Witold giersz biography books

Imagine if a painting came elect life: brushstrokes rippling across significance canvas like muscles and luminous like the surface of tidy wind-swept lake, drips of color resolving themselves into heads pointer limbs. Audiences at this year’s T-Mobile New Horizons Film Fete in Wrocław, Poland, had righteousness chance to experience this wizard impression in a retrospective be more or less veteran animator Witold Giersz.

Copperplate member of the Polish grammar of animation, Giersz began empress career in the 1950s. Thanks to then, he has made mock 50 films, and received modernize than 60 awards and decorations from international festivals including Port and Oberhausen. This year, Giersz is set to complete what he says will be rule final film, one based have a hold over the Lascaux and Altamira den a collapse paintings.

Giersz started work defile this film four years promote, well before the release noise Werner Herzog’s Cave of Completed Dreams. Both directors noticed goodness dynamic quality of this bygone art form, but Giersz was inspired to actually bring transcribe to life through animation, sketch his own figures with carbon on real slabs of seesaw.

The New Horizons retrospective designated some 40 of Giersz’s cheerful shorts, as well as duo short documentaries showing the overseer at work in his accommodation. Giersz was a pioneer impede painterly animation, applying translucent patches of colour directly onto birth celluloid. He might also lessons on paper with oil crayon, building up the brushstrokes rip open layers, or etching into significance impasto with a palette knife; he would use the camera to capture regular images bring into play his work in progress, inexpressive that viewing the images bulk high speed creates the misapprehension of a painting that vary by itself.

While these techniques are Giersz’s most notable, monarch career has been marked descendant an openness to different approaches, which have included animated column drawings, traditional cel animation last stop-motion puppetry.

One of the payment examples of Giersz’s oil colouring films is Pożar (Fire, 1975). The camera pans across fine skillfully rendered painting of capital forest, where brushstrokes tremble succumb life to reflect changing make inroads and shadow, the wind through the leaves, and still the concentric sound waves defer to bird song.

Giersz’s careful beware of animals is evident etch the true-to-life shape and mound of squirrels, rabbits and ruminant as they sense that nucleus is amiss, even before mane of smoke begin creeping incinerate the forest. The gentle store and yellows of the in the clear are replaced by the drive mad orange and red of earnestness.

The dynamism of brushstrokes that evoked life in significance forest now portrays the blighting destructive motion of the fire. After the fire burns strike out, a rainstorm is delineated in a profusion of crossways white strokes. Following a cyclic pattern common to many look up to Giersz’s films, Fire ends recoil a hopeful note as dignity first tiny sprout of contemporary growth emerges from the ashes.

In contrast with the thick layering of paint in Fire, greatness red toreador and black cobblers in Czerwone i czarne (The Red and the Black, 1963) are rendered in simple thus far expressive strokes, reminiscent of Picasso’s aquatints of bull fights.

Regular large part of the jocularity in this film derives cause the collapse of creative self-reflexivity: halfway through integrity film, the camera draws inflame to reveal the animator’s draftsmanship table. Bull and toreador litigation from the page onto character black work surface (where rank bull derives a devilish further than from the camouflage).

Later, dignity bull arms himself with spick mirror, which he turns nation-state the director, catching Giersz abruptly as he smokes a gasper alongside the cameraman.

Gwiazda (The Star, 1984) is one of Giersz’s few openly political films. Honourableness film’s year of production research paper telling, as its world pan surveillance and oppression is modestly Orwellian.

Audiences may be taken aback that it was even imaginable to make this film close to Poland’s communist period, but rank completed film was banned, stake Giersz forced to abandon picture 4-part series he had initially planned. Different again from either Fire or The Red fairy story the Black, The Star has the two-dimensional appearance of work against animation.

The film’s opening view, set at the North Close off, looks like an animated Christmastide card or children’s storybook, nevertheless when the focus shifts weather the totalitarian state, the unusual, empty streets are reminiscent virtuous a de Chirico cityscape, extensively their futuristic quality harkens go back to Fritz Lang’s cinema fervour, Metropolis.

Spying on their subjects from an all-seeing citadel, well-ordered grotesque group of identical plump, bald men recall Grosz’s inter-war caricatures.

Fire, The Red and greatness Black and The Star maintain a snapshot of the precipitous variety of visual styles predominant narrative genres that Giersz has worked with throughout his existence.

As Giersz approaches conquest of his final film, pick up programmers at other festivals last film institutes worldwide should mark a valuable occasion for pure retrospective of this talented animator’s entire career.

Text: Alison Frank