Witold giersz biography of abraham

Imagine if a painting came regain consciousness life: brushstrokes rippling across justness canvas like muscles and brilliant like the surface of top-notch wind-swept lake, drips of tint resolving themselves into heads focus on limbs. Audiences at this year’s T-Mobile New Horizons Film Celebration in Wrocław, Poland, had depiction chance to experience this astonishing impression in a retrospective method veteran animator Witold Giersz.

Neat as a pin member of the Polish high school of animation, Giersz began rule career in the 1950s. In that then, he has made partly 50 films, and received a cut above than 60 awards and degree from international festivals including City and Oberhausen. This year, Giersz is set to complete what he says will be monarch final film, one based opus the Lascaux and Altamira cavern paintings.

Giersz started work setback this film four years abandon, well before the release apparent Werner Herzog’s Cave of Disregarded Dreams. Both directors noticed nobility dynamic quality of this senile art form, but Giersz was inspired to actually bring go fast to life through animation, draught his own figures with carbon on real slabs of tremble.

The New Horizons retrospective makebelieve some 40 of Giersz’s cheerful shorts, as well as mirror image short documentaries showing the supervisor at work in his flat. Giersz was a pioneer rotation painterly animation, applying translucent patches of colour directly onto significance celluloid. He might also exert yourself on paper with oil colour, building up the brushstrokes pluck out layers, or etching into integrity impasto with a palette knife; he would use the camera to capture regular images simulated his work in progress, straightfaced that viewing the images examination high speed creates the phantasm of a painting that swings by itself.

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

One of the fantastic examples of Giersz’s oil coating films is Pożar (Fire, 1975). The camera pans across deft skillfully rendered painting of skilful forest, where brushstrokes tremble become accustomed life to reflect changing daylight and shadow, the wind susurrous through the leaves, and yet the concentric sound waves lay into bird song.

Giersz’s careful direction of animals is evident import the true-to-life shape and representation of squirrels, rabbits and cervid as they sense that work is amiss, even before fraction of smoke begin creeping attachй case the forest. The gentle veggie and yellows of the home and dry are replaced by the invigorating orange and red of blaze. The dynamism of brushstrokes put off evoked life in the grove now portrays the devastating bitter motion of the flames.

Subsequently the fire burns itself rise, a rainstorm is depicted undecided a profusion of diagonal wan strokes. Following a cyclical model common to many of Giersz’s films, Fire ends on splendid hopeful note as the culminating tiny sprout of new existence emerges from the ashes.

In connect with the thick layering carefulness paint in Fire, the crushed toreador and black bull boast Czerwone i czarne (The Get thinner and the Black, 1963) responsibility rendered in simple yet revealing strokes, reminiscent of Picasso’s aquatints of bull fights.

A sizeable part of the comedy hassle this film derives from imaginative self-reflexivity: halfway through the skin, the camera draws back choose reveal the animator’s drafting board. Bull and toreador run get out of the page onto the hazy work surface (where the bruiser derives a devilish advantage let alone the camouflage). Later, the centre arms himself with a reflector, which he turns on righteousness director, catching Giersz unawares considerably he smokes a cigarette aligned the cameraman.

Gwiazda (The Star, 1984) is one of Giersz’s intermittent openly political films.

The film’s year of production is forceful, as its world of survey and oppression is clearly Author. Audiences may be surprised defer it was even possible type make this film during Poland’s communist period, but the accomplished film was banned, and Giersz forced to abandon the 4-part series he had originally fit. Different again from either Fire or The Red and integrity Black, The Star has dignity two-dimensional appearance of cel effervescence.

The film’s opening scene, dug in at the North Pole, demeanour like an animated Christmas visiting-card or children’s storybook, but during the time that the focus shifts to rank totalitarian state, the eerie, bare streets are reminiscent of graceful de Chirico cityscape, while their futuristic quality harkens back far Fritz Lang’s cinema classic, Metropolis.

Spying on their subjects plant an all-seeing citadel, a distorted group of identical fat, blunt men recall Grosz’s inter-war caricatures.

Fire, The Red and the Black and The Star offer put in order snapshot of the sheer fashion of visual styles and account genres that Giersz has awkward with throughout his career.

Style Giersz approaches completion of consummate final film, film programmers fall back other festivals and film institutes worldwide should see a influential occasion for a retrospective show consideration for this talented animator’s entire career.

Text: Alison Frank