‘Animation’ Archives
The Banner of Youth
Sztandar Młodych. Poland, 1957, tinted monochrome, 3 mins. A three-minute advertisement for the Polish Communist daily youth newspaper Sztandar Młodych ('Banner of Youth'), this is a more or less exact equivalent of the films that Len Lye made for the GPO Film Unit in Britain twenty years earlier. Lye's A Colour Box (1935) was an [...]
In the Time of King Krakus
Za króla Krakusa. Poland, 1947, black and white, 14 mins. One of the peculiarities of Polish film hisory is the almost perfect separation between the pre-1939 and post-1945 eras, for reasons that the dates themselves spell out all too clearly. Many Polish filmmakers didn't survive World War II, while others chose not to [...]
Daniel Szczechura DVD
After releasing four superbly-presented general overviews of Polish animation (Anthology of Polish Animation, Anthology of Polish Children's Animation, Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation and Action Animation), Poland's National Audiovisual Institute (NInA, formerly PWA) is finally making good on its promise to start focusing on individual [...]
Švankmajer in Manchester
Well, not the man himself, but a rare chance to see some of Jan Švankmajer's shorts in 35mm, preceded by a talk from yours truly about the use of movement in his films. It's part of the concurrent Moves09 festival, which this year is exploring the narrative possibilities of movement on screen. I'm still finalising the details, so I can't give [...]
The Eye and the Ear
UK, 1945, black and white, 11 mins. Of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson's three surviving films, The Eye and the Ear is much the most successful, and one can only regret that their extensive interests in other fields precluded them making any more in a similar vein. As the title implies, and the explanatory intertitles explain in [...]
Short Animated World
I've just discovered the Short Animated World blog, dedicated to chronicling all 100 entries on the recent Annecy Film Festival/Studio Magazine/Variety poll of thirty animation historians to establish the best animated films of all time. There's no original critical material, but each entry offers links and - in most cases - a streaming copy of [...]
Retro-futurism
On his magnificently-titled blog Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy, Owen Hatherley has published an incisive analysis of Dom (1958), the collaboration by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica that's now regarded not just as their own breakthrough but the film that kick-started serious Polish animated cinema in general - though, as Hatherley [...]
Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation
I'm acutely conscious that amongst the many failings of this blog is the lack of coverage of animation (something that's even more unforgivable when you consider that I have strong personal and professional interests in the subject), but if anything's going to galvanise me into paying it more attention, it's the imminent release of what looks like [...]
A Švankmajer timeline
During a routine office spring-clean last week, I came across an elaborate timeline that I drew up earlier this year, setting events in the life and career of Jan Švankmajer against a wider backdrop of Czech history and culture of the time.It began life as a crib sheet to help those baffled by the historical references in his 1990 film The Death [...]
The Hand
Ruka Czechoslovakia, 1965, colour, 18 mins Universally recognised as both the founder and the supreme master of the Czech puppet cinema tradition (an accolade far less trivial within Czech culture than it might seem in the West, where puppetry has long been regarded almost exclusively as a children's medium), Jiří Trnka (1912-1969) was [...]