Posts Tagged ‘Walerian Borowczyk’
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 [...]
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 [...]
Derek Malcolm’s Century of Cinema
While researching something else (as is always the way), I stumbled upon former Guardian critic Derek Malcolm's A Century of Films - a survey of his personal Top 100, with a robust defence of each film's inclusion. And on glancing down the list again for the first time since 2001, I notice that nine of his choices came from central and eastern [...]
Borowczyk in Warsaw
Warsaw's Centre for Contemporary Art (CCW) is currently hosting a major survey of work in various media by Walerian Borowczyk, including a near-complete retrospective of his films. There's more information on their website, as well as a brief piece on it in the Warsaw Business Journal. The exhibition moves to Poznań in the summer, where I hope [...]
Walerian Borowczyk on DVD
Someone stumbled upon this site in quest of information about Walerian Borowczyk's films on DVD. So just in case they return... 1957 - Once Upon a Time (Był sobie raz..., IMDB) Included in PWA's Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation, Region 0 PAL (with English subtitles) 1957 - Standard of Youth (Sztandar Młodych) Included in PWA's [...]
Polish animation DVD update
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 [...]
Polish Posters
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 [...]
Polish animation on DVD
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 [...]