Back in February I posted a link to Jerzy Kucia’s first animated short, The Return. Since then I’ve been watching more Kucia films on Essential Polish Animation, a newly-released two-disc set that presents restored versions of 27 short films in high-definition. Tuning Instruments (2000) is a later addition to the Kucia oeuvre that isn’t on the Radiance collection. It’s also quite different to all the other films I’ve seen by this director, Kucia being one of those animators who tended to vary his stylistic and technical approaches from one film to the next.
The film does at least share a mood with some of Kucia’s later animations, a dream-like quality where the play of successive images is more important than any kind of structured narrative. Animation is an ideal medium for representing the shifting terrain of dreams yet the opportunity to do so remains under-explored. Quotes from Kucia in a biographical article at Culture.pl suggest that, for this director at least, the subjectivity of memory is more of a concern than the elusiveness of dreams. Tuning Instruments begins with a man doing exercises in a room. This sequence is followed by a motorcycle journey presented as a scrolling view of traffic and windows, after which the initial protagonist is forgotten in favour of a continually changing parallax landscape that leads us to a crow-filled wood in a misty countryside. I’ve no idea how Kucia and his assistants achieved many of their effects. The Culture.pl article says he mostly used drawings on paper yet the images are often overlaid or multiplied in a way that disguises their origin. Best to immerse yourself in the flow of imagery than wonder how it was achieved or what it all means
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return, a film by Jercy Kucia
Watching European animation always makes me sad. Not for the quality of the work but because it reminds me how impoverished American culture is. Anime has found a niche audience and Miyazaki has cast a spell but domestically Disney rules. And the problem is not ultimately with their work but the fact that for most Americans their conception defines what animation is and all that it can be . Over here the idea of an animated feature intended for adults and not for children is simply unthinkable. Europeans have the imagination but not the money and Americans have the money but not the imagination.
I usually put it down to the difference between art and entertainment as much as cultural outlook. Hollywood has always been dominated by the pursuit of money, and the US has never had the kind of state-supported film industries that provided work for so any European (and Russian) animators in the 20th century. Kucia’s early films were all made by state-run studios, as were many other Polish, Czech and Hungarian films during the Communist era. Their support cultivated a type of film-making which could be poetic and experimental, within certain limits. The collapse of the Communist system had a devastating effect on this type of film-making. The political authorities weren’t easy to work with–Svankmajer wasn’t allowed to make films for several years–but while the system was operating it supported a lot of art that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
Japan is an exception to this art vs. entertainment dichotomy. The massive animation industry of Japan has created a diverse environment where there’s space for smaller films which can experiment with the form. The audiences there also want to see these experiments which helps a great deal.