lenica made Labyrinth, considered an outstanding work of animation in terms of both its aesthetics and its metaphorical message of a totalitarian state.
This golden age extended through the 1960s, with Mirosław Kijowicz, Daniel Szczechura and Kazimierz Urbański making a name for themselves with their own cinematic experiments with form and image. Urbański's Sweet Rhythms (1965) explored the effects of heat on film emulsion, transforming a documentary on beekeeping into a whimsical, abstract array of imagery.
Józef Robakowski is one of the recognised names in experimental video. He honed his craft from avant-garde traditions of the 1960s and 70s, and research into new forms of media. Drawing inspiration from the "tradition of metaphorical montage known from interwar painting, photography, and avant-garde cinema", Robakowski used film and photography as a language to undermine the established communist reality of the 1960s. He was part of the Film Form Workshop, which pursued a language that was specific to the medium of film.
The first film released by the Workshop was Market Place (1970), an animated film compiled with still images of people flocking in Łódź's Red Square, made on a single day between 7:00 am and 4 pm. The day is compressed into a mere five minutes, producing a moving snapshot of everyday life in Poland at that moment in history. According to Łukasz Ronduda in Polish Art of the 70s. Avant-garde (2009), in Market Place - produced in collaboration with Ryszard Meissner and Tadeusz Junak - Robakowski attempted to
showed that the feeling of reality film creates is merely a product of technology and, more precisely, the effect of the standard frame rate in the camera or the projector (24 frames per second). A slight modification of this speed or filming at a different frame rate (say, five frames every two seconds, as is the case in Market), gives an entirely different image of recorded reality.
In the 1970s, Kraków became the centre of cinematic life for artists including Jerzy Kalina and Zbigniew Rybczyński. Rybczyński's Oscar Award for Tango in 1983 was a milestone for Polish experimental cinema. His style was characterised by the prominence of dynamic, changing abstractions and synchronisation of the image with sound. His goal has been to marry cinema technology and progress with an emotional and spiritual approach to aesthetics and form. In the 1980s, Rybczyński emigrated to the U.S. and continued to make award-winning films and music videos, including a Silver Lion at the Cannes Advertising Film Festival in 1987 and an Emmy Award in 1990.
The Polish programme wraps with the latest in experimental cinema, spanning the past decade and including curator Giżycki's animated short Kinefaktura. He calls the work a three-part variation on Henryk Berlewi’s Mechanofaktura. Dynamic Contrasts of 1924, with music and sound design by Jaroslaw Siwinski, a rising star of Polish contemporary music.
Contemporary films by Wojciech Bąkowski, one of the original and distinctive artists working in the field of animated film and visual arts, and Zbigniew Czapla, an experimental filmmaker active on the international scene, carry on the Polish tradition of avant-garde animation and push the envelope of technological experimentation and the exploration of unusual themes and abstract ideas. Czapla's Paper Box is a montage of decaying, disappearing photographs and documents destroyed during a flood, reproducing his family's experiences after catastrophic floods in 2010.
Marcin Giżycki is an art and film historian, critic, photographer, filmmaker and senior lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design. He is an expert at the Polish Film Institute as well as the founder and Artistic Director of the Animator International Animated Film Festival in Poznań, Poland. His work includes documentary, experimental and animated films. He has curated film programs for international venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Cinematography (Torino) and the Centre Pompidou. He has published over 300 essays, papers, articles on art and film and books, including include: Avant-Garde and Cinema: Film in Polish Avant-Garde Circles Between the Wars (1996), Disney Was Not the Only One (2000) and Dictionary of Movements and Key Notions of Art of the 2nd Half of the 20th Century (2002).
Giżycki's two-part juror programme is the first such showcase of Polish films in the history of the Ann Arbor Festival. The festival opens on the 19th of March and runs through the 24th of March. Established in 1963, the festival is the longest-running festival of independent and experimental film in North America. It takes place at the Michigan Theatre and attracts a diverse audience that includes staff and students from the nearby University of Michigan.
The Polish programme at the Ann Arbor Film Festival was made possible support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Polish Cultural Fun Ann Arbor and the Copernicus Endowment.
See the full festival programme at: aafilmfest.org/51/events
Author: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Ann Arbor Film Festival, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Culture.pl