Kinoblog

Further to my post of 8th June about a new two-DVD survey of key Polish animated short films, the Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne site has just uploaded official details - in Polish only at present, but an English translation will doubtless follow.

More good news is that the list of titles I uploaded was incomplete - there are actually 28 films in total. The two I omitted were the most recent, Tomek Bagiński’s Katedra (2002) and Marek Skrobecki’s Ichthys (2005). The page also confirms that the set will have English subtitles.

It’s also now available from Polish online retailer Merlin.pl, from whom I’ve just placed an order. Even including postage, it came to only just over a tenner, which has to be the bargain of the year.

Polish poster design is one of the frequently unsung glories of the visual arts over the past century. Many Polish filmmakers, including Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, started out as poster designers, and many other major Polish artists made memorable contributions to the form.

Their influence has been far-reaching - when I interviewed the Quay Brothers last year for their DVD Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003 (the same interview is on the US edition, Phantom Museums or, if you need French subtitles, on Frères Quay: Courts-métrages d’animation), they not only insisted on highlighting Polish poster art as one of their primary influences, but also treated me (and that was very much the operative word) to a guided tour of their own collection, some of which ended up on camera. Here’s what they had to say:

We arrived from our little village to the Philadelphia College of Art to study painting and drawing and we’d more or less chosen that over the idea that we could have been gymnasts. Our father was more or less saying “you have an opportunity to do one of two things: you can be gym teachers or artists”, and in the end we opted for trying to become artists. And on that day that we entered the doors of the college we saw this fabulous exhibition of Polish posters which was consummate in terms of the imagery that was assaulting us, the typography, the names which were unpronounceable, but in a way, on inspection and through the next year or so, we researched all these names of posters, names like Borowczyk, Lenica, Starowieyski, Cieslewicz, Tomaszewski and each one, for sure… through the research we realised that Lenica made animation films after having done posters, and Borowczyk made animation films and went on to make feature films, and it probably set a tiny star for us to maybe inherit.

At their suggestion, I ended up adding mini-biographies of many of the key Polish poster artists to the DVD booklet, which inevitably meant delving into their work myself - and they’re right: the range and quality is quite extraordinary. There are lots of examples available online - confusingly, two separate sites go by the names polishposter.com and polish-poster.com, each with loads of illustrations.

Here are a few direct links to work by some of the key designers to get you started (firstname and surname send you to different sites):

• Roman Cieslewicz
• Jan Lenica
• Jan Mlodozeniec
• Andrzej Pagowski
• Franciszek Starowieyski
• Waldemar Swierzy
• Henryk Tomaszewski

…but that’s just scratching the surface. Neither site highlights Walerian Borowczyk’s work as a poster designer , but Polishposter.com has a couple of examples.

This (downloadable Word document) hints at some very exciting news. Apparently the Polish government-backed PWA (Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne, or Polish Audiovisual Publishers), which has already released some highly acclaimed DVD surveys of classic Polish documentaries, is turning its curatorial attentions to Poland’s rich animation heritage, though I can’t find any formal announcements on its own site as yet.

But this is what appears to be included:

DISC ONE (118 mins 40 secs)

• House (Dom, Walerian Borowczyk/Jan Lenica, 1958, 10:55)
• Changing of the Guard (Zmiana warty, Włodzimierz Haupe/Halina Bielińska, 1958, 8:06)
• The School (Szkoła, Walerian Borowczyk, 1958, 7:42)
• Labyrinth (Labirynt, Jan Lenica, 1961, 15:30)
• Playthings (Igraszki, Kazimierz Urbański, 1962, 7:22)
• The Armchair (Fotel, Daniel Szczechura, 1963, 6:15)
• Red and Black (Czerwone i czarne, Witold Giersz, 1963, 6:58)
• Cages (Klatki, Mirosław Kijowicz, 1966, 8:06)
• Everything is a Number (Wszystko jest liczbą, Stefan Schabenbeck, 7:30)
• The Horse (Koń, Witold Giersz, 1967, 6:38)
• Stairs (Schody, Stefan Schabenbeck, 1968, 7:18)
• Journey (Podróż, Daniel Szczechura, 1970, 6:22)
• The Son (Syn, Ryszard Czekała, 1970, 10:08)
• Road (Droga, Mirosław Kijowicz, 1971, 4:35)
• The Roll-Call (Apel, Ryszard Czekała, 1970, 7:55)

DISC TWO (94 mins 54 secs)

• Banquet (Bankiet, Zofia Oraczewska, 1976, 8:55)
• Soup (Zupa, Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1974, 8:22)
• Reflections (Refleksy, Jerzy Kucia, 1979, 6:20)
• A Sharp, Engaged Movie (Ostry film zaangażowany, Julian Antonisz, 1979, 8:03)
• Tango (Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1980, 8:10)
• Unfaithful Portrait (Portret niewierny, Ewa Bibańska, 1981, 8:00)
• Little Black Riding Hood (Czarny Kapturek, Piotr Dumała, 1983, 5:16)
• Gentle Spirit (Łagodna, Piotr Dumała, 1985, 11:33)
• Solo on the Follow (Solo na ugorze, Jerzy Kalina, 7:15)
• Race (Wyścig, Marek Serafiński, 1989, 7:20)
• Tuning the Instruments (Strojenie instrumentów, Jerzy Kucia, 2000, 16:20)

If I find out any more, I’ll post it here a.s.a.p. - but they’ve definitely sold at least one copy. Even if it doesn’t have English subtitles, I suspect this won’t be a major handicap - of the half-dozen titles I’ve seen, none has any spoken dialogue.

(The links, incidentally, are to entries on the Polish-language but attractively illustrated 55 lat polskiej animacji site, which at least gives a passing idea of what some of the films are like.)