Tuning the Instruments

Jerzy Kucia (b.1942) was trained as a painter and graphic artist at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, where he is currently a professor and the head of the animation department. His first animated film, Return, was completed in 1972, and demonstrates beautifully Kucia’s interest in the interplay between reality, memory, dream, and emotion. In Return, although we are observing a rather static, uneventful moment in one man’s life (throughout most of the film, we watch him looking out the window of a train as a country landscape rushes by), it is clear that the real action is taking place within the man’s (and our own) mental landscape. The regular and rhythmic sound of the moving train, together with the hypnotic night-time scenery sweeping by, enables the viewer to slip into his or her own dreamlike journey.

In the 25 years since his first film, Kucia has revisited this motif and perfected his unique visual language in eight more films, all but one of which utilize a very similar abstract structure to present their themes. The one exception is Reflections (1979), which is Kucia’s only film to date that attempts to follow a narrative in the classic sense. Reflections, also about a journey of sorts, follows the laborious struggle of an insect hatching from its cocoon. No sooner than the insect wrests itself from its shell does it become involved in a life struggle with another insect. The drama ends abruptly when both bugs are crushed under a man’s shoe. Bleak though the message may be, Kucia manages to draw us once again into a singular, almost microscopic moment of time that is at once dreamlike and poetic, yet grounded in grim reality.

Kucia’s most recent film, Across the Field (1992), is his longest and arguably his most complex film in terms of imagery. In it, he applies many of the various techniques he has developed for his films over the years, the result being a rich collage of drawing, photographic images, and live-action film footage whose individual frames he has manipulated. This complex technique exists, according to Kucia, only as a vehicle to evoke the mood and emotion he wishes the audience to experience. This Impressionist approach to filmmaking is no doubt what inspired Marcin Gizycki to dub Kucia the “Bresson of Polish animated film.” —awn.com